On Writing in September
I have no expectations, no framework for how things work here. When people say “Cali” I don’t correct them though I’ve never heard anyone from California say it.
A short note as summer ends and I land here in Washington. I have my first east coast driver’s license and plates. The change feels mostly bureaucratic, but also like I’m driving around with an alias, except it’s the state I’m trying on, not a new name. But I like my driver’s license photograph. I didn’t mind visiting the DMV three times to get sorted out. Don’t go to the DMV on Fridays. I applied several large, ugly rectangular stickers to my windshield as required. And I thought, They couldn’t get away with this in California.
I’ve seen one presidential motorcade.
Last month, I moved into a professor’s house while he and his family are on sabbatical. I’d put my furniture in storage, and it’s interesting living with someone else’s couches and rugs, their art. I didn’t take down the framed wedding vows hanging on a wall. I believe there’s a short story in that decision. See Elizabeth McCracken’s “Property” in Thunderstruck.
My dog had surgery and wanders the house in a cone that looks eerily like The Handmaid’s Tale.
I have no expectations, no framework for how things work here. When people say “Cali” I don’t correct them though I’ve never heard anyone from California say it. The chaos of moving doesn’t work well for writing but the anonymity of a new place does. I’m writing applications to residencies, revising a couple essays, thinking about my novel. My story collection Small in Real Life comes out in paperback in October.
I read this piece by Sheila Heti in Harper’s (and discovered from Brad Listi’s newsletter) “The New Age Bible: On the Origins of A Course in Miracles.” I found myself back in Mill Valley, where I used to live, as Heti tracks down the daughter of the couple who published the Course. She’s trying to understand what’s behind the book that helped her after her father died. She learns the Mill Valley publishers were interested in the paranormal, which makes sense to me after living there in houses carved into redwood forests. When they published the Course in 1975, they changed the name of their organization from the Foundation of ParaSensory Investigation to the Foundation for Inner Peace to appear more legitimate. But maybe ghosts are a key to inner peace.
Heti hopes to uncover why the Course helped her and not others, whether the book’s author the New York psychologist Dr. Helen Schucman channeled its teachings from the anonymous but Jesus-like Voice as she claimed or they relate to an unrequited love story with her boss William (Bill) Thetford or a secret government operation. As Heti pieces together a history of the Course she finds a parallel to writing:
I began to wonder if the Course was partly a way for Helen to talk to Bill about her feelings “through” a Voice she didn’t have to claim. In some way, that’s what all art is: a way of speaking to the world through a voice that’s not quite one’s own, an oblique voice the writer doesn’t have to take credit for, or at least not entirely; an offering the creator can profess—honestly—not to fully understand.
This blending with “an oblique voice” as part of art making might be the source of my fascination with writing. That and working with language. And also, as Heti observes in her essay, talking about a piece after its published leads to more angles of understanding, which depends on readers who really start those conversations with writers about their books.
I do miss the redwoods. And the ocean. I feel lucky about the professor’s house because there’s a yard here with a sycamore tree as tall as a redwood. The first night I left the windows open, I heard a strange bird call. A barred owl. I used to hear the great horned owls calling to each other in the redwoods at night. Barred owls can grow just as big but they sound like an owl that swallowed a rooster. The bird sites say it’s as if they’re asking, “Who cooks for you?” The next night, eating late on the screened in porch, my other favorite part of this house, we saw the owl fly to the sycamore. Her grey and pale brown wings silent. We watched the owl in the tree until she flew away. Though I haven’t heard her since, I feel welcomed.
All my best and till next time,
Kelly
Recommended:
• LARB interview with Danzy Senna about her new novel Colored Television.
• Write-minded interview with Jane Alison on structure and form and her book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.
• Parul Sehgal’s New Yorker review of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain asks “What sort of technology is a sentence?”