Secret Notebooks

"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of lost things...children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss to come."

~Joan Didion~

My first full notebook was one I started at the age of ten. It was a Christmas present with gilded-pages, an embossed title: "My Year" and a small lock that could be picked with the edge of a dime. Each day was neatly contained by date in a small square with lines to record the sequence of daily life. January approached and I was eager to start the journal, but instead, I immediately censored myself afraid I would get in trouble for writing that it was New Year's Eve and my mother took my younger brother and I to a late movie because she "hated the holiday with its false hope". The three of us sat in the empty theatre, listening to the sounds of muffled fireworks booming outside as the year turned and the images onscreen saturated with their eerie light. It was one of the first nights I noticed that my father didn't come home at all.

I scribbled instead: "Movies with Mom and Dave. Came home with a headache." The year was just hours old and already I could sense the ways things were about to begin to unravel...like Didion's quote above, I was a child afflicted with a presentiment of loss to come. Some rough things had already happened, of course...my parents' initial volatile fights, my father's strong brand of physical discipline, a pregnancy my mother lost in the fifth month that my brother and I whispered about in his bunk bed after dark. But this, I somehow knew, was only the beginning. I worried, fretted, stared out my bedroom window at the streets when I should have been sleeping, then covered the notebook pages with curt phrases, subtle omissions and outright lies about what I wished my day had been.

I didn't write anything remotely like the truth...I just couldn't.

Also true, but off-limits to really sink in and write about? Twenty-two years ago on this day, my older brother died. He went out with friends to celebrate at a back-to-school bash and drank himself to death in an apartment off campus. He was a few days shy of his twentieth birthday and had uncharacteristically kissed me goodbye as I watched him leave the night before, calling me Betty like he always did and saying, "Be good." I think, in more ways than I can explain in just a few lines, I spent the next two decades trying to do just that. I never quite managed and was never quite able to shake the feeling that somehow Fate had messed up and the wrong child in our family had died. He was my father's namesake...the son to carry on the family line. He was closer to my mother than any of the rest of us were. My sister was beautiful, brilliant, a gifted athlete and firstborn. My little brother was the baby...adorable, charming, funny and affectionate. Then, there was me...second girl, third child, second youngest--the one without a clear role and the one prone to fits of melancholy and a need for space that did not mesh well with a large Irish-Catholic family.

In a household that valued discipline, mathematics, logic, academics, athletics and productivity, my scattered, dreamy, clumsy, secretive self felt very outside from a very young age. I was the only average student of the bunch...in part, no doubt, because in every single notebook from those years, I would write stories, sketches and poems instead of paying attention. I snuck toys into my desk...my favorite, a set of nesting matryoshka dolls, I played with secretly while the rest of the class worked. I was fascinated by the painted girls all embedded inside one another, layer upon layer of beauty and possibility. My parents asked, with increasing intensity year after year, why I "just couldn't be more like my sister." Though my parents loved me and would have completely reassured me that it was untrue if I'd ever dared to tell them I "should have been the one who died," it makes sense to me that I believed I'd somehow accidentally cheated Death. Given my tentative position in the family, I understand why I was always so afraid of never living up to the borrowed time I thought my brother's death had somehow bought for me.

Last year, I started writing in a series of secret notebooks. I surrounded myself with them...tucked in my desk at work, my bedroom, my car, on the side table by the couch. I bought notebooks with paper recycled from phone books, Chinese menus, jagged-edged maps, graph paper, art paper, pages harvested from old novels. I didn't tell anyone I was writing non-fiction ...not even my writing group. I didn't even confess to myself that I was writing anything that could be formed into one manuscript, instead I considered these "sketches" or "vignettes." It was the first time I'd dared to write, nakedly and without hesitation, the truth about what has happened in my life. At times, the writing has left me strung out and half-deranged, like I've been holding a razor blade and not a pen in my hand. Other times, it has been all sepia and sweetness...an acknowledgement of how beautiful things are, even in their brokenness.

I wrote in all of the separate notebooks at once...never re-reading, the only rule in place for myself was that once I started writing a scene I'd keep going until it was finished in one shot. Otherwise, I knew, I'd stop the second my skin hit the knife's edge of truth and drew blood. I started typing them up randomly, in a file saved under the working title from the lines of a Neruda poem. Today, I finally admitted to myself that these 197 pages (thus far) might just be a manuscript. The story has started right around when that first journal of mine did...only this time, I'm not writing in blunted half-truths. Right now, it skips around from my father to my brother to others who have left their fingerprints or their bruises on my heart. But, ultimately, it isn't a manuscript about men, but what it is to be me...nothing more ambitious than one person telling the truth. I had to scatter my stories into their various notebooks, like a matryoshka has to split herself into different pieces, different narratives, just to exist. The odds of me ever sharing this work with anyone else are slim to none, but this process of writing has started to give me some faint glimmers of awareness. In my life, it seems clear to me now, it is enough that I am here to be a witness. I am here to tell the story.

Moving Targets

My poem, "Moving Targets," from my sideshow freak series is in the current issue of Thirteen Myna Birds. Visit HERE to read it and to enjoy a collection of thirteen wild and whirling poems...

Birthday List

"Time has left its remnants and qualities for me to use--my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves." ~Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)~

Lately, I have been thinking about what gets left behind...my thoughts caught up in debris and remainders, my heart far more empathetic towards the fragments than the wholes. Another year of my life has just been counted on the calendar. Since my last birthday, I've left the remnants of journals full of words piled up and several entire notebooks of poetry and prose, mostly fictional sketches. I read through the year's journals a week or so back and can see how raw I really am...how new and foreign this territory still is to me.

I have left behind motherhood as I knew and understood it...what it was: full-time, home-with-kids, able to contain the entire universe in my two arms, the dailiness of the routines, the predictability, the lifetimes spent in rocking chairs with babies in my lap. There was the physicality of mothering: the wiping noses and bathing fat Buddha babies in warm lavender-scented water, the tucking them into bed every single night and peeking in as they dreamed, the moon slung like a boomerang in the sky in perpetual return to me, to this, to us. Life was: days under trees on old threadbare quilts, reading and laughing, watching clouds. I stood awkwardly in countless parks, watching the clusters of moms who never forgot sunblock, juice and hand sanitizer...women who seemed like they'd planned their whole lives to end up there--right there--a cherubic junior self in the sandbox and a joy and seamlessness in their maternal skills I coveted. Motherhood didn't sneak up and surprise them as it did me.

I have left behind being the "center" for my children. There are whole weeks now I do not live with them. The mantle of mother is shed then for one of solitary woman. This past year has been the first time in my entire life I've lived alone: no parent, sibling, roommate, friend, partner or child...just me. The experiences, doubts and unknowns in my 30's are those most people have in their 20's. As usual, I'm running against the tides. Where the 20's are for self-discovery, restless mistakes and heartbreaking uncertainties, the 30's promise stability, marriage, pregnancies and then nights broken only by the low cries of infant longings.

But my 30's see me quite rootless--two moves in 11 months, preceded by almost a year of rotating in and out of what was "home" my whole life. My 30's had not a dream wedding but an ending so surprising and unexpected that there are still mornings I roll over in bed and instinctively look for him...as if those dozen years worth of mornings with his face as the first I saw are somehow encoded in my DNA. I notice pregnant women and smile like a wizened ancient grandmother. Technically, I could have more children if I chose to for years and years yet, but don't even bother mentioning that to my body, which has quietly filed that ripening curved lusciousness of heavy pregnancy away in the depths of memory.

Now, my nights are broken by churning thoughts. Weeks when my children are with me, I sneak into their room and check on them, their unguarded faces in sleep giving me glimpses of the babies they once were. Weeks when they are not, I open the door to the backyard and stand on the steps in my nightgown, searching for the moon and the silver silhouettes of trees in the dim light, as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror. Somehow, standing there, letting night touch my skin and studying the patterns of the ever-changing skyline, I feel my anxiety edge off. If this fails, as it sometimes does, I stagger to the kitchen table, strike a match to a cluster of white novena candles and move my pen across the page. Pushing ink like a needle into a vein, the narcotic effect of the words I leave behind, my one sure thing.

It is all there, spiraling across my journals in my jagged script. Ultimately, the writing I do now will have my final say in the future. The words will survive me, even if it is only my children who ever read any of them and puzzle through the fragments and relics of their mother's existence. It may reveal my darkness more than I'd like or it may just show them our common human heart...words live on the page, offering the fixed immutable reality of how it looked from where I stood, one final "I WAS HERE" graffitied across the world's immaculate face.

This year, though, I want to leave behind some memories to add into my notebooks and (like this amazing woman does each year and this beautiful one just did recently) I'm sharing my list of things to do before my next birthday here below. Here's to new things to write about:

1) Try sushi.
2) Spend a day on rollercoasters.
3) Cook at least one (real) meal per month and invite others to come and share it with me.
4) Finish my last book edits.
5) Get a new camera (crushing on several types at the moment).
6) Read 100 books (and jot down or blog responses).
7) Attend a workshop or a retreat.
8) Publish my work again like I used to.
9) Get monthly massage.
10) Volunteer to teach creative writing in the prison again (or in shelter or outreach program).
11) Take several trips.
12) Go here to see sideshow.
13) Take my oldest here, just us.
14) Go skiing.
15) Set up luxurious reading corner with a chair so comfortable I never want to get out of it.
16) Swim in the ocean at night.
17) Get my meditation practice back to what it was two years ago.
18) I'm definitely stealing Jeanine's Number 18.
19) Clarify what I want next with my education.
20) Take my son on one of the three visits he wants whether it is in the vein of astronomy, military or monster truck show.
21) Totally and unapologetically make out with someone under the stars.
22) Get a bike and ride it often.
23) Go camping.
24) Take my youngest to see a show or a play.
25) See live music whenever possible.
26) Re-learn Spanish.
27) Visit here for the first time in years and years.
28) Try to blog more regularly.
29) Talk to strangers. Often.
30) Show my wildies my old ice dancing skills at the rink.
31) Write some letters and postcards on gorgeous stationery.
32) Go out with the girls twice a month.
33) Knit lace.
34) Give another public reading of my work.
35) Let go, whenever possible, of any people (or things) not essential to my life or not contributing to my sense of joy.

Reflections on a Poetry Bookshelf

Soon, I will be moving again. The past few years of my life have been marked with a constant migration, so I am growing accustomed to rootlessness, to wings. One of the first things I do when I am preparing for re-settling is go to my bookcases and trace my fingers along the spines of my books, deciding which to keep this time and which to let go. At first, this process is simple. I make piles of the novels I want my friends to read so we can discuss them. Then, I always put aside a stack to donate. My bookshelves are arranged by color and genre (in the ONLY form of perfect organization in my entire life—which gives a sense, perhaps, of just how important books are to me). The remainders get put back in place to await the boxes coming for them when the move takes place.

This process is very straightforward, really, right until I reach the poetry section. Invariably, I find myself sitting down then, slowly pulling titles from some of our finest literary lights: Pound, Pastan, Hoagland, Dickinson, Hughes, Whitman. With my poetry books, it isn’t as simple as just, “Oh, so & so would love this one, let me put it aside for her.” Or, “Hmmm…I’ve read that one three times. Clearly a donate.” My poetry books are, in so many ways, the keys to my own personal narrative. I flip open the cover of Mary Oliver’s Dream Work and my eyes immediately find pg. 38 and “The Journey.” While others will read: “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” and may be drawn to how Oliver reaches out beyond the line to address “you,” the reader, directly, I glance at it and am in Taos, New Mexico, studying creative writing.

My first day there, I rode up the mountain in a van full of strangers, stealing furtive glances at the dread-locked man with his bare, clay-encrusted feet who smiled out the window as we crested a curve. Light broke over the jagged angles his face, then he proclaimed, “Heaven or home? We’re here!” With that, I met Taos, and instantly lost my heart. Over time and several similar trips, I settled into the place. It wasn’t all extraordinary characters and violet sunflare, but it was close. During one of our last weeks, my roommate was giving a presentation on a writer who influenced her. As a part of the talk, she handed out poems as parting gifts…we each took one at random and, moved as I was by her wise words, I was certain the poem was going to have deep meaning for me, fated to be mine as it was. I read through it, feeling a lump in my throat at how completely its message was one I needed to hear. I felt like my tattered heart was showing and was terrified. “…There was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own,” the poem said, and I wanted to answer, “Yes, but I’m too damn scared to hear what it has to say.”

These years later, I still read that poem and smell sagebrush. It affects me deeply, every single time. The book itself has become a sort of diary of mine. It takes me back to being a mother with very young children, feeling overwhelmed with my desire to write and terrified that suburbia and the life I was making there would completely erase who I was.

It isn’t just one poetry book that has had this impact on me. The Complete Edgar Allen Poe volume is faux black leather with gilded edges. I barely graze the page with my fingertips and am in a rainy classroom in 8th grade, listening to the teacher read “Annabel Lee” and feeling my eyes fill with tears I tried to stifle because it made me think of my brother who died that year. Poems in other books represent different loves and heartbreaks so deeply that I skip over certain titles, unable to part with them, but not wanting to read about kisses and longings because it is just like reading through my old journals.

I touch the James Wright book I dropped in a bathtub in Taos and loaned out to a man I liked. When he and I parted ways, it wasn’t just his stories or our endless conversations I suddenly panicked at losing…he had my book! It was exactly as if he had a whole vital and secret piece of me just languishing and collecting dust with an indifferent pile of others on his desk. I mourned for that exact copy, which I’d purchased and devoured in Moby Dickens Bookstore, curled up in a chair beneath a garret window, on a day when my whole life felt mine in a way it hadn’t ever before. It is a testament to basic human goodness, maybe, that Wright’s Selected Poems is back in my collection where it rightfully belongs, water-swollen pages and all. The book quietly re-appeared when I’d asked for it to…no questions asked. The lines, “suddenly I realized that if I stepped out of my body I’d break into blossom,” mean more to me than I can explain, not only because of the day in New Mexico but because of a-relationship-that-never-was.

This book, like all of my poetry books, has stories to tell. There is something about poetry that breaks the skin. It cuts through bone and insinuates itself into our blood. For any of us who write it, read it or live through it, poetry is as constant a companion as our shadow. There is alchemy and seduction in between those lines, enchantment and gravity in between those book covers. This time, I know better than to try to part with any of my poetry books in the move. Selected Poems by Derek Walcott rests casually beside Plath and Neruda. Without even opening it, the lines, “Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life,” sing out to me and offer comfort. Right now, for all of my uncertainties and transformations, it comes down to this: where books of poems are concerned, for me, there is nothing to do but surrender to the memory and the magic.

Back to Jail

(photo by Masumi Hayashi)

Friday morning, I will head back into prison after a week off. I have my lesson ready and photocopies of Bukowski's poem, "So You Want to be a Writer," in a wrinkled folder to hand out. I will get up there in the front of the room in my two-sizes-too-big cargo pants and the long-sleeved black shirt I always wear. My hair will be held back in a low knot and my face will be bare. No scented lotion on my skin or perfume oil blotted along my collarbones or wrists like I normally do either. When I cross through the doors into the conference room of the jail and hear the audible sounds of the locks bolting behind me, I no longer want to project any image of sexual availability. When I am in that room, I am the only female present before several men I know have violated and overpowered a woman just because they wanted her...just because they could.

I want to think the best of each of these men. I have been awed by how that one can turn a phrase and how the other can spout the most natural, unforced rhyme I've ever heard without even thinking about it. I know that the man with the blazing green eyes was beaten so severely by his father as a child for leaving his bicycle in the rain that his back still is crisscrossed with scars from the bike chain he was hit with. This makes me think of my own absent-minded, dreamy son and how, had he fallen in with abusive parents, he would surely bear the imprint of countless rages for his forgetfulness. Each of these imprisoned and hardened men was a little boy once, just like mine.

Last week, my son sat outside and brushed my hair for me in the sunlight, counting out loud the different shades of dark he found there. After he was done, he nodded and said, "You're still pretty, Mom. Even though you don't have a husband or whatever to tell you that, I think you should hear it." His father and I have been split for long enough now that he is starting to tell me he's "the guy of my house" and so "needs to make sure our front door is locked at night." He holds open doors for his sisters and I in a gallant way that makes my heart ache. At dinner in a restaurant over the weekend, he wanted to sit by the window to keep an eye on my car because, he said, "if any bad guy tries to look in there and steal your stuff, I'm going out there."

I wonder what he would make of the "bad guys" I voluntarily spend time teaching once a week, the ones who have been convicted of murder, theft and rape. It is all so clear cut to him, at ten, that these men are "evil" and have crossed over into prison where they rightfully belong. Throw away the key and leave them there...why are they being offered creative writing anyway? Is anyone encouraging their victims to put pens to the page and write their hearts out? These questions haunt me too and I do not have clear answers. I entered into this program to "give back" for a financial award I was given for my writing. No one forced me to, it was completely of my own volition. Maybe I wanted to save someone...I think this is what I would say to explain it to my son if he asked. I imagined some triumphant musical score in the background while a student cried over his pages and then thanked me for listening. Since I can barely get out of my own way half of the time, it was a very self-centered and naive view of what was actually going to happen in there.

I didn't go in last week. There was a fight in my class the session before. Two men came into the room clearly carrying some sort of negativity with them. As one read the other repeatedly and intentionally dropped his pen and retrieved it with exaggerated and noisy gestures. This pissed the other off and when it was his turn to listen, he started coughing and tapping his desk. The kinds of things one would expect to see in junior high, but it had the effect of stirring up a tornado. So quickly I didn't even realize what was happening, the younger one was on his feet and screaming. The other hopped right up and went for him and one of the guards pushed me back behind the desk to intervene, the other hit the panic button and attempted to subdue the second inmate.

I stood there, my mouth hanging open. There was a loud burst in the center of my chest, like my heart was a pinata, blown apart. All I could do was stare at the other students beyond the melee and beg them silently not to move...not to do anything stupid...not to come for me while the guards were distracted. My eyes locked with N.'s and he narrowed his slightly. He is a convicted rapist and one of the inmates who makes me feel the most uncomfortable. The single thing that hooks in my heart when I try to not reduce him to just his crime is the almost imperceptible half-smile that quickly crossed his face when he read about raping a woman at knife-point. It could have been nerves over reading aloud, it could have been pride for being willing to get so raw on the page, but I felt blind rage carbonate my blood. So when the fight happened, it was his face I looked to first. I desperately hoped not to look good to him or to any of them, to not have inspired some sexually charged fantasy for him to suddenly act upon. He quickly looked away towards the scuffle but I couldn't catch my breath out of pure terror. In seconds other guards stormed the room and all of the inmates were ushered out...but there was something charged in the room and something changed in me.

Yes, these men are all some mother's sons...they write their truth and express themselves and show a determination and drive to create that I would bet rival that of any young luminaries in some MFA program somewhere. But, they are criminals...they are liars and cheats and violent offenders. Many of them, had our paths crossed under different circumstances would never resemble anything other than monsters to me, just as I wouldn't appear to them as "teacher" but as "prey." After that day I visited my kids and my son asked me "how the prisoners were"...I told him about the fight, but not how my body refused to stop shaking for three hours after I left jail. I didn't say how a look had passed between myself and a man whose crime has very likely robbed some woman of her full sexual power and sense of self-love. Every single day, I'm sure that man's face swims through her thoughts and for a second she feels like drowning until she remembers he's "away" and cannot hurt anyone else, until she remembers to breathe again. I didn't tell him that I wasn't sure if I could handle going back or that my dreams have been terrifying or that I sit up in bed at times and press my hand to the base of my throat to steady the wild thrumming of my pulse.

The inmates who fought will never return to my class again. The eight who remain were told the program was suspended for a "zero tolerance" policy, but will be rewarded for their non-involvement by the reinstatement of the rest of the sessions. Again, I was given an out by the program director who said that if I didn't feel I could resume classes, she would understand. It is either stupidity or stubborn pride, but I refused. Right now, how can I explain this? I am supposed to be in there, teaching. It is as simple as that. I have something to say to them...they have things I need to hear to challenge myself, to contradict myself, to grow as a human being and as an instructor. Friday morning, I will stand there in my standard drab clothes, hoping for invisibility and reading Bukowski to them, saying, "So You Want to Be a Writer?"

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Then, I will wait for their writing to flare through them and ignite across the page. In a small, windowless room, their words, my words, our words will burn like distant, unrestrained stars.

One Dream from Last Night

Italo Calvino showed up last night with a bottle of Merlot and hand-rolled cigarettes and sat with me on my back stoop for hours, swatting newborn mosquitoes and telling me about Difficult Loves...about men and women who fall madly in love through books, words and winter nights...about how the curve of my lower lip is exactly how he imagined his favorite character, Ludmilla's, though she was just fictional...a ghost, while I clearly am alive and very real. He ran his callused thumb over my mouth then--hard--like he wanted to leave his mark on me. I thought we would kiss, but Italo chuckled like he knew something I didn't yet and lit up a smoke instead.

Starting May 3rd, the Big Tent Poetry website will be launching with new poetry prompts, reviews/columns and, oh-so-importantly, an ongoing sense of poetic community! I encourage all of you to join this "Greatest Show on Earth" to keep your writing fresh and inspired. Ringleaders Carolee Sherwood, Deb Scott and Jill Crammond-Wickham are running the show. I am one of the Sideshow Barkers, along with the amazing: Christine Swint, Dave Bonta, James Brush, January O'Neil, Juliet Cook, Juliet Wilson, Robert Peake, Sage Cohen, Sarah J. Sloat and more! An off-shoot of ReadWritePoem, which is closing up shop at the end of this month, Big Tent Poetry is *the* new place for all of you poets to come hang out. Since many of you know about my sideshow/carnival poems (which are now headed to chapbook form) finding my way inside the Big Tent feels a lot like heading to a new home! I can't wait to see you (and read your work!) there...