Estée KlarTo Get To The Other Side

In part, this blog was to discuss the process of writing a book and of writing itself. Many people like to think that the end result is easy. Most writers know this is not so. While I’m not a new writer, I’ve not yet written a book.

Much like how we view people and autism — that there is a goal that must be reached — that only one end result is desirable or feasible — we forget the journey and the process as the greatest creation of all. When all is said and done and the product is finished perhaps a few people will read our work, perhaps fewer will remember it (or as Elizabeth Gilbert and J.K. Rowling will attest — sometimes there is “freakish” success). But that does not make the doing, the making, any less significant. An act of creation is no waste of time. It pains me sometimes when I watch a culture so invested in the end result that we continue to churn out less creators and more factory-line producers in business administrators and lawyers (but let us not forget that there are wonderful creators in these professions as well). I have a real issue with “professionals” being churned out of universities, as I find that those without such degrees can be equally, if not more competent, in business. I believe university is an opportunity to receive the Universal Education – not a place to learn a trade. It’s not that I do not appreciate trades and craftsmanship, for I have great respect for it and also believe we undervalue true craftsmanship. I believe learning a craft is equally as important as learning philosophy, literature, art, and the sciences. My real point is, life is more than the products we produce. It is the intricacies, decisions, confusions and the work in between that is often more meaningful and interesting to us in the end. The “wax on, wax off” of the Karate Kid was more important than the rush to learn Karate.  If the process of our lives wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be writing and producing biographies of people and their private lives — we just wouldn’t be that interested in them. We always need and want to know the story behind the creator.

I like to think of writing a book or a blog as a process as important as writing the Book of Life. As I went to a funeral last week, the Rabbi concluded that the “book of [the person's] life had now ended.” Our lives are complex narratives. We are reluctant to put the book down. When reading, we have been so invested in the journey. If this is not testament to how important a process is, I don’t know what is.

It was listening to a number of authors last week talking about process that I realized we are not a culture that appreciates it very much while it’s underway. We have our eyes on the prize.  One author even stated that there is no such thing as a failure in writing. We must have many of them. In this sense, there is no such thing as a failure.

I’m still writing and doing a lot of research now that the bones of what I want to write seems to be constructed.  The research is so much a part of my journey that I can see how some writers may not want to stop. Yet certain chapters have to be written. Some have to end. There is always something new to write about. There will be an ending to mine soon. But until someone reads the last sentence in my own Book of Life, I’m going to try and continue to relish the process.

I hope it need not be mentioned that this post is a metaphor for all of life, and for our autistic children with whom we place so much stake on performance and end results. It seems a bit of a let-down to have to spell it out.

I’m taking a break and writing at my desk while Adam plays. We’ve had a difficult weekend with anxiety so I’m taking a moment to permit myself to daydream a bit. Writing the book is a challenge with Adam’s needs. I haven’t showered since Thursday.

I have to admit I’m dreaming of a little white cottage on the beach by the sea. For some reason, I think I’ll just be pumping out the writing there. Isn’t that how we all dream it will “happen,” without the reality that it just takes daily effort and practice? But ah, the dream…. For now I settle for handwriting when traveling. I wrote a novella during my last trip Paris in the coffee shops where no real Parisian would dare to be seen writing. It’s what labels me a true foreigner there, apparently, alongside how I order my coffee and what kind of coffee I order at any particular point in the day. Yet I didn’t care. I loved every minute of it.

I’m interested for all you bloggers out there, when it’s the best time and place for you to write. I’ve got my little white office and I stare out at the street through two thinning pine trees.

“You didn’t see me.” That must be the most popular line of relationship distress we’ve all ever heard and the reason for much heartache. With those who are closest to us, we yearn to be seen meaning, we want to be seen for who we really are — all that vulnerable, squishy stuff inside of us that we want others to take in their arms and hold gently.

What does it mean to “be seen?” I mean, out here in Miami there is no lack of men and woman stripping nude, or nearly nude, wanting to be seen. Hair coiffed just so, a pair of trendy sun glasses and a spray-on tan, and off they go into the public to show off with their heads held just so –  pretending as if they are not aware that others are staring. These people may want to be seen all right, but they want us to pay attention to what they want us to see. It is a far cry from being seen.

If you think this post is about relationships it certainly could be. This is the meaty stuff of what makes or breaks many of them and why life is so hard sometimes. In his book Double Take: A Memoir, Kevin Michael Connolly travels to more than seventeen countries and captured 33,000 photographs along the way about the way people see him. Born without legs, “being seen” takes on a whole new meaning.

The photos in his book titled The Rolling Exhibition (named after his rolling around on a skateboard: “This Is A Legless Guy’s Skateboard. Please Please, Don’t Steal” he writes upon it), have been featured at museums and galleries around the world. They are taken from his perspective, low to the ground, (he is lying on his back when he takes some of them) with people staring down at him, which of course has a pent-up meaning in itself when talking about disability and the way people stare. They are passer’s by, whisking past him and he has caught their fleeting yet loaded glances. How could one describe them? Curiousity? Fear? What does it mean to be a subject of a stare when you have not intentionally invited it, unlike those plastic Miami boobs?

(Interesting to go off on a tangent here to recognize that those fake boobies are in the same sense a prosthesis that we admire rather than fear. Of course, we have the same curiousity and sometimes repugnance at the fake boobie because we understand that some person has intentionally gone under the knife and altered herself to make her more attractive for sex and they don’t look quite real. So we stare to make up our minds, or stare because we are just so darn curious. Aimiee Mullins, who has designed for herself a series of gorgeous looking prosthetic legs that can make her various heights has also noted the lack of difference between her legs and the many prosthetics men and women now use by choice in order to alter their appearance).

Like the performance artist Petra Kuppers, who with her disability stages performances that also investigate the stare, in fact invite it, Connolly has invited it by his being born with bilateral amelia (meaning born without limbs). It’s an unintended invitation, like being born into royalty with paparazzi following your every move. You don’t ask for it; it’s just sort of a birthright and a burden, whichever way you look at it — they seem to go hand-in-hand.

What I love about the camera is that it’s like staring back.  Being a photographer means you are like a voyeur, capturing other’s most private moments. One simple glance or expression, as they saying goes, captures a thousand words. Connolly has taken the stranger’s stare and turned it back on them. It’s rather empowering to turn the investigated into the investigator.  If I were Petra Kuppers, I’d be performing. If I were Estee Klar, I’d be writing. It’s what people who need to express a point, do. The camera captures private moments the way people stare at many disabled people who cannot fend off the stare. Often, we are intrepid lenses unwelcome in private moments. Yet Connolly, like all people who put their expressions out into the world has a conscience as he reflects in Sarajevo:

“What’s wrong,” [Beth] asked softly, her hand on my back.
“I don’t think I can shoot this anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I think I’m hurting people.”
“How?”
“People think I’m a beggar of someone who was hurt here.”
“Well, yeah. Maybe some people. But that doesn’t make you any more of a beggar than you were a month ago. You and I know who you are, so don’t let it get to you.”
“Yeah, but I’m using them for the photos.”
“So? It’s not as if their entire day is ruined or anything. You’re getting too wrapped up in everything. If you stop shooting and just quit, you’re going to hate yourself forever.” (p. 198)

It’s a question of art to a certain extent — this idea of truth-telling and who and what moments we use as subjects. When we take our personal experiences and use others to reflect a truth, are we doing unto others as they do unto us? The discussion about staring at people who look different or disabled is a sensitive one, and the more others can see themselves, the more we all can understand the effects of what we do everyday — those things we think are harmless like taking about an autistic person like they are not present, or criticizing the family, the parent, or autistic individual who needs to fight for things that come automatically to other families like access to education, services, and just acceptance into our communities without having to talk about autism, acceptance and the like. From a personal point of view, although I have to end up talking about it, I don’t want to talk about it everyday. We want (and deserve) to live our lives with autism as does any other person who wants to live their lives in peace, without having to justify the reason why they deserve to be here — why they “have” autism, where it “comes” from, or why they should have access to that school or that aide.

As a writer who likes to write about certain instances in our day-to-day lives — from the person who stares at Adam’s wildly flapping hands, to the friend whose account I once used about, when I was new to autism writing and the idea of “normal,” her desire to change the appearance of her child’s ears (I used the story about our quest to make our children appear indistinguishable and in Adam’s case, it’s simply impossible) — it’s really difficult to write about these real-life events. Yet there is a need for many of us to write, or make photographs and art, about them. It seems that everyone is sensitive, but the context in which these accounts are written are important. The consciousness of  not wanting to hurt other people, seems to me, is a must in the making of art, not that the hurt won’t be there. In the world of black-and-white autism politiking,  there is a need for education through thoughtful literature, memoir, art projects like Connolly’s. These projects help us understand life from a different perspective, and because it has been “done to him,” Connolly has a need to state his sensitivity. The outcome of his work is worth it. Like art and writing, the poignant point is made when it is evident that the artist has weighed the cost and the benefit of telling true stories.

In his Epilogue, Connolly reflects how the looks, no matter how experienced or hardened we become, still effect him:

“As these pages show, my lack of legs has generated a lot of strange looks. Those stares still get to me sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if I should explain myself to the people who shoot a sad direction in my direction. Maybe, if it would relieve that moment of guilt or pity from their lives, it would be worth it. But most of the time, I let those stares slide off my back. A lot of times, I don’t want to talk about my lacking legs.

Maybe it’s because dialogue has a tough time blooming when it’s about negative space. There’s only so much you can discuss about something that isn’t there, and isn’t forthcoming. And rather than try to make a bad riff on a Beckett play, I’d prefer to end this page with what I do have…

So maybe the reason I’ve been so frustrated at times by the question What the hell happened to you? [what caused your son's autism? -- my interjection here] is because it’s simply the wrong one to pose. It focuses too much on a physical circumstance based on a singular point in time, rather than on all of the influences and characters that followed.

Perhaps Where the hell did you come from? is what we all should be asking.” (pp.226-27)

I would agree. It would be nice to be asked that question rather than “what happened” to us, even though autism is certainly a part of our lives. The question is, Do you see me? For Adam and I, and Kevin Michael Connolly, it seems, it means the whole package.

—-

Kevin Michael Connolly, Double Take: A Memoir, New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

I hear Adam’s cherub voice, Ready. Set. Go! in my head as I’ve returned from Paris with fifty-two pages of something I think is finally good. It’s a little more than the weight and size of the limited edition of Jeanette Winterson’s Dog Days when I hold it. I can hear “ready, set go,” — that phrase we taught Adam to plunge him into a game or an activity, and I don’t forget the sound. Time, people, events happen so quickly and memory is fragile.

Over the past ten years, I’ve written two books, both incomplete and yearning to come together. At the Humber College for Writers and The University of Toronto, where I’ve attended writer’s conferences in the past, I was told that one’s first book takes about seven years to accomplish. Other writers have told me ten to fifteen years, which had me scratching my head at the John Grishams of the world and how on earth could they churn books out so fast. With my extraordinary impatience and harsh self-judgment, a difficult year has introduced me to some gentilité with myself and with others. So please “God,” this just has to be my year.

Thanks, John Baxter,  and his punctual rendezvous avec moi in front of Les Deux Magots, and avec Flannerie along Rue de Bonaparte and Rue Jacob, taught me a little bit more of the Paris that once belonged to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Miller and Gertrude Stein, among some other great literary figures. Thank you for also letting me hold a letter from Anais Nin to Jean Fanchette. I have come to realize why I became a curator but to understand the importance of preservation and memory.

I would recommend anyone out there to read John’s memoirs from Paris. He has written a series of that help describe the underbelly of and life in Paris.

It was not difficult to be alone in Paris and John’s paragraph caught my eye when I ran across it: “For a woman, Paris is a good city to be alone…Most of the expatriate writers who, since the turn of the century, created our image of the city — Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Nancy Mitford, Mavis Gallant, Dianne Johnson — were laureates of loneliness, who, even though sometimes married, preferred to live and work by themselves.” (page 137, Harper-Perrenial edition, 2005.) So here I was, a “ready, set go” decision to go to Paris, meet John, Leda and write. Another “laureate of loneliness,” but with no complaints.

Which leads me to also thank profusely, my long-time friend and pianiste extraordinaire, Leda Perac, who is another laureate living in Paris. I studied and became great friends with Leda in Germany fifteen years ago in colder, hungrier circumstances, nevertheless playing and singing our way through it all with Tori Amos. This time, having dinner in Le Châteaubriand with my face, she noted, visibily drawn from flight-fatigue, and undoubtedly the weight of a difficult year, she presented all of the letters I had sent to her in German when I returned to Canada in 1995 and 1996. Reading them between courses of poisson and some flirtatious chitter-chatter between myself and our exceptionally handsome waiter with the beautiful smile, I required her to translate the some of the very words I had written fifteen years later, to my chagrin. Leda, you helped bring back memories that remind me of who I was, who I am, and maybe more importantly, why I am.

And thank you, Paris. You gave me Adam, love, and fifty-two good pages. I’m ready to really begin.

Vive la présentation et le préservation.

Anais Nin is a woman who is true to herself and true to her writing from a woman’s perspective. I hope to visit her house in Louveciennes this week. Perhaps this short portion of the talk is a way for us to think about how true we are to ourselves when we write from where we are, which is hard to do when we hear so many ideas and inherit artistic styles. As I listen to her and write my way through this life as autism mom, single mom, and woman on a her own unique adventure, I am also learning that I have to go “the woman’s way:”

After listening to La Vie En Rose, I booked a last-minute ticket to Paris. I leave next week to meet my girlfriend, Leda, who I became friends with while studying in Europe fifteen years ago. Leda is a pianist and her father is a well-known composer from Zagreb. I mention this because I need my artist friends. I need to be around them like I need food or else the daily ups and downs of markets confines the spirit to downward spirals only waiting for outside influences to send them up again. Art puts everything into perspective and reminds me that its wonderful to be a part of the human drama. Perhaps because of our foreignness in a foreign country — we were both struggling to be part of German life in a town called Frieburg – and because we shared Croatian roots, and maybe just because we both loved music, Tori Amos and lots of laughter, we became good friends.

I met Leda again in Paris while I was married a few years ago. Our visit was too short. My ex was not that interested in listening to our memories, which made me feel pressured to cut my visit short with her as most of us do when we know someone is waiting. Thanks to email and Facebook, I’ve reconnected with many of my friends and I decided at the last minute to meet her next week.

I don’t know if it’s part of the divorce process – that bucket list of things we’re going to do only because we are not married anymore. Or perhaps it’s due to the sheer desperation to find and become something new, someone different, and the best way to begin is with a list. Like a compass, it can point you in any direction. All you have to do is choose.

It’s difficult, though, to travel with a child waiting for me at home. A child who knows poignantly when I am not with him, with his few but precious words, I am told, says “mama…mama…” and who is visibly missing me. If Adam only knew the sickness in my stomach that I feel every time I leave him for just a few days. I hate that he misses me or thinks I am gone forever and I worry about it until I’m nauseous. It stopped me from taking many long trips my ex otherwise wanted me to take with him. When your child cannot talk easily with you about his feelings or over the telephone, the worry plummets deeper. So I only booked myself away for five days.

In the earlier days when I knew Leda, when we were younger but not less hopeful, I would have booked several months away under similar circumstances and I would challenge myself even more. It’s like teetering on the edge of an old and new life like standing on the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, which I actually did once at The Royal Observatory. Real and imagined, even with five days, I am crossing a line. While I always hate leaving Adam, I still feel a rush of excitement about going to the airport, which despite the relative ease and economy of travel these days, and with delayed flights, packed airports and flaring tempers, still elates me and I might as well be back in the 1950’s traveling as far and foreign as Asia. I feel excited watching all the people getting ready to go to their destinations – people who speak different languages. I will fiddle with my bag, dig out my book and sit beside strangers knowing that just one conversation can change a person’s life. I love the smell of engine fuel and the sound of them revving before lift-off, the movie selection and bad airplane food and the struggle to sleep because tomorrow will be well underway when I arrive.

As I prepare by launching into a temporary state of transformation, I listen to Parisian music. I have booked a full schedule of concerts, literary walks and dinners with Leda when I arrive. I will bring my journal, put on red lipstick and pearls, and smear my coffee cups and wine goblets with red stains, and find a good pen to buy. I can almost smell the Marlboroughs in the air, and hear the echoes in skinny lane-ways on the Left Bank of lovers talking and giggling and the sound of my feet behind them like Anais Nin’s as the night clears the air. In Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the phenomenon of people changing and becoming like the environment they visit. While witnessing a group of Americans in Paris he describes them as “undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecules of a new people.” Travel, he implies, changes us and I yearn to be changed, if only for a week in time.

I am ready walk out into my life again in my little black dress — of rediscovering myself and perhaps who I will become. And I am discovering myself also as a single parent to my son who, even while schlepping to parent-teacher meetings, Adam’s team meetings, O.T., SLP and other like meetings in her Honda, enjoys her red lipstick and Coco Chanel. Discovery is a wonderful thing, and we can be many things to ourselves and to others. But most importantly, the best kind of travel and adventure is the kind where I know I still have Adam to come home to.

There are some things that silence me for a few moments. The death of a child, the poignant line. Vicki Forman’s This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood does both. About the premature birth of her twins, the death of one child and the survival of her son with multiple disabilities, Vicki must navigate life’s toughest challenges. Just the first paragraph alone will be enough to make you gasp, sit silent and want to read the rest of her book:

“I learned about grief during this time. I learned that no matter the true temperature, grief made the air crisp and cold; that it caused me to drive slowly, carefully; there was very little I could eat. I learned that I didn’t notice things until they flew out at me and that most stories and books and news articles were unreadable, being accounts not of the events themselves, but of me. Of what I had lost and would never have again, of what I had once allowed myself to want, the things I used to love. Of small consolations no longer available. I learned that my heart could stop and start a dozen times a day and that my throat felt so sore and tight I often had to swallow air simply in order to breathe. The world receded; everything took place in slow motion and was viewed as if down the wrong end of a very long telescope. So much was unfamiliar that if I was asked my name, I had to think for long moments. ‘Grief is a visceral process of disengagement,’ a friend said. In my grief, old versions of disembodiment became a cruel joke. You thought that was bad, not being able to walk into a roomful of strangers without disassociating or turning remote and distant? That was nothing. Try this. Try heart-stopping, immobilizing grief.” — Vicki Forman, This Lovely Life, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishers, 2009.

Tom Bissell, who writes the forward describes Vicki’s journey well: “She does not claim she is always correct; she sometimes expresses anger at certain doctors, and she occasionally behaves in ways that some readers may find appalling. But just as this is not a depressing book, it is also not an angry book. It is a book filled with love and wonder — enriched by the kind of grief that those of us who are not parents cannot imagine and those of us who are will not want to.”

We all love to read to our children. I have my own favorites and Adam has his. He will sit calmly in my arms reading The Giving Tree by Shel  Silverstein.  His favorite are The Mr. Small and Mr. Giggles books. Adam can begin to tell me his favorite parts and why they are his favorite parts — something that he could not articulate when he was two or three-years-old.  He loves reading cookbooks, all kinds of books now, when in his toddler years he would seem to only be drawn to books with letters and numbers. While he still occasionally looks at those, they are not all he looks at anymore. Did I teach him to like other books? Not particularly. There was no forcing I could do to get him interested, no “program” with a reward system of getting him to like reading other books. Instead all I think I did was use the books he was already reading, describing pictures within them, talking about other words that began with the letter of the day. Come to think of it, I should have been hired by Sesame Street for coming up with everything that goes with the letter A.

As Adam grows older, I’m interested in books that have meaning for us without hard-boiled moral endings. Books about the dentist are good. Books about doctors — good too. The books I come about autism and friendships are okay but the majority are made with the intention of raising money to cure the child which minimizes the purpose of not only the message, but the complexity of it.

Remembering the Wild Boy of Averyon, I decided to purchase the children’s version by Mordicai Gerstein.  When found in the wild living among the animals, the “Wild Boy” was brought to Paris.  He was found living successfully in the wild. Yet trying to “civilize” him in Paris was a challenge. The boy, never having been socialized with humans, could not talk. His sensory system was different (he could survive in the cold winters without clothes). He was observed and stared at as a strange creature, and written about in the media to the fascination of all who read about him. Because he didn’t listen they determined him to be deaf and mute. Of course, the boy tried to run away back to his woods, but he was captured so that scientists and scholars could study him.

He ignored the sound of guns shooting next to his ears, but not the sound of a cracked walnut in the next room. “He loved walnuts.” He would not eat the food civilized society gave him, but only nuts, potatoes baked in the coals. He didn’t seem to feel pain as they pinched him. They could not get his attention with toys and after weeks of examination.

“‘The boy’s behavior,’ they said, ‘places him below all animals, wild or domestic. He is hopeless.’ Then they lost interest in him.”

Until John-Marc Itar, a young doctor cared for him and decided to teach the boy he named Victor.  He began to learn the things Dr. Itar taught him, but he could never learn to talk.  Then,

“One sweet spring morning, Victor woke and, without thinking, ran off to find the woods. He became lost in the suburbs of Paris and spent the night hiding in a park till the police found him.” They brought him “home.”

His hair was combed, he could set the table, he was proud of himself when he could solve difficult problems. “He wasn’t wild anymore.”

“But he did remain silent, and could never tell of his wild life. And something of the wild was always in him….The sound of a rising wind, or the sight of whirling snowflakes or the sun bursting from behind a cloud made him tremble with excitement and wild joy.” Victor would gaze every night at the moon and the doctor would wonder what he saw there.

—–

Mordicai Gerstein, The Wild Boy, Sunburst Edition, 2002.

There are days I’m not sure how to write. This ache of inertia stops me short — what do I tell, what do I leave out? It’s a problem, actually, of writing about oneself; a problem that many writers experience when writing about life.

The mother always has to think twice. More like a thousand times a day. A mother has to wear a shield around her so she does not upset the children she loves so much. A mother has to be solid, grounded — a monolith MOTHER as described on the tombstones in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto where many of us Torontonians walk and run through every day like Central Park. I know, it’s a more melancholy park, you’re thinking. But it’s truly spectacular for it’s scale and landscape in the centre of our city. I walk by stone angels here almost every day. “Beloved wife of,” “Mother of.” That seems to be our legacy — and while it is an important one, it is peripheral and lonely. I am reminded of Margaret Laurence and her Hagar.

MOTHER – it describes everything and nothing out here in the cool fall air. If I were not a mother, I’d be pining to be one, envious of the epithet. If you don’t know me, now you do in part. I wanted a child so badly and had I not had one, I’d be crying now. I walk among the stones reading them, picking up brown oak leaves that smell fragrant as they decompose, wondering what my stone will read. I gather the oak leaves in my hand because that’s what I do when I go out on my walks. I collected my first three four-leaf clovers this year after looking for the previous forty-two of them. I would look for hours as a child. I’d search within the thick bush of clover knowing that one day I’d find my luck, but all I found were the common three-leaved variety. The rich green mass became too overwhelming to continue the search, and mother called me in for dinner. I found three this year when I wasn’t looking, and in the nick of time. Going through a separation while recovering from cancer surgery was the worst event of my life, so someone wanted to tell me something, I figure. Now, I pick up four oak leaves because the oak tree symbolizes strength and courage and you must know me — I’ve got a lot of that.

We are born into this life, a blank slate of possibilities and stories to be written. The stone that remains is a summary. The men in this cemetery typically get some interesting descriptions – heroes and veterans particularly so. I look for the mothers and wives, thinking that, like the sullen ambrosia of the leaves and earth, our time here is short but never lost; the earth and leaves beneath my feet are the smell of life that goes on forever. Dust to dust indeed — our fragrance is sweet.

Among phallic monuments erected to the family name or patriarch of the family, I’m particularly drawn to a modest stone laid just before it on the slant of a gentle hill. Sitting low to the ground, an older worn stone with the block letters spelling MOTHER. She is modest there in front of the huge piece of marble pricking the empty sky.

Underneath the “monolith,” the woman’s world is rich and wrought with things some children will never know. Why is it that men do not hide their desires as well? Why do they live out loud? Why do they get to?

It’s a problem, really, as a writer. I could dress her up in fictitious clothes – a universal mother, woman with desires and unmet dreams, who has been hurt, who has stories that can never be told, or if they are, told carefully.

I write around and around her like a rubber tube spinning so much harder and faster than the centre of the rim. The core that stands so open, awaiting the spear of the archer’s arrow, or my pen. Yet it compels, so to want to get to know her. I wish I could grab a cup of tea and look through her photo albums, have a woman-to-woman chat. I bet she shared her life with many of her friends. I bet she has a great story that should have been told. I bet it would have helped my own.

‘Tis the season of H1N1 and I am reminded of how many writers write about illness. I began The Joy of Autism blog in 2005 whilst suffering from pneumonia. I devoured the prose and poetry of Audre Lourde when I was diagnosed with cancer. Here’s an excerpt from Virgina Woolf on illness I found interesting, and which reminds me why many of us are compelled to write:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

From “On Being Ill,” by Virginia Woolf. First published by the Hogarth Press, 1930.

“We all take for granted the little miracles,” she said afterwards there, in the dark.

She said it after I pulled out the fishbone from my throat – about an inch and a bit long. I did it outside, after they said the meal was on the house, choking next to the kitchen asking for help quietly.

“You should have seen your face,” her eyebrows furrowed with worry, “it was going red.”

It was my usual fish – the filet of sole that I always ask to be de-boned. We were enjoying an evening out, two single women — admiring, being admired and that’s enough for the soul to ride on after a long swim in the dark. Just opening up can be enough. Opening my mind, my world, my eyes and the whole world smiles with me.

Until…I choked.

On a fishbone.

Almost choked to death as we headed to emerg.

Emerge.

And then I pulled the little bugger out, giving the term “dig deep” a whole new meaning, there, outside on the sidewalk away from the people, wondering if this little fishbone “was it.” This little soft bone the thread between air and breathlessness.

“We can never take for granted the little miracles that happen every day,” she said again, shaking her life-affirming head and pursing her lips. “You better frame that thing.”

Perhaps I should as the little reminder of being one step away from floating with the fishes.

Hovering like barometric weight,
each morning before I wake
an effort looms.

It was your idea,
your invitation
upon the podium I stood.
You wanted words of hope, I thought -
Of the little engine that could.

Lauded once and quoted some
for better and for worse.
There I learned but also burned
A scorch within the wood.

Shaded once by gilded trees
like cold metal – forlorn.
The artifact, the word, the thought
A dropped seedling in the dirt.

Cut it down, say no more,
words of love be gone!
Do not remind us, this plight we lead,
or of dreams – you cling on.

Be gone you feckless writer!
Just who do you think you are?
If we smite you and apprise you,
You can go — afar.

Of books, of words of thoughts and form,
some mold and shape and bend.
With exaltations and deflations,
An artist’s life is spent.

— by (me)

A year-and-a-half ago, I had an obsession with typewriters. I bought them first for Adam, thinking that he would find the one with the right feel and sound as he was learning his keyboard. For Adam, he enjoys sound and experiments by tapping onto different objects and surfaces. He studies sound as much as he is in love with letters. Adam’s father purchased a wonderful old Remington for me years ago that Adam enjoyed playing with. So, as I was healing from two surgeries for ovarian cancer in 2008 (I am fine, in case you were wondering), I entertained myself on EBay and bought some old electrics. When I was back on my feet, I began stashing them in various locations where I had planned to write.

Tomorrow, I’m going to write on one. Pretty much everyone understands how writing by pen, on the computer or on a typewriter can lead to different kinds of writing. I write my journals in ink. They feel sensuous and intimate when I write that way. The computer is great for blogging and writing articles, and yes, I’ve written a few chapters on the computer and I tend to type very fast. Yet there are just too many distractions here on my computer — Facebook, Twitter — man, I’m a pro. Yet other than the social aspect of this media, who really cares what song I’m listening to? To use the media wisely is to get out the word about the work we wish to promote.

So tomorrow I will see how writing like writers used to write feels like. The only bug may be that the tape might be out of ink and I’ll have to go hunting for some down on Queen Street.

And, if you are into distractions and procrastinations, here’s another site to distract you NaNoWriMo writers that I found today (while I should have been writing, of course — thanks Vicki Forman). I’ll keep you posted when I figure out how to download it.

I have a list of writing topics. There they are, line by line, one stacked upon the other awaiting more words in my little red writing book. The book is full enough to make me feel somewhat accomplished. The weight of the paper from its corresponding blue ink feels thick and full and crinkles differently than a crisp, empty page. I love flipping through written pages or read pages as in a book that I’ve broken well into.

There sure are a lot of ideas and words in that book. Like NaNoWriMo, I can claim my 50,000 words and then some. But as lovely as the weight of words feels in my hands, they are not woven together.

Weaving together is the art of writing. I can draw the perfect picture in my mind, and even watch my hand create it, but when it comes down to getting down to it, one just has to keep practicing. It’s never as easy as we believe in our minds, for what’s being created in our minds cannot be expressed as easily when we have to coordinate our bodies. There may be the will to create, even an idea, but the act of doing is much more difficult.

As a curator of art I was always mortified when some bloke would try to get under my skin and proclaim of a Barnett Newman painting that “I could do that at home.” I suppose some people believe that artists are sometimes pulling “a fast one” on us, but I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. There are a lot of “notes,” run-on sentences, thoughts and other bodies of work before the final product is complete.

If I could sift my writing (as in a Barnett Newman painting) and get it as tight as a few poignant lines on an otherwise empty canvas, that, for me, would be an accomplishment.

It is a pleasant coincidence that November happens to be Novel Writing Month at Nanowrimo and I decided to join (partly to become part of the community again). Nanowrimo requires 50,000 words by November 30th, but it’s the end product I want by next year.

Let the writing begin.