Hang on to your quill

I put on big-girl pants (well, pants, period; I was on my way to pajamas and severely tempted to stay home) and left my apartment to attend a reading by Jess Walter and Daniel Orozco tonight at Walla Walla University, sponsored by Humanities Washington. 

It was an unpretentious reading—and by that, I mean that there wasn't anybody up there in an excessive scarf reading what other writers have said about these writers just to introduce them, and there was no big fanfare. Just a couple sofas and some comical-looking portable mics. The space was perfect: a theater room in an old campus building. I love it when a place is comfortable enough in its age that nobody has restored the soul out of it. Even though it's winter, the night was mild enough that they propped the large oak doors open to the street. There were old theatre seats, covered in tattered red  material that may have been velvet or just velveteen with age, with wooden backs and hinges that allowed you to lean back.

Some sixty-plus students and the oddball prof or community librite (yes, I made up that word but you totally know what I mean) filled the room. Though WWU is an adventist college and students can't drink, wear jewelry, or eat pork (and therefore do all three with conviction, I'm sure), they were still familiar to me, and as someone two years out of a University and formerly submersed in the humanities, I missed them and loved them—the ones in dark glasses or vintage cardigans or dyed hair or knitted hats sitting forward, waiting for their moment to shine at question-and-answer; others in their bright new clothes and well-behaved hair taking diligent notes of details and missing the reading, others acting bored and probably believing they didn't understand anything but laughing at all the good lines (and let's face it, dirty jokes well-told are the good lines). I showed up three minutes early and already Orozco was reading from his essay/short story, "Shakers."

Jess Walter was sexy. He name-dropped (Sherman Alexie), but not, thank God, gratuitously or smugly—he and Alexie play basketball together, so they're each writing a series of stories about a fictional team, and eventually the teams will meet and play against each other. That's fun. I kind of want to look both teams up, now (so to speak and that's the only time you'll find me using those words). The story he read was really engaging, but to be honest I preferred Orozco's sweeping essay-like piece about a California earthquake and its unconnected, isolated victims. It broke a lot of rules, and I love that. It bordered on that sentimental, almost religious sense of place, and I love that too.

A couple of ideas that stood out to me:
Orozco said, in his essay, that "The middle of nowhere is somewhere to somebody."
Orozco also pointed out that when writers say they create the characters and after that the characters just kind of take over and tell the writer what they're doing, that's insanity.
Jess Walter said that he gets up and writes at 5:30 every morning. Now I think that's insanity.
Walter also noted that some people want to write, others want to be writers.

That last point made me wonder, which am I? Writing is not easy for me. I always believe before starting that I couldn't possibly have anything to offer of value. I don't understand people; how could I describe them believably? I've never done anything of great importance. I have lived a small and sheltered life—I live in a sad little shoebox world. But when I start to write, it turns out that I have a million things to say about every fine point. I get carried away as if I'm holding a brush and torturing the life out of a painting trying to get a blade of grass just right. Then I think of three or ten different things to say at once and get all pen-tied. The end result is often a big mess of words that I can't really expect a reader to follow. I believe that at my best I have a great sense of cadence and an instinct for leading from one sentence to the next. But my ideas get in the way. I'm like a graceful dancer with an extra foot. So writing is hard for me, and I keep it locked away. Because when I start writing, I feel compelled to write more. And then I don't have the discipline to keep at this painful joy so I abandon it again. All of which proves, I would be a terrible heroin addict.

So anyway, as you can see, my darling hypothetical audience, going to the reading gave me a wee bit o' the itch, it did. I haven't really written since I finished my thesis. I felt that it was a fraud, except maybe the art (I made prints to go with the poems and essay) and about two poems out of twenty-some, and I believed that my mentor/ the chair of my thesis committee was disappointed in it, too, so I lost the nerve, verve, piss and vinegar, all of it and went back into my head. But I guess I really just need to come at writing from a new angle—a refreshingly not-for-college angle. Of course, universities are where the surface of it all happens because it's one of the last places in a society where the arts are celebrated and recognized for what they are: the thing that makes us human and makes life beautiful. But they're not where writing happens; where it's done, where the stories take place; where it's read. Anyway, what I mean is, maybe it'll help me if I return to writing for the sake of writing, for ME, rather than for a grade or to meet somebody else's expectations. And of course, I hit on it a minute ago: Writing keeps me from retreating completely into my head. Rather, it gets my head out into the world. So I guess I'm writing again. Hold on to your hats.

Which reminds me of a quote from Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan, the guy who posthumously got me thinking about writing in college in the first place: "Then my sister would say to me, 'Do you think you can do it?' and I'd reply, 'Of course. Hang onto your hat.' / Your Hat/ Gone Now These/ Twenty Years..."