On Competition

At the silent retreat, once each day there was a question and answer period–the only time that any of us spoke. I didn’t have any questions–or rather, I did have questions but had grown quite accustomed to the silence, and couldn’t imagine hearing the sound of my own voice. I was interested in what others had to say, and one woman’s question, in particular, struck me. She was a very young woman–I’m guessing twenty-four or twenty-five–and wore glasses, her hair in pigtails.

“I work in a very competitive field,” she said. “And I’m having a hard time when a friend of mine succeeds. A friend told me the other day that she had just signed with an agent, and it was hard to be happy for her.”

So she was a writer, I thought to myself. That wasn’t surprising. She looked like many of my students, with her retro-hippie downtown vibe. But…a competitive field? Thinking of writing as a) competitive and b) a field struck me as just plain wrong. I wanted to go up to this girl–but of course I didn’t. I’m not sure I would have, even if I could have spoken. The teacher responded with a brief discourse on sympathetic joy– and the ways in which we’re able to feel joy for the success and happiness of others only when we, ourselves, are filled with that elusive Buddhist trait: equanimity. As the teacher was speaking, I found myself thinking about competition among writers. How was writing competitive? A writing life involved many difficult feelings, certainly: isolation, frustration, impatience, loneliness, obscurity, disappointment, rejection — was it really necessary to pile competition onto this already long list? Especially when it’s a useless feeling–one that brings along in its wake that dreadful feeling, envy?

I have had moments, flashes of envy about another writer’s success. Someone gets a prestigious grant that I also applied for. Someone else gets nominated for a major award. Someone makes a boatload of money. It’s only natural to feel a pang of desire, of longing–of thinking, I want that. Give me that. And I know that other writers have felt these pangs of envy about me. I know because I can feel them. Envy is such a palpable thing. But competition? The only competition I feel is with myself. I want to be better than I am. I want the book I’m writing to be better, deeper, more powerful than the last. John Irving once said that writers are lucky because we have the chance to get better as we get older. I want to be that kind of writer — the one writing at the height of her powers, as they say, well into my eighties. If only I should be so lucky.

I wanted to go up to that girl and tell her this. I wanted to tell her that if you think that way, it only gets worse–because nothing will ever be enough. The stakes are so high, the emotions so intense. There’s always more to want, and there are always people doing better. Horse racing comes to mind. Why do horses wear blinders when they race? I like to think that it’s so they don’t look right or left. So that they don’t see who’s coming up behind them. So that they can run their hearts out.

So pigtail girl from the silent retreat, if by some strange coincidence you’re reading this–I want to say to you: write your heart out and compete with yourself.

On Domestic Life and Writing

As my regular blog readers may have intuited by now, I have developed a sudden burst of blogging energy. I’m hoping to continue this, and to write most mornings about some aspect of the writing life. Take this morning, for instance. At 7:30, my husband and son left for the day, heading down the kitchen stairs to the garage with their usual assortment of briefcase, knapsack, reading material, and in today’s case, rock specimens for something at school called “rock shop” (don’t ask). This required a last minute flurry to locate the pyrite–found in a shoe box where all geology samples have been carefully stored away. Whew. Crisis averted. They left–the car made its way down our driveway which is always a complicated, bittersweet moment for me–and then they were gone. The house was quiet.

Time for my writing to begin, right?
Wrong.

I have only been at my desk for an hour this morning and here, so far, is what I have accomplished. In my overnight emails, there was a reminder about placing orders for holiday gifts so that they’ll arrive in time. Right. So I did that. While I was looking for all the addresses I needed, I heard a suspiciously loud sound from the kitchen. My husband had left his office door open, and the puppy had wreaked havoc. He had gotten into the shredder bin, and shredded the mountain of paper even further. It looked like a small blizzard had hit. While he was at it, he used the television remote as his bone. It’s a good thing the little devil is so cute.

I dealt with the blizzard, emptied the dishwasher while I was at it, then came back upstairs to my desk. Centered? Ready to work? You tell me.

But here’s the bright side, and it really is a bright side. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to remember that you can start your day over again at any time. I’ve tried to teach this to Jacob. Take a breath. Shake it off. Begin again. I’ve also learned, in a Pavlovian way, that if I don’t have at least a decent writing day, the rest of my day has a pall over it–a gray sky. The writing itself allows light in–not that it’s easy, not that it’s even pleasurable. Just that it’s necessary–and not just because it’s my livelihood, but because it’s who I am. I will leave you today with a new favorite quote from Virginia Woolf:

“The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practice anonymity.”

On Solitude

I’m back from three days on silent retreat. The schedule was this: Forty-five minutes of meditation before breakfast, then three hours of meditation (both seated and walking) before lunch, then another three hours in the afternoon, then dinner. Then another hour and a half before bedtime. It was the gentlest possible immersion into such an experience, with two extraordinary Buddhist meditation teachers leading the group and giving talks. But still, gentle as it was, it was extremely tough going for me. There was definitely a hump to get over — and once I had begun to get over that hump, it was already time to go home.

I didn’t get to know my fellow retreatants. I saw them out of the corner of my eye, and made up stories in my mind about them. 150 people–spanning many decades, shapes, sizes–all made a commitment at some point to come on this retreat. Perhaps sitting in front of their computers, as I did last summer, reading about The Garrison Institute, or these particular teachers, and making a split second decision, as I did. Of course, some of them were old hands at this; the ones who settled on their cushions with their own comfy blankets and water bottles. It was oddly intimate, living with these strangers, each of us going through our own internal adventure. Each morning I brushed my teeth and washed my face alongside the other women in the communal bathroom–something I haven’t done since college. We ate our meals next to one another at long tables, chewing thoughtfully in silence.

Now that I’m home again, and time collapses around me as if I had never been gone (the dogs, the homework, the lists, the school bake sale, the manuscripts) I am thinking about the quality of that particular kind of solitude. Looking around at the other people on the retreat, I was aware that I am alone most of the time, and I wondered if it might be even more difficult for those people who spend their days surrounded by co-workers. I do have a solitary life during the daylight hours. But I often fight that solitude even as I live it. I run from it, I distract myself. It’s as if there’s something terrifying at the center of it, and I’m afraid to look. After three days of going incrementally deeper, closer and closer to the core of that place, I am at the moment less afraid. My mind polished, settled, clear. How long will it last? Stay tuned.

On Silence

I’m thinking about silence as I prepare to leave on a three day meditation retreat. I’ve gone on meditation retreats before, but this one, in the literature, requests that participants engage in “social silence”. This means silent meals. No eye contact. No hellos in the hallways. Just silence. And I’m truly petrified. You wouldn’t think I would be so frightened of silence. After all, I spend my days quietly. Here I sit, with one of the dogs curled up on the reading chair in my office, the other dog downstairs in the kitchen–my only company during the days. The only sounds are the crunch of gravel in the driveway when a UPS truck pulls up to the house–usually with a package of books from Amazon–or the ring of the phone, which almost always startles me since I’m already turned inward.

So what is so frightening about this kind of meditative, contemplative silence? I suppose that I will have to come face to face with my own distractions. With the way that I manage my daily periods of concentration by regularly turning my attention away from the work, rather than towards it. I remember, when I used to smoke cigarettes, how it felt to take a cigarette break. The box of Marlboros, the ashtray, the matches, the blowing of the smoke–it was a real break from writing. When I quit smoking (this was in 1989 or so, in case you’re wondering) I was at a loss. What was my new cigarette break going to be, without cigarettes? The internet hadn’t been invented yet, or at least I didn’t have access to it. I didn’t have email. I remember the feeling: it was time for a break, but I had nothing to do. I sat there, fidgeting, nervous, waiting for the wave of discomfort to pass. I imagine this is how it will be, sitting in silence.

Here’s my current version of a cigarette break, nearly twenty years later: as I sit at my desk working, I regularly hit upon moments when I need to look away from what I’m doing. Instead of gazing out the window, or standing and stretching, or any one of a number of mentally quiet activities, I check email. I go online and look things up. Depending on the day and the state of my mental health, I find myself on the blogs of friends; or literary websites; I browse my favorite fashion website, though in all the years I’ve clicked through there, I’ve bought exactly two items; and worst of all, I google myself. This is never good, and I try hard not to do it. As Joyce Carol Oates said to her husband Ray at breakfast one morning, when he noticed that the New York Times had a review of one of her novels–I’m not going to read it now. If it’s good, it will ruin my writing day, and if it’s bad, it will ruin my writing day. But either way, I want to have a writing day.

As I embark on this rather brief period of silence that stretches before me like a great yawning gulf, I’m frightened, yes–but also curious to see what happens with no version of a cigarette break.

On Generosity

I’ve noticed that sometimes it’s hard for writers to be genuinely supportive of each other. I’ve seen this up close, myself, and I’ve seen it in graduate schools where I’ve taught creative writing to MFA students. The mistaken idea: that we’re all in competition. That what’s good for one writer necessarily takes something away from another. That there’s a small pot of gold (well, maybe copper) at the end of the rainbow and if one writer gets some of it–and this can be defined by prizes, literary acclaim, a publishing contract, or even just damned good work–that means there’s less for everybody else.

Well, bullshit. Over the last decade, MFA programs have become less creative environments–more about the elusive destination than the journey. Every student is looking over his or her shoulder at the competition. A couple of years ago, a thesis student of mine explained a little bit about this to me. “We all know that there’s a very small window,” she said.

Window? What window? I looked out the window of my home office at the meadow below. It seemed large enough.

“The writers who are teaching us–they’ll forget about us after the semester is over unless we make an impression on them right now,” she went on. “This is our only chance for our teachers to help us get agents and publishers.”

I was dismayed by this, even as it helped make sense of the hostility I had been sensing in the classroom. Students exchanging meaningful glances. Students not giving of themselves when it came to critiquing. I pointed to a pile on my office floor. It was a towering, teetering pile of manuscripts, galleys, books.

“See that manuscript on the bottom there? That’s from a former Columbia student of mine from, oh, ten years ago. The next one up? A galley from a former NYU student whose first book is coming out–I’m blurbing it. The manuscript after that? The fifth draft of a novel by a New School student who asked me to read it. The one on top of that? From someone I met at Bread Loaf.”

The thesis student looked at me skeptically. This was not what she had been led to believe. I told her that once someone was my student, they remained my student no matter how many years had passed–and I knew that my colleagues felt the same way. The act of teaching writing is one I have come to think of as sacred. It involves trust and commitment, and even though of course writers struggle with the balance–with doing our own work and giving energy to the work of others–this is a responsibility we take seriously. Honestly, I was appalled that students felt this way. And on a practical level, the effect of this kind of thinking was to constrict the work itself. Who can do good work when worrying about agents and publishers? Let me tell you, I know what it feels like to fall into this trap myself. I’ll be sitting at my desk and working on a story, and next thing I know, I’ll be imagining that story in The New Yorker font. This is the moment I stop writing well. Or I find myself thinking about a writer I dislike whose career is going well, or a writer I like whose career is going poorly–and I’ll compare. How am I doing? Where do I fall in the scheme of things? When I’m doing this, I’m lost. Completely, utterly lost. The work dries up, becomes a self-conscious attempt to please a marketplace rather than to find its purest and best form.

It seems a tremendous shame to spend the valuable time and considerable money on an MFA, or in a good workshop of any kind, worrying, comparing, envying, competing. The best workshops are like a fine orchestra, perfectly in tune, each writer’s melodic line supporting the next and the next. I’ve had the good fortune of teaching several of those workshops, and let me tell you: the work produced reflects the difference.

Prison

Often, after I’ve visited a book group, I like to post a picture. But there are no pictures of my most recent book group visit, because I wasn’t allowed to bring a camera. In fact, I was instructed to leave my entire bag in the car, and only bring my driver’s license in with me to the prison where I met last week with a gathering of female inmates. I had been asked to visit by a wonderful bookseller who has been involved in a longtime project of bringing literature (and, occasionally, the writers themselves) to this particular prison. Apparently, one of the inmates had heard me on The Faith Middleton Show, talking about Black & White. She registered that I live in Connecticut, and thought that maybe I’d be willing to join them.

I had never been inside a prison before. Before I went, I asked Michael if he had ever been in a prison, and he said: “Not in this country.” I was pretty sure that this was the place that Jean Harris had been incarcerated. It was Federal, minimum security. How disturbing could it be? Well, let me tell you: it was plenty disturbing. After going through security involving metal detectors, a body scan and a stamp on my hand, we were escorted into the prison proper by a guard. Once those doors clanged shut behind us, we entered an outdoor quadrangle with old, gnarled fruit trees, their branches bare and twisted like a Maurice Sendak illustration. The quadrangle was filled with women in gray sweat suits, and the lights overhead were bright. I looked up at the sky and wondered what it would be like to be incarcerated. To have the view straight up be one’s only view of the world out there.

The women in the book group were amazing readers. They had time to read, and the desire to read, and were starved for stories. They asked some of the best questions I’ve ever been asked by an audience. They had really thought about my books–some of them had read two or three of them–and were intensely curious and engaged. The whole time I was with them, I kept wondering about their own stories. Why were there here? What had happened? What had gone wrong–and when, and how? There were women of every age, shape, color, socioeconomic background in that room. I wanted to hear their stories, but knew I shouldn’t ask.

At the end of the visit, a bell rang–loud, like an alarm–startling the hell out of me. I stopped mid-sentence. I was a little jumpy to begin with, after the metal detector, the clanging doors. The women laughed. “It isn’t that bad,” one of them said. “You can finish your sentence.”

In and Out of the Cave

This is how I’ve come to think of it. When I’m writing, I’m in the cave. When I’m not, I’m blinking in the sunlight. Sometimes it’s difficult to emerge. Other times, it’s torture to go back into the darkness. The other day, I was in New York, making a promotional video for an upcoming anthology for which I wrote an essay. A bunch of the writers in the anthology arrived at the publisher’s office wearing their chic, black tops, as instructed. A make-up artist was there to touch us up. And as we sat in a conference room being prepped and powdered, I had a strong sense of being in a room filled with kindred spirits. Some of us were friends. Some of us had…how shall I put it…histories with each other. But what all of us had in common was that we’re people who spend most of our lives in a semi-hermetic way, and that this–the conference room, the platter of cookies, the bright lights of video cameras–was not where we lived, even though it was fun. I’m always struck by how odd my life is, when I find myself in an office building. People get dressed for work! They have meetings and lunches and they talk to other people all day long!

As I write, I’m in my bathrobe. It’s nine-fifteen on a Thursday morning. My half-finished second cappuccino of the day is to my right. My manuscript to my left. A bookshelf is within reach, piled with books relating to Devotion. Emerson, Thoreau, Jung, Dillard. Books by Buddhists, Rabbis, memoirists, psychoanalysts, philosophers. To my right, on the floor, three piles of manuscripts for an anthology I’m guest editing. Yet another pile of manuscripts for the Sirenland Conference is in the corner. One dog sleeps on my comfortable reading chair. The other one is down in the kitchen, hopefully not getting into too much trouble. The house is quiet. I can’t tell yet whether this will be a good writing day, a just-okay one, or an abysmal one from which I will emerge frustrated and depressed. I can’t possibly know that. All I can do is to sit down to write. To slowly find my way back into the cave.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I think one of the hardest things to accept in life is that nothing remains the same. I remember, last year, when we were in Positano, Italy for the Sirenland Conference, we were staying in the most magnificent room with a bathtub overlooking the Tirreno Sea, and our first night there, I found myself melancholy: a week from now, we will have to leave this room, was my thought. I will never be in a room this beautiful, ever again. Instead of simply living in the moment, I was already mourning the moment passing. I knew I was doing it–but I couldn’t stop myself. Watching my son Jacob grow and change is a big part of the process of understanding that life speeds by. Just yesterday, I stood and watched him on the monkey bars after school. While he swung easily from bar to bar, I was aware that even six months ago, he couldn’t have navigated the monkey bars. What will he be doing six months from now? Six years? In the area of Connecticut where we live, this year’s crop of Eighth Grade boys are looking at boarding schools for next year. When we moved to Connecticut, those boys were all younger than Jacob is today.

Everything changes. It all whizzes by so fast. As I work on Devotion, I’m increasingly aware of this, because the process of writing Devotion is one of slowing down. Of opening myself to the truth of what is. But slowing down is not the same thing as freezing time. There is no freeze-frame in this life of ours. Just a constant adaptation. We begin again. We re-invent. We plow forward, two steps forward, one step back. In the words of the great Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfeld: this too, this too, this too. It’s a journey that is changing me in good ways–but also in painful ones. At times, I feel like the Velveteen Rabbit. Rubbed raw.

Being a Jewish Writer

I had never known that November is National Jewish Book Month until, a couple of years ago, when I started receiving requests to appear at Jewish Community Centers around the country to talk about my work. I have always thought of myself as a writer who is Jewish, rather than a “Jewish Writer” — in the same way I’ve thought of myself as a writer who happens to be female, happens to be a wife and mother, happens to live in rural Connecticut. I’ve resisted being categorized–even though we live in a world that loves to label, and certainly I have been labeled all these things. But does it matter? My work reflects my Jewishness, in the sense that, as a child, I was steeped in religious observance. I frequently say, these days, that I know I’m ready to start a new piece of work when my own personal mishegas meets up with a big idea. Certainly my mishegas has to do with my Jewishness. How could it not? I am suffused with it, as I am with family life. And so I am a Jewish female writer, a wife and mother who frequently writes about Jewishness and family life. And, now that we’re into the month of November, I am traveling to various communities around the country to talk about the relationship between my life and my work. Last week I visited a wonderful JCC in New Jersey where, in the audience, there were many faces from my New Jersey past. Parents of my grade school friends were there. Neighbors from my home town. It was a very warm feeling–a feeling that I increasingly value–of being connected. These connections never really completely disappear, no matter how many years pass. Tomorrow I will be in Scottsdale, Arizona–far from home. And though I don’t imagine that I will run into people I know from the distant past, I have no doubt that the same warm feeling will fill the room.

Writing Days

The truth is that I can tell what kind of writing day I’m going to have within the first half hour of sitting at my desk. If I have just ordered socks, turtlenecks and thermal underwear for Jacob from the Land’s End Catalogue, I’m probably not heading in the right direction. (Best to leave these online shopping sprees for the wee, sleepless hours.) If I have found myself on my favorite fashion website, salivating over an unaffordable pair of Chloe boots (since when did $1200 become the new $600?) I am also, most likely, not heading in the right direction. Ditto, if I am answering emails. Ditto, if I am reading too much of the morning’s news.

Lately I have been opening my treasured copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary which I always keep within arm’s reach on my desk. I open it randomly, like the I Ching. It always has a message for me. Yesterday, Ms. Woolf had this to say: “Writing becomes harder and harder. Things I dashed off, I now compress and re-state.” As so often is the case, I felt a shock of recognition. This is what no one could have told me as a young writer–I wouldn’t have believed it. It gets harder. The more I learn, the more I know, the more I am aware of the scope of my own ambitions and the limits of my abilities and that crushing place where the two meet. I am tougher on myself. I don’t fall in love with my own words–ever. Long ago, when I was writing my second novel, I used to carry around manuscript pages with me–not to edit them, but (embarrassingly) because I loved them. This love should have tipped me off that I wasn’t doing the hardest work of all. Once, Grace Paley said that if she loved a sentence she had just written enough to get up from her desk and go read it to her husband, she knew she had to cut it.

Now, at this very moment, I will open up A Writer’s Diary and see what Ms. Woolf has to say for today: a bulletin from 1927, here it is:

“The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity.”