Living

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Writes of Passages

Okay, that was one of my more fun puns to write.

A newly discovered writing friend, and it’s so nice to call her a friend, recently wrote a blog about the writer’s dilemma: the business side of writing. How to get your book published in a world where there are “. . . ever-changing literary/publishing trends.”

The way I have dealt with it is to take the Lana Turner approach: sitting at the soda fountain looking cute and waiting to be discovered.

I’m not particularly proud of this (and it hasn’t been particularly successful – but you never know) and think that I need to get over myself.

So my new goal is to start sending my work out. A couple of writing friends have suggested that we have a weekly coffee klatch so we can give reports on what we sent out that week. A kind of weight watchers weigh-in for writers if you will.

The saddest part about doing this is that getting a rejection with a handwritten note is considered a step in the right direction.

Oh, my. I think that’s how I felt in high school. I hope I have girded my ego with enough maturity to actually endure this.

In the meantime . . . one needs to keep writing. And it’s easy to wonder, “what’s the use” since the odds of getting published are so high, and even if you do the odds of your ever coming close to recouping your costs are astronomically against you. I spent two and half years on perfecting a short story that I discovered in my Iowa Summer Writing Festival class last year should probably be a novel.

The task seemed daunting, so I’ve approached it as a novel in short stories. I’m actually enjoying it. It gives me more time with the characters, which deepens my understanding of them, and forces me to become more understanding of what it means to be human.

Which leads me to a book by Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth. I’m reading it as part of my research for being the dramaturge for the play Metamorphoses. It is quite literally short (you can read it in an hour or two). I got to the last two pages and found this:

“. . . like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever.”
page 148.

And then this:

“If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.”
page 148-149

That’s why writing is worth it — worth doing it with respect for the power of language to transform. Or in the words of William Faulkner, worth “the agony and sweat.”

As for the business part of it, well, that’s not going to go away. However, the Greek word for marketplace meant a place for debating and exchanging ideas.

Perhaps it’s chutzpah on my part, but maybe there’s something we as writers can do to help transform the marketplace — the publishing world that thinks in terms of trends and demographics. I mean the one undeniable demographic is that we are all human, and humans need good stories as certainly as they need food. I think we are meant to live our lives, not merely survive them. Perhaps the recent economic bubble was an expression of that – a desire for something “more than.” Money and things weren’t it.

I don’t know what the answer is (perhaps five), but I feel better and plan to keep on writing, with the knowledge that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.

You will all be invited to the release party of my best-selling novel, a work of such transformative power that it humbled the schmuck who said there was nothing unique or compelling about my writing so he joined a monastery and took a vow of silence, an act for which writers everywhere are applauding.

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Thar’ be Dragons

I wrote to a friend recently about the difficulty of moving back to my hometown after a 34-years absence. I was afraid, I said, that there would be dragons lurking there. And there were.

One could say that I entered the dragon’s cage.

So this morning I googled “Joseph Campbell dragons” and found a transcript from the “Power of Myth” and an excerpt from “The Heroic Journey.”

I learned that slaying the dragon is a part of the journey Campbell refers to as “the soul’s high adventure,” the journey each of us has to make if we are, I concluded, to live and not just survive.

We are called to make the journey perhaps when we have “ . . . a realization that the story we are living no longer matches the story that we are;. . .,” Campbell says. “Psychologically,the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage.. . . The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.”

Oh.

Captured in my own dragon cage.

Then there was this exchange between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell:

Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

Campbell: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

Moyers: Is it my work or my life?

Campbell: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”

Moyers: When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?

Campbell: If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself.

So I came back to my hometown so I could follow my bliss. Not what I expected. For one thing I thought bliss was — well blissful. Filled with fluffy clouds and maybe even bare-assed angels playing hand held harps following me throughout the day, whispering “No pain,” in my ear.

Now I think that bliss is finding your authentic story and living it. And while that surely will include pain as well as joy, it is much less painful than living the story that no longer matches you. There is certainly no joy in living a story that doesn’t fit.

But to follow your bliss you must first free yourself from the dragon cage; embrace the story that you are, which might not be the one you’ve been living. To do that you have to be willing to let the fire of the dragon’s breath burn away what isn’t you, then slay the dragon — with compassion.

And here’s the thing. My writing took on a new depth after moving here. Perhaps because when the story isn’t working, you have to go deeper to find the real story.

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Why I Write

There be wolves out there — dangerous creatures beyond the boundaries created by the should-bes: what a good girl should be what a woman should be what a person should be what a good girl would write. Or so the story I heard growing up was told.

Then there was the summer, over twenty years ago, when I first started freelancing. “I just want to keep the wolf from the door, I just want to keep the wolf from the door, I just want to keep the wolf from the door,” I would shout as job after job fell through, until finally someone asked, “Why don’t you invite him in?”

And so I did. He had dark brown eyes–wolfeyes–wore a very elegant tuxedo and sat down at my dining table without so much as a by-your-leave and began sipping espresso from a demi-tasse.

I was outraged. “How,” I very nearly shouted at him, “can you sit there sipping espresso without a care in the world when I worry about how to pay the rent, put food on my table, keep clothes on my back?!!”

His tail lightly brushed across the floor as he poured a spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred slowly and replied, “Don’t you know everyone worries about those things?”

Well, that had never occurred to me. And sure enough, I got a job the next week.

Two months later, a dog who was part wolf wandered into my life. With just a bit of negotiation, we agreed that I would be his human and he would be my wolfdog. And so it was for five years.

Until a tumor appeared on his vena cava. All I could think was that I wanted to keep my wolf from the door. I did not want him to leave. Not now. Not so soon.

But he died two days later anyway. Because that was as it should be.

There be wolves out there. And there be wolves in here. And the should-bes have nothing to do with being a good girl good woman keeping the world safe for what we would like it to be. Rather it is about being. And being willing to embrace life as it is and letting love transform us as it passes through us.

We are spirits learning to be human. And so I write.

To new stories
~Karen Hogan