I took the grant money and bought a car. I wanted to go to Paris but I bought a car instead. A reliable car to get to and from work. I didn’t take myself out to dinner, I didn’t buy myself champagne, I didn’t eat chocolate.
Thank god the go to New York Writer’s Exchange prize didn’t have a practical alternative for self destructive people or I would have let that go, too. Almost in spite of myself then, I went to New York. Where the writers are.
The “prize” of winning a Writer’s Exchange grant from Poets and Writers is that you go from one state to another — in my case, Oregon to NYC. You get to choose writers you’d most like to meet and the Poets and Writers folks try very hard to arrange meetings. You get to give a reading at the National Poetry Club, you get to stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel and drink scotch into the night with smart cool people as if you are one too, you get to meet editors and publishers and writers and agents at very fancy lunches and dinners. How fancy? I kept the napkins and receipt scraps. From 1996.
The person who judged the contest on the fiction side of things was Carol Maso. I only entered because of her. Her writing was considered “experimental.” “Innovative.” “Heterodox.” All I know is that her weird made my weird feel better. The writers I wanted to meet were Lynn Tillman, Peggy Phelan, and Eurydice. I don’t know if you know them like I do, but to me they were the intellectual shit. I didn’t actually think it would happen, I just got drunk, wrote the names down on the form they sent, laughed, farted, and mailed it back to them. I remember thinking, fat chance. My ass. But Frazier Russell collected them all. This is how four of the most humble happy nights of my entire life happened to me. Dinners that cost more than my rent. Food that tasted so good I thought I might faint. Wine that made your teeth melt. And women so intelligent, so creative, so gorgeous and present in their own minds and bodies … I mean I nearly barfed, piddled, and orgasmed all at the same time. Fuck heaven. Puny cloud lie. These women were the loves of my brain life.
These four women wrote unconventionally. Intentionally unconventionally. Wildly, passionately, blood-bodied, unapologetically blowing up the house of language from the inside out, unconventionally. And all four of them insisted on the body as content. They were not mainstream writers. They were carving out astonishing paths of their own quite to the side of mainstream, quite in spite of the stupid mainstream, maybe the way water cut the grand canyon. I wanted my writing to go like theirs. Follow it. I felt like their writing had parted the seas for people like me.
I can’t tell you how many times I choked up talking to each of these women. Looking into their eyes. Trying to see an I. I don’t think I said much. It’s possible I went mute. It’s hard to remember anything about me. Though I remember nearly every word each of them said. Of this I am sure: I was never as … happy.
More magic happened on that trip — there was a poet guy who traveled with me from Oregon. He’d won the poet side of the prize. Turns out, I knew him from the Eugene days. Incredibly wonderful man stunning poet named John Campbell. Among the poets he requested was Gerald Stern, who I will never forget eating and talking with because he’d dislocated his shoulder and wore this sling thing all evening — only able to gesticulate with one arm. Still, he was something. We also lunched with Billy Collins and Alfred Corn. The latter I adored. The former talked to my tits. But my poet friend also requested to go to a jazz club in place of one of his writer choices. So I got to sit about 15 feet from Hamiet Bluiett at one club and about five feet from McCoy Tyner at another. I’m pretty sure when I got back to the hotel that night my underwear was soaked to shit from glee. Thank you forever, John Campbell.
What an opportunity, huh? Oregon writers in the big city. Still makes me smile and get a piss shiver remembering it.
But there is a bittersweet in my throat too. A small stone I carry there. The small stone of sad that came from my inability to say yes. I was taken to meet an editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. He talked to me about my life as a swimmer, and he suggested I had a nonfiction book in me about my swimmer’s life. I don’t know, say, like a memoir. I stood there like a numb idiot smiling and shaking my head with my arms crossed over my tits. He waited for me to jump at his suggestion. Nothing nothing nothing came out of my throat. He shook my hand and wished me luck. He gave me some free books.
I sat at dinner between Lynn Tillman and the beloved W. W. Norton Editor Carol Houck Smith — who sadly has since died — while Lynne tried to convince Carol to publish me at Norton. Carol Houck Smith, who leaned over and said well then send me something. Her bright fierce little eyes staring right through my know nothing skull. Most people would have stepped off the plane back in Oregon and run to the post office. It took me over a decade to even imagine putting something in an envelope and licking it.
After the reading at the National Poetry Club, the agent Katherine Kidde from then Kidde, Hoyt and Piccard came up to me and asked me if I’d like representation. On the spot. My small sad throat stone. I went deaf and smiled and shook her hand. I thought I might cry in front of all the dressed up people. All that came out of my mouth was “I don’t know.”
She said, “OK then.”
All those open hands held out to me.
You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests.
I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect.
I didn’t even think, be a writer.
Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.
If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.
I knew even on the plane back to the west as the evergreens and rivers came back into view through the perfect drizzle of home that if I was a woman writer, then I was a broken kind of woman writer. I drank many tiny bottles of airplane feel sorry for yourself. I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, with only a head and heartful of beautiful memories about what it would be like to be a writer, since I’d eaten with them and shared such perfect company. It was the only prize I allowed myself.
But something in me had been born, still.
Dreaming in Women
SOMETIMES A MIND IS JUST BORN LATE, COMING THROUGH waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.
With Marguerite Duras, you must lie down on a bed in an apartment in a foreign city — foreign to you — foreign enough so that you become the foreigner. Lose your name and your language. Lose your identity moorings. Lose your very thoughts. There must be shutters on the tall slightly open windows. The room must be blue. The floor made of stone. You must be naked. Her breath a whisper against your skin. Up the length of your body. Down. You must listen for the sounds of the city moving all around you. You must listen then beyond that, to the ocean and wind beyond all human motion. And then you must listen beyond that, to the blood in your ears and the drum of your heart and how a lover’s skin stories over you. At night, it will rain. Open the windows. Desire wets. There is no inside out but the body. Love unto death.