False starts, fury, and what lies beneath

Plus, a sonnet!

The minimum three liquids on my desk at all times

I’ve written three different essays for this week, none of which I am posting. There is so much that I want to say, that I feel compelled to say, that ultimately doesn’t feel of use to the world, or original. Everything I want to write about the election has been said by other writers. One of my drafts began in a wild fury (aggravated no doubt by massive doses of steroids) with a version of this:

I am uninterested in handwringing about how Democrats got everything wrong, how they failed the country. Pundits seem very focused on the strategies we should have used in order to win. As if this were just a game we have played badly. Why are we not focused on the fact that there are so many people in the country willing to elect a rapist who has previously led a violent insurrection? Surely that is worthy of our attention?

Why are we not focusing on the stubborn persistence of racism and xenophobia in Trump voters? Why are we not focusing on their willingness to overlook our survival on the planet, the health, safety, and autonomy of women, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia? Do they not understand that there will be no economy on an uninhabitable planet?

The people who failed the country most were Trump voters. The soul-seeking that needs to be done should be about how to the combat misogyny, racism, homophobia, and climate misinformation that this election confirmed in our population.

It’s tempting to go on, but that’s the last thing you need.

I also feel driven to discuss rumors that the publishing world is already racing to self-censor itself, to keep meaningful, beautiful books from being published in favor of mindless, frothy airport novels, in the erroneous belief that all people want in the wake of the election is trash. As if suddenly we all want to stop thinking and immersing ourselves in challenging, exquisitely crafted literature. (And no, New York Times, I don’t want to read about magical cats and other purportedly “healing books.” You know what books heal me? Brilliant, provocative, lyrical, memorable ones with complex characters. Am I some kind of outlier?).

But I’m holding off on that one, as investigations continue.

Also, yes, like others I’ve read, I want to reiterate that making art and writing is essential to the world. And yes, I also think we need to do more. I am tossed back and forth between my belief that making significant art/books should be enough for anyone to do, and my belief that in our current global crisis, it’s clearly not enough.

Just when I feel sure where I stand, the ground shivers.

If I am honest—at last, here’s the pivot!—what I have been spending most of my time thinking about is my bowels. That uncelebrated body part so essential to our health and survival. Every moment of my days is focused now on trying to make this body part function. My doctors have put me on a restricted diet of things they feel can most easily slip through my system. I’m drinking too much coffee to try to help things along. I am watching my abdomen with anxiety, wondering if the ascites are building up again. Or if maybe it’s just that nothing is moving.

My first week on taxol, everything started working. My second week on taxol, everything stopped working again. I’m trying to send love to my body, to appreciate its efforts. Thus (and keep in mind I am not a poet):

Sonnet to the Bowels

How oft do we extol our haughty hearts

So filled with love, more than our other parts.

Yet deeper down, doth pulse a labyrinth

As worthy to be praised on a high plinth.

All fruits and fats you push between your lips

Traverse the fifteen feet twixt ribs and hips.

Straight through their walls pass everything we need

To nourish cells so that we may succeed.

When every nutrient has been osmosed

This magic tube expels the chaff from host.

Yet its good deeds go all unrecognized

Its end results concealed, flushed, and despised.

But when malignancy throws up a wall,

Too late we love the alimentary canal.

Okay, so I realize that the last line has six feet rather than the five feet iambic pentameter requires. But you try to cram “alimentary canal” into the last line of a sonnet in five feet.

My moods are all over the place. I am trying not to feel enraged all the time. I am trying to protect my nervous system without hiding my head in the sand.

While I rage over the elections and the state of the planet, I know that beneath it all is an anger I am less able to confront: My fury that I may not get to see my daughter continue to evolve. My fury that I won’t get to accompany my husband into old age. My fury that every tree and leaf and mountain and lake and human of this world will be taken from me.

It is useless to engage this fury. But it is there; it lurks.

I try to focus on the short sections of the path that lie just beyond my feet, on the small, immediate steps.

This past weekend, I taught a workshop on ekphrastic writing at the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) conference in the UK. Which thankfully was online this year. Since 2016, I have found this conference to be a source of both inspiration and community. The writers who participate are consistently both edifying and kind.

The first time I attended, I was nervous. I was worried I would be sneered at for lacking a PhD (necessary to teach creative writing in the UK), or that everyone would hate me for being American. Neither of these things was true. The community welcomed me, and a woman I met at a cocktail party ended up offering me a teaching job at Bournemouth University. Even before I had my PhD!

Cocktail parties have always gotten me more work than any job site.

Cancer treatment is keeping me from applying for the full-time teaching jobs in academia I crave, but I teach however I can. I still mentor writers, I teach workshops in person and online, and I take short-term positions. I know how to do these things.

This past weekend’s NAWE conference did its usual magic. I left with a notebook full of new writing and new ideas for teaching. And my workshop was well received, if I am to judge by the emails I received afterwards. It helped me to feel a tiny bit useful to the world. For two entire days, I was euphoric.

Now, less so. But creative euphoria was never meant to be sustainable.

It’s my daughter’s birthday today. She was born on a Friday the 13th and was the luckiest thing ever to happen to me. This year, she isn’t in the mood to celebrate. There is nothing material she wants, no special experience or event. But I will celebrate her, always. She makes the world a better place, and is only getting started. All I want to give her is happiness, and it is the one thing I am failing to give her.

I will spend the day receiving chemotherapy, in the fond hope that I will be around for many more of her birthdays. It’s the least I can do. Then, we will take her to dinner.