Standing at the Intersection of Art and Grace

            Someone was mean to me once, and it threw me ten years off course.

            It is sobering to look around in my mid-forties and realize that I’ve squandered some important creative years, all because I took to heart some freakishly harsh criticism from a person I loved, a person who should have done better by me.

            The “who” doesn’t matter. What happened is this: I was in the middle of a creative project that thrilled me, and I talked about it to one of the people I cared most about. This person sat me down and told me all of the things that were wrong with me. I felt I was better than everybody else. I lorded my accomplishments over others. I flaunted my education. I refused to speak normally, and instead used big words and complicated constructions to say basic things.

            This were personal criticisms, not poetic ones, but they rose from my attempt to express that moment of artistic glee—I had a project that was changing my creative life and making me feel like I had real potential as a poet.

            By the end of that conversation, I had put my pen in a drawer, figuratively speaking, and it stayed there for a decade.

            The other day, a friend mentioned that she was worried about sharing her work with her loved ones. Other friends piped in with advice. The work is important, they said; the loved ones need to hear it and support it, or they are not worth loving at all.

            Sharing work with special people is tricky. I’m always hearing artists talk about the fear that accompanies a family member reading their poetry or seeing their visual art in a gallery. And it may not be worth the trouble. When loved ones are also artists, it’s easier; they know how to honor the humanity within the work yet separate the product from the creator. Loved ones who aren’t artists may look for themselves in work; they may psychoanalyze the creator or see something unhealthy about the way we work through things on page or canvas.

            It seems like the best move may be to go ahead and keep work and loved ones separate, unless family, friends, or lovers seek it out on their own, or otherwise show readiness for confronting the artist through the work. I certainly experienced no profit from excitedly talking about my life-changing project with someone who didn’t know or care what it meant to me.

Art, including literary art, can be regarded sort of like, say, gardening is. It’s lovely to hear that someone has planted dahlias in the side yard; we can hear about the bold blossoms, maybe glance at them and appreciate their beauty and the fact that someone has cultivated it. We don’t need to investigate the roots and stalk. We don’t need to count the petals. Seeing the happiness of the gardener is sufficient. That person—and maybe any person who increases, rather than decreases, the beauty in the world—should be congratulated, cheered on.

            It is tempting to be angry with the person behind this moment that never stops being horrible. (I go back to the conversation from time to time, and it hurts just as much after all this time as it did at the moment it was happening.) The fact that this person made the wrong call doesn’t even factor in. An MFA in creative writing is not the kind of education one flaunts. A non-tenure-track job, lowest rank in the institution, is not an accomplishment to be lorded. Being awkward and stilted in conversation is not a source of pride. The poetry, though? That’s a very reasonable source of delight. A professor I had once told me that there are two kinds of poetry: good poetry and great poetry. The act of making art is, in itself, ennobling, whatever the product.

            I think the rightful focus of anger is obvious. It’s me. Most people are nice and supportive—even strangers hold doors and spare a smile. We run into stinkers from time to time, though, and from time to time, we are the stinkers. The only unforgivable act in this scenario is not reporting for duty—not answering the call of those poems that tried to find their way into being during that empty decade. Who knows what words might have visited me, had I been in position and ready to accept them?

            The unkindness of others shouldn’t change me, and I won’t let it change me again. Whatever the actions of people around me, I choose, forever after, to be a loving person and a gracious host.

Rose's Writing Group

As occupations go, writing is either the loneliest or the most crowded. I can’t decide.

For me, when it comes time to put words on a page, it’s just an arm, a pen, and a notebook. What’s lonelier than that? Even if I compose on the computer, a Facebook tab visible, number of notifications indicated, it’s still just me, represented in pixels instead of blue-on-yellow smudges. There is no buffer between self and memory, nor between self and the utterly stupid things I can’t scribble out or delete quickly enough.

But the brain is a crowded place where old boyfriends and childhood playmates and the members of eighties hair bands and Jesus and my mother elbow each other and vie for attention. Real human contact makes things less crowded, I’ve found; when it’s me alone, the brain is a mosh pit teeming with grandmothers and bosses and babysitters and the person I once saw eat a Fudgsicle off the floor of a Chicago train.

The soul selects her own society, Emily Dickinson says, and then shuts the door. At some point, the writer has to select her own society and pull it off to a side room temporarily for conversation. The poem happens in that side room. Nonfiction happens in the kitchen, for me—a few souls engaged in conversation while the writer combines ingredients at the stove. The best fiction can’t be confined to a home, however; its souls take to the streets laden with flowers or hauling a Howitzer, at which point all bets are off.

Like I said, I can’t decide. It seems like I’m dealing with a lot of people when I’m writing, but when I look up from the page, there’s no one, or maybe there’s a cat.

But my soul has made an easy decision about one society, my writing group, which tries to meet weekly and features a handful of badass women who crack the whip of truth to break a sometimes-oppressive silence.

We women—creative thinkers and scholars, all—support each other in our writing projects, whatever those might be (and they run the gamut). We also help each other make sense of workplace happenings, often filtering them through a less masculinized lens than we might find elsewhere in an institution. My writing group makes me feel empowered and emboldened, both on the page and in the hallways of my workplace.

It is worth noting that we meet in a house on our campus where Rose O’Neill lived out her final days, and we call ourselves “Rose’s Writing Group.” O’Neill was known for the Kewpie characters that she famously created in 1909, but she was also a brilliant, forward-thinking artist, writer, and suffrage pioneer. O’Neill made a habit during her lifetime of welcoming artists into her Greenwich Village apartment and supporting them fully as they worked (to the extent that she spent her entire sizable fortune during her lifetime), and when I go to the Rose O’Neill House for meetings of my writing group, I feel this vibe—I know what it means to be lifted up and championed and supported. I am not alone in my creative endeavors.

I guess that’s the difference I’m considering here. The writer’s brain teems with people—this is true—but the world doesn’t much care about whether or not we do what we do. No one is waiting for the next poem to hit the page. No one needs my essays. We could probably go to the smallest village in America and find somewhere within it a novel lying in a drawer. I remember before my father died that he said his biggest regret in life is that he would never get to read everything he wanted to. I share his regret—yet here I am, jotting down letter after letter after letter, making more.

My writing group makes me feel like these letters and words and lines and sentences add up to something, and better yet, cheer them along. When a particular notion makes it from the crowded brain to the empty page—when it takes shape—we are in a territory O’Neill understood well. As she said, “I am in love with magic and monsters, and the drama of form emerging from the formless.”

As much as I am inspired by the intelligence and hard work of my fellow writing group members, I am equally moved by O’Neill’s real-life example—how she sought out the company of creative minds and gave all that she had to nurture them. That’s a model to emulate.

A Life Devoted to Poultry—Ahem, POETRY

When covering farm news, it’s good to have some jeans and a pair of boots in the trunk of your car, because you never know what you might end up walking in.

I learned this from my agricultural beat predecessor, a woman raised in rural Ohio, and someone who knew the ins and outs of a working farm. While my own upbringing was also rural, my family lived in the woods and did not farm, aside from a rather mean goat and a copperhead-filled chicken house we maintained for a few years when I was growing up.

On the farm beat, one day you might cover a tragedy in a silo or a gravity wagon—both of which can pull a person’s body under the grain and smother him or her as rescuers make a futile attempt to fight the pull. On a brighter note, you might cover a new crop—my colleague knew of a secret field of peppermint, the location a closely kept secret because of the value of the harvest in an area mostly dedicated to corn, wheat, and soy.

The constant friction between family farms and large-scale egg or pork production facilities is another part of the farm reporter’s beat, and there is also the highlight of the year—the county fair and the winning entries in livestock, small animal, and even baking categories.

            My time as a reporter spanned the decade of the 1990s in the small town—practically a village—of Kenton, Ohio. I was also a poet, which at the time didn’t amount to much more than writing words in a notebook and trying to shuffle them around until they lined up as they should.

            Being a poet also involved reading. Every trip to the state capital, Columbus, I would buy journals, anthologies, whatever I could get my hands on that had poetry inside.

            My favorite book was by a poet named William Matthews, who was quite a famous poet, although that fact means very little in the broader, non-poetry world. Matthews wrote a book called Flood that really spoke to me as it chronicled what floodwaters did to a landscape. These flood poems felt relevant to what I was doing at the time as I covered the stories that seemed to alter the landscape of my community. I wrote about farm news, of course, but I also covered county government, heartbreaking court cases, and features about extraordinary people—because even in rural America, brutal monsters and awe-inspiring heroes walk among us.

            Matthews’ poetry moved me so much that I decided to track him down and write him a letter. Poets don’t get a lot of fan letters, although these days the big ones are probably drowning in unsolicited e-mails and Facebook friend requests.

            I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. It would not have been unlike me to use the word “love.” I know I told him what I did day in and day out, and also what I wanted to do—make poetry of my own. I closed by thanking him for inspiring me.

            Some weeks later, I checked my mail and found an unexpected postcard, its message handwritten in small, tidy black print. Yes—it was from Matthews.

            He had filled the blank side of the picture postcard with kind and gracious words. Although I’ve moved a few times since then and lost the postcard in the shuffle, I remember one sentence distinctly:

A reporter is to a small town what a poet is to the language.

The words may as well have been strung up before me in neon. Even now, they are seared on the back of my eyes.

            While Matthews praised the part of me that was stuck as a small-town reporter, I also saw in his analogy a glimpse of myself as a poet. Already, I knew that my feature stories had the power to move people like poetry could. Matthews’ postcard made me realize that what I had viewed as a deviation from my path as a poet was actually another step along it.

I have no doubt that in that line of text, Matthews was referencing the Modern poet William Carlos Williams, who famously said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” I was well acquainted with the intersection of difficulty and news. I had once covered the murder trial of a young man, small in stature, who had been beaten to death at a quarry. They pulled his body from the water and matched a boot print on his child-sized chest to the foot of one of his killers.

            I knew another kind of difficulty, too—the challenges posed by spreadsheets. Obfuscation surrounding a polluted landfill. The science in agricultural reporting. Journalism was nothing if not practice in sorting out complex things, in making sense of the world.

            Matthews’ little aphorism suggested something new to me—that I had in me the potential to offer readers a different kind of news in my poems. Maybe I was too busy being a watchdog of local government, and not busy enough being a watchdog of the spirit.

           

            Over the next few months, I applied to the two nearest creative writing graduate programs and was waitlisted by one (Ohio State University) and admitted into the other (Bowling Green State University). I began working evenings at a chicken restaurant to make some extra money, since I would be leaving a full-time job to pursue my new course of action.

            I also continued to report the news, but with a renewed sense of its possibilities. On one assignment, I remember approaching a large group of sandhill cranes (a “sedge” of cranes—that’s the collective term, the precise word for such a gathering). I snapped pictures and edged closer and closer, until some signal passed silently among the birds and they took flight together, right over my head, so close I could have reached up and touched a trailing leg.

            I also remember my very first feature story for the newspaper, about a woman who, though dying of cancer, set up what she called a love garden, where anyone could come and gather enough to eat. Evenings, she would sit up in bed, sunlight through the window turning everything golden, and she would look at her neat rows of beans and lettuce, and sow compassion until her very last day.

            Sometimes when the sports desk was short-handed, I would pitch in there and help out as best I could. On a few occasions, my job was to photograph a college basketball game, and this entailed sitting behind the net and pointing my camera at lanky athletes as they leaped toward the basket with the ball, just above me—sort of like those cranes taking flight.

            And some days, I would just photograph a farmer in his or her field to track the progress of the corn. “Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is the old saying; in practice, though, July corn can be eight to ten feet tall.

            My nights at the restaurant, I wore a different hat, or, more specifically, an apron. My usual role was to seat people and bring their drinks, and to bus their tables when they left. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, all-you-can-eat chicken nights, I had another responsibility: the chicken pass.

            My job these nights was to take a platter of broasted chicken throughout the dining room and distribute extra pieces. It was disconcerting at first as a young woman to be summoned to a table by a barked-out command, “Breast!” or “Thigh!” I got used to it, though. That didn’t mean it grew any less strange, or that I wouldn’t eventually write about it.

            One night a person I know came in—an affable fellow, someone I’d once interviewed for a story. He wasn’t particularly a friend—you don’t always make a lot of friends as a reporter, although in a small town, most people know your name.

            “I hear you’re heading off to college to study poultry,” the man said politely as he picked out a wing and a thigh.

            It struck me that this was farm country. Food, something so basic to human existence, was foremost in everyone’s mind in this place. From daily fluctuations in the price of a bushel of soy to the land application of waste from a massive chicken farm, this was the news. It was also, I had had come to understand, the poetry.

            I let the misunderstanding pass. “Yes, sir, I am,” I replied.

            “You’ll do fine,” he assured me.

            His words had the ring of a blessing, so I tucked them away exactly like an extravagant tip to spend later on something nice, just for me.

Blessed and Stressed—The Facebook Birthday

            Yesterday was my birthday. It was a low-key affair as birthdays go—I put in a request with my family for a big, blazing cake and a pile of presents in a couple of days, when the weekend comes. My semester of teaching has just started, I had a job interview, and I had to take a kiddo to the doctor. By the end of the day, sitting on the couch felt like an awesome celebration to me.

But a celebration was going full force on Facebook, where throughout the day, some very dear friends—well over six hundred of them—posted personal notes, and not just the “Happy Birthday, Karen!” that Facebook generates automatically for you in the list of birthdays. There were birthday wishes mixed with good-luck messages for my interview, and there were personal memories and musical clips and videos.

The dearest of dear ones invited all of my friends to post pictures of fruits and vegetables that look like famous people, and several took up the challenge. There was a pepper that looked like Sylvester Stallone and an onion that resembled Whoopie Goldberg. There was a Nixon eggplant and a Kermit the Frog Brussels sprout. The sheer variety of vegetative lookalikes was sort of stunning. The images made me laugh, and they moved me—people I knew made an effort to make me happy.

Since I was focused on so many other things, it wasn’t until the end of the day that I sat down to reply to my messages, although I watched them arrive with utter delight all day long. Waiting to reply was a mistake.

My undergraduate college friends weighed in. I remember that I left college feeling shell-shocked and damaged. It was an emotional ride for many reasons. Yet on Facebook, my college friends are some of the people I love best—so smart and hilarious and giving, each one—a daily source of delight.

My high school friends sent their love. I went about twenty years feeling very disconnected from my hometown, a beautiful river town that has much to deal with—a disintegrating downtown (sometimes literally so—buildings have been known to collapse), unemployment that far exceeds the national average, poverty and the drugs that so often go with it. Something kept me from connecting with my town—I felt estranged from it, and from the people there. But on Facebook, there they are again—my indomitable friends, just as kind and friendly as they were in high school. For all of its flaws in academic offerings, I remember my school as a clique-free place, with jocks and Future Farmers members and musicians and academics all getting along—and often the jock was the musician or the scholar. It was fluid and worked the way all of life should.

I heard from friends from my former university, where I earned a creative writing degree and taught for a dozen years. Classmates and coworkers and union allies and, a uniquely precious group, former students all wrote to remind me of where I came from and how loved and accepted I once felt.

My present-day colleagues and students and friends, the ones I haven’t known long, chimed in, reminding me that I am valued and appreciated here and now.

Writing friends sent their wishes—poets, many of them, whom I’d gotten to know early in their careers, and some of whom I’d published for the very first time as editor of a distinguished journal. I even heard from a few of the poets who most influenced me—and some that I hold in such high esteem that I could barely believe they were celebrating with me.

I even heard from my sister.

It’s a big task, responding to correspondence. I have more sympathy for Parker Stevenson, who mailed me a machine-autographed picture and a mimeographed letter addressed to “Dear friend” after I sent him a heartfelt love letter at age eight. I get it now, Parker, although I felt only confusion and disappointment at the time. We can’t all be Davy Jones, dropping everything to take Marcia to the prom.

I am richly blessed. And while I will try to respond to the avalanche of kindness, one glittering, beautiful stone at a time, my gratitude and joy are written deep inside with a Sharpie—the kind Parker Stevenson really should have used to sign that headshot, don’t you think?