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.

Kindness That Is Not Random

            I’ve been thinking about kindness since the start of the New Year. In fact, I’ve made kindness one of my daily goals in 2015. It’s going well so far—better than my diet, at any rate.

            It is not random acts of kindness that I’m thinking about; actually, it’s kindness toward people we know who need and deserve kindness. I’m trying to be a little kinder to the people who are closest to me—to my mom and my partner and my friends.

            This morning I nominated my son’s teacher for a prize. This man is more than just a patient person who works hard to help my special guy focus and succeed. He even helped him to make a friend—something my son needed more than anything—and this friend and his family have become an important part of our whole family’s life.

We all want someone to hang out with, to laugh with, and my son had been missing out on that before this new friend came along. Mr. W, his teacher, hooked the two kids up, even though my son’s friend is one grade-level higher than mine. That required several traits—the desire and ability to really understand children, the planning and energy to bring them together, the compassion to know that doing so would be important. This type of educator is far more than award-worthy, and filling out a brief nomination form was an easy way to demonstrate how much he means to us.

Random acts of kindness are a beautiful thing. Arriving at the drive-thru window and finding that the person in front of you has paid for your meal gives a moment of confusion followed by a quick burst of joy—someone has done something nice just for you. You could make someone else’s day and keep the ball rolling. The world could be a gentler, sweeter place.

But I have a friend who is scared about her job, and another who feels overwhelmed by expenses. Someone I love is alone, and someone else I love is in constant pain. There is nothing particularly random about the suffering that is happening and observable in my daily life. And let’s face it—I could have afforded my own drive-thru lunch. It was a nice enough gesture that didn’t change a whole lot.

My sister has a bum knee and is bored to death in her apartment. The mystery novels I mailed to her in a focused act of kindness will make a difference, or at least I hope they will.

A good friend of mine took a risk and felt vulnerable. Another friend gathered her supporters and we all went out for drinks, and I got to see the first friend relax and even laugh. This kindness—which did not originate with me, although I was privileged to participate—makes a difference, too.

I’m in favor of all kinds of kindness. I resolve, though, to be kind nearby—to focus my goodwill. There is nothing random about the way care and compassion can radiate out from a center in great waves of goodness, touching people we may not even yet know.

World's Fattest Animals

            My son has a library class three days a week. This is so different from my third-grade experience, which involved merely visiting the library once a week to check out books, or to forget to check in the books I had checked out the previous week. But this is the information age, and my son’s class teaches information literacy and all the ways to find out what we need to know. It’s really pretty great—a way to create lifelong learners, instead of mere memorizers of facts. And he gets to check out books, too, when he’s resisting the influence of the overdue-book gene he got from me.

            The other day, I asked him what exactly he does in library class, since I had no equivalent grade-school experience to draw upon. He told me that they learn about the different parts of the library, listen to a story read aloud, practice finding and checking out books, and search for information on the computers.

            After this detailed explanation, however, he switched from a matter-of-fact tone to a stage whisper to give me the straight scoop.

            “Mostly I just look up the world’s fattest animals,” he said.

            There must be a name for that tendency we have, when given the opportunity to learn anything, to default to the ridiculous.

            I brought home my first personal computer in the early 1990s. It was one of those all-in-one Apple McIntosh systems with the tiny screen. I admit I feel a little nostalgic for the simplicity of that machine—how I’d just carry it up the stairs to my apartment by a back handle and plug it in to the wall, with no separate hard drive, speakers, or other accessories.

            After I had found a spot on a table and plugged the computer in, there was the simple matter of removing the cord from the phone and sticking it in to the computer’s data port. Everyone who computed in the 1990s remembers the bleeping wind-tunnel sounds of the connection being forged (and having to go through several phone numbers to find one that was not too busy to accept the log-in). It’s very strange to have to explain something so recent in such detail, but the fact is that a reader under the age of thirty would have almost no recollection of these sounds, or the excited-for-me tones of a disembodied male voice saying, “Welcome! You’ve got mail!” We over-forty types may as well have driven a covered oxcart to hop on to the Internet—it’s exactly that strange.

            What’s less strange is what we did the first time we were alone with that new home computer. Like everyone else then, and now, and in all the days to come, we plunked as many filthy words as we knew into the search engine and pressed “Go.” It’s really no wonder Jeeves turned in his letter of resignation, considering the nature of the things we had been asking him to tell us about.

            A young child’s version of forbidden fruit is manifested in the sneaky Internet search. It’s looking for the “world’s fattest animals” while the rest of the class is looking for “Abraham Lincoln.” Out of curiosity, I replicated my son’s search.

            Most of what came up were huge housecats, held awkwardly under their arms, their great girth suspended like bulbous pears. I saw an obese giraffe, but I’m pretty sure its ground-touching gut had been photographically manipulated into place. There were some sad-looking dogs with back problems—pity the corpulent dachshund, overindulged and bucking at his center of gravity. There were representatives of the naturally fat animal set, elephants and hippos and pigs and whales. There were also some dolphins and manatees that looked quite satisfied with their fat lot in life, and some huge baboons, stuffing their faces and staring into the camera with fuck-off eyes.

            It was an interesting search, with widely varied results. My unfiltered computer brought back some pictures of naked fat people—the rescued-from-their-own-bathroom level of fat—because searches of any topic will yield something for voyeurs like us to sink our teeth into. I doubt my son saw these in the school library, where he contented himself with puffed-up winter birds and squirrels whose cheeks were packed to capacity with nuts.

            I do wonder what led him to that particular search, within the entire universe of odd and worthwhile things to see. He gets picked on at school sometimes, and it’s possible he was looking for something kind of jolly, like he might find at home, or something fierce and defensive—like he also might find at home.

            It’s hard to let them go into this sharp-edged world, and when he ambles back to me, I can’t help it—I become the mother hen, fluffing myself around my skinny chick’s defenseless down. I think of home as a round nest, as a soft place to lay one’s head.