the amateur

As I gather together my coffee in the pre-winter, pre-dawn holding pattern we seem to find ourselves in up here, I consider all the stories turning about my head. And that’s what they do, they V out and honk like geese, they spread through my gray matter like chemtrails as I fumble about the kitchen, and this morning, the thought that: why now, why am I feeling, so, ready, is this the story time portion of my life? Is this the beginning of the end? I can answer that. No. I wrote a 50 page novella at age 8. At 26, I worked with a woman who was so singularly fascinating, dousing me with  nonsensical aphorisms and sour as tequila, I just wanted to write about her, and only her, for the rest of my life. I offer this possibility:Someone could follow her around with a little notebook and record her one liners ( ‘I think 19 century British hanging practices were totally justified, you steal a loaf of bread, that’s it, you’re done’)  (‘ Sara, remember that time you left your 
father outside in his wheelchair, he looked miserable. Ya’ll were gone for hours) That last statement was untrue, and my father had recently died. I had spent so much time working with her, that she wore me down, I remember mutely agreeing by omission when she launched into another story about how black people are fundamentally different. This was on the tails of her telling me that in a past life she was a well loved slave, working in the fields, but close to her mama. I get the impression that she had had a mean mommy. But who didn’t, at one point? This new trend of being all about your kids is a recent phenome . 

  Her mom had told her to never smile in a way that showed her teeth and reveal the lack of dentistry. She took that to heart, stomping through life with a stormy expression, ruddy cheeks and frown always at the ready.

I used to think writing had an element of revenge in it. I recall thinking that Alice Munro, or Margaret Atwood, couldn’t have had too many friends. Or real friends. Their prose and descriptions were deadly, their world of women a trap laden, treacherous place. Ah, I loved A and M. My heroes of fiction. Don’t you be gettin around those women with your silly, giggling hypocrisies, your pervy uncle gropings, your beige lisle stocking wearing church going miserable lower-middle-class striving-to-be-upper barely concealed fury. They’ll slay you bare. As a young woman myself, reading, understanding the vast stretches of rock strewn Canadian landscape and the frenetic fanaticism on the schoolyard and just barely begun dancing around the mysterious ‘adult’ world. I remember having the thought ‘ I’d have no friends, if I wrote, because I would have to describe them as they are’. I still haven’t answered the question, suitably, do (did) Alice and Margaret have friends? Well, yes, in the sense that people like to be around people who have accomplished something. But could they have true intimates? Could they be trusted? 

  I’ve discovered that writing is not an act of revenge. I do not feel attached to that idea of catching people in the act of being who they are. Experience has formed a soft pearlescent filter to which I view the world, a wizened humour, an epidemiologist overview. In this vast saturation of information, I can glean from and interpret the algorithms of human behaviour; the rise and fall of trends, people (companies, gurus) who successfully experiment with manipulative techniques in order to capitalize on psychological weaknesses. It’s a new world, and no one wears beige lisle stockings anymore. I’ll continue to play the long game. Writing is a calling, an upsurge. It’s an answer to a compulsion. It’s also very hard to do. Not coal mining hard, or killing another human being for your country, hard, or even understanding the set of syntactic rules which comprise the language itself, hard. You have to lasso an idea, just one of them, out of your head, and wrestle it down as it parries and thrusts, wildly reaching into other blind alleys, and nestle it down to its conclusion. And you have to trust yourself, mostly. Already, within this short piece, I’ve lied. Just a little. By omission.