All my life writing has been life and breath to me (as anyone who evern knew me can attest). Poetry was my inheritance, passed onto me probably on a DNA level by my poet grandfather and then I was weaned on it,being sat down and read sonnets to when I was barely a toddler to the point that even today I can produce a sonnet in five minutes or less if I can get the first line down, it’s that much in my blood now. I taught myself to read at 4, was reading very much grown-up books (as in full length novels written for adults) by 7; I began writing as soon as I could hold a pencil, produced my first poem at 5 years old and my first novel-length manuscript by 10 or 11 years old, and my first GOOD novel at 14; I began winning awards for writing when I was 12 years old. It’s always been part of my self, my soul. I remember one writing interview given by Ursula Le Guin at one point and she was asked what she would be if she wasn’t a writer and she replied succinctly, “Dead”. I remember reading that response and concurring completely.
Except.
The first time tragedy shut me down, writing-wise, was a massively traumatic situation that occurred when I was in my early thirties, and for almost a year, at that time, the voices in my head that whispered stories to me were silenced by that moment in my life. I dragged myself through my days, silent and zombie-like, until those voices whispered to me, “start writing again, or we all die”. So, slowly, painfully, I did that – and I entered into the most productive era of my writing life, in the aftermath. Stories flowed, novels happened, I was multiply and internationally published, and more awards bent my way.
Part of that recovery was down to meeting Deck, to finding someone who supported me unflinchingly, believed in me absolutely, and functioned as so many things in my writing process – my First Reader, my First Editor, my one-man cheering squad, my webmaster and marketing crew, the one who cooked and bottle-washed so that I could go and write… and although I began the writing journey alone and self-sufficient in what I did, I was deeply grateful for the one-man support system I had lucked into for my adult life. For twenty years he was there, stalwart and sturdy, unconditionally loving me and being proud of what I did and choosing to do whatever he could to be wherever he needed to be when I needed him there.
It was utopia. It did not last. And when he died, that entire scaffolding of support went with him. And my voices went silent again.
This time it was all piled onto by my mother and her own decline and the fact that I spent the two years after Deck’s death and leading to her own demise running as fast as I could just to keep up with myself and my efforts to meet her ever-increasng needs. If it wasn’t grocery shopping for her during the time of Covid and trying to keep her adequately fed, it was juggling her medical requirements (appointments (making of, keeping track of, chauffeuring to and accompanying on), medications, insuance adminstrivia, endless forms and a changing cast of doctors, nurses, social workers and finally hospice staff). Or it was trying to stay ahead of increasing dementia, which sometimes led to a physical altercation (I left her presence with scratches and bruises many times during this period). And then she asked me, “why aren’t you writing any more?” and the only answer I had to that was a silent wail. There was no room in my head for voices, for stories. There was only grief for Deck, and there was everything that SHE needed from me. There was no more room for me in my head, let alone the voices I had always carried with me. Was this state, this silent state of running on empty, what Ursula Le Guin had meant when she said “dead”? Because it felt like it. It felt like something had died. It felt like the silence might be permanent and that the thing that had always defined me might have been smothered out of existence, might be gone for good. I simply… did not know how to write any more. I did not know WHY to write. I drowned in the silence.
Mama died a little over a year ago, and left me truly and completely alone for the first time in my life – alone, in that silence.
And then a tiny little voice whispered again.
I’ve been writing, in the last couple of weeks. I’ve submitted several stories to different markets. I’m writing something that might never be published at all – a non-genre and almost autobiographical ‘novel’ which is taking stuff from my own life and gilding it with a layer of fiction and creating a story from it – but it’s well past novel-length now, in terms of numbers of words, and at least I have proved to myself that I can still do this thing. And if I listen hard enough the other voices might be there again, too. Maybe.
I’ve had to re-learn how to write alone. I’ve had to re-learn how to breathe. I’ve had to re-examine my own sense of self and re-define who I was. And maybe I’m not quite “dead” yet.
Recent Comments