Right now I’m wearing these two gold rings with little emeralds that my mother gave me a few weeks ago, in acknowledgment of my book deal. I guess I’ve been trying to think a lot about the powers and pleasures of crowds in tension with the urge to stand out or escape from them.īack indoors after my windy walk, in a different mood, I’m more inspired by the small-scale. But the gulls can’t let that ruin everything. Sometimes there’s an eagle in there too, cruising for a meal-eagles eat gulls. I’m not even sure if they think of themselves as belonging together. I’m inspired by their group choreographies, the way form is always being dispersed and reasserted when I observe the flock at a distance. Mark’s bathhouse: “political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies.” These readings or talismanic words inflect all I see, including the gulls at Deer Lagoon on Whidbey Island, where I’m in residency at Hedgebrook as I answer your questions. And then, relatedly, that Samuel Delany quote about the St. The Spanish word muchedumbre, which means something like crowd or throng or undulating mass of bodies. I guess when I was younger I thought I’d either quit or be cured. On the other hand I’m surprised to find how vivid the lifelong torments remain. I’m surprised to find that I’m a good enough mother to myself. I think I haven’t done anything but then I see I’ve done the one thing that enables me to go on. Sometimes I “wake up” from rough stretches in my life and am amazed by the way I’ve unconsciously rationed my energies towards the projects or opportunities that are most likely to sustain my writing life.
Even though I’m a Taurus, I experience myself as disloyal and impatient, so the evidence of my own steadiness always takes me by surprise. I like this question, with its implication that dedication is itself surprising. What has surprised you most about your dedication to this writer’s path? But poetry remains a place where I can keep secrets out loud. Yikes, that alliteration! Over time I’d have to learn that my poetry couldn’t stay proper if it was actually going to help me live.
Poetry permitted my precious feelings-I was an only child, a crybaby, and a precocious people pleaser-a proper place. Soon after, I would discover that I don’t have a gift for plot, and poetry presented itself as an alternative to storytelling. But when they ask what’s most important to me, I say “my family, my feelings… and oh! The big book of stories I’m working on.” This is the early evidence. The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, etc. “They were not white you would only call them that if the word ‘white’ meant something special to you.” Well then! Like Kincaid I think I was influenced by what I had been told was literary. Much later I’d read Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” where she visits the white cliffs of Dover after reading about them in countless poems. When they ask me where I’d like to take a vacation, I say “England-because of all the HISTORY!” Kind of a colonized mind moment. There’s a video of me in second grade for a school time capsule project, where the second graders interview each other, and many of my answers are eccentric.
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