Writing Is My Drink (12 page)

were stories of fishing with grandfathers and visiting poor rela-

tives in failing mining towns. A few of the men cried when they

read their pieces. One man gestured that he couldn’t read any

further into his piece, and Terry softly reassured him that he

could. And he did. By Tuesday afternoon, the room had soft-

ened. By Wednesday afternoon, we were a group. That night

Terry stood in front of an auditorium of people and read from

her book
Refuge
about the women in her family who’ve died of cancer, the price the people of southern Utah have paid for living downwind of the nuclear test site in Nevada. Her words filled

the room; the temperature rose. As she read, I thought nothing

in the world seemed as important as speaking your mind on the

page.

We were exhausted by the next afternoon when Terry gave

us our final prompt: Where is home? We wrote and wrote, filling

pages and pages of our notebooks. I wrote about not truly hav-

ing one home, about displacement, about moving and restless-

ness, about my father shuttling between California, Mexico, and

Vietnam throughout my childhood, and about how my mother

had emigrated from Canada to California and back in search of

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love and money. I was buoyed up by the group, unafraid to ex-

plore the dark territories that usual y frightened me off. If they

kept writing, I would too. I felt like I could write forever.

Final y, Terry called time, but this time instead of asking us

to read right away, she urged us to work on our assignments

at home. That night I wrote with a feeling of purpose I’d rarely

experience before; my writing mattered because someone was

waiting for it, a person for whom I wanted to write, an audience

that was more than theoretical. I wasn’t writing into an abyss. I

was writing for Terry. The next morning we read our pieces one

by one while Terry listened with the attention of a cat watching

birds. She scribbled as we read. Final y, when the last reader had

finished, Terry cleared her throat and read a poem that incorpo-

rated the best phrases from each of our pieces. It was a tremen-

dous poem. In her clear voice, we were one and we could hear it.

We could hear how very alike we were.

And then all the writing together was over. For our last after-

noon together, Terry took us birding down by the Virgin River.

We tramped through the bare trees around the edge of the river,

the river that united us. We were more alike than I’d wanted to

believe. I knew that now, but I also knew that I’d soon be leaving.

Wherever I ended up, I would be there to write.

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Try This

1. Invite a writing friend to write with you for an hour or two.

This is a very companionable way to get some work done. I

meet with another writer regularly for a few hours of writing

together. We usual y meet in a café and spend the first half

hour or so chatting about our writing lives and our careers

(not usual y about the writing itself) and the rest of the time

we write in silence. It’s very harmonious, and when I’m with

her I often do some of my best work.

2. Explore writing classes you can take in your area. A literary

center? An extension program at a university? A continuing

education class at a community college? Or maybe there are

writers in your area who hold workshops and writers’ retreats

in their homes.

3. Consider taking a trip to visit a writers’ retreat or conference.

Or apply for a residency. The Poets & Writers
website is a great resource for contact information and submission guide-lines: http://www.pw.org/.

4. Write with your kids or someone else’s. I wish I did this more

often. It’s happened a few times spontaneously when I was

working on my laptop in the living room, and my two daugh-

ters flopped on sofas and began working on their own writ-

ing. Young kids are great because they haven’t caught on that

writing is hard. They just think writing is “fun.” One time I re-

quested it on my birthday: an hour of family, writing together.

It was one of the best presents. Ever.

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5. Start a writing group. Writing groups can be structured in a

number of ways ranging from groups that take turns distrib-

uting their work for critiques before the meeting to groups

that simply write together. If you’re planning on a group that

will give feedback, it’s a good idea to put some forethought

into how the group will be structured. There are a number of

books out there on writing groups, including
Writing Alone,

Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups
by Judy Reeves.

6. Set your timer for fifteen minutes and write using Terry Tem-

pest Williams’s prompt “Where is home?”

7. One of the images around the word “writer” that I held in

my coming-of-age years was of someone who could live and

work in total isolation and who did not need the reassurance

of others to keep writing. Because I knew that I knew that I

could never live up that image, I believed I couldn’t ever be-

come a writer. (I also thought I had to be male to be a “real”

writer.)

a) Think about what preconceptions and images the word

“writer” conjures up for you. What were the images you

held of “a writer” in your childhood? Are any of those im-

ages limiting you still? Write for ten minutes on this topic.

8. Write for ten minutes about where you grew up. If you grew

up in more than one place, as I did, write about each of those

places for ten minutes apiece.

9. Answer this question for each of the places you grew up: How

did that place contribute to your sense of yourself as a cre-

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ative person? Was your creativity encouraged and stimulated

there, or were you shamed for your creative impulses? Or was

it some combination of encouragement and shame?

10. Write about a place that you love for ten minutes. Go for the

detail. What about that place inspires you?

11. Write about a place that you loved when you were a kid.

12. Make a list of times when you’ve been part of a group or a

team. Pick a time when you had a transformative experience

with a group and write about that for ten minutes.

13. Make a list of times you felt isolated and another list of times you felt part of a community. Pick a time from each list and

write about them together.

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6

ginger Harper Died for

My sins

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she

does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when

there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of

promise, you keep writing anyway.

—Junot Díaz

A month before the seminar with Terry, my grandma JoJo

died of a stroke. She was found in her drafting room taking

a nap, the magazine beside her open to an article on Islam.

Fresh dirt clung to her gardening shoes outside the kitchen

door—further evidence that she’d spent the last day of her

eighty-six years wel . I felt the loss of her acutely, though, for

she was someone who’d understood my lifelong yearning for a

big life of authentic expression; in fact, she’d insisted upon it.

JoJo showed me that an artist is a person who makes art and

a writer a person who writes and that your love of doing the

work exists separately from whatever value anyone else might

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place on the work. Now that I had decided to final y use my

sabbatical to pursue my dream and for MFA programs, I would

need to remember this lesson.

Growing up, I’d counted on JoJo to show up for me in all

the ways that my mother couldn’t—not because my mom didn’t

want to but because her love for a married man and her drinking

drew her away from the present moment, the place where chil-

dren dwel . When I looked into my mother’s beautiful blue eyes,

I saw a vacancy, a desire for something that was far away. My

mother was also distracted by running her business, which was

both a necessity and a passion, which pointed to one of the ways

that my mother and I essential y differ, although it would take

me decades to see and understand this as simply a difference.

While I see the world in stories and feelings, my mother sees the

world in numbers. When my mom and I talk, she wants to know

my numbers: the day’s temperature, my mortgage interest rate,

the reading on my car’s odometer, my weight.

JoJo, on the other hand, lived alongside me, seeing the world

through a lens of imagination and creativity in her little pink

stucco bungalow on Finger Avenue in Redwood City, Califor-

nia. Whenever I arrived at her door, I knew her face would light

up. By the time she was fifty-five, she had three marriages be-

hind her (the family average), and although she still kept com-

pany with one of her former husbands from time to time, she

had, for the most part, turned her focus from relationships to

art, landscaping, playing canasta, and, eventual y, to writing. She was home most days, working in her garden or her art studio or

at her drafting table or loom. Like her sister, the Zen Buddhist

Pat, JoJo knew how to navigate solitude. She lived the last thirty

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years of her life alone and never seemed too concerned about

it. “I found sex awful y repetitive,” she told me once when I was

twenty-three.

JoJo’s approach to the world excited my imagination. It

was JoJo who taught me about the missions that stretch along

California’s spine, dotting El Camino Real every twenty miles

from San Diego to Sonoma. “A day’s walk apart,” she told me.

I could picture the monks in robes like Saint Francis walking

steadily from mission to mission, just as I could imagine myself

beside JoJo in her white Buick Skylark with the top down, driv-

ing from mission to mission. The farther south we drove, the

further we’d go back in time until my California—the groovy

California of the 1960s—magical y transformed into the Golden

State of her youth. In her stories, California belonged to Stein-

beck, John Muir, and Henry Miller, a legendary, fertile kingdom

where orchards spilled into orchards and dirt roads puffed a

cloud of burnt sienna dust behind us as the Buick became the

black Model T her father bought her in 1924 to drive to Calis-

toga High School.

I’d often stay at JoJo’s on the weekends that my mom would

go away when I was a kid. It would take a long time for me to

realize where my mom had been on those weekends—even

years after my older sister said, “Of course, he was married!

What did you think?” Before my mom would leave for I did not

know where, she and I would wend our way toward JoJo’s, up

El Camino with its neon martini glasses flashing and forever

spilling onto the word COCKTAILS, El Camino with its liquor

stores that smelled of cardboard and Dubble Bubble, its gas sta-

tions and endless cheap motels.

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When my mom and I hit Redwood City, we’d turn onto

Whipple Avenue, past the Wienerschnitzel hot dog restaurant

and the Shaws ice cream parlor and then left at the AAA office

onto Finger Avenue. Down Finger Avenue at number 173 stood

JoJo’s bungalow, with the lime and apricot trees in the back and

in the front, the modern, water-efficient landscaping that once

was featured in
Sunset
magazine. This was where JoJo wove wall hangings made of sticks, feathers, and dog fur (Samoyed,

to be precise), ran her landscape design business, and opened

her doors to the occasional undocumented worker to live in her

guest room. JoJo was the grandmother who thought coloring

books were immoral and that you should definitely know about

Picasso by the age of seven. She was my dad’s mother. I had al-

most no relationship with my biological father, Ted Nestor, but

it never occurred to me that it was special or strange or amazing

that JoJo made our relationship continue and flourish despite

his complete disinterest in being my parent.

Together, we ate vanil a ice cream in small glass bowls with

silver spoons and played War at the picnic table in her dining