Writing as a Small Sturdy Boat
By Guest | May 1, 2016 |
Photo by Julia Munroe Martin
Please welcome Bethany Reid as our guest today. Bethany earned an MFA and a PhD from the University of Washington. Her poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in regional and national journals, including Blackbird, Santa Clara Review, Prairie Schooner, Pontoon, Calyx, Studies in the Novel, The New England Quarterly, and Twins. Her chapbook, The Coyotes and My Mom, was published in a limited edition in 1990 by Bellowing Ark Press, and Sparrow won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux, and was published by Big Pencil Press. Bethany lives in Edmonds, Washington, with her husband and three daughters.
For most of my teaching career, I taught community college students—all ages and many backgrounds, including women returning to the workforce after rearing children, formerly homeless youth, and military veterans. My students often felt as though other people could write, but not them. But you don’t have to have scads of time, special equipment, not even a room of your own in order to write. You have a story, and you get to tell it.
Connect with Bethany on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Writing as a Small Sturdy Boat
What does writing feel like to you?
This was one of the first questions I asked my freshman composition students, back when I was teaching two or three sections of English 101 each academic quarter. I didn’t just ask, they had to write a response in-class. I didn’t allow abstractions, no words like “frustrated” or “happy.” I wanted a picture. If they wished, they could actually draw a picture instead of writing a description. To clarify further, I didn’t want to see anyone sitting at a desk in front of a notebook or keyboard. Not propped in bed. Not at Starbucks. I wanted an image, a metaphor that represented the feeling that writing gave them.
The negative images my student writers produced astounded me.
- Like that dream where I’m giving a speech and I don’t have any pants on.
- Like a pothole.
- Like a cow tangled in a barbed wire fence.
- Like being devoured by fire ants.
One student wrote, memorably, “Writing is like digging out my eye with a rusty spoon.”
After they wrote, we sat in a circle and shared our images aloud. This was useful in and of itself. The students felt listened to, and they realized that they weren’t alone. With luck, they heard at least a few more positive possibilities for how writing might make them feel. Toward the end of our discussion, I liked to share Alice Walker’s metaphor, writing as “a very sturdy ladder out of the pit.” I might read a poem, maybe Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer,” and we would talk about heavy chains and iridescent, flying creatures.
I also shared my own metaphor for writing—a small boat.
I first came across my small boat in a book by Thich Naht Hahn, who advises that in a crisis a person can concentrate on keeping her own small boat from capsizing. (A little scary, to think how much of my life in those days felt like crisis.) I had three young daughters, a husband, a house, the usual burdens and blessings, plus the lucky, tenure-track, full-time teaching job. I dreamed of being a writer, a real writer, whatever that was. In the meantime, I got up early each morning and wrote in my journal before leaving the house to go to work. My daughters got older and more independent. I kept writing. I wrote in my minivan during their soccer practices and swim lessons. I wrote on my lunch break and between advising appointments. I eked out poems and a few essays and short stories, even several drafts of a novel. Writing was my small boat, but like Walker’s ladder, it was sturdy.
I confess to having felt overwhelmed and beleaguered in those years (nicely nautical terms, overwhelmed, beleaguered). My boat and I were out in a storm, it was dark, I didn’t have any oars, and there was no land in sight. I clung to the gunwales and salt waves chapped my hands. That was okay. All I had to do was stay calm and keep my small boat from going under. All I had to do was keep writing.
Then, two years ago, my boat and I retired from full-time teaching, a little ahead of schedule, as my mother was ill and my youngest daughter had reached that age where she needed more attention. (A lot more attention.)
So for two years I have helped with my mother’s care, and I have kept tabs on my teenager and her friends. I have done a lot of driving, and I still write in my car. I have continued to eke out a few pages here and there. My writing process feels, even now, like a small boat. It may be sturdy, but it’s adrift.
This is enormously frustrating, so frustrating that I think I finally understand the potholes and tangled barbed wire that my students used to serve up. For so many years I thought, If only I weren’t teaching, then I could write. After two years, shouldn’t I have finished—definitively—that draft of a novel? Shouldn’t my short stories be published? Shouldn’t I be reworking my stories and sending them out, at the very least? Shouldn’t I be churning out a memoir about my mother’s illness?
Writing in my journal one morning recently, as I unraveled a lucid dream—one of those dreams in which I had the uncanny experience of questioning what happened in the dream, while dreaming—I remembered working with my students’ images. Look closely. Ask questions, I used to tell them. I thought again of my student gouging out her eye with a rusty spoon.
- Why a spoon?
- What does a spoon symbolize?
- What else might one do with a spoon, besides digging out one’s eye?
- What if this image could be converted into one of nourishment?
- What if you put a can of beans beside the spoon? Or a bowl of ice cream?
Scribbling all of this down in my journal, I returned to my own image for writing—that small boat. Yes, the boat had stayed afloat. It was a good boat and it worked for me, had worked for decades. I’m grateful. But, now, when I really do have more time on my hands, is it really all that much better than the worst of my students’ constricting, limiting images?
- Why a small boat?
- Why not oars?
- Isn’t my pen kind of like an oar? Aren’t I moving somewhere, intentionally, when I put my pen to the paper?
- Why not imagine a break in the clouds, or the pink of dawn on the horizon?
- Why not see some land in the distance?
- Why not row in that direction?
I still like my small, sturdy boat, and I confess that I’m not ready to overturn it and splash anywhere, boatless. But my point in sharing this story is that, no matter how you imagine your writing life, it is yours. You dreamed up this image, just as much as a novelist dreams up a character. You get to interpret it. If you dare, you get to make more of it.
And on closer examination, my small boat turns out to not be the usual sort of boat at all. It’s a bit like Dr. Who’s Tardis, that funny and so English blue police box—bigger on the inside than on the outside, capable of traveling not merely through space, but through time.
What does writing feel like to you?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Nice imagery! For me it’s like climbing a high cliff face. Fraught with danger of falling every step of the way, my outline provides those vital footholds.
And of course there’s something ENORMOUSLY satisfying about successfully climbing a cliff face.
Like swimming in a pool of Jell-O. Most days it’s strawberry at least, but every now and then it’s lemon. But it’s always Jell-O.
One of my Writing Lab writers resonated with this one, Ron. It’s such a great image. Thank you for posting!
To me, writing is like a window into the world, it is an escape from the humdrum of real life.
Merlin — You have reminded me of (a million years ago) my master’s thesis, in which I compared a poem to a landscape seen out a window. Even the boat, of course, is a means of escape from the “real.” And weirdly into the real-er. Thank you so much for commenting!
Writing feels like a visit to Diagon Alley; it feels like magic.
Thanks for being with us today, Bethany!
All Harry Potter references embraced! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to post here.
Bethany – turning a troubling image into a friendly tool – wonderful. It came just in time for me. Thanks.
I’m so glad to hear this.
Writing feels like cocking my ears to catch the faint strains of a complex and beautiful song while being frustrated by my own persistent deafness.
I loved your story about your students (another former English teacher here).
I love this image and hesitated to respond because I keep thinking that it is pure genius, like Beethoven! Good to meet another “former English teacher” (though I’m not sure we can ever fully retire from that role).
Bethany–
What does writing feel like? Just now, the question makes me think of one of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte’s paintings. It’s called “The Human Condition,” and it shows an artist’s easel set up in front of a closed window. Outside the window is a pleasant pastoral scene. The position of the painting’s canvas AND what it depicts occupies most of the window area, and IS what there is to be seen outside. Maybe. The only way the viewer knows it isn’t the window is the white border on the edge of the stretched canvas.
If you or anyone else can interpret why this picture makes me think of what it feels like to write, please get in touch.
Barry — you have sent me on a visit to my days studying art history and thinking that might be my path. Thank you! (I will blog about this soon — back at A Writer’s Alchemy).
Am I alone in this writing world? I never felt any of that. Except for the feeling Merlin D. DuVall gives: an escape into a different world.
I’ve always found writing one of simple pleasures of life. I sit down relaxed and poke away. Some of it is okay, some of it not. I don’t break my head over it. When something good gets going, I may develop it into a historical novel. Working on one now, I’ve actually got about 500 real words on the “page”, and my protagonist has come alive. The rest will be cooking awhile.
Another part of the adventure is the research that goes into a historical novel. So here I am again, about to follow a character where he goes. I have the beginning and the ending in my head, but the middle is still waiting to be found from the research. I have to fit him into the facts, then make sure the facts I use are relevant to the story line I have in mind…
This is not suffering for the sake of art, this is pure fun.
This gives me such hope! Of course the reason I keep coming back to writing (each day) is those moments of joy and “pure fun.” You’re right.
To borrow that ubiquitous line from “When Harry Met Sally,” I’ll have whatever Lyn Alexander is having! I envy her.
I’ve never found writing “one of the simple pleasures of life” or “pure fun.” I find it more a complex pleasure and intense fun. My image would be something involving total immersion — wonderful once I get into it; difficult and sometimes scary enough that I often put it off for a while.
Loved the post.
Writing is me entering into another world that I can control on the page. I can select how the scenery is and what people are thinking and the emotions they are dealing with. Writing allows me time with one of the most precious gifts I know–WORDS.
Beth, I agree.
In other words, writing makes us into minor gods. We have full control over our little worlds and our people. What power!
:)
Yes!
I want to say that writing is for me like walking down a country road, and sometimes I’m noticing the rhythm of the grasses, the shadows the fence throws, and the swallows’ acrobatics, and maybe I’m in a hurry and not seeing any of it, maybe I’m lost and starting to panic, or perhaps I’m ambling and taking in each tiny detail–one bloom, one cutworm. I like that image. But then I suspect that it’s often more like dance class–trying to make my body into the right shapes while I’m standing on one leg or even turning and usually feeling awkward and wrong and terrified that I’m going to fall down except for those few brief moments when I feel it inside of me and my muscles and the music come together.
And those moments have sustained me! I guess what I’m pushing for (and toward) now is to have more of THOSE moments!
Bethany, your title drew me into this essay, in between lunch and choir practice. For two days I’ve not been able to write what with the kids’ sports, the shopping, extra choir practice and … you get the picture. And that’s what makes me feel adrift, which makes me cranky.
Writing feels like scratching a persistent itch. It’s also my little tent of a sheet where I get to play with my little people :)
I think you targeted something important in this comment. It’s not the *writing* that makes me feel adrift, it’s the difficulty of getting to it. Thank you!
Bethany, writing to me is a car. Never a hip hybrid or a lithium-ion Tesla missile, but always an internal combustion clunker. Sometimes the key is turned, it warms to an even purr and it rapidly rolls through its gears, and other times it’s a sputtering, coughing thing that lurches and spews foulness.
Sometimes it just sits cold in the driveway, because it feels like my license was revoked.
Tom — not sure how one signs up for a Tardis, but it sounds as though we both need one. :)
It’s a new day. Today I am up against the wall.
Blank wall.
(Tom, my licence is suspended, not revoked)
Writer’s block, no matter how transient, is NOT fun.
So today I will take a long walk in the woods with the dogs and watch the leaves of springtime sprouting on the trees.
Then I will come back and write.
Writing, to me, is a long, drawn-out conversation with someone I’ve yet to meet.
Bethany,
Loved this article. As a former college writing teacher myself – now writer & blogger, I connected with this on many levels. Instead of writing a new poem for the day I found myself blogging in response to your article – on writing, poetry & metaphor — ultimately, our human experience. Thanks for the inspiration!
Stacie
Writing is like cleaning out the basement–so much junk, so much overwhelm, so much indecision. And then, there it is, under a pile of files, in a match box, a small tooth–a marker of my son. All history changes.
Thank you, dear mentor, Bethany.
Sheila
hmmmm, I will be working on that question and dissecting it once I find the answer. Really lovely. and congratulations on the guest post!
Space Mountain at Disneyland. (A little bit naked.) It’s dark and I don’t know what will happen. Click, clickety-click, click, as the roller coaster train edges upward.
And at the top, whoosh! It’s amazing. That splendid line came out of me!
Oh my, here we go again. Will this time around match the thrill of the first? I’m exposed. What if I share this with someone (anyone) and they see right through me?
And now I’m lost in the ride, wind blowing back my hair, and gazing all around at the twinkling stars. It’s not safe, exactly. But millions of people have survived it, a few with brilliance.
Then the phone rings or there’s some mundane urgent task calling, and the ride is over. For now.