On the Way to Jerusalem
By Bryn Greenwood | July 2, 2020 |
As it has for most of us, COVID-19 upended not just my plans, but my schedule. In March, all three of my weekly volunteer opportunities were cancelled until further notice, which put me in my house for six more hours a week than I usually am. I can’t remember what I frittered away those hours on the first few weeks of the shutdown, but by mid-April, I began cleaning. In May, having cleaned and organized pretty much everything else in my house, I started on the filing cabinet in the corner of my office.
The filing cabinet held a ridiculous number of years of utility bills and bank statements, as well as the owner’s manuals for things I no longer own, including my first telephone answering machine. Like a time capsule, in that same drawer, I found the manuscripts for dozens of short stories, plays, and novels that are so old they are handwritten, typed, or printed from long obsolete computer platforms. In short, they are artifacts from my early writing life, each of them the lone remaining copy of a story I once desperately needed to tell.
Leafing through them, I soon identified a common thread in those early stories. They all took place far from Kansas, where they were written. There’s a story of a married couple in Bath, England, a young orphan in post-WWII Yokohama, a woman with amnesia stranded in Gare Saint-Lazare. In those stories, I see how keenly I wanted to escape my home. I see a teenaged me who thought my life would not start until I went out into the world, and a big part of that life was my writing.
So I went. To New York, to London, to France. (There is an underpants joke here that I can’t quite nail.) I even went to Japan for a few years, then to Florida, a strange and foreign place in its own right. At last, after so much perambulating, I came back to Kansas. My writing came back to Kansas, too, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about since I unearthed those old stories.
After all those years of wandering the earth, and all those years of believing that I needed to see the wider world to write about it, my breakthrough novel, the one that well and truly launched my writing career, it was about a girl growing up in rural Kansas. The next novel, also about people in Kansas. The book I’m writing now … Kansas.
It’s not that I didn’t benefit from seeing the world. I firmly believe that improved me and my writing, but it turns out that the stories I need to tell aren’t about people very different from me who live far away. The stories I was meant to tell are the ones I already know, which brings me to the title of this blog post.
My last year in college, I went to a Laurie Anderson show. At the time, she was touring for her album The Ugly One with the Jewels. One of the pieces she performed is called On the Way to Jerusalem. The premise is that a 15th Century nun wants to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as an act of spiritual devotion. Due to some practical considerations, she makes the journey by walking around and around inside her convent’s cloister. Each day for three years, she walks, steadily accumulating the necessary mileage to reach Jerusalem (metaphorically speaking.)
The performance piece ends with these words: “At the end of her journey, the nun was so exhausted that she collapsed. A doctor was called. After examining her, he announced that she was too weak to make the return trip. The nun died shortly after.”
My friends and I left the theater laughing about this. “She was too weak to make the return trip!” we shouted. “The return trip!” For several years after, that remained our rallying cry of both exhaustion and frustration over our writing. In the years since, friendships have waxed and waned, until I no longer have anyone to make jokes about it with. In those years, my understanding of it transformed, too. I used to think it was just a clever joke, but I don’t laugh about it anymore. Maybe that’s simply the work of age, but I believe it’s also about how my view of the world, my ideas about home, have developed in the intervening twenty-five years.
Now, I think of the nun’s journey as a sly truth about all our journeys. You may leave your home. You may leave all that is familiar. You may walk all those miles to Jerusalem, but you can’t leave yourself behind. You are the immutable object. This is particularly true for writers. Yes, we can tell stories of people unlike us, living in different places, different times, different societies, but we are still telling stories about ourselves. We are each the nun walking in a circle inside the walls of our private cloisters. The story is the pilgrimage, and with each circuit we weave the narrative. After we reach Jerusalem, we must still have the strength for the return trip.
The advice to “write what you know” gets bandied about a great deal, and it’s often interpreted as a limitation, a warning not to overstep yourself. I prefer to think of it as an affirmation. Teenaged me thought her life was boring, thought she was boring, that’s why she wrote (with a great deal of ignorance) about places she’d never been and people she’d never met. Now, I understand that my experiences have value, that my own stories are worth telling. Today, like every day, I’m walking toward Jerusalem, but I’ll sleep in my own bed tonight.
Is there a story that you feel uniquely qualified to tell? Or a story of your home that you’ve been struggling to write? If you’ve previously seen your life through a filter of mundane vs. extraordinary, has your view changed as you developed as a writer?
BRYN GREENWOOD (she/her) is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer. She is the NYT bestselling author of The Reckless Oath We Made, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will, and Lie Lay Lain. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
I find that no matter where I set my story or who I write it about, it’s ultimately about me or some part of me I need to explore. My shadow. Or something that happened to me that I can’t look at directly. Beautiful post. I hope you’re well.
I definitely feel the “something that I can’t look at directly.”
Yes, absolutely—wonderful post. Memory and the details of it enrich my poetry and prose with a deeper emotional core whether through character or scene. And I agree that this is the case for most writers, whether it’s deliberate (as in my case) or unconscious. Thank you for sharing this!
I’m always fascinated by things that surface in my writing that I wasn’t consciously aware of, but that are very close to home.
This is so many shades of fantastic, Bryn, and you’ve helped me to contextualize where I am in my own story journey this week: I’ve completed a circuit that I often doubted I’d complete. I’m hoping the next circuit will be a little easier now that I know I have the ability to tackle those steps. Thanks for a great post.
It’s a long walk, but totally worth it!
Hi Bryn, I often read and am taken to places where I have never been and know I will never see. The world is complex and various and to be a writer, I believe you must see the world from different heights and shallows. But so far, my own writing has centered itself in the world I know–The Midwest. It’s as if the tears I’ve shed and the joys I’ve had are part of that landscape. I even titled the first version of my WIP Landscape, though no one would probably ever pick up that book. Thanks for this post.
This is why I love to read stories written by people who are from vastly different places and experiences than mine. In so many ways it’s a much more powerful thing than me trying to go and experience something similar myself.
Bryn,
The story of the nun walking to Jerusalem brought to mind Mahalia Jackson’s, “Walk in Jerusalem,” which speaks to Jerusalem as being synonymous with heaven, i.e., the final destination of our journeys.
The nun’s tale, to me, was a cautionary, pitiful one: a person so intent on reaching her destination, the details of her journey were irrelevant, as long as she arrived. What a boring trip that must have been, with never-changing scenery and people, only cracking walls of an aging convent and sister nuns whispering, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” It’s akin to walking in place just to “get your steps in,” forgoing all the beauty and wonder and fresh air (and new stories) the outdoors hold.
The realization that our experiences on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem provide ample manna for a lifetime of stories, and that “home” is in our hearts and not necessarily where we lay our heads, gives encouragement to press on. There is no need for a return trip.
I prefer to think that the nun’s experience was one worth having. Not everyone has the option of leaving their walls, but they still have stories to tell. And even in an enclosed space, there are details worth noting. After all, I walk the same routes through my neighborhood every day, and I always see something new. That said, yes, there’s no need for a return trip, which is kind of what I see as the point to Laurie Anderson’s joke.
Lovely essay, Bryn. I can’t remember who said it, maybe Ursula Nordstrom, but if you’ve survived childhood, you have something to say. I loved the story of the nun–my husband and I veer towards the monastic and it points very much to the heavenly Jerusalem.
I’ve been compiling short stories that I wrote for my children when they were little and my daughter drew pictures–it’s been great fun. Much of my early magazine work was along those lines, celebrating the simple joys of early childhood. What a contrast to my own that was filled with the pains of a fractured family, moving, moving, moving, having to say goodbye, and so after the delightful stories, I’m returning again to the darker periods, mostly because I have questions and story helps me find the answers.
Be well, Bryn, and I look forward to reading more of your work.
My stories – frequently sparked by dreams – always seem to involve travel (quests, running for one’s life…). But the characters generally end up – geographically at least – at or near the location they started from.
My childhood was full of travel, but now at last I am beginning to put down roots. Literal roots, as I plant trees in my garden with the strange and new expectation that I will still be here when they bear fruit.
Fantastic post. Yes, I think we always bring ourselves to whatever we write. Anything we write is so revealing about us. It seems to touch an intimate place that sometimes we don’t even know we inhabit.
Thank you
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