Questions From Robin, Midlife Matters

People who journal online have been interviewing each other.  I have stepped in—below are the rules:

 

Leave me a comment saying "interview me." The first five to leave a comment requesting to be participants will be interviewed. I will respond by asking you five questions. You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. (Write your own questions or borrow some) Fun and easy right?

 

These questions are from Robin at Midlife Matters 

 

Q.  I loved the questions that you pose to your writing students.  Try one of them on for size:  What did you not see in the past week

 

A.  I didn’t see any snail mail letters.  Since I was young, I have always thrived on mail communication.  When my brothers were in the military, I wrote to them several times a week, and I had several pen-pals through the years—in   India, Hong Kong, France,  and  South Africa, and there are countless others I struck up mail friendships with.  There is nothing to compare to a letter, addressed in someone else’s hand, with your name on it.  I love my blog and I love e-mail.  But neither is as exciting as snail mail.  So, in the spirit of the assignment, I would  write something simple and direct, like:

 

This week, I didn’t find any letters

Addressed to me in someone else’s hand

Nothing on which someone else had

Scrawled my name, thinking of me

 

Q.  You've done it -- you've actually published a real live novel!  What was the publication experience like?  Rejections?  Revisions?  Acceptance?  Working with an editor?  Holding it in your hands for the first time?  Did you promote it 

 

A.  I’d like to focus on  Holding it in your hands for the first time.  I remember the day my book arrived from the publisher.  I remember thinking, “It’s so small.”  It seemed too small to have been such a heavy burden for six years, the length of time it took to write it.  A much better feeling was one I had in a recurring dream I used to have before the novel was finished.  I used to dream I was holding the completed manuscript in my hands, and it felt heavy in my hands, as heavy as it was supposed to, given the amount of emotional turmoil I was going through in order to complete it.  The emotional turmoil was mostly the result of lingering doubts that I could actually write a novel in the first place.  So it makes sense that my dreams would involve the novel’s completion.  I also think the dream partly came out of the experience of one of my writing teachers (William Hallberg) bringing his completed manuscript (of The Rub of the Green) into class one day with his editor’s comments on it.  

 

 As for promoting the book (see also my interview with Lisa Hannon, One Woman’s Writing Retreat) just before my book came out in 2002 I found out I would have to have surgery.  That operation took about 6 months out of my life, all told—I wasn’t really fit physically or emotionally to promote a book.  In January of 2003, I started writing a collection of short stories, based on  the effects of that surgery, so that collection consumed me for about a year

 

In retrospect, I did very little promotion

 

Q.  Many people who do other things, from plumbing to lawyering to farming to dancing, dream of writing, but you are a writer.  If you could be anything else, what would you be (and why, of course 

 

 A.  An artist.  (Judi Heartsong--you rule!)  I got an undergraduate Art degree as well as an undergraduate degree in English.   

 

Two reasons, I think, why I failed to pursue art at the Master’s level are that my craftsmanship is poor.  I am sloppy and impatient with image-making (same with other creative endeavors, such as cooking.)  I remember once, how one of my art teachers reached for my paintbrush to demonstrate a technique, and the handle was covered with paint!  "How in the world did you do that?"  he asked, thoroughly and understandably disgusted.  (In contrast, my husband, who used to work as a painter for a welding company used to sandblast and paint all day, and he never had even so much as a speck of paint on his clothes.) 

 

And second, I was not ready for art school—I didn’t value the part of myself that needed to make visual art.  I was trying too hard to make representational Art—I wanted to be a Renaissance Artist, a new Leonardo Da Vinci, denying the part of myself that is fanciful and wild.  I focused too much on literal truth and technique.  

 

Q.  Anticipate a day on your boat trip this coming summer, and write an advance journal entry for it.  What are you looking forward to, what are you hoping to avoid, and what really happens?

 

Looking forward to:  Spending long, slow, quality days with my husband, away from the hubbub of life, away from the horrible malaise of our times.  Having time to think more, better, and deeply.

 

Hoping to avoid:  Being or seeming weak in the face of physical hardship

 

Entry:

 

At least twice in the last two months, I have seen the Ohio River referred to as Styx, the river separating the two worlds of the living and the dead.   Styx  comes from the Greek word meaning “hate.”  In myth, Charon, the ferry man, takes the dead across Styx from the land of the living to the land of the dead.  At the mouth of the underworld, dragon-tailed Cerberus guards, allowing all souls to enter, none to leave.  The River Styx is said to be so foul that any god drinking from it would lose his voice for nine years The Ohio, like Styx, is foul—I read that the Ohio is one of the top five polluted rivers in the U.S.  As I ride in our little boat, I think about that.  And also of D. H. Lawrence’s poem, “The Ship of Death.”  He writes, “Build then the ship of death, for you must take / the longest journey, to oblivion.”  He also writes of the need to die the “long and painful death / that lies between the old self and new.”  That is what I want to happen to me.

 

Q.  What was your life like when you were nine years old?

 

A.   I lived with five other people in a small trailer in Eastern North Carolina.  It’s the trailer I wrote about in The Secret of Hurricanes, a ten wide Magnolia.  That was the year my grandmother, who lived with us, died at the age of 82.  I remember my elder brother, Jack, who is dead now, sitting on the wooden steps, slumped in sadness, the trailer door blowing and hitting his shoulder, over and over.  I remember him turning and in his anguish pummeling the trailer door with his fists, then slumping again in the agony of his loss. 

 

Thanks, Robin, for asking some really great questions!!!