Sheer Plod

Wading through the messy middle

When I was in college, I volunteered with a group that brought authors to speak on campus. Which meant sometimes I got to drive them to and from events. I didn’t have a car, so I don’t know whose vehicle I drove, but I remember the writers. I wanted to be a writer with all of my being, and just breathing the same air as these luminaries focused my attention so I can remember them, decades later.

There was the poet Richard Brautigan, who drank liberally and, apparently continuously, during the dinner, the talking on the stage, and afterwards. When I went to pick him up at his hotel the next morning, he was nowhere to be found. I was relieved that I didn’t have to wrangle the tall inebriated writer from lodging to airport.

I got to drive Tillie Olsen home. I loved her essay collection Silences where she wrote about the way life will silence women writers, especially life with children. She wrote a short story called I Stand Here Ironing. She was so warm and generous. I talked about my mother to her, about how my mother had been silenced following my father as his career took us around the country. Olsen went into another room and came out with a poster that was a black and white image of a naked white woman’s torso, her arms up in jubilation or welcome. A tree was tattooed across the scar that marked where her right breast had once been. Tillie Olsen said it was an image of her friend, who had reclaimed her narrative of what was taken from her after breast cancer. I ordered the poster for my mother and tried to explain to her why it mattered. But she didn’t understand and rolled it up and put it in the back of her closet. Looking back now, after so many long silences of my own, I wonder if Olsen, who died in 2007 at 94, didn’t perhaps see some glimpse of my future and understand I was the one who would need that image, not my mother.

One night I sat next to EL Doctorow, and was so shy I couldn’t speak. He had a large voice, and entertained the table full of students and professors with anecdotes and witty observations. He turned to me, and I must have said something because he used the phrase “the writer in the family,” in a way that seemed to include me and Doctorow in the same phrase. I’ve loved the phrase “the writer in the family” ever since.  

But the one who stays most in my mind is Tobias Wolff. I drove him to the San Francisco airport. It was a warm day. I hadn’t read any of his work yet, but I remember him talking about Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried. He told me that there were many contemporaries of O’Brien’s who had more education or better craft. But that O’Brien, who served in Vietnam, had more to say. Writing, Wolff said, the wind from the open window blowing on his face, was mostly “sheer plod.” The phrase is from a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins called “The Windhover”, and I didn’t know that until today when I looked up the reference.

I’m writing a book, which is due to the publisher at the end of the summer. It’s challenging. I’m at that part of the process where the original idea and burst of inspiration has waned, and I have enough written to see that it may all be a misshapen pile of shit. I’m not alarmed. This is the first non-fiction book I’ve written, but I’ve written three novels and one memoir and there is always this sophomoric ebb, when everything is muddled and I question my sanity in taking this on, my delusion that I have any talent at all, or that anyone will ever want to read what I’ve written.

I’ll save you the time on Google – you can find one of the novels on Amazon, it’s called Radio Silence. That was book two. Book one is lost, like Hemingway’s possibly apocryphal suitcase that his wife left in a train. I wrote it when floppy discs were a thing, and I hope to find the printout or the discs at some point hidden in one of the many boxes in the basement I keep meaning to sort through. Novel Three is my best work but I can’t get anyone to buy it. It’s about a woman who runs an ad agency for a big agency network, and the summer she runs a pitch.

The memoir is also good but the agents I talked to said no one wants to read a book about a dead kid. Which is not actually true. But I don’t know that I have it in me to revise the book about the dead kid.

So, I’m writing this one, which I’m actually getting paid for, about a way of making decisions about work and career. I think it will be helpful. I don’t have a title yet. But as I stall with my substack here, I realize I have assembled a little altar of words to some of my writer patron saints. To try to remember that it is immaterial that I haven’t been published in the way I thought I would when I was driving those authors around, convinced that I would be following shortly in their footsteps. Life gets in the way, especially for women caring for children without much help, responsible for supporting them financially and emotionally while doing the laundry. Tillie Olsen got that.

I was and am still, the writer in the family, and that’s something no one can take away.

I didn’t end up like Brautigan, because I realized that my first book, the lost one, the autobiographical one, was about an alcoholic. I believed that when I got sober, I wouldn’t ever be able to write again. I was willing to give that up to not be a drunk mom. But I got it back, so now I can’t imagine how any alcoholic writer does it drunk. Although I know it’s not the writing that we want to drink over, it’s the space after the writing; the ebb, the doubt, the snake of loathing.

And I know how to do sheer plod. And I have never forgotten what Wolff said, that even though I didn’t get the MFA or the critical acclaim, even if my work isn’t polished and sleek, I have lived enough of life, and watched it carefully, so I have plenty to say.

When it’s really tough, I look at the stats on this little newsletter. Every week, over a hundred people read this. That’s tiny compared to others, but to me it’s encouraging. I started this last July as a discipline, writing practice. But it’s become a beacon of another kind. It’s like a little light in the dark, a very small navigational point, that 112 people want to read or listen to what I have to say every week. So, thank you, really, for showing up.