Where I Have Always Been Coming To

For Christmas in 1991, my mom picked up two books for me. They were both by A.S. Byatt: Possession, which had recently been released in paperback, and Still Life. I hadn't read A.S. Byatt. The books had beautiful covers that felt like satin. I still have them.

I struggled through Possession first. It was heavy with poetry, with historical letters, diary entries, words even, like frisson, that I just didn't know yet. I didn't get it until I read it a second time, a couple of years later.

I read Still Life the following summer, and again the summer of 1994, before beginning my honors thesis. In between, I read The Virgin in the Garden, in an old 70s hardcover that my friend Lena got for me, maybe at a flea market. I have that one too.

My copy of Still Life is covered in my own annotations. I wrote my first really serious paper on that book, my undergraduate honor's thesis. It was on Still Life as a piece of impressionist painting. I spent a long time delving into Impressionism as a movement, and then taking apart Byatt's language to show that what she was doing was similar to what the painters had done in the late 19th century. I used passages like this one:

Anthea lay as though dancing on the hot folded sand, the pale lively hair curved outward on the duck-egg blue towel, on which her lovely profile rested, the skin darker than the tossed gold, the marvelous bones picked out by clear cut shadows and glitter of sweat. Her bathing dress was peacock, rippled green and blue, like waves of an illuminated sea (Byatt, Still Life, from the chapter Seascape, p. 79).

But further, Byatt struggles with representation in the novel, with the representation of things, of being able to hold things up, to show, as it were, and she relates this particular struggle of writing to the work of painting, in the Prologue:

At first [Alexander] thought he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was an apple or a sunflower a sunflower. . . . But it couldn't be done. Language was against him, for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower (Byatt, Still Life, 2).

I wrote again, on The Virgin in the Garden, on the iconography of Elizabeth I, and again, on Byatt's short story "Body Art," in which I discussed the pregnant body as the queerest body of all. Both of these infused with art, with heady language, with odd human relationships, sex, disconnection, but peace, too, and stability in the quotidian, the ordinary.

Me and Dame Antonia, 2005

This is my context. Before I knew it, these books shaped me in a way I couldn't imagine. Before I discovered Raymond Carver, before I read Flannery O'Connor, or Joyce, or Denis Johnson, or anyone else who helped me learn how to write a short story, taut, minimal, withholding like an iceberg. Before that, I had Byatt, who taught me, very simply, to love the sentence. And to love the characters she created: smart, mouthy, gingery Frederica, her soft, golden, doomed sister, Stephanie, poor troubled Marcus, heavy, brooding Daniel, elegant Alexander. I loved them. I still do.

On Friday, A.S. Byatt comes to Clinton to read at Hamilton College. I've been invited to have lunch with her, and some other professors from the department. I've met her before, in 2005, when I saw her read at Arizona State University, and was able to ask her a couple of questions, and have her sign some books.

I don't know what I'll say to her, or what I even want to ask. She led me to George Eliot for God's sake. I read almost all of Eliot (save Adam Bede. Yes, I even read Romola.) to understand Byatt. At one time, I thought of becoming a Byatt scholar, if that's a thing that even exists. Not for love so much, but for volume, for sheer volume of information, for layers and layers of meaning and evidence, buried in every text. She taught me to be a scholar. To love language, and she helped deepen my love of art.

I walked away from scholarship, from the Ph.D. But on Friday, I get to lunch with one of my favorite minds, as a writer, as a grown up. If it's an early 40th birthday present from the universe, I'll take it.

*My title is a quote from Possession, "This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."

In Between Days

not the cover, just an idea

I'm expecting a new book.

The Conjurer arrives in May from Standing Stone Books.

What should you expect from The Conjurer?

The stories are longer, the characters, older. It's just as anxious, and even sexier than States, but it lingers in heart break a little longer, and for different reasons. It wades through loss.


Here's what my kick ass friend, writer Melissa Febos had to say about it:

These stories, like the characters who inhabit them, are tough-skinned and tender-hearted, and wickedly funny, as only the broken can be. Jennifer Pashley is the real conjurer here, pulling beauty from the despairs of ordinary people, splitting the skin of everyday tragedies, of people whose hearts have been ravaged and whose hands have done hurting, to reveal the hot pulsing hope in them, in all of us.

I'm gearing up for a Conjurer reading tour, but in the meantime, I'll be reading this Sunday -- along with Michael Nye, Kate Hill Cantrill, and Danny Goodman (whose website has a mustache and cussing, for fuck's sake!) -- for Sunday Salon, at Jimmy's 43 in Manhattan. I'll read from The Conjurer, but I'll have States for sale.

Hope to see many of you there.

Straight out of My Own Bones: Some Thoughts on The Bell Jar

It's the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Here, in honor, is an essay I posted at the Downtown Writer's Center's blog a couple of years ago.

 

A few years ago, I outlived Sylvia Plath. And somehow, despite an aborted attempt at a PhD in American Studies, and a robust American poetry course as an undergrad, I'd read a lot of Plath's poems, but I'd never read The Bell Jar. Until this week. I read the whole thing on Monday. I haven't read an entire book in a day since high school, when I read all of The Great Gatsby in one sitting.

Why didn't I read it before? I think because no one takes it seriously. It's sort of that memoir-disguised-as-novel written specifically for college girls who cut their wrists for attention. Right?

In her introduction to the 1997 edition, Frances McCullough writes that if Sylvia Plath had lived, “it's hard to say whether … the novel would ever have been published in this country.” McCullough goes on to question what might have happened if Plath had written more novels, better novels. Would she have returned to her first novel, The Bell Jar, and thought differently? Would she have self-censored? Told less of the truth? Crafted the truth into something less raw? Something dulled at the edges, or as Wordsworth says, recollected in traquility?

We'll never know. As McCullough says, “of course Plath did die a tragic death at the age of thirty, and the book's subsequent history has everything to do with that fact.” By which she means that Plath's suicide makes the book a cult favorite, but she also means that if Plath didn't die, the book might never have seen the light of day – because it's not very good. Right?

I was surprised. It's not the best book I've ever read. The plot – maybe because it's so true – feels predictable. The ending feels a little like a a Lifetime Movie. But, as McCullough points out, “her voice has such intensity, such a direct edge to it,” it forgives the structural flaws.
  

Take the opening lines:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive along all your nerves.

And she never lets you go. It's a close, tunnel-vision narrative, right out of the eye-sockets of Esther Greenwood. And that voice never waivers.

It's not The Kite Runner. It's not a globally significant narrative. In fact, it doesn't stray very far from the geography, class or political background that it knows. So why does it matter? Why did it ever matter? Because one college educated white girl from New England was depressed one year and wanted to get it off her chest? Wanted to drag you into the eye of the storm?

This is why: because in her marriage negotiations with Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood stumbles upon this observation:

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. 

That's why.  Because more than anything, this book struggles with the notion of either / or. Esther can be a poet or a mother. She can be an editor or a wife. You can pick one fruit off the fig tree, she says, and once you pick one, the rest of them wither and die.
   
What makes it so hard? Why are women prone to second guessing? Can't you do both? Be a mother and a writer? Tell the truth, and tell it hard, unfiltered, like a holy scream*, and do it well? I'm asking you. I've second-guessed my own answer.

You can debate Plath's answer – the suicide answer – the answer No, you can't. And if you try, you won't get out alive. But what you can't ignore here are the questions that Plath asks – about agency, about identity, and about telling the truth without apologizing. Or that what she asks has resonance, regardless of her own solution: Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones. 

*from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry – the really old, 1972 version I have, which was given to me by poet Barbara Moore. In it, Anne Sexton is listed as still living. In the intro to Sylvia Plath, the editors write “Sylvia Plath's poetry is a document of extremity. Her sensitivity is inordinate, but so is her ability to express it. The result is a holy scream, a splendid agony – beyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond all but art.”

No Fear, or Obligation

Here's another thing that happened in 2012: I came out on Facebook. In the least creative way, on National Coming Out Day and by posting this picture. I don't know what a creative way would have been. Maybe a Lady Godiva-style ride through the village with a rainbow sash.

Apparently, it caused a kerfuffle, and included some speculation that it was a mid-life crisis, when Geoff, my husband, posted the question You're What? in response to my admission.

He was kidding.

It's not a mid-life crisis, and Geoff has always known.

GK 95

Here's my least favorite reaction, when you do tell people, and maybe this is why sometimes, I don't tell people: But, you're married.

That's right. I'm married, and I've been married for a long time. Almost 17 years, and we've been together since 1994. When we met, I was batting about 60/40 male / female on the dating. I was skeptical. Not because he was male, but because he was cool.

I got lucky. We belong together. Not because the government or the bible says so. Not because we are male and female. Because we are who we are. We are people who belong together. And for us, that was lucky. It meant we could get married without a battle. It meant that when we decided we wanted kids, we had them. (Which is lucky on more than one count; plenty of heterosexual couples can't, or have difficulty conceiving.) No one gave us a hard time.

But. It certainly wasn't a choice based on ease. In fact, I'm not even sure it was a choice. People are given to you. By what, you decide, or discover. Me, I prayed to the Virgin for my people. Both my partner and my kids.

So why bother saying it? Let me ask you this, you who have been married or partnered a long time, who are straight but still look at, desire or think about the opposite sex: you do sometimes think about the opposite sex, right? Guys: I know you look at women. Girls: Come on. We had a fair debate over Channing Tatum versus Ryan Gosling. Your desire for other than your partner does not fade away to nothing because you have paired off. You are still your own sexual being.

And so am I.

I've had significant relationships with women. I've fallen in love with women, and I've fallen in love with men. Here's one of my favorite quotes about it:

In itself, homosexuality is as liming as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.  -- Simone de Beauvoir

There's me. Don't put me in your box.

Your deal.

The World Didn't End. But It Did, Sort Of

2012, I'm so over you.

Some years are bad years. I'm still not over 2008, or 2005 really, although 2005 had some really high points to it as well.

Here's a rough line up of some of the crazy shit that happened this year.

I pulled my kid out of school and homeschooled him for the spring semester. It was critical, and in some ways, it worked. If it kept him from being arrested or out of the hospital, then it worked. But because of that decision, I didn't actually lose my job at Syracuse University, but it was recommended that I never be rehired. Which is pretty much the same thing. You can read about that here.

I never revised my novel. I started to. I started again. I started again. And one more time. But never finished a revision to send to my agent. This is a real problem for me.

I tried to start my own consulting business, but never followed through on it. Also, a problem for me. Also, I tried this at the beginning of this summer, and as we say around here: this summer sucked.

I watched my kid (same kid) get into and out of an abusive relationship. It was intensely painful, for him, for me, and because of this, this summer really really sucked. I've never felt that helpless or trapped. Because of this, I haven't even written or really talked about this summer. It'll take a while for that writing to surface.

I got to meet John Taylor. Yep. That was my high point. He's extraordinarily sweet, honest, and humble. And still really handsome.

My mom came to visit. Which probably also should have signaled the coming apocalypse.

Geoff got a new job. Theoretically, this means he will travel a lot more, but it hasn't happened yet. Also theoretically, it should help pay off some of our exorbitant debt. Debt we accumulated after years and years of not making enough money but still buying houses and having kids. It hasn't happened yet. But maybe, in 2013, it will.

I set plans in place for a new book. A second book of stories. When I can, I will tell you more about that. But in the mean time, there's some champagne to be had. Because of the new book. Because things have ended. Especially this year.

In All Things

Way back in elementary school somewhere, Kieran was asked to tell the things he was thankful for. I don't remember what grade, but it was early, pre-K or kindergarten maybe. He listed two things: the moon and my body. Probably, that's all anyone ever needs to be thankful for.

A lot of the beauty of Thanksgiving is lost in all the chaos: the sales, the turkeys being pardoned, the too-early Christmas music, parades, football, gluttony.

So, really simply, here are some things I'm thankful for.

My kids. These guys slay me with beauty and sadness, with their wicked (and very different) senses of humor, their talents and their perfect faces. I can't believe I made them. I can't believe they're sort of mine. (Because really, any parent knows you are just shepherding them through. They belong to something bigger than little old you.)

My crazy family. That's right. And when I say crazy, I mean certifiable. But in the spirit of real thanksgiving -- in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (1 Thes 5:18) -- I wouldn't trade them. Even the really crazy one. It's hard to practice being thankful in all things, but I believe in it. That said, I'm also thankful for modern psychiatry and anti-anxiety drugs.

My own body. I hate it a lot of the time, but it works really hard for me. Tugging the dog uphill, working outside. It's sturdy, and it's healthy. And someday, I should probably send a thank you card to my liver.



Sunshine. Just that. Me, and the dog.
We love some sunshine.

This guy. Because even if we were the last two suckers on earth, we would figure it out, and it would be ok, as long as we were together. Which, also, incidentally, is why we should probably do The Amazing Race.

Happy Thanksgiving.

This Writing Life

I was just admiring my friend, poet Jane Springer's work habits. She rolls out of bed, doesn't get dressed, sets up on the porch with her laptop, some iced tea, and a full pack of cigarettes and sets about writing. For the whole day.

I am a hub of distraction.

This morning, I slept in. Because last night, we decided to watch another episode of Twin Peaks at 10:45. And then, what's another glass of wine at 11:45? Before I went to sleep at around 1:00, I remember saying, You know what would be great? If you just shut the door and let me sleep tomorrow.

And I did. I said goodbye to my teenager, but missed the little one getting on the bus. I slept until almost 10.

When I got up, I got online, answered emails. Checked to see how many people liked the photos I posted on facebook. And got a phone call from my brother.

Cascade Mountains, WA

My mom is coming to visit for ten days. I saw her last in 2010, but she hasn't seen the rest of us since 2008. And while this should be totally exciting, it's really mostly totally anxious. Everyone is anxious. We're anxious about being anxious. And my brother's reaction to anxiety, especially high levels of it, is to talk about it.

At 11:05, I finally got off the phone, only to be called by the teenager, who was on his lunch break, and wanted a cigarette. So I drove to McDonald's, where they were all gathered, dropped of a cigarette and went through the drive-thru for a free cup of coffee and nothing else.

Because I'm also broke.

I haven't written anything yet. Or even opened up the dropbox where my writing is. Truth is, I probably can't today. Not with the anxiety hanging over me. I'll probably clean the house and walk the dog. The cleaning will be scattered and less efficient than usual. I'll flit from one task to another and the end result will be that the house won't look much different. But I'll pace around for a few hours.

Writers I know spend long days working, or reading, because that too is part of the process. My brain is like a misfiring weapon a lot of the time. Doesn't, or does, too much. Too rapid. I've been told to quit drinking, to go to bed earlier, to not answer the phone, to get help, to focus on my work, to become the asshole who can steal way, can hole up and write, as Sugar says, like a motherfucker. I've been told to man up.

But the truth is, this is who I am, and this is what has made me into a writer when I'm able to do it. I should do some of these things, sure. I should also eat more leafy green vegetables. I would write more if I could ignore the phone, if I could not be so invested in my kids.

And when I think of that, I think of when I used to go to mass with my parents, and the way my dad would grip my hand during the sign of peace. He'd grip it like it was all he had to hang onto. Us. Would he have been happier, more productive, if he could have shrugged us off a little and not clung so tight? Maybe.

And maybe I would too. But it's not in my blood.