We were driving back from Ottawa yesterday, chatting about our weekend and listening to the radio. Lynda Barry was (on CBC) talking about her past and her books, which led to car conversation about my past and about writing. (I am laughing as I type this, knowing too well the rigours of narcissism.)
Anyway, as we were rolling along in the rain, I was also thinking about having said, the previous day, to my son and his wife that life is full of useful epiphanies. I told them the story of the time in the late '90s when I ran through the Rideau Street Loblaws waving a $4.99 block of on-sale Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese, careening around corners looking for Don. "I know why my father didn't call me back!" I roared. "He was jealous! Because I was in school! It wasn't what he expected me to do. He expected me to fail." (Which is doubly interesting in light of the fact that I gave up that degree course shortly after realizing that my father was likely never going to speak to me again.)
Anyway, yesterday, as we were driving and listening and laughing, we got to talking a bit about writing, this part of the conversation engineered not by me but by mareseatoats, who has been wondering if I am ever going to finish that novel I began about fifteen years ago (if two pages of writing counts as began), picked up for three months in 1999 and three more in 2000, returned to briefly in 2004-05, and have dabbled at intermittently since.
I said that I was beginning to wonder if the excuse I have been using forever -- I don't want the journey to end (I am quoting a friend of mine, actually, who said this of me several years ago) -- is truly the reason I have not completed the book. I wondered out loud how it was -- how it is -- that I had completed a first novel back in 1991 in three months; have marked and corrected and copy edited dozens of stories, articles, textbooks and pieces of novels; have taught grammar, punctuation, style, syntax, dialogue and short story writing; edit our annual publication, and blurt out dozens of blog entries, and yet...
And then, like epiphanies do, it hit me.
My first novel had been rejected (and not once, but a dozen times). In fact, one well-known publishing house sent me a personal letter, discussing what their staff felt were the merits of my writing (another editor, who no longer published fiction, had referred me to this publishing house because he thought I could write, whatever that means, or meant to him). The rejection letter was so full of praise, in fact, that I wondered if I ought to have framed it. Still, there was no story in my novel, and there were problems with my protagonist. (I think agony and separation of church and state might have been among them.)
As mareseatoats and I drove along, I said to myself, "That's it. It's the rejection." Not the fear of rejection, but the rejection.
The dead mother.
The lost brother.
The absent grandparents and aunts and uncles.
The absent cousins.
The disappearing nephews.
The lost father.
The quickly sick and dying and then, and now (and forever), the -- my -- interminably terminally dead and too-young-dead husband.
The loss of identity.
The loss of a son.
The loss of two grandchildren.
The friends you thought you had and had not and, therefore, lost.
The veiled threats of loss that surround you all the time.
(And why am I writing you when clearly I mean me? And why am I using a question mark when I am so obviously making a statement.)
And then, magnificently, horribly -- their loss: of life, of daughter, of son, of wife, of mother, of father, of aunt, of uncle, of niece, of nephew, of cousin, of brother, of sister, of friend. Of life. Of life. Of life.
I used to say to Don, "Why isn't knowing enough?" Which is just another way of saying...epiphanies aren't much use to you if you can't make them useful.
Maybe today I will get back to my novel. Maybe today I will create new deadlines. Or maybe today, because deadlines have a way of scaring people (just look at my list above), I will remind myself of the thing I already know best: it's in the doing, not the done.
Either way, I now have a longing for a hunk of Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese and, more deeply, for a time when I was young -- but not too young -- and had no real way of knowing.
