A young writer came up to me today. You write so well, she said. What is your technique?
I felt diluted. Like I really wasn’t the talent I or she thought me to be; just someone picking her way and learned a trick or two along the block.
I said I actually don’t write so well, and I am not a writer. Are you?
But my God, was she tough. She just cast her eyes down and smiled, then knitting her brow as though she was in some harmless guessing game, she again turned her face to me. Wasn’t I glad she isn’t pretty: her cop-out, her get-away. You saying I just wait for the Muse, if she finds me worthy she will find me?
Oh no darling I’m not saying anything!
This is an effort to save that young writer. I am a just a teacher, not a writer, and this is what I have to tell her: Don’t follow me, I have lost my way. As for writing, It cannot be taught. It can only be bought.
When my best friend got married, how my walls went tumbling down. Mimi was my confederate. In life, and in Literature. She drew and wrote poetry and run-on essays, and my, was she good and was getting better and better by the day. So when one day she took the notion of carrying the neighbor’s baby like she wanted to know how it'd feel to play cradle and coo, I just knew she was going to leave me.
Now she’s a doctor in the KSA. I sometimes imagine her going crazy, making doodles inside a stonehouse harangued by an oversized baby. If she ran into a surgeon who told her, You know you’re different, she keeled over. Even of the husband she was rather proud to have procured for herself, she’s run out of things to say. I’m only happy here on payday, she last told me.
Danny was a classmate in college. Quiet but articulate, I once thought he would make a brilliant poet-revolutionary one day. Imagine my dismay when he ended up an officer of a giant pharmaceutical company and stole my pitch in service of corporate money. Charged, he told his girlfriends at FB that he was still going to pay me even if like I said there's no such thing as free lunch in Cuba, but to please please, he loves his wife and family.
And so when it was Karen Kay’s turn to marry and have a baby, I just said Damn. Now there goes another. Into the gully. You cannot marry and be good by me.
I once caught Uma Thurman on telly telling Oprah how women’s lives are interrupted by motherhood. The host cut her. Don’t you ever say that, went Oprah, emotive and sincere-like, hurting in behalf of martyred humanity. You would think Motherhood was Art itself and that great beauties like Uma would do fine serving time in the scullery. Uma, then divorced wife and single mother, blinked and smiled, all artifice. Thankfully it wasn’t her show. She had erroneously used the word “ruined”, too strong too sharp, a taboo for such a dull magazine show.
Are you learning anything? If you are not, then I’m a good teacher, you Go.
