Slippery

I had to grow up enough to care not at all what anybody thought about what I might write.

I eventually did.

I had to get past the assumption that anybody else’s writing was some kind of SAE standard – some kind of specification. I mean, I never thought like that, but the notion that I had to apply some kind of caliper to what I might write was essentially where, for me, it was at.

Sure, like everybody else, I’d read The Subterraneans, but my head was too full of bone to get the artistic meaning of what Kerouac had done. 

It took my neighbor, the celebrated poetess Jean Esteve, pegging down the beach on her walking sticks to take a chance on what I might be.

I’d thudded a heavy bell jar over writing. Thirty years later, I doubted I particularly cared about writing, but Jeannie has a matter-of-fact way of urging that has heft.

She said she was in a “writing group”. She said it was called Tuesday. She said they met every Tuesday. One Tuesday, while I was standing in a hole I’d just dug, I remembered the tone of her urgement. By the next Tuesday, I had written a juvenile thing about a kid on a raft in a swamp and I figured I was ready to go and I told Jeannie so. Tuesday after that, we went. She added that if I did the driving, it was “one less risk” for her.

To her Tuesday group, I read the first installment of what was to become Lostine. Tuesday encouraged me vaguely. Weekly, I kept writing chapters. They started saying things like “You suck us in,” or “I don’t mean to gush about your writing, but I’ve seen a lot of writing, but not like this.”

You can easily imagine I liked hearing that sort of thing. I began to feel responsible, like I was scripting a weekly radio show. By the end of twenty-five weeks, Lostine was entirely roughed-out.

Problem was, now I cared about the characters I had dreamed up. Problem was, I realized Lostine’s 6th-grade narrator was just me, myself and I. And Lostine for sure wasn’t any Victorian boys’ adventure – Lostine was about a risky girl forced to gamble with death – and love.

Jeannie’s word for Lostine herself is “slippery.” For me, Lostine is over-drive personal.

Tuesday sat with me around our big crowd of shoved-together tables and water-tortured me with words like prequel and sequel.

That’s where I am now.