Assuming it Matters

"Assuming it Matters" first appeared on the Kore Press blog "Persephone speaks" on WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Assuming it Matters by Susan Baller-Shepard

When I was very little, I loved to write in my room, on long skinny strips of paper given to me by my great aunt the librarian. In seventh grade, I won an essay contest and a big chicken dinner for my whole family. In eighth grade, my essay about a local candy company was published in a state history journal, and my mom and I got to have lunch with the governor. The message to me: words feed people.

But in college, writing become uncomfortable, so I abandoned it. I worked at a church, left the country, returned, got married, went to grad school in a dual competency program, and got two masters: divinity and social work. I took one writing class, along with my other graduate classes, and the instructor told me I had “verb tense problems.” I got ordained, worked at churches, eventually had two sons and adopted a daughter. I did the things women do that get repeatedly undone: laundry, dishes, meals, house cleaning.

I felt an urge to write again. I thought no one would take me; I hadn’t written or published in years. Still, I kept feeling this need to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. I submitted a manuscript to Dr. Lucia Cordell Getsi, editor of Spoon River Poetry Review, asking to get into her graduate poetry writing class. I was convinced it wouldn’t happen. I got an email back from Lucia saying I was welcome to come and try out the course. She wrote, “I can tell from your manuscript that you are a serious writer.”

Lucia helped me think again. She was not as I had conjured her in my brain. She was short, attractive, worldly, wordy, scientific, mathematical, poetic. I tell her she is surgical in her editing. She cuts away what doesn’t belong, and sees what is healthy and connective. Mostly, though, she helped me to think through poems, learn the skeletal frames of the poems, consider their sinewy tissues. Now I have a book length poetry manuscript which Lucia edited, a children’s book manuscript, and I am presently writing a collection of essays.

I am forty-five and grateful to have age on my side, to be a woman writing the truth of my life, as a minister, web site editor, wife, mother, writer. They are mutually inclusive roles. My brother Jim says I should be glad my roles feed each other. That’s the beauty I see in the over-forty writing women and men I know well. They speak the truth about their lives: the good, the bad, the less-than-perfect. I value this. It’s less about publication now than it is about giving voice to what needs to be said, what can finally be said at this side of forty. If we don’t say it now, maybe it won’t get said.

On TV recently, I saw Jessica Lange give the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College. She urged the young women,

“Remember who you are. Because, right now, you have it all: the power of your imagination, the velocity of your dreams, the language of innocence, and the passion of a beginner. Don't lose it. Don't let it evaporate or get stripped away or worn away. And, as time passes, if you find you've come far away from yourself, allow the breeze of humility to remind you of who you were—who you really are.”

Persephone lived in circles, cycling between worlds, going away, coming home. I am thankful to Lucia, and others, who reminded me of my writing self.I have circled back around to the child I was, the child who shut herself in her room because she loved to write.


Spoon River Poetry Review
http://www.litline.org/Spoon/index.html

Jessica Lange’s Commencement Address
http://www.slc.edu/news-events/Jessica_Lange_Commencement_Address.php

Love the whole notion of "Playing for Change," a global music effort

Sure thing...

So if words are like bread, and they feed you as you write them,
then how do You choose to share them? Or do you?
It's a conversation we have in our writing group.

And, if you wish to have your bready words published, then how, and when, and why?

If you haven't picked up The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, it's a great book on writing, etc.

Meanwhile, got my first non-fiction manuscript rejection this week.
Surely this is supposed to inspire humility, a rethinking, a pause?
But it doesn't really. I'm just glad I know the yea/nay thing with that imprint.

What's the sure thing in your writing process?
For one friend, it's the writing process that's the sure thing.
For another? It's the writing and the publishing that count.
For me? It's the conversation, the shared wordy bready things.
The talk about what sustains us on this journey.

Have you ever been on an airplane for an extended period of time, maybe on the tarmac
and because of your hustle between connecting flights you have missed every meal,
and then you find yourself rooting through your stuff to see if you have anything
like a mint or a piece of gum, something wholly unsatisfying, but anything, because
your stomach is actually growling above the din of the plane's motor?
Do I want the words I share to be the linty piece of gum wilting in the bottom of my purse?
No. I want to write words like the spread before Johnny Cash in his "Hurt" video,
something you can choose to take or leave, but a big spread nevertheless.

So maybe the words are food, or maybe they're not, but if you're hungry,
you'll dig for something to sustain you more than a piece of gum.
And maybe that's something to write to: the hunger
And as Sheryl Crow sings, "Maybe that's something."



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go