The place the stories come from

For several years now I’ve been working on a collection of stories related primarily by place. The place is so present it’s a main character. It’s what the stories start from. The physical location is the Key Peninsula, a narrow strip of wooded land in the South Puget Sound where I grew up. The place is real, but it’s also fantastical and, come to think of it, the fantasy is mostly in what is omitted. For example, the Burger King that showed up out of nowhere when I was a teenager has not been invited to the page, but it’s real, it’s there. I just keep looking past it, down the road toward the pasture with the old horse on whose gray rump a bird sometimes perches. I hold out for that.

Although I often admire and sometimes enjoy fiction that doesn’t shy away from garage door-openers, cell phones, microwaves, mini-marts, and online shopping, I never want to dwell in it. I get filled up on those things just by being alive. The fiction that compels me allows for a removal from these things. I write because I can’t send myself back in time, and I can’t send myself to another world, and I’m not satisfied with how we live today.

The stories I’m working on are where I’ve always wanted to live, where the trees are thicker, the water wider, the community smaller and tighter. They’re what might have been had fewer people come to the peninsula I grew up on, had the ones who originally settled here all remained. I wouldn’t call them fantasy, although the people in these stories spend more time walking on beaches, rowing in dinghies and looking out of windows than they do watching TV, or buying things, or messing around with computers, and I know that alone is far-fetched. I hope that despite my omission of many things, these stories are still connected to the experience of real people. I want this collection to express a vision of what is possible—a rooted life—but I do not want to become lost in the ideals of my make-believe, to go so far that I leave behind the struggle and beauty of the strained and daunting world we’re placed in. “Never get so attached to a poem that you forget truth that lacks lyricism,” sings Joanna Newsom, and she hits me every time.

A room of my own

That’s me, sitting under the window in my writing studio in our new house. I would like to say to Ms. Woolf before going further, “Dear Virginia, thank you for the good advice.” This is where I’ve been sitting down to write since Michael and I moved in December. We’ve spent our time since late July working here, making this 1910 house a good place for us. And now I am ready to stop scraping ceilings, sanding walls, priming and painting, filling nails holes, and considering trim so I can delve again into work less practical and yet persistently valuable to me.

Let me introduce you to the room. This is where the former lady of the house, Ella, did her sewing. She probably chose the shutters and window trim as well as the handles on the wonderful drawers and cupboards all around me. I’m the one who painted the room green and Michael pulled up the floor so the hundred year old fir could be refinished. You can see a spinning wheel made by Mr. E. Sorrels (an old man on the Key Peninsula) and my bobbins on a Lazy Kate my dad built, standing atop a rug stitched by my great-grandparents in North Dakota. I’m going to knit my first homespun garment this year, no excuses. I’ll put some things on the walls soon. On New Year’s Day I unpacked my box of journals and spent the time it takes to line them chronologically along the back of this desk. These are the things I would take if my house were on fire. Maybe I should keep an empty box nearby, but it's probably better not to live that way.

If you’ve written journals before you might know this strange thing; there is an increase of excitement toward the end, and then a queer adjustment of pacing lest your final sentence on the last page be about toast or the weather. It is gratifying to complete one. If you write in journals and enjoy organizing them chronologically on your desk or bookshelf you may also be familiar with the introductory, occasionally stiff and explanatory tone tinging the first few entries of a new volume, the tendency to write things like “Whirlie, my dog (5 ½ years old), just came in to put her head in my lap.” How much do these pages need to know about me? How much should be cleared-up and pointed-out should some distant generation of Flesher or Duggan get its hands on my pages? Following that thought, should I censor my private journal, or maybe even spice it up a little?

I have 29 journals in my collection, including the one I’m still writing in and I do find a censored self in them sometimes. There are also the rants (evident by large irregular handwriting and a disregard for polite sentence structure), and the entries that are only particulars without emotion, those catch-up paragraphs I write when for some reason I feel compelled to explain what has passed. I think they are usually honest, but that may be a discussion for another day, whether the person I strive to preserve there in those journals, or even here on this page, is truly the one I inhabit. (Now, that would be a satisfying last line, good self-indulgent philosophizing free from humdrum particulars of the content of one’s breakfast.)

In the Open

What I’m hearing, persistently from a few valuable friends, and less certainly from myself, is it’s time to step into the open with my writing. I’ve been writing regularly since college. The word regularly might not reveal the whole truth. The truth is I continued writing after graduating, and I’m writing now, and I’ve never given it up, but the regularity, the routine, is interspersed with long, guilt-ridden periods of inactivity. Sometimes all I write about is wishing I would stop wanting to write. When I do write, I’m home alone and I open a journal or my laptop, and I get a scene out, or a conversation, or a setting, and then I press save or close my book. And no one needs to know. I like it that way, the secret activity, and the secret inactivity on all those days when I don’t work to find a scene or a setting. Since leaving my college writing workshops behind, the completion of a story is met by my own sense of satisfaction, but the question marks and comments in the margins are harder to come by. I’ve been going on like this for a few years, and I send a story or two out, and once in a while that’s gotten me somewhere, but lately I’ve been feeling a tug. Behind all those pages I’ve written about my wish to want to stop writing, is the fear that I will stop, perhaps that even now I’m coming to a stop. I think when that fear was strongest is when I began to feel the pull to unfold and be a bit less private. 

I happened to bump into Mariesa Bus, an old schoolmate, and she asked to edit a story of mine for a project she was working on in her editing program. All of a sudden someone else was involved in my writing and that alone seemed to open a magic door of productivity. Now we’re working together regularly. Not long later, one of my oldest friends came home for a visit. We were sitting on an old quilt on the beach talking about our lives and then her eyes lit up and I think she might have even clapped her hands and she said “I want to do this for you. I want to build you a website. I’m gonna be the fire under your ass!”  And I said, “Okay.” That’s a really small sentence, and might seem like the obvious answer, but there are a lot of times when I would have backed up, smiling, nodding my head in a way that means “I don’t know” which means “no” and I would have come home and opened my journal and written for a while about how I haven’t been writing, and how maybe I should just stop. But I’d been feeling that tug toward something new, the warning that I needed change, so I’m giving it a try. 

Thanks to Lisa Garcia for making this website. I see it as a way to hold myself accountable to my writing life. If I’m not alone in it, I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ll be sharing my stories here, and I’ll be making entries like this one about how my writing is going, or about the place I live, or things I read. This website is a way for me to be more communicative, more public, a little less of a homebody. I see it as a step into the open, and as an offering. If you’re curious, take a look.