- Posts tagged Writers Conference
- Explore Writers Conference on posterous
God is Wakantanka
I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause.
Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:
“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”
As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.
“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.”
Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning.
With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying:
“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”
With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences.
The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all.
As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.
Primal Decorum
As we winged our way west toward Steamboat Springs, I was reading an article in Harper’s by Paul West titled “My Body, Myself.” In it he wrote, “I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not—if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off.” He deemed his sense of connection a “primitive hunch,” adding, “…I began to think of myself in the third person but I was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal decorum…”
I felt I knew what he meant when he said, “I hovered,” as I sat in a high-backed seat, floating through the sky on my way to yet one more destination with which I had no permanent relationship. I was thrilled that the particular spot I would be visiting was at least one of my favorites. I had never been to Colorado in the summer so I was eager to see the difference warmth brought to the town I’d only known when its bowl of a valley ringed with jagged peaks was filled with white powder.
Our first morning there, I opened the curtains to find a black cat with glowing golden eyes watching the thickets that bristled at the hem of the woods. As I pulled the curtains back further, its eyes swung my way, focusing on me as its body tensed, its crouch deepening as if it were readying to spring away. When I didn’t move, the feline turned its gaze toward the half-empty birdfeeder and studied it with intense interest. I wasn’t in the mood to see a bird or a chipmunk mauled on that particular morning so I slid the door open a bit, causing the cat to bolt into the bush, its tail swinging into the thickets as it disappeared.
As soon as it was gone, a chipmunk roused itself from the woodpile in which it had been hiding and unleashed a round of chirping chatter that berated the cool, clean air for its collaboration with the monster that had been stalking it. The louder he chirped, the more frantic his tail flipped behind him—like a conductor’s wand during a particularly stirring segment of a symphony, though his tail’s movement was a delusional testament to his prowess at having warded off the cat! After a final crescendo, he inched his way toward the scattered seeds beneath the bird feeder, keeping one eye on the tree-line just in case, and helped himself to a mouthful of breakfast.
The next brave beings to return were the Stellar’s Jays, and they were closely followed by the magpies—cautious but bossy as they sparred for domination over the birdfeeder. The chipmunk made the mistake of commencing a series of squeals and one of the magpies hopped over to it to give it a piece of its mind. As the bird squawked a refrain, cocking its head sideways to see if its point was being made, the chipmunk backed up a few paces but was far from ready to acquiesce. Its chirping intensified and the Stellar’s Jay scooping feed with its enormous beak rotated its head so its closest eye could see what the ruckus was about. So much drama everywhere in life! I thought as I closed the door on the cacophony.
The bold landscape touched me as much in its summer gentleness as it had in its wintry hush. The rising breath of the breezes stirred the wildflowers and rustled the silvered leaves of the aspens, the bright colors of the flowers superimposed against the pale spotted trunks of the trees seeming to testify that the earth was indeed good. The storms at such a high altitude were no different than they were at home or even at sea level in Panama City Beach, as they swooped in and rubbed out every inch of light in the same manner they behaved in any other landscape. The flat tops of the distant peaks still held drifts of dull snow, as if a great white hope belonged only to their loftiness. The matchstick trunks of the long-dead pines pointed at the heavens as if to accuse the mountains of not seizing the day, their bare bodies—ravaged by borers during the 1940’s—serving as a reminder that death was always just one step behind.
The wilderness threatened to consume me as I rested my head on a burned-out tree trunk and sank into the foliage that softly licked at my skin as the breeze dictated. I listened intently but couldn’t tell whether the rushing stream was involved in a dialogue with the steep hillsides or whether it was simply a soliloquy understood only by its own rippling currents. The babble sang its message to whatever party happened along and I was glad it was performing for me in this idyllic moment in time. The sun came and went, ambivalent toward my desire for warmth, and I celebrated my last lazy day for a while, as I would be attending the Steamboat Springs Writer’s Conference the next day.
I was nervous about meeting other writers and having my work critiqued. My skin had always been so thin when it came to my strung-together sentences, and I turned out the bedside light that night wondering whether I might have grown out of the shyness that had always kept me from connecting with others who might have something to teach me.
# # #
This post is a #LetsBlogOff contribution, the question of the moment being “What do you look for in a Blog Off; or what motivates you to participate or not?” I would like to tell the esteemed leaders of our fearless tribe that I’d prefer less specific topics, ones with broader philosophical implications because these ask me to dig deeper. And, hey: thanks for asking—such a rare show of respect in our fast-paced, communication-rampant world! To see the other posts of the day, click here for the list.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
A Road Less Traveled
Once I arrived, the setting inspired me—a good first sign I decided as I drank in the spiky mantle of cattails edging the marsh that spread out around the hotel. The murky water filling the shallow expanses sparkled like it had been sprinkled with bugle beads. I unpacked and wandered around the room like a testy lioness, finally giving myself a break as the early evening sun transformed the water into a festive crackle of light. I drew a chair to the window to record what I was seeing in my writer’s notebook, regretting my decision to leave my camera at home so that I would be forced to capture everything I saw in words. Though I was happy for the exercise, I missed looking through the lens to capture the details of such a resplendent setting.
When the tide went out to sea, it left a slick plane of polished mud stretching out from the hem of the mounded land on which the hotel was built. Hummocks of grass sprouted in the water, which took on the color of a knife blade as the sun glided westward. A brown rabbit fed on the green tufts, its ears moving like the sonar of a ship as its nose twitched with its chewing. A woman called out to a friend as she passed it, causing it to raise its soft head and sniff the air before hopping into a thicket of stunted bushes, the bottom halves looking as if they’d been stained by tobacco from an incessant submersion in sludgy water.
Just before sunset, the light infused the water until it appeared backlit like an ice-skating rink. A meandering walkway cut a linear silhouette through the center of the scene, and a rail of pickets framed the water and two figures standing separately on the edge of a copula that punctuated its end. They were perched on opposite sides of the octagonal surface that rested just above the face of the water—the man leaning forward with his arms spread, hands grasping the railing and hips cocked in a stance that “read” frustration. He changed positions often as if his thinking was too tumultuous to allow him to stand still.
The other figure was a woman whose gaze seemed to burn itself into the horizon. What questions did she ask? I wondered. Had these two bodies, black against the glow of the water, ever been intimate with each other? It wasn’t likely given how they inhabited separate worlds at such close range, and yet something about them made their stories seem intertwined. Why would I think this as each of them walked silently from the pier, keeping whatever struggles they were experiencing secret? And why did I assume they were grappling with something? If there was conflict, it would not have been with each other; was it with the sea, or only in me?
I was beyond nervous to face the other writers at the conference—something I had never done and something I had little confidence in doing—so I walked to the edge of the bay the next morning before it was time to meet to try and calm myself. The bank was pocked with holes into which crabs rushed on tiptoes, scampering around like ballerinas on point. Several challenged each other, face-to-face as they sidled across the mud, their shiny, claw-tipped arms raised like swords. Their warring world was far from clean, but the muck in which they lived was elemental, unlike the toxic waste spilling from the factory across the Intracoastal Waterway. It belched smoke and steam at a serious rate, and I’d noticed that cloud towers had formed at sunset the night before near the spewing of the pollution. I’d wondered then if nature was hoping to rain the toxins down before they had a chance to erupt into the atmosphere.
The summer solstice had arrived at 11:57 p.m. as I tossed and turned, feeling overwrought and chiding myself that my nerves were getting the best of me. It turned out that my anxiety wasn’t unfounded because as early as my first session, it was clear I wasn’t going to do well at the conference. I managed to keep myself steady through the first day, retreating to my room as soon as an excruciatingly slow dinner had passed. I was polite enough as I made small talk with the older women at my table, all hoping to publish cookbooks or craft books about knitting and crocheting. I knew I was being arrogant but the quality of the writing that had been shared that day was disappointing. Once back in my room, I stood watching the edge of a front approach and wondered if I shouldn’t just go home.
The explosion of gray felted clouds comforted me until the rain came, tough as nails as it pelted the windows. Far above, a half-moon, muted by mist, emitted a fuzzy light as the storms began to overtake it. When the torrents were unleashed in full, the pounding heavens echoed my internal chaos. I decided to leave the next morning, feeling conceited that I’d dismissed the majority of the attendees because I did not feel as if they were serious writers while also feeling clear that this was not the way I wanted my writing education to unfold.
On the way home, I was barreling north on the highway near Savannah—speeding along at 90 miles per hour—when an old man in a pickup truck crested a hill in front of me, driving the wrong way in the fast-lane of the highway. Had I been passing someone at that moment, it’s not likely I would have survived the collision that would have been unavoidable, though he might have made it given he was perched in an ancient Ford pickup as solid as a hunk of steel. I shuddered as I watched him blunder on his way and prayed that he would not meet anyone else head-on. The experience made me cringe; made me grateful that I had lived to cringe, and I vowed to try to be more appreciative of the opportunities I had in my life, even when they turned out to be disappointing.
Back home, I found myself so emotionally charged that it seemed I was spilling myself on the sidewalk, emotions leaking out of me like perforations had sprung up in my psyche. I couldn’t seem to get back to my writing, the conference having taken the wind out of my sails, so I did the best I could by scribbling missives into my writer’s notebook: “You are almost a stranger to me, oh book that glues my guts together and holds the secret dream I nurture in silence. Why is it called free verse if it is never free? After all, someone had to pay the price to write it, no?” Do words have a shelf life? I wondered. If so, would mine be out of date before I’d ever figure out how to make them palatable enough to consume?
In a week’s time, we would be heading back to Costa Rica and I caught myself humming, “Do you know the way to San Jose?”—the answer, of course, being yes. Before we departed, I made a trip to Atlanta to have my car serviced and felt so weary that I began to seriously wonder what was wrong with me. It frightened me that I was such a sad case of the walking wounded. My therapist had me reading M. Scott Peck’s A Road Less Traveled because I found myself so solidly groping for direction and a measure of peace. I tried to let the book help but it simply made me wonder why I’d come into adulthood with such issues like character disorder and whether I really needed to know what my dis-ease was called.
I felt spent, even as I craved the motivation to carve beautiful words into the spongy surface of a page, any page. For whatever reason, they simply would not come. Peck implied that God is love but I couldn’t seem to feel how the concept of a divine being fit for me because my soul was scabbed over with so much pain that the concept of unconditional love seemed like such a foreign thing. I did hunger to learn so I continued to try to make sense of his advice as I dealt with the stress that I was possibly on my way to losing Jim and my own life. If I continued to digress into the hard-bitten places I seemed destined to live, I didn’t feel my life would be worth much anyway so it was difficult to see the point in trying.
“I want so badly to ‘get it all together’ so I can have an effective life,” I wrote, “but I seem to become all the more ineffective the harder I try.” Jim and I attempted to talk about how lost we had become to each other but he remained adamant that I had not been working at our relationship so I limped away, yet again, feeling as if everything that had happened was my fault. How could I work at anything when I didn’t have a clue as to who I had become? I wondered. Our life had gone through so many changes, as had I, and it was remarkable to me that he was able to stay unscathed. I felt that I had lost myself under the weight of everything I was handling. “It’s ironic that I’m so materially fortunate,” I wrote, “and that I feel uncomfortable with my life I can’t enjoy it. It’s time to grow into it so I can be an effective person in the world and in my relationship. But how?”
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
