The Artist's Way
Well, I haven’t been doing a lot of posting on this particular LJ account because most of my energy, recently has been going into school, work, and writing. I’m sure those of you whom I’ve spoken with in the last few weeks know that I’ve begun doing the Artist’s Way again. I can’t tell you how changing this is, and how much it’s meaning to me right now. When I went home last weekend for my cousin Christopher’s wedding, my parents were shocked to see the change in me. It isn’t really definable, maybe. An elusive change, a gradual change-like when you haven’t seen someone for years and then you see them again and you know something is different, good, but you don’t know what it is. In a matter of three weeks, there was a change.
I’m starting to feel like me. A me I know, a me I’ve been talking to for years, and a me that I’m sure those close to me can sense-the essence of me, so to speak, which has been buried. It’s beginning to work its way to the surface, and I can’t wait to feel that freedom.
My mom introduced me to this creativity workshop during my senior year of high school, but I didn’t really have the will to do it back then. Mom has a habit of doing lots of things at once, just like me, but unlike me, she has the habit of trying to get everyone else to do them with her. All at once. So, it began that mom and dad and I (Winston was in basic training for the Air Force then and so escaped, not that he would have allowed himself to be caught up in it anyway) began a diet, Pilates, and The Artist’s Way one fateful morning. All at the same time. Go mom.
Needless to say, it didn’t last long. Mom was going through chemical hell* and I was going through post-mononucleosis work-load, two AP classes (and the makeup work for them both [see post-mononucleosis work-load]), college Spanish at Wake Tech, and a play. Load on top of that the fact that I was experiencing the worst bout of extended insomnia I can ever remember (12 days, with something like 22 hours of sleep total…no identifiable reason other than stress) and the college application process. My parents were also away on weekends-renovating the tobacco barn on our family farm.
With all of these factors working in synch, there was no way I could see the point in something as apparently-pointless as the Artist’s Way. My mom had done it before, and though I hadn’t been aware of the process at the time (I was in middle school when she did it, I believe) my dad has since told me that he watched her bloom into the amazing artist she is today.
Most of you don’t know, though some of you do, that-despite the fact that my mother graduated with a BA in art-afterward she pursued not art, but nursing. She’d tried to model for a few years and, beautiful as she is, agencies would not take her because she was 27 and therefore “too old.” They said she could be a runway model, but she would have to lose weight and that, to my mother, didn’t seem like a healthy lifestyle. After she married my dad, she worked for several years to support them through his graduate schooling, and then had my brother. Not too long after, my brother was born. When I was about two or three, she began nursing school. Her mother was a nurse, and she felt a calling toward that profession, though it had never really interested her before.
When I was four, my grandmother-Nana Jean-fell sick with cancer. When I try to conjure words to describe my father’s mother, I find myself unable. Even now, my skin is pricked with chills, because there are no adjectives to apply to her. Words, images, impressions-they all fall short. I have no way to translate what a vast person she was, no way to show how she could take the world in thrall and hold it in her hands like a diamond. I have no description for her. She was. And it was wonderful.
When Nana Jean fell ill, my mother was a semester from completing her nursing degree. She was so close that the hospitals allowed her to spend the last months of my grandmother’s life at her side, being the comfort she needed, being the familiar face and the loving hands. My mother was her constant aide-doing all the things the nurses did, but only for her, and at all times. We rarely saw her, and I can not imagine the mixture of gratefulness and envy my father must have had, living in South Carolina, working and taking care of two small children, separated from both his dying mother and his wife who cared for her. I know he is eternally grateful that she was able to be there to comfort Nana Jean, so that she wouldn’t be alone, but I’m sure that he wishes, somehow, it could have been him. I’m sure there’s a part of him that covets those months my mother had in Nana Jean’s presence, which he didn’t. I don’t even want to imagine the pain he must have felt, but I have to. For her memory, and for his, I have to.
Maybe I’m writing too much outside the point of this entry, but this is how it’s falling from my fingers, so this is how it’s going to play out. These are things I need to explore and that I want to be remembered. I don’t want it-any of it-to be forgotten. I need this memory. I need this heritage that’s inside me; it must be excavated to heal me. Just like buried dreams and crushed aspirations, the pieces of my past have to be uncovered and drawn out and reconstructed. This puzzle of my being-of my meaning-is incomplete without the history to define it. What is seen and experienced by others, the me that people can meet and shake hands with and talk to, has no definition without these pieces.
My grandmother’s story ends on Christmas Eve, 1990. We were in Georgia, at White Hall-a place that only the great and audacious would dare to call home, but she was both, and grandly so-where we gathered every Christmas. I was five, and I somehow knew before anyone told me that Nana Jean had died. It’s an odd thing when you’re five, wanting to be excited about Christmas-being excited about Christmas-but also trying to comprehend that your grandmother has just died. You know the adults in the house want you to be happy about Christmas, because they’re encouraging you and giving you presents and trying to smile, but you also know that they are sad. That maybe they resent your being happy in a way, because they can’t-because you should be sad too. And I was. We all were.
But how does a five-year-old deal with those feelings? How does a five-year-old comprehend such a tumult of emotion and turbulence? Can a child really understand, really know how great a force has just faded away? I wonder if we couldn’t. I say we because we were all of us-my cousins and I-children. The oldest was Betsy, who is 27 now and was, I suppose, ten back then. Maybe she understood on an adult level, but I sure didn’t.
I got an Easy Bake Oven that year, and instead of going to the funeral, I stayed back at White Hall and played with it-my mother’s mother had flown in, and she took care of me. I remember when they told me. I remember how they said it.
“You know…your Nana Jean died last night…” this, from my mother.
“I know,” I said, and I think I did. I remember I was trying to play with my oven, trying to ignore what was going on around me. I remember I had wanted that oven, but that I wasn’t really happy. I don’t remember being very happy at all that Christmas.
I wonder if it was because of this experience that I’m unable to deal with crises when they happen. I cry easily over trivial things, and I feel a great deal of weakness when I’m overwhelmed by lots of little things at once. But when it comes to the important, life-changing factors…I just can’t seem to feel it. Mary Bell died, and I don’t think I cried until months later. When we thought my dad had cancer, I did feel a huge amount of fear, but I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t even feel sad. I felt enormously confused. That was years ago, in High School. I didn’t cry then, but I’m crying now. I cried when I wrote about it in English class. But I didn’t cry when it was happening. Just like I didn’t cry for Nana Jean until much, much later.
It isn’t that I don’t understand these things when they happen. I do. I comprehend them in full and think about them, and they roll around in my mind and I worry and hammer and bend them until there’s nothing left to do but sit down and stare. But do I feel them? No.
I remember my mother asking me, when we weren’t sure about my father, “Do you understand?” I did, but I think my lack of apparent reaction disturbed her. I think it hurt her. I don’t think she knew how much it hurt me, and how well I understood. I don’t think she knew to take my lack of reaction as a sign of just how much it affected me.
Maybe that’s normal for people. I wouldn’t know, but it’s what happens to me.
After that Christmas was over, Winston and I got our mom back. My dad had been offered a job in Florida working under his friend Steve Ramsey, and-after a poor past experience-my mom wasn’t about to let him pick the house. And after the past several months of not having my mom, I wasn’t about to let her out of my sight. So my mom and I flew to Florida. I remember the plane had great food trays-they were brown and transparent with a pretty design on them, and I liked them so much that the man sitting next to us let me keep his. I don’t remember anything else about that trip, but we soon after moved to Florida.
My mom never finished nursing school. She believes-as I do-that she was called to nursing for the purpose of taking care of Nana Jean. When it was done, she wanted to raise her children. And she did. She had artistic friends, and she did a lot of crafts and stenciling designs onto barstools. A lot of mommy-stuff. At this time, she also fell ill with Lime Disease, and struggled with that for a few years.
Finally, we moved to North Carolina, when my dad got an offer he couldn’t refuse-News Director for WRAL-TV, where he’d worked before.
What she did have was time. Some people may think that a woman in her forties is too old to start a career. Well, those people can kiss her ass.
My mom started going to a directed workshop at Barnes & Nobles (hey…I work there now, imagine that!) called the Artist’s Way. I had no idea what she was doing, I think I thought it was a book club or something, but suddenly she had…friends. I hadn’t known my mom to have what I would consider real friends since we’d left Florida. But she did. I remember her bringing home Cher and Beverly, and I remember all sorts of interesting, artistic talk. I was very removed from everything back then, so my memory of that time is kind of strange. It consists of our home, and to remember, I have to walk through our home as it was set up at that time. It appears in my head similarly to a Myst game, or Riven, with an odd, lense-like quality to the scenes.
I was shocked when, not too long after, my mom went back to school. She-out of nowhere, it seemed to me-had decided to become an interior designer. She was going to put her ideas, her energy, her artistic sense, and her latent talent to use and build the career she’d never known she wanted. She graduated from Meredith in two years (maybe it was shorter) and launched her business: J. H. Interiors. It was a one-woman show, un-advertised, and new, but she made it work. She made it happen. Her list of clients grew and grew until there wasn’t enough time in the day to pursue every one. She raised her prices to new clients. They kept coming. By word of mouth alone, my mother’s business blossomed, and she is doing something that she loves. She is living the dream of every artist: she is doing what she wants to do, and making money doing it, and, above all, she’s making herself and other’s happy. With art. So kiss her ass.
If I could use one word to describe her experience with the Artist’s Way, it would be this: triumphant.
Well, I can’t say that my mom was really the one who turned me on to the Artist’s Way. Actually, I didn’t know any of her experiences with it back then, back when she was trying to get my dad and me to do it. But she did sew the seed, and I do remember the positive effects of the morning pages from then. Despite all the factors that made me stop them then, I’m glad I did them at all.
For so it was that, a few weeks ago, I found that Sammy and her friend Rilea had begun the Artist’s Way. When she mentioned Morning Pages, I knew at once what it was. We talked about it, and I felt an irresistible urge to do it. To start it. Something. Anything. Because I’ve been blocked in a terrible way. So the next day at work I bought the book, bought the journal (thank you B&N employee discount) and, like a sign, that very night I met Orson Scott Card. The Artist’s Way talks about a concept called synchronicity, which I’m doing to define here as intentional serendipity. We want, we dream, we pray, we ask, and somehow, mysteriously, God (or the universe or fate or life itself) answers back. “I have learned…never to ask whether you can do something. Say…you’re going to do it. Then fasten your seatbelt. Remarkable things will happen” (Cameron, The Artist’s Way).
Ignore me for citing in a livejournal entry. It’s just the kind of person I am.
In any case, I experienced synchronicity before I even cracked the cover…but I didn’t miss it for what it was. A sign. Somehow, Orson Scott card-one of the most renowned science-fiction and fantasy authors there is-chose my register to come to. I didn’t recognize him-to which, later, Adryn said “I would have recognized him on the spot” and proceeded to fangirl at me-but I complimented his choice of books, which were all Young Adult fantasy and sci-fi, and some poetry. He chose to make a comment about someone ordering his book. Indeed, someone had ordered Ender’s Game, and it was behind me. Maybe my being a fan of his book choice tipped him off, but I knew instantly who he probably was, and made sure.
“Which book?”
“Ender’s Game.”
Die. I knew he was in Greensboro, I knew he came to the store for signings, I had never managed to be here when he did, but here he was, in front of me, on the day when I decided to get off my ass and do something about my dream of writing. Die.
And so it happened that I met Orson Scott Card, and he told me to submit to his literary magazine, just when I had decided not to give up. The next day, I received the copy of “remark.” magazine in which my poem “Helen of Splenda” had been published. That week, I received a phone call from Amity telling me that they were offering me a job to teach English in Japan-another dream, reached.
Today I got an e-mail from the JET program, inviting me to the interview in Atlanta, GA. Not only have I reached one dream-a dream that will undoubtedly fill the well of necessary experience for every writer-but I have the possibility of choice. And I can feel confident that I am finally truly qualified to do something.
Because that’s what I’ve been missing. That feeling of qualification. That knowledge that, whatever failings I have, however much I might dive and flounder and sink at the things most people consider basic skills, I am qualified to do something, and do it to the best of my ability. Which just so happens to be pretty damn well.
So, skeptical world, I charge you: kiss my ass. I’m going to Japan. I’m published. I’m fucking ON. MY. WAY. The artist’s way.