“I know how to write forever. I don’t think I could have happily stayed here in the world if I did not have a way of thinking about it, which is what writing is for me. It’s control. Nobody tells me what to do. It’s mine, it’s free…”
—Toni Morrison
Back in Texas
“Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it.”
—John Steinbeck
Our Lake Erie Sabbatical is officially over, and we’re back home in Austin, Texas, living just a few blocks south of where we first landed a dozen years ago.
I find it annoying how the older I get the more the clichés ring true. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. (Luckily, you can always turn around.)
I never gave this place the credit it probably deserved. People would say to me, “Oh, living in Austin, that must be so creatively inspiring!” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know about that. It’s just a nice place to live.” But all my books and sons were born here, and the minute I got back, I started itching to get started on The Next Thing.
Every morning walk in the past two weeks has made me thankful for our return. We visited the Blanton this weekend, and this Jeffrey Gibson piece said it all for me. (I didn’t even look at the title. Every year has its theme.)
Good to be home.
Writing to find out what you don’t want to know
“Write what you know,” goes the adage, but you don’t really know what you know until you write about it.
May Sarton: “I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”
Kathryn Schulz: “For me, the engine of writing is almost always ignorance. I write to figure out what I think.”
Adam Philips: “Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe.”
James Baldwin (it’s his birthday today) went even further: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.”)
The more I think about it the more it knocks me out.
It’s one thing to write to find out what you don’t know, but to write to find out what you don’t want to know takes guts.
“You’re finding out what you got,” George Saunders says, “and it might not be what you want to have.”
Melville and Basquiat
It’s Melville’s 200th birthday, so here’s one of my favorite things: the table of contents for Moby-Dick, copied out by Jean-Michel Basquiat onto 9 sheets of paper. Here’s a close-up:
He also incorporated some of the table of contents into this (untitled) piece:
Closer up:
(All of these images come from a teacher’s packet put out by the Brooklyn Museum.)
A one-armed miniature version
“Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades; and it is terrible, but not very terrible.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World
Here is a six-year-old photo of Owen and me. A few days ago, at a signing, an expectant mother asked me if I had any advice. “Oh man. I don’t know,” I said. “That first year is rough. Just take it easy on yourself.” Then I thought about all the hours I spent trapped with a sleeping baby under my arm. “Try to find a one-armed miniature version of what you do!”
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