Not Knowing

May 2, 2007 / Tracy Abell

Readers suspend disbelief and writers suspend disbelief because writing and reading are acts of faith along the path to knowledge, not just one particular knowledge but any knowledge that is part of the essential truths lurking to be shared by the reader and the writer and all those people in that story, that are coming not to just one conclusion but many conclusions, that follow not one path but many paths, because the writing and the story are not just about one thing but many things, and in this essential multifarious way writing is an embrace of all the complexity of not knowing and wanting to know and getting to know and all the contradictions that reside therein, and that has been our task, on these paths, all of us – writer, reader, character – to embrace those contradictions.

—Fred G. Leebron’s “Not Knowing” from THE ELEVENTH DRAFT: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Personal Yet Universal

April 17, 2007 / Tracy Abell / 66 Comments

In August of 2004, my health crashed. Diagnosis was first Lyme disease then chronic fatigue. I went from an incredibly strong person who ran, lifted weights, hiked, swam, etc. to a woman with no energy who spent the day in pajamas, napping three or four times each day. Friends drove my children to and from school. My husband did EVERYTHING around the house. I had difficulty concentrating, could not multi-task, and overall was mentally fatigued.

I eventually regained some strength but experienced a near-constant buzzing/humming sensation throughout my body, and pain in my hands and legs. I still could not think clearly and was easily overwhelmed. I became depressed.

In the summer of 2006, I happened upon an article about post traumatic stress disorder and chronic fatigue. The article mentioned a book called WAKING THE TIGER by Peter Levine. I read the book and realized I was suffering post traumatic stress! But how could that be? I hadn’t been assaulted, hadn’t experienced a natural disaster or lived in a war zone. Well, I learned trauma can accumulate in our systems. The time I’d been rear-ended, the various dental procedures, the C-section, all those experiences left residual energy in my system (I think of it as by-products of the adrenaline my body put out during those fight/flight moments), and my body reached the tipping point. Hence, the buzzing/humming sensation.

In October I began weekly somatic experiencing therapy in which I learned to discharge that unwanted energy from my system. It’s an amazing process and I’m thrilled to say I’ve regained much of my strength and vitality. I’m not 100 percent yet but I’m running again, I can multi-task, and I’m not so easily overwhelmed. Also, the process helped me understand the ways I disassociated in order to survive.

So why am I writing about this now? Yesterday’s news out of Virginia Tech brought back many of those old “symptoms.” My legs buzzed, my hands ached, I couldn’t think clearly, and I cried. And cried.

And then I thought about these two news briefs from yesterday:

BLACKSBURG – A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech … The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33.

BAGHDAD – In the northern city of Mosul, a university dean, a professor, a policeman’s son and 13 soldiers died in attacks … Nationwide, at least 51 people were killed or found dead.

And I cried even more.

Because I realized I’m still living the post traumatic stress profile in regards to Iraq. Even though every morning I maintain this sign, I’ve disassociated from that tragedy. The civilian death toll is so high I can’t even visualize those numbers (I realize the “official” number is much lower than the actual death toll). I can’t imagine what it’s like waking each morning with the knowledge there’s a very high probability someone you know will lose someone they know that day.

The Virginia Tech tragedy plays out each and every day in Iraq. Not the same circumstances but the same cycle of horrific violence and heartbroken families. Yet I don’t cry about Iraq on a daily basis. I won’t allow my mind to dwell on the terrifying reality of night raids, rapes, executions, explosions, starvation, and disease. I’ve forced those thoughts from my mind in order to survive.

And that scares me. Because when we become numb to the lives of other beings (human and otherwise) on this planet, atrocities occur and our collective health is damaged.

I don’t want to “disassociate” the fact that we all love our children. That we all want a safe, happy, and healthy future for those children. And that every parent grieves the same way.

Today I grieve for everyone on the planet.

Secrets

April 4, 2007 / Tracy Abell / 10 Comments

Just pulled Eudora Welty’s ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS from the shelf and opened the book to a page (p. 17) I’d marked when reading it several years ago. This was highlighted:

The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.

Eudora Welty wanted her mother to tell her where babies came from but the mother always spoke around the issue, never coming out with the facts. But one day Eudora happened upon a small white box that held two nickels, and she ran to her mother for permission to spend them. That was when Eudora learned a baby had been born before her, a brother who had died. “And these two nickels that I’d wanted to claim as my find were his. They had lain on his eyelids, for a purpose untold and unimaginable.”

Gals Write for Gals Read – ?

March 13, 2007 / Tracy Abell / 49 Comments

I bought this book at my son’s school book fair and everyone in the household (me plus the three males living here) has read at least portions of it. (For those even more behind the times on their reading lists than me, GUYS WRITE FOR GUYS READ edited by Jon Scieszka (2005), is a compilation of stories/memories from 90 male children’s writers and illustrators, including our own davidlubar). The project is part of Scieszka’s literacy initiative designed to encourage boys to read.

It’s a great book. Now that I’ve finished all the stories, I plan on taking it to the library and looking up some of these writers’ books so I can expand our household reading horizons.

But . .

This book makes me wonder what a GALS WRITE FOR GALS READ compilation would look like. Guys’ childhood experiences are by no means universal (okay, maybe farts are a common thread) yet there’s this underlying “guy code” in the book that makes every male a member of the club. Even those boys who weren’t classic guys’ guys knew what was expected of them, and while some didn’t speak the language, they all understood it.

Would it be possible to have a gal edition of this book? Do gals have a universal language? Universal expectations?

While society does place all sorts of expectation on females, females have much more leeway than males in terms of sports (athletic girls are admired but it’s no big deal to be unathletic); the cars they drive (Hummers or VW Beetles are equally acceptable); the clothes and colors they wear (pants or dresses are fine, black, brown, pink, purple – every color in the spectrum is okay); make-up (women are free to wear it or not but men are denied one of society’s greatest inventions – lipstick!). In terms of careers, plenty of men are still intimidated by female doctors, scientists, and race car drivers, but there isn’t a majority unspoken opinion that a woman embarrasses herself by being, say, an astronaut. However, there is a prevalent attitude that men shouldn’t be nurses or dancers.

I grew up with two brothers and two sisters. I was a “tomboy” who threw a better spiral than most boys on the playground but also played with dolls. I climbed trees and sledded, built forts, pushed my cat around in a baby buggy, played dress-up, had pinecone fights, sang into my hairbrush along with the radio, wore lip gloss, laughed at fart jokes, read books.

Maybe my childhood is a representative snapshot of what a GALS WRITE FOR GALS READ story would offer: girls exploring different interests and attitudes.

And perhaps the GUYS WRITE participants would disagree with me, but as I read their stories I wished for a little more flexibility in their lives. Opportunities for them to be true to the real guys inside, whether that meant jumping off barns, composing musicals, designing clothes, or Xeroxing their butts.

Either way, I absolutely want that flexibility for my guys.

Bathroom Humor

October 17, 2006 / Tracy Abell / 2 Comments

Today as I used the facilities and read a little CALVIN AND HOBBES, I decided once and for all that my mother is wrong. It isn’t uncouth to have books in my bathroom. Not when those books provide middle-of-the-day smiles.

These days I’ll take laughter wherever I can get it, even if it means me sitting there on the toilet, giggling at Hobbes leaping onto Calvin coming through the front door.

Who Cares?

October 4, 2006 / Tracy Abell / 4 Comments

3,645 / 38,000
(9.6%)

So I’m creeping along on this project, reassuring myself that while the words are coming slowly, they are, for the most part, quality words. They are words that tell a story I care about and though I don’t spend much time thinking about potential readers, my gut tells me others will care about this story, too. And then just a moment ago, doubt started shouting at me from the wings, taunting me with “Yeah, well I bet Author X cared about his story, too, but that doesn’t mean anyone else would.”

Here’s the deal: I’m reading a YA right now written by a multi-published author I absolutely love and respect. He’s magic with the English language and writes emotions and humor and characters/stories so real you feel as if they’ve made camp in your solar plexus. And yet, as I read this book all I can think is “Yuck!” Not about the writing itself but toward the story and basic premise.

I haven’t read any reviews of this book because I always wait until after I’ve finished reading, but I gotta believe I’m not alone on the ick factor. So did Author X ever wonder if he’d be the only one to care about his story? And should he even waste time wondering?

I truly believe we write the stories we need to tell, so here are my questions: Have you read well-written books that made you wonder what could possibly have possessed the writer to tell that particular story? And if so, did you end up caring about the story?