So I’m sitting on the porch of my grandmother’s house (she’s no longer here), looking out at the lake and the rising light, a wash of soft pink and blue across the sky, the thick line of pines on the opposite shore cast purple-gray. And I’m thinking of the time my agent, who I worship and adore, told me that when she’s having a rotten day, she goes to the Museum of Modern Art and sits in the Water Lilies room until she’s all right again. In truth, it had never occurred to me that she might not be all right, at any time or for any reason; she’s very impressive and a little fierce.  So I liked the idea that she would be calmed by Monet. Have you ever seen his Haystacks series? I don’t even know how many there are—many—and they chronicle the seasons and qualities of light as the day and year goes by. I have seen them in New York and Chicago and Minneapolis and St. Louis (I think)—it seems like everywhere I go there is the same haystack in the middle of the same field with the precisely captured changing season and sky. I would like to see them all in one place, and walk down a very long hall watching the light change, and trying to fathom how Monet could possibly get things so right, and wishing I could describe place so perfectly as he does.

I was writing to a painter and poet friend the other day—it makes me a little cross that he can both paint and write, and more than a little envious—about the fact that visual artists are terribly lucky to have such a tactile thing with which to make art. If I knew how to paint or draw or sketch, I think I would take terrific pleasure in being able to actually touch my materials, and in having something that guides my hand and translates what I see to what I say. There are, it seems to me, not nearly enough words with which to do this. Van Gough’s sunflowers make you want to reach out and grab them. They seem to burst from the canvas into the room. Language is less evocative, and it has to invite readers into it, rather than coming to them.

The train’s whistling by. It’s the same train whistle I’ve been listening to for nearly forty years, and the same whistle that the characters in The Center of Winter listen to as they lie awake. I’ve always wanted to know who’s on a train this early. I remember overnight train rides up the west coast, from San Francisco to Portland to see my grandmother when I was very small. And I remember middle-of-the-night treks from Minneapolis to Chicago when I was older and alone and eavesdropping on the old men arguing amicably nearby.

I think writers return and return to places, maybe a little obsessively, in their work. I don’t know why they do. I don’t know why some writers are so deeply immersed in place, and keep trying to describe the place they’re in and bring the reader into it with them and show them what it’s like and make them feel the place for themselves. I’m one of these weirdly place-centric writers. It bothers me when I can’t find myself in a place in my work; it makes me feel like I leave the reader floating in midair, unable to see or sense their surroundings, and it makes me very uneasy. So I keep coming back to places. One of them is obviously northern Minnesota, and I’m not sure why; it just absorbs me and I want to take people here. Though I’m not from here originally, I spent long spells of my childhood here, driving north on Highway 10 through cornfields and fields of sugar beet, to visit relatives who were loud and a little scary but fascinating, the same relatives who morphed into characters in my novel—and now they’re doing it again.

People ask me often if the characters in my fiction are me, or my family, or people I know. The answer is no; they are people who have taken on a life of their own, emerging mostly from names that pop into my head, names or features of people familiar to me, but who walk away from their starting point and take on form and substance totally unknown to me until they write themselves down. It’s an eerie process, and I don’t particularly like it; fiction is awfully amorphous and dictates itself according to its own interior logic. Not knowing how it will go until it goes there is a deeply unsettling process, and very uncertain, and it seems like you’re feeling around in the dark for a thing, and you don’t find it till it’s found.

So now the new novel is doing that, and I wish it wouldn’t. When I stop thinking about it and trying to push it around, it’s actually kind of neat, a discovery process that’s as much like reading someone else’s work as it is like writing your own. This is rarely possible for me; I’m hoping I’ll grow into it, and by the time I’m eighty let my books write themselves as they intend to do anyway. Anyway, the new novel has returned to this place, this very porch, with the seagulls making noise and the whistling train and the Monet light. It doesn’t stay here, of course; it goes right back to the west coast, another place that consumes me and to which my stories gravitate. And its characters are doing what characters do. I began with my grandmother’s name; she then walked off, changed eras, changed selves, became her own thing. This may have something to do with the fact that I hardly knew her, in life; it may just be the way characters act.  Both my grandmother’s names set characters in motion in this novel; neither of my grandmothers is in it after all.

As for the book on spirituality—it’s the most amorphous writing process I’ve ever gone through. This is probably to be expected. The subject is a more than slightly amorphous in itself. There are days when, while writing, I wonder what in the hell I was thinking, starting a book like this. And there are days when it surges along of its own accord, and makes sense of itself as it goes, and surprises me every time.

Frankly, only poetry makes sense.

And memoir is a different beast. I’m reading Mary Karr’s Lit, which is fantastic. Karr’s memoirs are all wonderful, but this is my favorite of hers. She takes an enormous risk, which is to write about her life. This sounds odd. Many memoirs—probably most—are about a subject. A topic. Say, eating disorders or mental illness. And I have often said in teaching about memoir that when writing about one’s life, one perhaps is wise to take a subject. A great many awful memoirs have been written that are about a writer’s thoughts. Just, you know, thoughts in general. And most of us meander through the thickets of our thoughts with little direction or purpose. This does not, plot-wise, make for a good book. We find our thoughts terribly interesting; to most people outside our own selves, they are not. Mine certainly are not. I have thoughts about subjects that may be interesting; but not to everyone, and my average, everyday thoughts are a big plotless mess. And our lives take much the same shape—they have no plot. They do not have narrative structure. In order to make good books, they have to be pared down to the barest minimum—an era, or a situation, or a subject—to make for well-paced reading. So, generally, memoirists don’t write about their lives; that is what autobiography is for, and the only people who get to write autobiographies have had long and interesting lives that encompass so much they’re worth writing down in full. But Mary Karr takes on life. The daily and the precise and the detailed and the crystal-clear, and the damn thing has a plot.

The rest of us should be so good.

And it’s on my mind today in particular because the characters in this novel that has been kicking my ass for two years—what I’d give to write fiction as rapidly as, say,  Louise Erdrich—the characters in this novel are in an argument. It is a book-length argument, a basic difference in their view of the principle of what matters in life. Some of them hold that life is the grand scheme, the whole scope, the cultural and political and world-sized and ever-changing business of people in the tide of time. The others hold the opposite. They believe, as Jake (character) says, that “what we have is our little lives. These little worlds. Only each other, and these days.” The difference in opinion splits them apart.

Today I hold with Jake. In truth, the subjects of my memoirs, which are specific and relatively broad and touch on things that affect lots of people, are not the things that consume my days, or, I suppose, very many of our days. I think about small and insignificant things. Places. Degrees and qualities of light. The people who populate my head and the coffee shops where I sit. The fact that seagulls, for some unfathomable reason, have gotten from the sea to the dock where boats are drifting in front of my porch.

It’s what I have. I wish you happiness in your very own world, and your day.

Peace,

Marya