typing into oblivion

A newsletter in which I try to explain all my fears about writing and sharing my work ... and in which I force myself to share some of my work.

Lately: I sort of have a kitchen. What that means is I have a range and an oven and a fridge, but no sink, dishwasher or microwave. What that also means is I am trying to cook one-pot meals, stuff that makes for fewer dirty dishes carted down to the laundry sink in the basement. Sunday, I tried this salmon with rice, which was very good. You can never go wrong when miso is involved. Tonight, I’m making this mushroom-leek pasta and praying for dishwasher installation tomorrow. Send all your good vibes. … Over the weekend, we were in New Orleans for a family wedding, and before the festivities started, we had a free night, which we used as an excuse to go back to N7. It’s consistently one of my favorite restaurants on the planet. There was a crab au gratin appetizer special that I’ll be dreaming about for months. … Remember I told you I’m pregnant? Well, the baby’s kicking. It’s as insane as advertised.

Life lately ... none of which has anything to do with today's newsletter topic

typing into oblivion

For a decade now, I’ve been saying I want to write a book. I’ve been working on writing a book. Well, technically — books. I started out with one idea, a work of nonfiction with elements of memoir, about my great-grandmother and the forgotten slice of southeastern Missouri where she lived all but a few of her 95 years. Then I thought the story might be better told as fiction, in the way Jeannette Walls wrote “Half Broke Horses” about her grandmother and called it a “true-life novel.”

But after a while, I put that idea on pause, too, and started working on a novel that I hope will eventually live in the genre of contemporary literary fiction. I’m still working on it, writing and deleting (and often deleting more than I write). When I tell people this, they seem excited, and that makes me frantic. It makes me want to talk about anything, everything else. I want to yell, “I don’t even know if I can do it!”

And I don’t. That’s part of the reason why I fill my workdays with other tasks and jobs that aren’t getting me any closer to becoming a novelist. (The other part of the reason is that those jobs pay me every two weeks.) If I don’t have time to fully try, then I’ll never know if I’m not cut out for it.

Recently, I gave myself a deadline: Have a first draft completed by the time I give birth, which should be in late February. That’s actually a reasonable goal, and some mornings I wake up and think, absolutely. Other days, I feel like an impostor, a woman who’s delusional enough to think she’s going to type the last few words of a draft — a project on a scale she’s never come close to achieving before — while nine months pregnant. And so I throw myself into the jobs that pay me. I read. I buy furniture and chart the baby’s growth — chicken breast! pomegranate! large onion! — and do everything except what I need to do to meet that goal.

I type this newsletter, and in the process, I’ve realized: I’m scared of something else beyond failure. I’m scared of the flip side: success and the reality that comes with it, that other people would have to read my work.

These days, most of my professional hours are spent editing. There’s less ownership in that than in writing. Sometimes it can feel as if there’s no ownership at all. I don’t even put all my jobs on my LinkedIn page, so who’s to know I’m the woman tinkering with the words? There’s something freeing about it, and I enjoy the work of making stories better … but not as much as I enjoy the anonymity.

And by not writing regularly, I’m getting worse and worse at sharing — and more and more scared of my eventual finished novel. It used to be that I’d write a story, and maybe I was proud of it (maybe I wasn’t). I’d tweet it once or twice, respond to a few Internet People and go about my day. Now, I’m most of the way off social media. I write occasionally, the story publishes, and I can believe with more conviction than ever that it’s disappeared into the ether.

And that’s how I stay scared. No — it’s how I get even more scared of building a reputation again as a writer. So in the sprit of using this newsletter as a vehicle for growth, I’m going to try to buck that trend by sharing two things I’ve written lately (and, until now, shared nowhere).

The first is this feature in Washingtonian, which I reported in the spring right before we moved away. It’s about a team of researchers at UVA’s medical school who study near-death experiences in service of answering a potentially unanswerable question.

At the eastern edge of downtown Charlottesville—past the red-brick pedestrian mall with its bookstores and fudge shops and busking guitarists, beyond the incongruously modern amphitheater, just as the road begins to slope downhill toward the train tracks and then out toward Monticello—sits an utterly nondescript condo building.

I was there looking for the site of some highly unusual research conducted within the University of Virginia’s medical school. It’s mind-bending, norm-challenging work that explores the metaphysical—which is why I’d expected something a little more mystical. A spiral staircase, an owl, a crystal ball. The divination tower at Hogwarts. Certainly not a mid-rise straight out of Anywhere, USA. Only there it was, visible through the glass front door: a placard in the lobby reading “Division of Perceptual Studies.”

The door handle turned with a wiggle. Upstairs were the researchers I’d come to see, inside an office lined with heaving bookshelves, at wide wooden desks scattered with papers and research journals. They’ve devoted their careers to one of life’s biggest questions: What happens when we die?

The second piece, Lost and Found, is the one that actually gives me nightmares. It’s my first-ever published work of fiction, a short story published in the Bellingham Review. I haven’t had the guts to read it since it went online, because I know I’ll start picking apart the comma placement and word choice. Fiction, even more than the more detailed and extensive reported stories I’ve written, seems ripe for an unending cycle of tinkering and revision. Nothing is ever perfect, but I can’t help but think one more pass will get me even closer — so for that, I suppose, I’m grateful this now lives on the internet in a static state.

But the real thing that makes me nervous is the seed of truth this story sprouted from. I seem incapable, at least in this early stage of writing fiction, of coming up with any idea that isn’t rooted in a memory or relationship I’ve experienced. I have no trouble making things up from there, but I can’t help but worry about the speck of truth buried in these fictions. Will people feel misrepresented? Will they recognize themselves? They shouldn’t, because the real-life inspirations for my stories are only that: sparks, curiosities, jumping-off points.

This story is about an older couple and a lost bracelet. My grandpa and his second wife inspired the characters, and there was a bracelet picked up off a concrete parking lot. But that’s it. That’s where the truth ends and these characters’ motivations begin.

I’m finished explaining myself. Want to read the story? Here’s the beginning, and you can keep going by clicking this link.

It’s nothing more than a quick glimmer on the asphalt, weak morning sun grazing dull metal. A minor miracle in the parking lot at Saint Ursula as an old man’s filmy gaze catches a wink of light. He stops, and for one more step, the woman next to him keeps walking. He sets a hand on the nearest car’s tail light, steadying himself before bending down. “What on earth?” his wife asks, turning on a sensible heel, her voice deep and full, a laugh with syllables.

Sam and Lily O’Dowd have grown to look alike, just like so many couples of a certain age. They are age-spotted and gray, with pink-rimmed eyes and long earlobes, rounded shoulders and swollen knuckles. Their skin is creased like paper once crumpled and bound for the trash, then smoothed into a state of not-quite flatness. Like a shattered vase, reassembled, but they are still defiantly whole, still driving, still grocery shopping, still kneeling down on the mahogany pews each day just past dawn.