Lilian Nattel on the Writer as Mom

Fellow Canadian Lilian Nattel spoke at the Festival of Faith and Writing in a session she called "From Naptime to Novel: The Writer as Mom." I took furious notes because so much of what she spoke about resonated with me.

The Singing Fire

Nattel is the mother of two girls, aged seven and four, adopted from China. In the session, she told the story of how becoming a mother changed her novel as well as her life.

When she set out to write her next book after The River Midnight, Nattel wanted to do something easier, a "fast mystery that would make a lot of money." Twice she made it two-thirds of the way through the manuscript, but she couldn't seem to finish the ending. At last she realized, in a late-night panic, that her mystery was full of holes. So her husband asked her, "Is there anything at all in this book that has energy for you?" [What a great question.]

Indeed there was: a small subplot about an adoption triad: birth mother, adoptive mother, and child. Not surprising that adoption was on Nattel's mind, since she was waiting to travel to China to get her oldest daughter. The novel was in tatters, but when that baby was placed in her arms and Nattel sang her a lullaby, The Singing Fire was born.

Nattel said that when she became a mother, she became bolder. "All children became my children." Whereas she wrote about mother/daughter relationships in The River Midnight as a daughter, she was now writing The Singing Fire as a mother.

Nattel's thematic preoccupations came out in the writing: the ways that people hide their past, parts of themselves, and how it comes back to haunt them. The ghosts in The Singing Fire demonstrate that "love couldn't die," something Nattel found out when she became a mother (and she was careful to note that fathers can be mothers too). She spoke of the Hebrew concept of Shekhina, the feminine aspect of God, the divine that is not separated from the world. "That is the voice of our mothers."

You can read about the inspiration for The Singing Fire in Nattel's own words at her website.

Writing with Children

Nattel had some practical comments about writing with children around. She cannot wait for the muse to show up. Before children she wrote from 10 am to 8 pm, six days a week. Now she writes from Tuesday to Friday, some days only during naps and after bedtime. People remark how well her children go to bed, and Nattel says it's because she's a writer, and very strict about bedtime! When she's writing, her children can come up and give her a hug or show her something, but they know she's working.

She said that when she doesn't write, she gets clumsy. "If I start dropping things, I need to have some quiet time. I structure my life so I have that time." Every Saturday she takes her daughters to the library, and then has an hour to herself after that.

The way parenthood changes you forever, Nattel said, is that you are no longer the most important person in the world. I was inspired that Nattel could take on parenthood so fiercely and passionately, and still make space for her writing.

Writing Against the Odds, Part 3

The third speaker was Leslie Leyland Fields, who lives and writes in Alaska. Her latest book is called Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy.

Leyland Fields first spoke about the obstacle of work. She works with her family as a commercial fisher. So, she asks, how can she write when work claims so much of her? She spoke of having to be "here" with her work while she longed to be "over there" with her writing. But she found that when she lived to write, she was wasting her life. She needed to live to live, and then write to more fully live, not to escape and record her life.

"Either life is holy with meaning or it doesn't mean a damn thing." (I think that's a Frederick Buechner quotation.)

Her second obstacle to writing was love. It takes a lot of time to love a husband, and six children, and a mother-in-law with Alzheimers. Love empties us into needs that are never filled or silenced. The quiet writing life she dreamed of was gone, dead. Instead she had a noisy, riotous writing life, more desperate, bloodier, with no time to pretend.

But how can love be an obstacle to writing, she then asked? What will you write if your passions are not lived in you first? Leyland Fields realized she needed to write "here," in her life, where she was standing, not from an empty life. Yes, you'll be tired, you'll write while others watch a movie, you'll write in planes and hotels, you'll forget how to relax. But write from within the life you've been given, if you dare.

What a great challenge.

Writing Against the Odds, Part 2

The second speaker on "writing against the odds" was Tom Montgomery-Fate, currently the Henry Luce Foundation Artist in Residence at Chicago Theological Seminary.

His latest book is Steady and Trembling: Art, Faith, and Family in an Uncertain World. [I have ordered a copy, and I'll update this post with some quotations once it arrives.] From the book description: "How does one learn to be creative rather than only productive, to search for meaning rather than marketability, to belong to nature rather than control it, to live in awe rather than on autopilot? From his home in a Chicago suburb, Tom Montgomery-Fate, the father of three children, demonstrates how one might weave a family and a faith into something that is both creative and sustaining, into the art of daily life."

Montgomery-Fate opened by saying that writers need two things that don't usually go together: patience and passion. He said that both words come from the same root word, pati, meaning "to suffer." In other words, he said, suffering is a requirement for writing, not an obstacle.

I'm not sure whether I agree with that, but I'm keeping an open mind. I suppose it depends on how you define suffering. Later on I'll have a story from Han Nolan that involved a lot of unnecessary, self-inflicted suffering.

Writing Against the Odds, Part I

My first session at the Festival of Faith and Writing was tailor-made for Wrestling the Angel. The panel addressed "Writing Against the Odds -- Some of us have to carve out time and energy for writing amid demanding jobs, busy families, abundant noise, and lack of space. How do we overcome the practical and intangible obstacles to the writing task?" Each of the three authors described the obstacles, costs, and advantages of writing aginst the odds.

The first speaker was Debra Rienstra, professor at Calvin College, and mother of three. Rienstra wrote her first book, Great with Child, during the months before and after her third child's birth:

This book was written mostly in a corner of my bedroom in snatches of time, mostly between ten and eleven at night, over the course of three years. Many nights all I could do was slump over the keyboard for fifteen minutes after the kids were in bed and tap out a few sentence fragments. What you read in this book is all true, but please realize there has been lots of revision. The original drafts were truly horrible.

There were a few blessed twenty-four-hour periods here and there when I did actually go away and write at my parents -in-law's great little house on the lake. And in the last stages of revision, especially during the last month of the process, I was able to work full days in my office or in the library.

But even with those more consolidated periods, this is a book rescued from fragments--fragments of time, energy, and space that mothers of young children stitch together to accomplish anything. As T. S. Eliot said, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." He was speaking of vast cultural movements. I'm just thinking of sleep deprivation. Anyway, if this book wound up with any coherence at all, it is a miracle.

Obstacles

Rienstra described her first obstacle as lack of silence, both literal and figurative. She once read Jane Kenyon's poetry book Otherwise in one sitting (a practice she recommends for poetry) and was left with the impression that here was a woman who had silence. And Rienstra was jealous! She described the noise in her house and head, of students, work, children, husband.

Her solution was to make the most of whatever silence she got. No warm-up, just sit down and write. Books written in fragments this way are different, she said, but not inferior.

The second obstacle was having no steady work pattern. Each day is different. She tries to tell her writing classes that the best practice is to write every day at the same time ... but she can't finish the sentence without laughing at her own foolishness.

So in response to an evolving schedule, Rienstra continues to adapt. As she mentioned, Great with Child was written between 10 and 11 at night. She described the writing of this period as very raw and precious, partly because there was no editor in her head--the editor had gone to sleep! I could certainly relate to this experience with my 5 am writing sessions.

She also said that she doesn't do any household chores while her kids are at school. Dishes go unwashed, the house remains untidy, while she gets down to work.

Costs

The first cost Rienstra listed was a phantom one. She said that time away from her kids might seem to be a cost, but not for her. She spends quite a bit of time with them, and her husband does much of the child care, so she doesn't feel guilty when she's writing.

The cost she does pay is in frustration when she's not writing, but has to do other things. And her only reponse is to cry and get crabby! But she finds it a good engine for motivating her to work. She never gets tired of writing because she never gets enough of it.

She also counts the cost of thinking that she could create better work if she only had more time.

Advantages

So what could possibly be good about facing such challenges to find writing time? Rienstra appreciates not having to put all of the value of her life on writing. If things aren't going well, she can comfort herself that at least she's a mom, and has a job. There is less pressure for success on her writing.

And finally, she has a rich life. She has three major endeavours (family, job, and writing) that enrich each other. What would she write about without these things in her life?

So whatever eccentricities, blatant inconsistencies, contradictions, errors, and foolishness you find here, let them stand as the appropriate literary representation of a state of mind a little frayed around the edges. What literary style best captures the life of an expectant or new mother? Until recently, no one has known. New mothers, especially, have rarely written. They still don't do it very often. It's just too hard. One must be really quite nutty or desperate to try it.

In my case, I would probably have gotten nuttier if I hadn't. There was an element here of avoiding ruin. I went to the writing place--in my mind, I mean, as the actual physical location varied--because I desperately needed a place of retreat. While writing is definitely work, it is also release, and that leads to a kind of peace.

I was sorry to learn that Great with Child is out of print, but you can find excerpts at her website. (Luckily my sister happened to have a copy!) And you can check out the Rienstra family exploits at their blog, RONdezvous.

Death in the Family

I feel very privileged when writers allow us into their personal experiences of death and grief.

Telling the True is children's author Jane Yolen's online journal. She has chronicled the illness and final days of her husband, David Stemple, who died only two weeks ago:

Grief comes at peculiar moments, and sets landmines. I suddenly break into fits of weeping where seconds earlier I seemed just fine. Little things start me: a smell, a photograph, trying to say something to a concerned friend or neighbor. And then as quickly, the spasm of grief has passed.

David moments: Astonishing birdsong. A friend reports a double rainbow with three birds flying through. Friday morning a huge air balloon flies past the Owl Moon woods and lands in the field by David's grave. Heidi, Betsy, and the kids chase it down, talk to the balloonists. Jason sees an eagle.

In John Terpstra's book The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician's Daughter, he writes about the life and death of his wife's three brothers, who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy:

It is not better this way. It is not better to not have Eric or Paul around. It is worse. It stinks.

No one has said these words to those who came to comfort, either in the funeral home or at the reception afterward. The words should have been shouted.

And no matter what anyone may think, a household that revolves around the care and comfort of three young men in wheelchairs, in bed, is not a horror. Young men who rarely complained about their condition, their lot. Who transcended their condition.

People mistook the relief the caretakers might feel in being freer, with happiness.

I have already mentioned Donald Hall's book, The Best Day the Worst Day, about his wife Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. At some point I plan to read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes herself through the year after her husband John Gregory Dunne's fatal coronary.

For those of us to whom death is relatively unknown territory, reading these beautiful, harrowing accounts is a way of preparing, of casting out fear, learning how to survive. And for the authors, there must be some gift in writing them, too.

Writer on Vacation

Are writers ever really on vacation? I'm in Florida for a week, and amidst the games of shuffleboard and trips to the beach, I can't stop thinking about my novella. I'm itchy to work on it, even when I'm touring the wildlife park or sitting in the hot tub. My husband Shawn and I are staying with his parents in their trailer, so there isn't much space to get away and work, and I'm reluctant to get up early and disturb others. So I'm stealing a few minutes here and there.

Part of me thinks I should just relax and have a good time, not worry about writing. But the thing is, I want to write! I feel better when I do, not so antsy or distracted. Writing doesn't feel like work to me right now. I haven't always been in that space, so now that I am, I want to take advantage of it.

One of my favourite writing anecdotes is about James Thurber and his wife at a party. Seeing a certain look come across his face as he was ladling punch, his wife snapped, "Damnit, Thurber, stop writing!"

A few years ago, Shawn and I took our first trip south, to Costa Rica. One day I stayed back at the resort while Shawn went on a wildlife tour. From my journal:

Four months this story has been sitting, waiting for me to come back to it. But it's stingy now, reluctant to let me in, and I'm rusty, my thoughts come slowly and seem thin. Wouldn't it be easier just to read someone else's story? Instead of write my own? Easier, yes, but sad, that this agility, this facility has slipped out of my grasp. How to bring the words back? How to prime the pump, prove again my devotion to this story?

I have given up a trip to Palo Verde and Santa Rosa -- I will not see the birds and crocodiles and monkeys. Is that enough? At breakfast this morning they asked, why didn't you go? I wanted to stay, I replied, leaving them none the wiser. But we know, si? We know I stayed for you

I did eventually finish that story, and I've never regretted the lost trip to Palo Verde. In fact, I cherish the memory of choosing writing over "vacation."

Can You Not Do Your Writing Today?

I had a flash-forward to my future while reading Andrea's post today at a peek inside the fish bowl:

At swim lessons the other day Sarah offhandedly asked me if I could "not do my writing today." Her comment took me by surprise.

I bring my notebook and pen wherever I go. They've found a permanent spot in my bag. And I bring it to the 30-minute swim lessons as well. The notebook keeps me company when I'm sitting alone. But it's not like I put my head down and write semi-conscious streams without ever raising my eyes. I write, I watch, I write some more, but I don't think she has ever even noticed the small notebook lying open in front of me. Obviously, she has.

Her comment induced a pang of guilt. I write because I love to write. It helps me organize my thoughts and develop ideas. Does it make her sad that my eyeballs aren't on her 100 per cent of the time?

What to do? I will become a mother sometime this year (my husband and I are adopting from China) and the question of how to integrate writing and parenting is a big one for me. Andrea doesn't have the answer herself, but it helps to know that others confront the same question.

My Kids Will Read This Someday

In the Guardian, Tim Parks takes a humourous and discomfiting look at being read by one's children:

It was of [Europa] that some reviewer remarked that "Parks's nearest and dearest must tremble whenever another novel comes out". But actually the person who gets a little nervous is me. "Why ever would I teach at the university if not to have a constant supply of fit young women to shag?" my son has just read in the first chapter of this novel. His father, of course, teaches at a university, where, notoriously, 90% of the students studying languages are young women.

Difficult enough to write fiction, where you can at least protest that the lecherous character is certainly not autobiographical. But what if you're writing memoir? Maria Dhavana Headley has some advice for you at the PowellsBooks.blog:

Your grandma is going to read your book. Including the part where you lose your virginity on her front lawn at age 15, while in the process of trying to get your first kiss.

Now you know why I write fiction. Hi Grandma!