Dislocation, Writing, and the Power to Print
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
a little something from my bulletin board to help keep me where the light is…
I suppose it goes without saying that moving to another culture is sometimes hard. There are a lot of exciting new things, to be sure. But there are sadnesses too, and mine tend to gang up on me around midnight. (Nasty little buggers.)
There’s been a kind of low-grade depression riding around on my breastbone these past few weeks. It seems to be always waiting for me—there, on the other side of the threshold, like the Wolf waiting until my Grandmother is weak enough to devour. I’ve been holding the sadness at bay fairly well, but when my hormone stew starts boiling, or if something goes awry – say, your semi-truck sized shipping container full of all your earthly goods arrives with a hole in the roof and two weeks of rainfall in the bottom –well, let’s just say things get a little shaky.
One of the things that is bothering me the most is that even here, in a country where I know virtually no-one and have no outside obligations, I am still fighting like mad to put pen to page. First I lost a week to migraines, then the children were out of school for Easter vacation, then there was a week spent getting ready to move, and another actually moving, then half a week waiting for the children to switch schools (again). Today I marched them into the local school, and when the teacher said this was just a meeting and not their first day, I had to insist that the schoolmistress had told me otherwise until the girls were given desks and workbooks, and I was able to escape to my desk for two quick hours before school was out again.
I feel so frustrated by the limitedness of my ‘success’ as a writer. At least as a pastor, at least at the church, there were concrete things to do, things that seemed to matter, something to show for my time. This accomplishing of things is much unlike writing, where a thousand days of pen-to-page may yield only a $50 paycheck and a stack of rejection letters. Still, I know in the core that there is no going back. I must write, compulsively and widely, even if the right combination of reader, market, and printing press never yields a dollar.
“This is the year for publishing, I think.” I wrote that in my journal a week or two ago. If a real live publishing house picks me up, so be it. But if not, there will still be books of mine on the market, even if the market is just the print-on-demand of self-publishing and a link to LuLu. Right after I made that decision, my soulsister told me she had launched this, and the self-publishing world transformed. Through Jen’s lens, sisters doing it for themselves was a not a second-class compromise, but a tool for artistic empowerment.
We may never make money, the soulsisters of the world and I, but we will put pen to page goddammit–we will testify.
Entries
