How I Began

I was seven or thereabouts when I wrote what I think was a poem inspired by the words on a wooden plaque that hung above my bed:  Put God First.  I clearly recall writing it but have no recollection of what the poem said.  I was not one of those child prodigies who fill notebook after notebook with stories and poems.  In fact, I produced no further work until, at age 12, my story about frontiersman Davy Crockett and a bear (my twist on a popular folktale and song from the1950s) hit the kid’s page of the local newspaper and earned me $2.  The next impulse to write did not surface until, in my 20s, sitting in the San Francisco Mission making a sketch of the arch in the sanctuary, I began writing words that took the shape of a poem:  Cold antique silence / shattered by an irreverent whisper…. 

I produced a few other poems during that decade along with a couple of short stories, best forgotten even though one of them earned me a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont. Rather, I was encouraged by my boss to do professional writing—first journal articles and essays, then, at age 37,  a textbook on international nursing.  Still, I’d never felt destined to be a writer until, in my 30s, I experienced an irresistible pull toward poetry.  I signed up for workshops, sent work out, had a few poems accepted, then, at 49, published a chapbook combining narrative poems arising from my experiences as a nurse in a small urban clinic along with haunting photographs of some of our patients taken by Jim Hall, the physician with whom I worked. I’ve published four books of essay and poetry since then.  The fourth, in my 70s, is likely my last.

Will I finally lose my desire to put purple ink on a yellow legal pad or occasional entries into one of a variety of journals I keep?  No.  This one thing I’ve learned—though I don’t pretend to know just how it began—I will always have the habit of art. 

Reading My Obituary

No, I haven’t written it yet though I know people my age who have done so, either on their own or as part of a group exercise.  But at my age, it’s not out of the ordinary to think about how I want to be remembered.  Truth is, if an obit is written and published after my death, it’s unlikely to attract many readers outside my circle of family and friends.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what is most likely to survive me is my online identity.  For the first few decades of my life the internet did not exist so there are no references there to my early years.  Even now, since I don’t post on social media, there is only my website, which will vanish the moment the maintenance fees go unpaid, and a respectable number of links on Google and other search engines under my professional name.  There are none to my nickname or legal first name.  I did find one reference under my maiden name, linked to a work-related photo of me in El Paso, Texas wearing a giant sombrero along with another photo of someone else identified as me.  I have no memory of the photo or the occasion.  Make of that what you will.

So, I’ll exist, if at all, as Veneta Masson, nurse and writer. And I will only surface if someone has occasion to search for my name and knows how to spell it.  (This assumes that the internet continues on in its present form.)  It puts me in a thoughtful frame of mind.  I know what matters most is the legacy I’ll leave in the hearts and lives of those I love.  But may I hope that, just maybe, that legacy will include a random poem or essay from one of my books.

Are You Writing?

It’s a question I’ve come to expect in the course of a conversation with anyone who knows that I write, especially since it’s been three years since I published my last collection and just six months since the love of my life died.  The answer is yes and no. 

No, I don’t have a project or even the draft of a poem in the works. 

But yes, I am writing.  There’s my current 5x7 spiral sketchbook (number 12 in the series) that I open when the mood strikes.  It contains observations, records of memorable events, provocative quotes, mandalas, collages and even the New Yorker cartoons that capture some aspect of my life.  There’s the yellow legal pad where I do free writes from time to time.  These pages help me to pin down my thoughts and offer me a chance to imagine the first line for a poem even though it will likely never come to life.  And, as you see, there’s this online journal.

Then there’s the soft leather-bound book handcrafted somewhere in Asia that I received for Mother’s Day.  It probably goes without saying that I receive a lot of notebooks as gifts and don’t find a purpose for them all but this small one, with its thick rough cut pages, coming at the time it did, I decided to use.  What does it want to become, I asked myself?  Not a replacement for my sketchbook, something else.  Turns out I keep it next to the chair (Allen’s reading chair) where I drink my morning coffee and use it to record my first random morning thoughts, many of them disconsolate, some of them surprising.  I don’t know that this will come to anything but we’ll see where I am when I’ve filled the pages.

It occurs to me that what’s missing from my writing practice is correspondence—not emails, but the old-fashioned kind that many writers of note took pains to maintain with family members, friends, readers and publishers back in the day.  I used to do this.  Many of us did, but I currently have only two friends who post letters and these are rare and precious, both the letters and the friends. I can’t say that I plan to revive my correspondence—emails and even texts have choked out that garden.  But I can say with near certainty that I’ll continue my long habit of filling blank pages with words.

This Theme Keeps Recurring

In September of last year, I wrote about the two places that have most inspired me as a writer—two rooms in two different homes.  In November of last year I wrote about the stage set for playwright August Wilson’s autobiographical play and how the various props illuminated his life and his writing.  I imagined how I might design such a stage set for myself. 

Then, on a Mediterranean Cruise I was lucky enough to take last month, I discovered a book in the ship’s library titled Paradise of Exiles by Olive Hamilton published in 1974.  In it she tells the stories of several British writers drawn to Tuscany for important portions of their creative lives—Shelley, Byron, the Brownings, Trollope, D.H. Lawrence, the Sitwells and others. What drew them there?  The climate, the cost of living, the company of other writers?  And how did the spirit of this place affect their work?

Our ship stopped at a port in Tuscany.  I could see how it might attract artists of all kinds. We also stopped at ports along the Côte d’Azur in France where many painters have come because of the quality of the light (or so I have read).  I can attest that it is stunning.  All this left me wondering how my own creative journey has been affected by my place is the physical world—primarily the capital city of the United States, Washington D.C. What if I had moved mid-career to the Big Bend area of Southwest Texas, something I seriously contemplated at one time? Would I have written about the borderlands instead of the city?  What subjects would I have addressed?  What shapes would my writing have taken?  Perhaps there’s a clue in this never-finished poem from back then:

We sit in the desert
high on a limestone ledge
watching the dying sun
draw blood from the mountains.
Below us the river,
a blade of whetted steel,
knifes its way through rock

We are not surprised
at news of desert storms
for we have come to expect violence
in a land where the wind
cows every unbowed head
and even the plants, to survive,
poison the ground around them.

Here's a Surprise!

My beloved Allen has died.  I am shrouded in grief.  As I thumb through a book of songs while planning his funeral, a loose piece of sheet music falls into my lap.  How?  From where?  It’s a song I’d written for my church community many years ago called “Don’t Get Sick on an Unripe Tomorrow.”  Clearly, this is not meant for Allen’s funeral.  It is meant for me.  I mull over the lyrics and play it again and again on the piano.  It becomes a source of great comfort.

Meanwhile some dear friends and family give me books about grief and grieving.  I haven’t felt ready to read them, but imagine my surprise when lines from some of my own poems begin floating into my head at odd times.

From “La Muerte”
Old Mother Death sits / down beside me. / Neither cruel nor kind / she does not take, she receives.

From “Buying Time”
Each life makes its arc / then glides out of time / slipping all ties.  Pain dies. / Desire dies.  Gone, / the humming dread of what waits beyond breath.

From “Holding”
I loosen my grip,/ let him slip from my grasp // knowing, somehow, he’s still held // and not only he but we—… // we are, all of us / held.

From “Upheaval”
[…death has] struck / shattering everything fragile / collapsing carefully crafted structures… / Their familiar terrain disrupted / all learn to tread carefully.

From “Griefs, Like Nesting Bowls”
No church, priest or liturgy here / just battered souls / in silent communion.

From “The Poet’s Job”
Their poems may end on the ash heap / though the divine combustion / has been known to light up a city / or, like a disposable penlight, / guide one or two souls down / the dark path / to their own door.

The idea of my own poems leading me back to my own door—it’s breathtaking really.  

Epiphany

If the imagination were a place
this is what it would look like—
not a place you go to but the place you are—
this cluttered terrain where random thoughts
arise and take root and inspiration waits. 
There you are traipsing through
an everyday day
when you stumble
onto a tiny live wire, coiled tight
ready to spark.  You don’t see it at first
but when it ignites—oh, you know
you’ve caught fire.

How I Learned What I Learned

The setting is the crucible in which many a work of art has been fired.  There is a stool, a coat rack, and atop a desk, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

This is the set direction for August Wilson’s autobiographical play, How I Learned What I Learned.  It’s a one-man show consisting of a series of reflections, anecdotes and conversations spoken by the actor playing Wilson.  The first sections are titled My Ancestors, Hill District, 1965, The Set (the main drag where life happens), Barbara Peterson and on from there concluding with one called How Do You Know, What You Know.  These sections are framed by pauses during which the actor is typing. 

Already an admirer of Wilson’s 20th century ten-play cycle set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, I was quite taken with this one when I saw it performed in 2017 at the Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland.  The set design was riveting—the bucket of nails, the ball of rags, the lunchbox (all of them “detritus of the Wilson canon”) strewn on an abandoned lot with a performance platform in the shape of a boxing ring (Wilson was a boxing fan).  Behind it hung a wall of paper scraps cut from 5,555 sheets of paper—a tribute to Wilson’s habit of writing his plays on legal pads, envelopes, napkins and checks, whatever came to hand.

At long last I have my hands on a copy of the script and just reread it.  I’m thinking about people, places and events that I’d include in my own one-woman play—Conneaut, Hilda Burr, Ninth Street, Shirley Cochrane, 1993, Rebecca, the nurse poets…. And my stage set?  Maybe a basement room with a plank desk, electric typewriter, the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, my old leather home care bag and, on the wall, Rachel Dickerson’s woodcut, “Wanting Memories.” This is a work in progress. The script will evolve. 

At the end of Wilson’s play, the actor pulls a poem from his pocket and reads it aloud:

We are what we are—
Are made by old things,
Come back. Clearly,
Brilliant as the sun.

The Places Where It Happened

Sitting in my deep green recliner the other day doing a bit of the life review that we’re told is an important part of aging, I began to think about the places where I have felt most inspired and productive as a writer.  The first was the basement room in our rowhouse in Washington DC. I called it Hogwallow Flats, a name I first came across while hiking in Shenandoah National Park.  I liked it.  Somehow it fit.  I’d tiled the floor brick red, filled one side of the room with bookcases, and sat either at my makeshift desk (a wooden plank over two file cabinets) next to my typewriter table or on large floor pillows near the radiator where I wrote in my journal and produced longhand drafts of essays and poems on a yellow legal pad. My first two books were conceived there, mostly in the evenings after long days at work, first in international health and then in our DC family practice clinic.  I was 31 when I began.

The second place was the leaf-green room in my third floor apartment overlooking Glover Park—a woodsy branch of Rock Creek Park that runs north and south through Washington.  It had built-in bookcases and a window seat next to a wall of windows.  Perfect.  I’d brought along my desk and typewriter from the house but not the large floor pillows.  I especially remember writing in the early morning before my work at the women’s clinic.  My next two books were birthed there.  I was 51 when I began. 

Those two places were my home for a total of 32 years.  True, two more books have come since then but perhaps not with the intensity and focus of those earlier years.  Purely by chance, after writing the first draft of this note, I happened on a quote attributed to Alice Munro in her book Too Much Happiness: 

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places. 

For me, there were these two.

My Essayists

As of today, my essayists occupy just 18 inches on a single shelf of one of my bookcases—24 books, 18 writers.  As I’ve aged, this exclusive group has been culled several times, usually because I decided that my relationship with them had ended.  I thank them for what they have given me and then send them on to other readers.  I see my essayists as interesting, insightful and inspiring friends who speak plainly on themes of importance to me.  My poets, on the other hand, occupy considerably more space and reside longer on my shelves but most often serve as mentors or spiritual guides who reach out to me from a distance.  True, there are some writers whose work appears in both camps, poetry and essay.  Still, I keep them separated on the shelves. 

Recently I took down my two books of essays by Lewis Thomas, physician, scientist and thoroughly engaging writer whose work dates from the 1970s.  I hadn’t read Lives of a Cell in some years and wondered whether it was perhaps time to part ways with Thomas.  Science has evolved.  Perhaps the essays were hopelessly dated.  But no.  He still earns his place.  Here’s just a taste: 

It begins to look, more and more disturbingly, as if the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from all the rest of life.  Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings.

And to think Thomas is only one of the old “friends” with whom I can have stimulating conversation any time I want.

Why I Read It

What is it that I read?  Zero at the Bone—Fifty Entries Against Despair* by the poet and teacher of religion and literature, Christian Wiman.

The first why:  I was curious about the structure of the book—the mélange of poetry (his own and others’), memoir, criticism and philosophical discourse.  How does that work?  Does it work?  Is it something I might try in the nebulous sometime?

The second why:  Wiman, who has rejected the Christian fundamentalism of his youth in West Texas, continues to probe the teachings of the Bible, the Christian religion, and his own faith.  I do too.  I’d previously read his book My Bright Abyss.  Might I benefit from this exploration despite the fact that I can’t always grasp his poetry, or even his prose?

The third why:  What does he have to say about poetry? 

What I discovered:  He says that a poem that is reducible to a message is not a good poem.  Poems are not wisdom machines.   So I ask myself, is there a place for accessible poetry, the kind I think I write?  I try to listen to the muse but not with the intention of manufacturing wisdom. 

What I found that I didn’t realize I’d come for (a “mere” parenthesis on page 196):  By “faith” I mean an admission that our minds cannot know our selves or the universe in any ultimate sense; or, if one is inclined to hold—as many scientists are—that the universe and our place in it are knowable even if such knowledge is in its infancy, then an admission that this position is an act of faith and indistinguishable, in metaphysical terms, from a religious gesture.

In fact, the whole of pages 196-197 in which Wiman expands on the notions of faith and science was enough to gratify both my seeker’s mind and my poet’s soul.

*Zero at the bone—a phrase from Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Snake” meaning a chilling fear