By Lisa
Connors
(Non-fiction
with an asterisk)
An open
letter to my beloved Rainier Writing Workshop Cohort 11, the magnificent RWW
Community, and Explorer, Literary and Literal Eco-Activist and my Mentor (thank
Rick and the Gods), Gary Ferguson.
SCENE
Thursday,
August 14, 2014. 9:44am. Chicken and I have been awake for several hours.
Tucked in this 240 square foot cabin perched on a hill, grounded, solid yet
through the bare window of the alcove cradling the bed it appears we are hovering
in this thick stand of Alders. We are 1.2 miles from the Goose Community
Grocery on South Whidbey Island, a twenty minute ferry ride from Seattle and
ten more by car, but the siting of the cabin, and the utter silence are such
that I feel like I’ve slipped through a curtain, arrived on some other side I
hoped existed, bereft of the gift to describe it for you. I remember Gary
Ferguson’s gentle counsel from early last week, Monday I think, “The first time
I write it down, it is never as good as it was in my head. Don’t worry about
it.” He said. So I won’t, or I’ll try anyway. And while Chicken’s crazed eyes
and gawking, silent-scream mouth would suggest otherwise, he/she sits serenely,
and worries not one bit. Gary wasn’t my official mentor when he offered those
words about crafting story on paper, but I have been learning, in a rush,
fiercely, hungrily, from him since January of this year when I discovered his
books and essays, out of all of the faculty’s auspicious work, calling me, not
only as a writer but an explorer and even better, a daughter of this vast
wilderness called Earth - belonging
and thus bearing the responsibility of living into the laws of a co-active
community that as a human member I struggle to both understand and live up to.
You try. And forgive yourself when you don’t get it right, when what you
believe in loses something in translation from your heart to your head and
again through your hands as you pull more toilet paper off the roll than is
sufficient. Then you try again. We are awake, Chicken and I. Wide awake.
SUMMARY
My bid for
Chicken at the fundraising auction Tuesday night, the last event of the ten-day
sprint called Residency, was a bid to belong. As the youngest of three kids,
transplanted when I was midway through kindergarten by city-raised parents who
dreamed of a farm into a tiny rural village in Southeast Michigan teeming with Baptists
and combines and cousins and dynasties whose names were plastered on the grain
mill and shops, belonging was something not granted to me in the ways ‘most
people’ get. My family shed our religion (Lutheran) back two generations, and
our European ingredients are so varied that sifted together over our bodies and
sensibilities we were simply coated in flour bleached white. My grandparents stayed
behind as my folks followed wanderlust and my Dad’s job with Sears, along with
the pictures and stories and mealtime rituals bequeathed to the few cousins I
have. As I have moved into the middle lands of my lifetime I work to slip out
of the cloak of not-needing-anyone-much I stitched for myself, squatting in the
lean-to I built out of small rotting tree trunks. That last is not a metaphor,
although it is metaphoric I guess. Between the ages of five and ten, after
which magic wears thin, I ruled the slight stands of scrap trees and burry
brush behind our house, the crown princess of the forest and the fields beyond,
assisted by my little dog, Bertha - half Black Lab and half Dachshund. Not a
mix one would choose for beauty or speed, but unmatched for devotion and
squeezing under fallen down things. I belonged without question to the land and
myself. A cast of imaginary animal friends, (including a raucous black bird
named aptly if not elegantly, Dum Dum Dee Dee) were my clan. I watch the world
of people thrum by from the edges while I pretend to be one of them. So Cate
(G) I argued against your bids for that piece of ridiculous rubber, not to
compete, not even to give cash for the cause, but to take one more step out of
the shelters I’ve made.
SCENE
It is now
11:23 am, still Thursday I think, and I am still laying in my pajamas in this
white cloud of a bed, down stuffed and draped with deep red plushy curtains,
nowhere to be, reading and writing and occasionally sipping tea, and thus
padding into the bathroom I share with no one, five steps away over polished
wood floors, tamping my toilet paper usage down to a minimum. I say this not to
brag, I am keenly aware of the gift of this space
against the work and the families and the sprouted potatoes and the NOISE you
all face now, but to make the comparison and follow some thread back to Gary’s
example in his life and his work that is helping me name just what it is I need
my writing to be in the world. And then I ask you, in the name of Chicken our
Muse, to share more of your story and who you are becoming with me as you find
the time and inclination. Perhaps inspired, as I assuredly am, by the mere
presence of Chicken. I have to pee. Back in a minute.
SCENE
On the way
back to bed, just a step or two in, I pause in the kitchenette to make a yogurt
parfait. Yes, there is decadence in this cabin I highly recommend. As I spoon
yogurt into a wine glass, then layer in organic vanilla granola, then
blueberries then start over again, I am reminded of Gary asking us to notice
how skilled writers spoon out bits of story. I an drawing spoons in the margins
of his 2003 book “Hawks Rest,” eyeing the dollops of personal history,
eco-imperative cause, good-plain-folk language, lyric interludes, science that
makes one feel smarter - not dumber, character quirks and philosophies, and
flat out action-adventure in quantities and textures measured and chosen to
draw certain types of readers out of their own encampments, (la-z-y-boys worn
against large bodily masses and rent vinyl or perhaps even leather patched up
with duct tape; downy white beds in cabins on islands in sounds off the coast
of real life) to join an expedition as part of an American legacy of defining
self and collective against the harder edges of the outdoors. Chicken is eyeing
my parfait and AWKs at my choices. “Sprinkle on a few bugs.” He/She suggests.
Chatty now, having heard that a rooster is up for grabs in the wilds of
Pennsylvania he/she asks lustily to visit Cate (H) next. “Who knows where that
might go?” He/she croons, through a throat ringed with pearls. The arrow shot
through the tramp stamp quivers just so. In a pinch might this serve as one of
my critical papers? If I edit out the tramp stamp part? 1:32 pm Thursday,
August 2014. The first day of something I will write my way into, but right now
it’s time to shed the comforts of this beautiful cabin and rub up against some
hard edges.
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