You Gotta Have Faith

I’m a pretty private person. Though I blog, I rarely share much of the emotional stuff of my life. The emotional stuff, well, I dump that on a few lucky friends and in my fiction. I’ve never understood the need to post every lousy thing that happens on Facebook, to tell every person in the grocery store line my life story. That’s just not my style. I’m more of a “put on a smile and get on with things” kind of girl.

So I won’t go into details, but there have been some challenges this past year that, for the first time in my life, made me lose faith. Faith that there is a point to this writing thing. What do my attempts at storytelling matter when friends die, when a loved one is ill, when life can be so hard?

When you lose faith, when you no longer know why you write, you might as well shut down the laptop and put it in a drawer. Because when the writing no longer matters to you, then what you write will no longer matter. For several months I was in that place, spending a little time writing, but spending much more time feeling guilty about not writing. When I did write I was less than fully engaged. I had a hard time caring about my characters. My heart was not really in it.

Then I remembered Carolyn See’s book, Making a Literary Life. During the writing of that book, her love of twenty-seven years died. As she put it, “As John got worse, I couldn’t help but think: What’s the point? The finest mind and soul I’d ever known was going away. All the writing in the world wasn’t going to change that.”

She made herself write anyway. And she began to find the joy again. She likens writing to a marriage, taking it on faith that you are still in love, even when you don’t feel like you are, and working at it every day, even when you’d like to walk away. So I picked up my laptop, and I locked myself in a room, and I started typing. Nothing earth-shattering, but the more I typed, the more I remembered how much I am in love with the process, how much I love putting words together.

There will surely be times again when I ask why. Hopefully, though, when that happens, I’ll remember that I long ago committed myself to my relationship with writing, and I’ll sit down and fall in love all over again.

I See Tomato Soup, You See Blood

A friend of mine visited last weekend, and one of my favorite things about showing someone around Charleston is that I get to see the city through someone else’s eyes. Often when we live somewhere, we take things for granted, barely notice them. A fresh perspective reminds me to look at things I may see every day in different ways.

Rachel has a rather skewed view of the world (well, you do) and she always makes me notice things I’ve missed. Take our local soup shop, Ladles. I’ve been there dozens of times, and each time I go I walk under a sign with a ladle dripping what is presumably tomato soup. And never think anything of it. But, as Rachel commented right away, there are no soups quite that color red. In fact, the logo looks very much like a ladle dripping blood. Now every time I go I will be reminded of blood – a soup shop that could have been featured in Twilight. Not sure that’s the look they’re going for.

While at White point gardens at the Battery, Rachel got a big kick out of our statue to the confederate dead. Nothing unusual about having a statue on the Battery to the Confederate Defenders of Charleston. However, it is a bit strange that they are wearing fig leaves. As Rachel put it, no wonder the south lost the war if they were parading around in fig leaves instead of uniforms. I’ve walked past that statue every day on my way to work, and never thought anything of it. But it did make me wonder why. This of course made me research that statue and all the other military relics in White Point Gardens. Still don’t know why the sculptor depicted the defenders of Fort Sumter this way, but I did learn lots that I didn’t know about the relics there.

This is what a new perspective does for me. It stirs my imagination, makes me ask questions, and sometimes makes me question the absurd. I have always been one who wants to know why. Visitors make me question something I’ve taken for granted. They remind me to wonder about the commonplace as well as the unusual.

Key West Literary Seminar 2013

by Sharon Harrigan

Sharon Harrigan, a friend and fellow WriterHouse member, was the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award recipient at KWLS this year, and I asked her to share her thoughts on the experience. Thanks, Sharon, and congrats again on a much deserved award.

If the view out your window is anything like mine right now—snow on slippery sidewalks—let me offer you this mid-winter writer’s daydream: Flip flops and floppy hats on beach cruiser bikes to stir up inspiration. The sun so bright on the ocean you can swim in it every day of the year, like Tennessee Williams did. The descendants of Hemingway’s cats lounging at his house under flowering shrubs, just the sight of their softness somehow making your prose more muscular. Cafe con leche and guava pastries before writing workshop with Hilma Wolitzer at Judy Blume’s house. Panels and presentations by literary superstars like Colm Toibin, Brad Gooch, and Billy Collins, followed by dinners with the speakers and your fellow workshop writers at the lighthouse, near the southernmost tip of North America. Finally, after a corkscrew climb down the winding steps, a pink taxi or pedi-cab waits to deposit you in the jacuzzi at your bed and breakfast (aptly called, of course, Authors’ House).

It’s not a day dream. It’s called the Key West Literary Seminar. I was able to attend for the first time, last month, and the experience still helps me write more brightly, whatever gray days may arrive, outside my window or in my head.

The seminar takes place every January, and there are three ways you can attend—as a winner of one of the three prizes, as a scholarship participant, and as a general attendee. I was lucky enough to be the Joyce Horton Johnson Award recipient this year. For more information, see the seminar’s web site: http://www.kwls.org/

Spread the word about KWLS. I wouldn’t have known about it at all if it weren’t for my fellow WriterHouse members who won the award in previous years (hooray for Kristen-Paige Madonia, George Kamide, and CHRISTY STRICK!). It must be something WriterHouse puts in the water, or maybe good things just happen when you’re part of a fabulously smart and encouraging literary community. Thank you, Christy, for all your tips on Key West and everything else.

Sharon Harrigan has published over three dozen short stories, essays, and reviews in such journals as Narrative, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown.