February 13, 2009
Friday

Pour my eternity
         into the chalice of today
Let me drink drink drink
          my journeys down . . .
              — Sherry Reiter, b.circa 1950
                  American creative arts therapist
                  quoted in Finding What You Didn’t Lose, a book of writing prompts by John Fox

Today I observe two anniversaries. It is the ninety-eighth anniversary of my mother’s birth. You can read about her in the eulogy I gave at her funeral. It is also the tenth anniversary of the start of this collection of personal essays. You can read about me in any of the more than 650 pieces posted under Markings: Days of Her Life (2006 to the present) and at The Silken Tent — A History, the content from the first six years.

In that first post I quoted Sylvia Plath, twice, first from a diary entry she made as a breathless teenager in which she confessed a desire to “keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen,” and then from a letter to her mother written thirteen years later in which she declares “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name . . .” She would end her own life not long after that, no longer able to keep and hold, or even recognize, life’s raptures.

For ten years in this space I have been drinking my journeys down, endeavoring to keep and hold the rapture that is my life. I identified myself in 1999 as “a suburban wife and mother, a writer in search of recognition” and invited readers to “come along, while I make my name.”

When I look over this body of work, I see how I have grown and changed as a writer. In the process of taking some of the early pieces out of the form in which they were originally published and placing them within the WordPress structure, I have sometimes cleaned up my punctuation and sentence structure (in the beginning I used a lot of dashes and sentences with many levels of subordination that sprang from my academic training, and I still use too many parenthetical clauses, like this one). But I have never removed a piece, never disowned an opinion or a thought, never labeled anything “private” and required a password for access. I have always written under my own name and welcomed dialogue and criticism.

I’m not much of a “hit slut” anymore. That is, I don’t pay much attention to how many visitors I get, what search strings brought them in, which pages they read. I have a fairly informal “notify list,” fifty or so individuals that at one time or another indicated an interest in my work. I also post the links to each piece on my Facebook page and my Twitter stream, and I know there are some who subscribe though the RSS feed. I don’t know how many people read, nor when, nor what, unless they contact me. I closed the “comment” section because it got too much spam. If you want to tell me something, you have to send an e-mail, or a Facebook message, or a tweet. That level of effort can discourage some readers. I am like a newspaper columnist who writes for a largely anonymous audience.

Last year I renewed my domain name for nine years, an investment in myself that confirmed I was in this for the long haul. I am a better writer than I was ten years ago, both in the nonfiction personal essay and in fiction. I’ve found my voice in both forms. I am doing the best work of my life. Thank you for coming along while I make my name. Thank you for so much, so often.

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