November 6, 2007
Tuesday

Today I finished the last bit of non-trip related work I had to do. The workshop group I belong to meets next Tuesday, and I needed to submit a manuscript for consideration. I’d been working on a revision of some material that was existing as backstory to the novel I’m taking to Wyoming. (I used a paragraph of it as the epigraph to the piece I posted on November 3.) My Bread Loaf tutor in 2006 suggested that it could be developed into a stand-alone short story. The workshop leader I had this year heard it at the reading I participated in and expressed great enthusiasm for it.

I worked three days last week and two days this week. Like so many of my manuscripts, it began suffering from “character creep.” The more I developed the story line, the more additional characters, all with names, began coming on stage to participate. Layers of meaning were beginning to build up, and I realized I was dealing with something a bit more complex than a youngster who dawdles on her way to school. To make my deadline I was having to move too quickly, and my work was complicated by the fact that I am beginning to feel both intense anxiety and intense excitement about undertaking the trip.

This morning I made the decision to submit to my group a story that went through workshop at Bread Loaf in 2004. It’s been rejected by two journals, although one sent me a note indicating that while it wasn’t right for them at that time, they were excited about my work and wanted to see more. Having fresh eyes look at it (it’s been about a year since I showed it to anyone and got feedback) will put me back in touch with it, back in touch with my writing.

I pulled up the file, made a few changes, and sent it. And I immediately relaxed.

I relaxed so much that I even read some fiction. I started “Falsetto,” a short story by Antonya Nelson in the current issue of Glimmer Train. It’s about a woman, Michelle, who must return home when her parents are seriously hurt in a car accident. She is accompanied by her boyfriend, with whom she is dissatisfied, and must care for her brother who, at eleven, is eighteen years younger than she is. She communicates about the crisis with her twin sister, who lives a thousand miles away, has two small children, and is pregnant. At one point, Michelle pictures her sister at home:

Their house, which Michelle had visited just once, was part of a subdivision named after the trees it had obliterated, a house brightly lit like a catalog display, everything new and smelling of recent manufacture, the floors golden oak, the rooms painted creamy ivory, the appliances silent and tucked into the walls. There were shelves and baskets and drawers designated for all their belongings, a peculiar and alien tricky neatness to it all. The girls [the protagonist and her sister] had not grown up this way. Their home was dark, filled with, oh, birds’ nests and shucked antlers, dated magazines and obsolete kitchen tools, broken mantel clocks that their father collected, dried flowers that their mother pressed between the pages of all the heavy encyclopedias, rust rings and shed hair everywhere, piles and piles of books like pieces of furniture, a cloud of enveloping dust when you sat down in a stuffed chair. Serious, sedimented strata on every surface — history, mystery.

Except for the shucked antlers and the broken clocks, she’s described my house, where the sedimented strata tell you more about me than I might want you to know and where the piles of books really do seem like part of the furniture. The contrasting house is the sort that, when I am a guest in such, makes me long for order and simplicity, at least for a few hours. When I return home I sigh at the state of my kitchen table, maybe reorder some of the piles or put them in a different room for a while so that, for a day or two, I have the illusion of order and simplicity.

Antonya Nelson’s description of clutter as history and mystery washes over me like a wave of warm water. Her long sentences with strings of details probably went through dozens of drafts. She took the time. She lavished on her prose the care her characters deserve of the words that tell their story. I can do this, I told myself. I can do this.

Antonya Nelson will be at Bread Loaf next summer. I now know whose name will be at the top of my workshop choice list. I also know whose books I will seek out tomorrow at Barnes & Noble or the library, to take with me out west.

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)