Michael Steinberg

Blog # 24

Note: Renée E. D’Aoust will be our guest blogger for this next post.

Renée is a versatile, multitalented writer whose first book Body of a Dancer is a passionate yet clear-eyed memoir about her experiences as a modern dancer during the nineties when she studied at the Martha Graham Center in New York.

Her essay/post below, Water the Rocks: A Few Writing Ideas to Unblock Your Heart, is about a more mundane concern, one that all of us have experienced at one time or another; writer’s block.

MJS

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At our northern Idaho house, I’ve surrounded the hosta plants and Siberian Bugloss with red rocks from Montana’s Hungry Horse River. (Please set aside your concern regarding the ethics of my stealing river rocks and transporting them across state lines.) My distraction: I like to water rocks. Red rocks, gray rocks, black rocks, striped rocks, flat, small, jagged, and big.

Distraction with a hose. The green hose is a dragon’s mouth; the water, its language. I pour language over the pillars of my life. The problem expands. When sitting down to write, I become distracted. Instead of writing what I need to write, I write what I don’t need to write. Arguably, rocks don’t need watering. Plants do. Arguably, the new book needs to get written. More emails don’t need to be written. (Sorry email pals.) Oh, phooey. Does the world even need one more book? I get up, leave my desk, walk outside, pick up the hose, and water my rocks. I am dragon. Strong. I return to my desk.

Then I sit down to the new page, and I want to do everything but write the page. Take a bath. Bathe the dachshund. Walk the dachshund. Grade student papers. Prune some trees. Eat some chocolate. Water those rocks! They are dehydrated, I think. They miss the river. They need water. I pick up my dragon hose.

Distraction is familiar to all writers, and management of distraction is a skill all writers master. But what happens when distraction leads to anarchy, and the new page stays blank for months? What then?

Put as a question: how did I stop watering the rocks and return to the blank page of my new project? A memoir about trees and loss. A woman in the woods with a saw.

I’m a writer who has never looked kindly on writer’s block. To my chagrin, I thought writers who confessed to such frozen moments in their creative careers were weak, spineless specimens. Who wants to read words from a writer with no vertebrae? Although if a coelacanth wrote something called The Long Swim: Memoir of an Old Fish, I’d read it. Then I became a weak, spineless creature. No backbone. I wasn’t wise like a coelacanth, which can hide at the depths. I wasn’t strong like my imaginary dragon. I was a kleptomaniac: I had stolen rocks.

After the pages of my book project stayed white for months, and longer, closer to a year, or more, I cannot confess the length of painful time, well, I had to own the label: I have writer’s block. You have to accept that something is wrong and name it before you can move forward, right?

I tricked myself into thinking I was not stuck. Oh no, not me. I was writing book reviews, wasn’t I?! I was writing posts for the Women Owning Woodlands website, wasn’t I?! I was writing dance reviews, wasn’t I?! I was writing, for goodness sakes. But, really, I was turning in on myself, picking at my skin, eating lots of chocolate, and taking dachshund Tootsie on more walks than she needed or wanted. Oh, yes, I was watering those rocks. Faithfully.

I’d published my first book, Body of a Dancer, and as my brother put it, succinctly, in the way of siblings, “Basically, you pursued your dance dreams, and when you didn’t succeed at dance, you wrote a book about your failure, and that means you turned adversity into something lasting. Into art.” I liked thinking about those hard modern dance years in New York City. The struggle was all. I didn’t eat any chocolate then.

What had also happened just before publication of my first book? My beloved mom passed away one month before release. My mom was a writer, and she was my first reader. Without her, I was lost. I couldn’t send my new writing to her via email and receive back an encouraging note, “Here’s the nut, honey. Try this focus.” She wasn’t at my readings; I looked for her and didn’t find her.

My husband was the first one to address my writer’s block; I was irritating him with lots of whinnying, like a horse. Daily. I started to smell kind of horsey. Musky. My horse-ness hid my deep-mother loneliness, and he knew it.

When asked about my new book project, because on a book tour, I found out, kind people ask you about the not-yet-written book in addition to the just-published book, I told the same story over and over. I was writing a memoir about logging and loss set in our family's northern Idaho forestland.

“It has to do with mother-daughter wood labor,” I said. I was struggling to connect my numb creative process with my new tree book, but I shied away from that conversation.

But then I would tell them this story, as a sample: Once, I was up in our northern Idaho woods with my brush saw, and I hit some asshole’s old barbed wire with the saw and whipped that old rusty wire way too close to my shins. The wire locked around the blade, fortunately stopping the spinning possibility of spurting shin blood. Sure, I was wearing my chaps to protect my legs, but there was a stupid space between my boots and the bright orange chaps.

That stupid space was how I thought of myself as a writer. I inhabited the stupid space. Anything I set down seemed dumb—yes, I was judging too soon—and all the buttons on my personal emotional keyboard were on full alert. Smashed down, high shrill sound, stuck, stuck, stuck. I was a dumb writer and a stealer of rocks. My first reader, my mentor, my mom had passed away, and she was no longer here to prop me up. My mother smelled of English lavender. I missed her scent. How could I meet the vulnerable page without my mom? My heart was numb.

A numb space. Even standing under the shower for long hours didn’t shake me free. It just tangled my long hair. My mother had gone bald from chemo, and I didn’t cut my hair for a year after she died. I now have that hair (cut by Robyn) in a bag to be planted in Mom’s Moon Garden. Full of white rocks. For the moon. My mom watered rocks. I learned from her.

Deep in grief, writing was not a balm for me, as it may be for others. Deep in grief, my fingers and arms spiraled into a waxiness I didn’t recognize. When my brother died ten years ago, I had wanted to scream. I had things to say. I wrote to live. When my mother died almost three years ago, I sat motionless for months, waiting for the sound of her voice, “This sentence here, honey, this is the real nub.” She’d cut pages and pages with a flourish of her pink highlighter and send me back to the computer with a hug. Or she would come and sit next to me, clucking and rocking me onward. No that last is too cute for the person I know as my mother. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. But she would approve of watering rocks.

In my current state, Mom would have said: “Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, write.”
My husband put the computer in front of me. Without my knowledge, he had designed a blog for our dachshund Tootsie, in orange and purple colors, and he said: “Here, if you can’t write for your mom, then write for Tootsie. She has things to say.”
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And that is how I started writing again. I began by writing a dog blog. Our principal residence is in southern Switzerland, and we spend summers in northern Idaho. The last thing the world needed, I thought, was another blog by an American ex-pat abroad. But an American dachshund abroad who became a naturalized Swiss dog-citizen with an official Swiss Pet Passport (complete with the Swiss flag)? A jet-setting tube of black-and-tan fur? I prefer to say that my dachshund Tootsie writes her blog, but you know she doesn’t have opposable thumbs. The dog blog was so much fun—it is silly and sincere. I discovered that Tootsie had lots to say—about polite Swiss doggies and frowny Swiss people and Italian signage and eating carrots and green beans and hiking the Alps. Writing the blog meant writing was fun.

Then I tricked myself. Writing the dog blog was like watering those red rocks. I became obsessed with maintaining my doggy blog. I didn’t need to do it; I certainly didn’t need to post that often. The rocks don’t need so much water. But I loved doing it. And the love of those long and short words for our long and short rescue dachshund meant that I felt free again. I stopped judging my stupidity space and as soon as the blog post was done, I switched over to the harder writing. But I didn’t call it harder writing… I called it pecking away. I called it writing some shitty paragraphs.

I made a commitment to write a few paragraphs, as if those words filling up a little bit of space were rather like a river of water running around the outlines of the content I wanted to write. I got out my 3x5 cards. I wrote notes on the cards. Scenes I wanted to write. Trees Mom and I had pruned together. The day a black bear stole Mom’s tennis shoes. How my mom never made it to Paris, but I did. Bits of information. On one card, I wrote down the barbed wire experience.

I returned to my cut-and-paste childhood. The computer’s blank page was for crap paragraphs. The 3x5 cards were for ideas, notes, images; the cards became my outline. Pretty simple, really.

But what I’m writing about, as you know, is breaking through the boulder between your heart and that blank page. I’m not advocating smashing that boulder of writer’s block into little bits. I advocate finding ways around the mind. Engage the movement of the mind, but trick it.

Tootsie’s dachshund blog is a trick around the mind. It is my writer’s warm-up.

And the shitty paragraph is my freedom. Because writer’s block is about fear. And fear stops us in the form of the troll on the shoulder. My fear: “How am I going to write without my mom?” Well, the question goes deeper for someone like me who had the rare blessing of a mother as confidant, best friend, first reader, best editor, and all-around champion. We transplanted heirloom roses together. We planted tree seedlings together.

I say to Ms. Shoulder Troll, “Don’t worry; I’m only writing one paragraph. Nothing important.” I’m not trying to be a dragon watering rocks. I’m not trying to be Wonder Woman. Ms. Troll goes back to sleep because trolls really prefer to sleep rather than to criticize. Criticism is exhausting. Debilitating. Soul-wrenching. Pet the troll (careful, she bites).

Trick the troll.

Water the rocks.

Miss your mom.

Write the dog blog.

And then write one shitty paragraph. It will free you. It did me.


Renée E. D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press) was a finalist for Foreword Review’s “Book of the Year” (memoir category). Recent journal publications include Ballet Review, The Collagist, Notre Dame Review, Penguin Review, The Rumpus, Trestle Creek Review, and Under the Sun. Recent and upcoming anthology publications include Americas Anthology of Contemporary Writing, Peter Grandbois, Editor (Texas Tech University) and On Stage Alone, Claudia Gitelman and Barbara Palfy, Editors (University Press Florida). D’Aoust is an online instructor at North Idaho College and Casper College. She lives in southern Switzerland and spends summers on her family’s stewardship forest in northern Idaho. For more information, please visit reneedaoust