Thank Your Losses (No, it’s not alllllllll good): Breakthrough tip for 7/11/2014

Don’t worry. I’m not writing about the cheery saccharine “It’s allllllll good.” that people warble as the world falls down around you.  As usual, I write from my hardest teacher – my own life. Last week, I ate lunch in Prescott, Arizona with my friend, Susan Lang, author of the addictive Small Rocks Rising series. We talked as we always do, about writing and the sorry state of contemporary publishing, funding for writers’ conferences and shrinking chances for work. “It seems,” I said, “that every time I turn around, something else is lost.”

“We’re losing so much,” Susan said. “Everywhere.”

I found myself abruptly remembering The Year of Losses, 2007 – during which my closest friends left our connections; my landlord sold the property on which I lived in a beloved scrap lumber and wallboard cabin;  Flagstaff had become a playground for the wealthy and oblivious; NPR rejected every commentary I sent them; I broke my arm hiking; and I faced into knowing the man I had believed to be the love of my life was not ever returning. I knew – and it was not allllllll good – that had the losses not have happened, I would never have written my new novel.

“Are you okay?” Susan said.

“I am,” I said. “Susan, if I hadn’t lost what seemed like everything back in 2007, I never would have written 29.”

“How so?”

“If my home, my work and my intimate life hadn’t become wastelands, I would never have moved to the Mojave. I would never have fallen in love with the people and the land. And when it came time to write 29, I would have had no place from which the stories could emerge.”

“I know. You know I know.”

“Thank you. And if I hadn’t spent 2008 on Luna Mesa Drive, with nowhere to run from the heat and glare, I wouldn’t have sat with my part in the losses and my part in my own near-destruction. I wouldn’t have been cauterized. And if I hadn’t found the old Joshua that looks like a seated Buddha, I wouldn’t have sat on the sand at its base, watched a year’s full moon risings and lived through the cauterization.”

Susan grinned. “I almost said, ‘The Mojave taketh and the Mojave giveth.’ We better split a dessert.”

I drove home later thinking how Loss had spun me into a burning desert wind from which there had been no escape and taken me down to bone and truth – and writing a novel which felt like the keeping of a vow. A gentle rain beaded on the windshield. Thunder echoed softly in the mountains around me. I opened the driver side window and said – to the losses, to the rain, to the Mojave,  to whatever had carried me through the hard times – “Thank you.”

Perhaps you have had a Year of Loss, perhaps a decade, perhaps as it can sometimes feel, a life. Perhaps you made it through. Perhaps you are in the deep abrasion. You know that if someone said to you, “Hey, it’s alllllllll good.” you’d walk away, maybe even piss on their shoes. I don’t know what you will do with any of this. I’d love to read what you write – you could begin with Thank you… (If the pen digs into the paper and shreds it, you might be on the right path.)

 

 

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