Introduction
From adolescence onward, I wanted to write and didn’t want to write. I had thoughts that demanded to be expressed and equal resistance to expressing them. As a teenager, I only intermittently kept a diary and marveled at girls who used paper and ink as intimate companions. Most of the time I couldn’t be bothered; it was more fun to share secrets with girlfriends. Later, observations and ideas came that my brain wouldn’t let go of, but except for the most urgent, I rather successfully resisted expressing them. Only because I loved to read and longed to understand myself and the world did I become an English major in college. Even then, I would procrastinate writing papers until, sometimes, I had to pull all-nighters. Yet I always made A’s, and after college taught high school English for a year and got bitten by the graduate-school bug. Later, as a college professor, writing had become easier; in teaching students I taught myself. So publishing academic writing, necessary for professional survival, came easily enough. But those thoughts of mine, not Shakespeare’s or Toni Morrison’s, kept up their persistent pestering. It was as if the goal of expression divided me in two.Decades later, in spite of writing bits and pieces of my own thoughts, I still felt divided. Then late on a Friday afternoon in about 2000, the clinic where I had recently had a mammogram called with the results. The voice on the phone said, “It looks as if you have stage three breast cancer.” I felt kicked in the belly, the chest, and everywhere else. But knowing nothing could be done until Monday, amidst our tears my husband Thorpe Butler and I continued packing to spend the weekend at a friend’s cabin on a lake in East Texas. During the weekend I felt the emotional roller-coaster of forgetting for a while and remembering with dread. No longer a believer in an interventionist God, nevertheless, I bargained: “Dear God, if you will just let me get through this, I will write. I promise.” On Monday morning, I again got a call from the clinic, this time saying that my mammogram had been mixed up with someone else’s. Mine was fine, the mistake a simple clerical error. Simple. But I never forgot the promise I had made.
One day, perhaps in 2009 or 2010, my friend Pat Kimbrell and I were walking at an outing in the woods. Not only did I simply like Pat, we taught similar courses at different colleges. That day, one of us said, “We ought to start a writing group.” This, it turns out, was the first step in acting on my promise when I thought I had breast cancer. But not until we both retired, in 2012, did our vague wish for a writing group begin to happen. Thorpe, also a retired English professor, wanted in on it, and we heard about Kendra Pecci, who had written two unpublished novels and wanted a group. Then Laura Nagel heard about us and wanted to join—and you have read in Laura’s introduction to our blog about her yen to publish. After a few years, Kendra dropped out to get a job and put her kids through college, and we recently invited Elizabeth Long, a retired sociology professor, to join us.
The magic of the group for me was in the prompts; they provided a focus for the swirling thoughts I had trouble corralling. (We each gave Pat six nouns and six adjectives, and she paired them.) Usually, the prompt would trigger an image or a memory or a metaphor, as the time Pat gave us “Abandoned Suitcase.” Having just returned from Italy, I thought of the balcony at our hotel where we ate breakfast and of a suave Italian friend of a friend I had met. I imagined him striking up a conversation on the balcony with an American art history student studying for the summer in Rome. Flying into Rome late the night before, she mistakenly picks up the wrong suitcase, which contains elegant silks and designer shoes. Both unable to get the mistake corrected by the airline and tempted by the beautiful clothes, she changes from her jeans and T-shirt to silks. And once the encounter at breakfast happens, her new persona opens up new adventures. What fun using words like Prada and Versace, unknown in my wardrobe. Writing was suddenly easy, and people in the group actually liked the story and knew how to improve it.
I soon discovered that my real love is the personal essay. The prompt “Silver Dollars” reminded me of a story my grandmother Roxie used to tell about her father Dougal Sloan. He married Molly Reed in his late twenties when she was just a girl of twelve, daughter of what passed in rural Texas for a wealthy family. The only picture I ever saw of my great-grandparents showed Molly as an old woman worn out by ten child births sitting next to an erect, handsome Dougal, in a white linen suit. As the family story goes, Dougal used to grab a bag of silver dollars, ride into town, and buy drinks for everyone in the saloon, returning drunk late in the evening when all the chores were done, swaying on his white horse. My grandmother Roxie claimed, bitterly, that her father wasted the Reed money and left her and her generation with nothing. Roxie had lived with us when I was a kid, and writing allowed me to speculate on the roots of the un-grandmotherly personality I had suffered under. And I discovered that one of my subjects involves trying to understand the early culture of Texas, which my ancestors settled (and invaded) in the 1830’s.
My process of writing stories and personal essays, in Elizabeth’s apt phrase, is swimming-pool dependent. If I’m lucky, when in the deep end of a pool, focusing on the prompt for the next meeting, thoughts float up unforced. Once I have a line or an image, I can go home to the computer and get lost in the flow of words. Though I may still flail around when I first think about the prompt, writing has become something I look forward to. With the group’s combination of encouragement and smart analysis to thank, I am fulfilling a promise from the past—and gaining the sense, finally, that I am no longer divided. I can write in harmony with myself.
Houston Writers' Group 