What We Ache For
I stole the title for this post from a book by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. This book sits by my bedside, and every morning I read a little bit of it; every night I page through for an idea to take with me into sleep. This book reminds me, over and over, that I love words, that I love playing with words, and that there is a music and a poetry to good writing that moves me past “what happened next” into a sense of wonder and beauty.
I try reading bits of “What We Ache For” aloud to my husband sometimes; he gets lost and baffled in her long and sometimes complex sentences, hearing a drone where I hear orchestral music. He reads Clive Cussler and Jack Chalker; I read Mary Gentle, Rumi, and C. J. Cherryh. And yet we’ve made it through nine years of marriage so far … proof that miracles do happen.
At a convention I recently attended, I was struck by two things: one, the number of poets in the attending crowd, and two, the complete disconnect the chosen speaker had to that segment of the audience. He spoke of popping out a book in six months, of crafting short sentences to suit what he seemed to think of as a nearly illiterate audience; spoke of his six-book contract and the importance of writing cross-gender books in order to hit the widest possible market. He made sweeping generalizations and grand statements … and not once did he mention loving the music of words. Writing was clearly a job for him. A successful, profitable job; a way of supporting his family–but I heard a drone underlying his words where there should have been an orchestra of joy.
And yet during individual conversations, author readings, first-page critique sessions, poetry workshops, and other panels, I found myself again and again seeing writers play with words, turning them into a symphony of amazing connections I never would have seen. A young writer painted a vividly breaktaking image of boys looking out over a pumpkin field filled with crows; an older writer evoked the mystical beauty of the Appalachian mountains in her children’s book; a poet’s reading brought tears to my eyes with the unexpected image of a military plane unloading at a commercial airport. Other poets and writers made me laugh. All played fast and loose with words, with connections, with images and sensations, touching my heart in a way that successful author never managed to do. I left the conference with no interest at all in spending even ten dollars on the Big Name Author’s books, but with thirty dollars worth of small-press novels and chapbooks of poetry in hand, along with a handful of cards, titles, and names for my shortlist of books to buy when there is more money in my tight budget.
What does this say about the successful author? About me? About the conference? I’m not entirely sure. I just know that I came away convinced, once more, that the Great Commercial Success he spoke of will never be mine. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with writing with an eye to the money, I will probably never support my family on my writing. I am not commercially oriented; I write the stories that come from my heart, not the ones that will please a big-name publisher. My writing has been accused of “suffering from an emphasis on the poetic,” a criticism I am still struggling to understand; I am baffled that any writing could suffer from being poetic. Books without poetry inherent in their prose come across to me as dead and boring, a recitation of action sequences without any soul.
That may be what sells. That may be what gets the big bucks, the six-book contracts.
But it’s not what I want to write. What I ache for is writing like Oriah’s, writing that flows and swoops and loops and sets me on fire. I’ll close with a quote from the opening of her book:
We ache to touch intimately what is real, to find the marriage of meaning and matter in our lives and in the world. We ache to feel and express the fire of being fully alive. When we cultivate and refuse to separate those essential expressions of a human soul–our spirituality, sexuality, and creativity–we feed the fire of our being, we find that place where the soul and the sensuous meet, we unfold. Willing to do our creative work and refusing to separate it from our sexuality or our spirituality, we add a life-sustaining breath to the world. (From “What We Ache For”)
What has your creativity added to the world today?
