East of Eden

This morning, after driving through a surprisingly thick snowstorm, I found myself in a tiny room in the radio studio of WDEV in Waterbury. Hester Fuller, the host, had kindly read my book and interviewed me for a bit, then Gary Miller (author of the fine collection Museum of the Americas) came in, too, with Joe Citro on the phone line.

We were literally knee-to-knee in a tiny room, talking about the intimacy of writing. Writing is that curious mixture of intense privacy – literally, the stuff of our own experiences – spun into shared stories. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden wound into my life when I was fifteen, lodging deeply in my blood cells, its influence surfacing in my own writing. Over and over, I have hammered myself against Steinbeck’s anvil that insists on seizing human choice despite the chaotic happenstance of human life. How will I understand my life? The lives of those I dearly love?

Driving home in the dark tonight, I realized my character, Fern, understood her life like this: finding an abandoned sweater in a library’s free box, she washed and then unravelled the yarn, discarding what was ruined beyond repair, saving what she could. Then she knitted, by trial and error, a sweater patterned with trees and mountains and Lady Moon, creating a work of beauty – and practicality.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Burlington, Vermont, March 2016

Years ago–not that many but still a number–I worked at a business owned by a decent man who was in forties then, and his life was falling apart, in just about every way. He and I spent a great deal of time working and talking together, and at one point, he remarked that the lives of everyone he knew then were falling apart.

I rather blithely replied that my life was not falling apart.

When I think back on myself in those years, I imagine myself as a clipper ship, strongly-built, straight-masted, confidently sailing through sunny blue waters, a fine wind in my sails. I had no idea in those years that boards would spring loose, the ocean harbored darkness and flesh-eating creatures, that sails would rend in a deadly storm. How could I have known that if I sailed far enough, careless without a map or compass, the seas would freeze solid and shatter my wooden hull?

While the footprint of my life is yet on West Woodbury Road in Vermont, the geography of my life now has unfolded and unfolded yet again, into a landscape that extends beyond the garden’s button zinnias and life with small children to the territory of disease and betrayal, of human cruelty and despair: the realms that as a youth I naively believed I could witness but not sully myself by partaking in. Perhaps the real folly of youth is to believe you can refuse the chalice of human suffering.

As a young woman, one of my beloved books was John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, an enormous novel about the human ability to choose between good and evil. I still have that paperback copy my father gave me one Christmas, marked up in pencil in my girlhood handwriting. Like Walden, that book has arced through my life.

Walking with my daughters and the neighbors this evening, the rural air was rich with the scent of freshly-cut grass and hydrangeas in bloom. The air was warm without cloying, and all around us was the summer’s growth, wild and intertwined and beginning to brown up at the edges and curl with the end of summer. Overhead, the stars came out in the deepening blue sky, a single glimmer at a time. How sweet it was, with the children happy, but the dark was falling in, and I took my children home.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Private v. Public

Stormy Seas, Human Choice