The Literary Marriage

August 19th, 1978

Very early in our relationship my husband professed his intent to see me achieve my writing dreams. He told me that it would happen. There have been many times when I have asked him if he wasn't perhaps deluded, or just plain wrong. These are joking comments from me because his steadfast belief has sustained me from start to finish.

Many writers have described unions where both parties are committed to the literary life. Female writers joke about needing a wife, one who types each draft, brings lunch in on a tray and does not say a word while the genius is at work. If early success yielded substantial financial success, that just might work, but for most of us, it is not that cut and dried.

 The ups and downs are all imaginary.

He asks, “How was your day?”

“A new character arrived!”

“That's great!”

Or, “How was your day?”

“My novel is falling apart. I just wasted the last decade, no the last four decades, no my entire life. I should have gone to law school.”

“How was your day?”

“My agent called. The book is going to auction. There's talk of a movie deal too. They think it will be perfect for Johnny Depp.”

I never stop thanking God for the gift of my imagination.

If you read copious volumes of writer's diaries, you learn a great deal about their marriages.  Lucy Maud Montgomery had a terrible time of it, and I could all but cry for her as she listed her trials and tribulations. I wanted to whack her husband over the head with a hockey stick and said so aloud to my beloved as I waded through the volumes. She created a fine fictional husband for herself in the person of Gilbert Blythe. Ted Hughes, married to Sylvia Plath, is not held in very high esteem either. Leonard Wolf, married to Virginia, tried very hard, but as it was she who wrote the diaries, he did not fare very well either. What of Zelda Fitzgerald and the Hemingway wives? If you read The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, you know what I mean.

I will state here and now that I owe everything to my husband. In changing times, I was afforded the choice to be home with my children, a decision I will never regret. In fact, I miss those days sorely. My husband has helped me with computer issues, printer foibles, discouraging setbacks and several lapses in confidence. Being a creative person himself he knows that the power of the imagination can leave artistic types rather unhinged from time to time.

Tolstoy had the secretarial sort of wife, and by all accounts, she did not exactly have the life of Riley. What would the marriage of two writers look like? I shudder to think.

“How was your day?”

“Chapter five is falling apart again. What about you?”

“Our accountant called. He said we should just pay off the mortgage with the last royalty check.”

Constant support and eternal optimism. That is what marriage has given me. Last night we watched back to back episodes of Downton Abbey.

“Should we really be watching last week's show when we've seen it already?”

“Yes,” I answered. “We can discuss each developing storyline and then watch the new episode in silence.”

“Oh.”

Do we know of any really admirable literary marriages? Stephen King writes only for his wife. She does not read each developing page, but is given the privilege of being his first and most important reader. She is very independent according to him and has no trouble filling the hours where he is unavailable. He is not to be interrupted for any reason. She once slid a note under his study door to inform him of a plumbing emergency. He considers himself lucky, as do I.

The WNI Six-Word Story Contest: We have our winners!

After careful deliberation, the judges have made their choices of the top winners of our Six-Word Story Contest.

First place goes to Heather Lynn Atwood of Mesa, Arizona. In a Writing North Idaho first, Heather, actually tied with herself for first place with two entries:

I swapped stilettos for a minivan.

and

A wounded veteran. Not bleeding. Empty.


Our second place winner is Nancy J. Wood of Canada, who wrote:

Guests gathered. Bride waits. Exits alone.

Third place goes to Kerri Thoresen of Post Falls, Idaho, with:

Battered and bruised but still standing.

The judges looked for fresh themes, a lack of cliches, clever language, vivid imagery, and above all, a story. What makes a six-word story, versus a sentence or a statement?

The best stories tell a tale, evoke an emotion, create a vivid picture, and open the mind to deeper reflection. They move forward from beginning to end.

In Ernest Hemingway's famous example, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn," we see the clear image of the baby shoes. "For sale" tells us they are no longer needed, for whatever reason. So far it sounds like any typical classified ad or Craigslist posting.

"Never worn" is the heart of the story, the part that raises deeper questions. It tells us that the baby simply didn't outgrow them. What happened to the baby? Did he or she die? Was he or she given away, or taken away? Was there no baby to begin with? Did someone buy baby shoes in anticipation of a baby, but something happened--infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, a broken marriage--to crush that dream? Our minds move from the beginning--the basic fact of shoes for sale--to the end--something happened to that baby, and we want to know what it was. Clearly, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn" tells a story in a way that, say, "For sale. Baby shoes. Size two" does not, even though both contain six words.

Many thanks to all who entered. We hope you had fun and felt challenged, and will enter the next Writing North Idaho contest, which will be announced in November. In the meantime, feel free to send feedback about the contest or ideas for future contests to wnicontest (at) writingnorthidaho (dot) com.

Happy writing!
from your friends at Writing North Idaho

Ice-Scabbed Cliffs and the Place Driven Story, Part Two

Places, just like people, have chief characteristics. Consider, if you will, the incredible power of the first impression.  If it is a desolate place, weather beaten and foreboding, the champion of this type of location, in my mind, would be Newfoundland. With its rocky shore, freezing cold climate and with the pounding it takes from Atlantic storms, it can be quite foreboding.  People settled there in order to fish the grand banks, but oh what a challenge the environment posed. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx  features this landscape prominently.

From The Shipping News:

“The aunt looked out, saw the blue land, her first sight of the island in almost fifty years. Could not help the tears.

'Comin 'ome, eh?' said the man in the watch cap. 'Yar, that's ow it takes you.'

This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.

How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portugese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to the Spice Isles, expecting cities of gold. The lookout dreamed of roasted auk, or sweet berries in cups of plaited grass, but saw crippling waves, lights flickering along ship rails. The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds. She had caught the bitter scent as a child.

Shore parties returned to ship blood-crusted with insect bites. Wet, wet the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped around on the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into the fog.

Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath the flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fisherman into wet bones, sent to boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered stories in old mouths; the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a floe awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicines- always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.

She had not been in these waters since she was a young girl, but it rushed back, the seas hypnotic boil, the smell of blood, weather and salt, fish heads, spruce smoke and reeking armpits, the rattle of wash-ball rocks in hissing wave, turrs, the crackery taste of brewis, the bedroom under the eaves."

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What distinguishes this passage has much to do with the choice of words. Honestly, who can write like this? Annie Proulx, that's who.  Using regional terms whose meaning can be easily ascertained,  this writing has both a presence and a sense of  "malefic spirits."

I did not come from Newfoundland. Alas, I have never been there, but I have a desire to visit, based on the books I have read. Growing up as I did in staid, and staunch old Toronto, I have no such scrobbed, or knobbed memories. Mine are of hockey games and tea served with shortbread cookies. This week, as the world of stage and screen visit my former hometown for the Toronto International Film Festival, I am astounded at how much the place has changed. Mary Pickford was the only movie star I ever heard of going there and Ernest Hemingway thought of Toronto as purgatory. Toronto and Detroit could well be described in terms of  the tale of two cities.

 Working on a memoir, I dwell in another time, when Detroit rocked and my city was described as provincial and dull.  Some places change and others never do.  I am thrilled with the present, still slightly in love with the past, and like everyone else, am horrified with the current plight of  Motor City. Knowing some of her citizens, as well as I do, I am hoping the tide will turn. Place driven stories are full of history; there are sagas under the corner stones of the most venerable, old buildings.

Newfoundland though, is a story in and of itself.  As with my memories of Toronto, the place itself  inspires me.