FALLING APART/ COMING UNDONE Can Be Step #1 in Making Real Art

by Mary Rakow

Picasso, Guernica, 1937

On Mother’s Day you go with your family to Picasso’s Weeping Women exhibit at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. You’re in your teacher’s private writing workshop and working on fragments for a story about a woman whose child is taken by the babysitter for a quick trip across the border but is killed in a car accident on the freeway, the child’s blood splattered on the ice plant.

You stare at the enormous mural. You realize you have nothing to add to the depiction of the woman on the far left fleeing with her child. You collapse onto the floor. The family is elsewhere looking at the Picasso portraits. You hear inside yourself a voice saying that you must “go under the dirt.” You are crying. You don’t know what this means. But in some terrifying way, you do. A month later a memory comes in broken pieces. You scrap your original idea completely. When the novel is finished you have a scene where a young girl is buried in the dirt under the house by her father. You did not make it up. You remembered all the pieces.

Something cracks open when you’re sitting on the museum’s grey carpeted floor. You can’t believe you’re sitting on the floor. It’s not even the real Guernica. It’s just an image projected onto the museum wall. You stand, collect yourself. Wipe your face. Find the family.

Over the next eight years you will come undone. You go down. Into yourself. Now you know why you are writing.

Something is over.

Something else has begun.

When The Memory Room is finished, you remember the letter you had to write to your writing teacher explaining why you wanted to be in her workshop. You remember that all you talked about was gardening, which was all you knew. You did it for ten years. Just digging in the dirt, that desire to find silence.

You start to think that all art is memory.

Lannan Foundation gives you a $75,000 Fellowship for The Memory Room. You meet the late Seamus Heaney and his wife. Lannan gives you two separate month-long residencies in Marfa, Texas, with car, home, overseer, food, airfare etc., even though you’re a total unknown. It’s surreal. You didn’t get an MFA. You’ve never written anything but your academic thesis and letters. There’s no applying for a Lannan. They just liked the book. And are super generous. It’s that simple.

But you did write that application and you did get into that amazing workshop. And you kept being brave because you were coming to know other writers who were being brave too. Every two weeks, month after month.

What does all this mean? Only one thing: That the world hungers for the book that we alone can write. The world hungers for the book that will never, ever be written unless we write it.

I deeply believe we are each mysterious. Complex. Original. What we must try to do is to access that uniqueness. Even if it means coming completely undone. Even if it’s really terrifying.

We live in this paradox: we are each radically singular. We are each having a very distinct experience of reading this little blog post. But the closer we get to that uniqueness and the braver we are to inhabit the space that only we can inhabit, and the more we structure our time and space and social life to support that radical singularity, the greater chance we have of getting and staying there. And when we do that, when we stay until the job is done, we bring back to others the light we find that is ours alone. From that place we don’t just make stories. We make art.

We are entirely singular yet we have this way, through art making, of deeply connecting. And the depth of our ability is not found in any other life form on the planet Earth. Other animal species communicate in glorious ways. But nothing like this. This is our privilege, alone. We alone share this joy.

We fall apart. We work from that place. We look for a teacher, a workshop, an editor, other writers who call us to our best work. There are all these beautiful pieces of the puzzle. But we have to be willing to come undone.

When we do, we not only make art but we can also look back at ourselves and see that we are different too. We have made an object that is authentic, truthful and beautiful. And we have made lifelong writer friends in the process. And in the making we ourselves become more authentic, more truthful, more beautiful.

Here’s a poem by the late Mary Oliver, you may like. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry:

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations—

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

* (It just occurs to me that I wrote in second person for much of this blog. I’d just edited a piece that is in second person. But now I see Oliver’s poem is too.)

Writing Exercises

In writing The Memory Room I dressed in a suit and heels because this helped me to not leave the writing desk to put in a load of wash, to vacuum. But equally because I was so afraid all the time in writing it. Dressed this way, I would often look down at my lap and see a grown-up in grown-up, business-meeting clothes. It helped me tell myself, “No, I’m an adult now. I’m not that child anymore.”

1. What is the story you are too afraid to write?
2. Are you with other brave writers? Are there small things you can do to help yourself tolerate that frightening place?
3. Have you had another kind of ta-dah moment in your writing process? Where? When? What did you discover?
4. What is the story you alone can write?
5. We’re changed from the very moment we decide to write. Describe your moment. See if you can give it to one of your characters. Not a decision to write necessarily, but a crucial decision.

Though I don’t respond here, your comments always complete the blog. Thank you!

When I edit I am listening very carefully for these issues. You can read more about my editing philosophy here:

https://www.maryrakow.com/editing/

If you need an editor I’d love to hear from you. I give a discount to SFWC writers, friends of former clients, members of Mechanics Institute or Harvard Club and anyone coming through this blog. For fees, options, scheduling and more writing exercises visit maryrakow.com

See you next time!

Mary

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A freelance editor living in the Bay Area, Mary Rakow, Ph.D. works with clients who are both local and global. She is both rigorous and encouraging, insightful and kind.

A theologian with graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, Mary writes with deep feeling and a questioning faith. This Is Why I Came earned outstanding reviews in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal, Christian Century, O Magazine, Ploughshares. It appeared on reading lists for courses at both Princeton and Yale.

Graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from UC Riverside, inducted into Alpha Sigma Nu for her doctoral work, Rakow is a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellow. She received two Lannan residencies and two residencies at Whale & Star, in the studio of visual artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, where she wrote the first book-length treatment of his work, Martinez Celaya, Working Methods (2014).

Rakow’s debut novel, The Memory Room, received outstanding reviews and was shortlisted for the Stanford University International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of the West by The Los Angeles Times.

Mary is a beloved editor and writing coach. She is constantly on the lookout for new writers, both those who are just starting out and those with publications and writing accolades.

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