Whumping, Purling, Seething! A Dispatch from Provincetown

 Awoke this morning to find an email from a poet.  It read: 

“Amanda dear, I wish I had a camera to take a picture of your cottage right now, because your door is half-buried in a snow drift…I don’t know if you could open it.  If you want to get out anytime soon, holler and I’ll come over and dig you out!”

I wrote back to thank her for the warning (my windows had been frosted over with blowing snow, so I had no idea how much had accumulated) and to tell her that she needn’t worry about digging—I had no intentions of coming out.

Then I started work on my novel, and within a sentence or two, it seemed suddenly imperative that I get out.  It was important that I find my camera and sneak out the back door (less drifted) so that I could photograph the front, as the poet suggested.  So I pulled on my clam boots and forged through thigh-high drifts to take the photo.  Then I forged back, only to find that the back door of my cottage has an automatic lock.

Gloveless, in my pajamas and clam boots, I marched to the aforementioned poet’s door and borrowed a pair of gloves.  Thus equipped, I announced with some glee that we could “dig like dogs!” and began frantically flinging snow out from between my legs.  I was making some headway, and in fact, breaking a bit of a sweat, when I noticed that the poet had not embraced the idea of digging with her hands, and was instead standing behind me with a shovel, trying politely to get my attention. 

Of course, the shovel was more efficient, and I finally unburied my front door, only to remember that it was locked too.

Anyway, it’s not much of a story: I found a spare key, and eventually regained access to my warm little cottage, where I listened to the howling of either the wind or an actual hound dog (there’s one across the fence so it’s a legitimate confusion).  Then, the snowy weather put me (and Andrea) in mind of the wonderful Ron Hansen story “Wickedness,” one of the coldest, snowiest stories ever, about the sudden, fierce blizzard of 1888:

“Cows tails stuck out sideways when the wind caught them.  Sparrows and crows whumped hard against the windowpanes, their eyes seeking out an escape, their wings fanned out and flattened as though pinned up in an ornithologist’s display.  Cats died, dogs died, pigeons died.  Entire farms of cattle and pigs and geese and chickens were wiped out in a single night.  Horizontal snow that was hard and dry as salt dashed and seethed over everything, sloped up like rooftops, tricked its way across creek beds and ditches, milkily purled down city streets, stole shanties and coops and pens from a bleak landscape that was even then called the Great American Desert.  Everything about the blizzard seemed to have personality and hateful intention.  Especially the cold.  At 6 A. M., the temperature at Valentine, Nebraska was 30 degrees above zero.  Half a day later the temperature was 14 below, a drop of 44 degrees and the difference between having toes and not, between staying alive overnight and not, between ordinary concerns and one overriding idea.”

So now I think I’ll make some hot chocolate, be grateful for my toes, and revel in Hansen’s inventive use of verbs.  Whumping, purling, seething!  It’s enough to get a girl back in the writing spirit.

 -AR 

 

Provincetown – Sunday or Some Such

Days have a tendency to blend together when you don’t have time-specific obligations, when you’re free to just wake up, drink tea, try to write, drink tea, try to write, examine your fingernails, try to write, lie on the floor, etc. Recently, one of the artists here said that playing trivia at the local bar on Wednesdays helped him break up the week. “Yes,” I said, “but how do you know when it’s Wednesday?”

Then someone alerted me that it was indeed Wednesday, so I joined two smarty-pants fiction writers and together we defeated the champion Wharf Rats—a team of longtime Cape Codders every bit as intimidating as they sound. They’re good, real good. But we edged them out in a tiebreaker that had something to do with…geography, I think…I had a pretty good-sized glass of wine.

Just returned from a morning of clamming and my refrigerator is full of littlenecks and cherrystones, all of them alive, I’m told, despite being out of the water. To catch a clam (for those that have never been) one simply walks out at low tide with a long-tined rake and starts prospecting. It seems as though the clams like to hang out in groups, so if you find one you’re likely to find others. I tried as best I could to think like a clam, and follow my instincts to a spot they’d favor. Sometimes, I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. And once, when I thought I’d found a great conglomeration of clams, I pulled up a really angry (but beautifully colored) crab that snapped at me and made all kinds of threatening postures until I buried him where he’d be safe from the circling seabirds.

When our buckets were full, we went to the breakwater (on the other side of which lies an unofficial nude beach—but not in this weather) and plucked some mussels from the rocks. The little guys cling to the rocks with their beards, and they’re difficult to pry loose. One of our party also collected tiny periwinkle snails, which he intended to steam and eat with a sewing needle. Here, I started to wonder if perhaps it weren’t more sensible just to eat things like say, bread, or apples, which are so easily obtained and can be devoured very quickly, as is my habit. But just when I was beginning to think this clamming stuff was for suckers, we brought our bounty home and steamed a few—salty, fresh and delicious, entirely worth the stiff fingers and frozen toes.

Aside from eating apples like some kind of wild animal, I’ve been writing, reading, cooking, and watching short films by the Russian animator Yuri Norstein on YouTube. He’s been around forever, but I just discovered him, so I’m thrilled. He calls his work “visual poetry,” and as he eschews computers, it’s all done very painstakingly. He’s been working for the last 25 years on a feature-length rendition of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and as I understand it, he’s completed about 20 minutes. His fidelity to his vision is really inspiring, as is his drawer full of miniature ears (as seen in the documentary about him). He doesn’t speed up, or resort to computers, regardless of what pressures there may be for him to do so. He knows what interests him, and he’s committed himself to it.

Along the same lines, I found a great quote from Eve Ensler, about eradicating self-doubt: “I trust that what interests me interests other people, and what moves me moves other people. And I think if you go from that basis in any project, that if you don’t second-guess people and you don’t try to ‘create’ things for people but you allow people to see what you see and be moved by what you’re moved by, it works. I think the reason we don’t have leadership in America today is that politicians are double-guessing people and trying to say what they think people want them to say rather than having a vision. All you really need is something that moves you or an issue that disturbs you and passion behind it, and then you need to tell a story in a way that is truthful. That makes a good play or a documentary or a story. If it comes from a place of true intention and true passion, it always works.”

-ar

 

Provincetown, Some Monday

Woke up this morning feeling like I might have gotten into some debauchery…but no. I was just worn out from a late night of playing charades.

I wish I were kidding. And I wish I were kidding when I say that for a few moments I positively channeled the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But alas. There must have been something in the pear tart.

Seriously: these fellows can cook. Apple tarts, pumpkin cheesecakes, carrot soups, even a biscuit cook-off, which I volunteered to judge (it was a draw—I’ll require more biscuits). It’s amazing to a person like myself, whose attitude toward cooking leans toward the utilitarian. Why make quiche when you can just eat an egg? To which one of the biscuit makers said: “So, instead of making a biscuit, you’d just eat a handful of flour?” I ceded to her point, but with the secret knowledge that I’d probably just buy some Saltine crackers. What can I say. I’m a philistine. But cook on, you lovely culinary artists, cook on! You need eaters like writers need readers, and I’m always here, ready to ingest, to sing your praises, and to ask after the recipe, which I’m sincerely interested in, but probably won’t attempt.

It has been a week of firsts: my first Nor’easter (Hurricane Noel); my first time looking for post-storm flotsam and jetsam (found nothing but a dead bird); my first Halloween in an old mansion with a blue-lit cupola where a whaler’s wife used to watch the sea, waiting for husband’s return (or so said a man dressed as a shamanistic elk spirit, who stood with me in the cupola). I was dressed as Emiliano Zapata. From the street, we must have cut a strange profile.

I’ve also been contemplating first novels, and what Jane Smiley has to say about the form in her book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. I usually avoid books about writing, because my chief trouble in composition is that I try to edit everything as (if not before) it is written, and reading about writing seems like just the thing to heighten one’s self-consciousness. But her book has had the opposite effect. She describes a novelist as a kind of scientist, who has a hypothesis about the world, and a wish to observe it closely: “A novelist also shares with the scientist a partial and imperfect knowledge of the phenomena he wishes to observe. And so both novelist and scientist say, what if? What if milk teeming with bacteria was heated to a certain temperature and allowed to cool? What if some uneducated country people were to set out on a journey by wagon to take the corpse of their mother back to her place of origin?”

I love this idea, because it allows the writer to be unenlightened, even ignorant, at the outset of a project, and to write from a place of mere curiosity. When I sit down to write, and the weight of all a novel is supposed to accomplish (entertain, transport, suspend disbelief, be original, have universal themes, have relevance) settles down onto my shoulders (not to mention the combined achievements of every author I’ve ever read) I’m likely to get up and start making a quiche. But it is easier, and good deal more fun, to think of oneself as an explorer setting off into the wilds of your imagination. So hurray for the question not being “What do you know about the world?” so much as “What do you wonder about?”

And hurray for dressing up as a shamanistic elk spirit—wherever you are, guy, I raise my coffee cup to you.

-AR

 

Provincetown Day 20

I’ll begin this dispatch by listing a few fantastic things about Provincetown:

1. It’s a pedestrian town—the entire population gets out for an afternoon amble, and cars simply have to wait. Sometimes there are more people in the street than there are on the sidewalk, and this combines with the smell of burning sage at the local head shop to give Commercial Street a vaguely third-world feel;
2. However, a great number of the pedestrians appear to be really large old women, until, upon closer inspection, they turn out to be large men dressed up as old women.
3. It always smells salty.
4. There are whales in them thar waters. I seen ‘em.

Things that are somewhat less fantastic:

1. I bought a tomato today for $2.50. A small, misshapen one.
2. My cell phone service is so spotty that I had to email my boyfriend to call my Mom after the following conversation: Hi, Mom. Where are you? In Provincetown. You’re in trouble? No, Mom, I’m in Provincetown. The reception is terrible. You’re terrible? You sound terrible! What’s happened? No (laughing) I’m fine. Okay, Mandy. Stop crying for a minute and tell me if you’re all right! Mom, I’m–BEEP BEEP BEEP. CALL LOST.
3. I’ve heard that it will get really cold and dark and I’ll go crazy.

But, as far as I can tell, I haven’t lost it yet. I have, however, spent hours and hours revising individual sentences. I’ve allowed a single scene to baffle me for an entire day, right through meals, right through sunset. I’ve found myself standing before the pantry with a handful of chocolates, mumbling about narrative arc. And this morning I called three separate people in the hours before dawn (forgot about time zones) to ask how long it would take to dig a pond. Eat a prawn? Get something pawned? No, I shouted, leaning into the window, where sometimes I can get a clear signal. Dig a freaking pond!

As though that made any more sense.

And of course, I’ve been observing the behavior of the far-more-interesting visual artists. Yesterday, I encountered one sitting in the common room with something that looked like a small pane of glass balanced on her palm, with something that looked like chocolate smeared on it. When I got closer, I saw that the brown stuff was smeared in an intentional way, in a pattern that suggested wind, and waves on the ocean, and was actually quite nice.

“Don’t touch it,” she said.

I assured her I wouldn’t. Then she explained, in a way that I will never be able to reproduce, all about printmaking, and what this piece of glass had to do with it. She was a little crestfallen because she feared she’d made a mistake, and she wanted to start the whole thing over again, but was making herself finish it anyway. I swallowed–I’ve been starting and abandoning projects at the rate of three per day. Then she said that she often made mistakes, and sometimes they turned out to be the most interesting aspects of the work—not mistakes at all, just the unexpected. And of course, you can’t tell the difference until you finish the print.

So here’s to not (immediately) squashing the unexpected. And to finishing the print.

-AR

 

Provincetown Day 10

Still, no debauchery.

There’s been some ping pong, a little cancelled whale watching, some homemade clam chowdah (not homemade by me, of course) some baseball watching (not by me, of course) and in the meantime I’ve been staring in amazement at books, and in horror at the blank page, and listening to—I kid you not—a fly sizzle itself again and again on the light bulb by my desk. Buzz buzz. Sizzle sizzle. Die already!

Oh, and I’ve been dog walking. I’ve commandeered someone else’s dog, but because the dog doesn’t really like me, and won’t walk without its owner along, I walk the dog and the owner, too. I can’t believe they’ve agreed to this arrangement, but they have, and I’ve had the chance to explore the sand dunes and the beech forest and some kind of mud bog with a Corgi at the helm.

During one of these walks, the dog owner and I had a long discussion about plot, and about Cormac McCarthy, whom I’ve been utterly smitten with since 2001, when I read Child of God, a novel about a bungling necrophiliac. This prompted me to watch his interview with Oprah online, which was well worth becoming a member of Oprahs’ Book Club. (Relatively painless process—no “O” became emblazoned on my forehead or anything.)

The interview had some illuminating moments, particularly Cormac’s discussion of avoiding work (that is, the kind you do for somebody else), his thoughts of the role of the subconscious in the writing process, and his remarks on the genesis of The Road. And, as one might expect, it was an awkward affair. Throughout, Cormac made the couch look like a giant, man-eating plant, and Oprah struggled to find the right facial expressions, particularly when Cormac spoke of his utter disinterest in material things. What team of people had chosen her earrings that day? What kind of furniture had she chosen for the vacation house she’s building in southern Colorado? How could she appear at ease before this man who at one point couldn’t afford to brush his teeth, and didn’t give a damn?

Also, he said “book” like “spook”. I love him. So much so that I now say “book” like “spook.” If you haven’t yet, check it out.

 

Provincetown, Day 4

One arrives in Provincetown having heard much about its strangeness: the colorful and clannish locals, the dreary winters, the feeling of isolation. One also hears a lot about artist’s colonies: the inspiration of having a community, the debauchery, the likelihood that one will either get fat, become an alcoholic, or destroy a marriage during those long winter months.

But so far, I haven’t eaten to excess or poisoned my liver or pursued anybody’s husband. But it’s only day four, and it’s like 76 degrees. I’ve prowled around the town a bit, where there are lots of sashaying men with bushy mustaches, and ambling tourists. An old woman nearly fell into my arms when she came careening out of an ice cream shop. Later, I found a headstone by the roadside that belonged to a sailor who died in the 1700’s. Beyond my desk, where so far nothing much has occurred in the way of writing, there is a small garden with tomatoes ripening on the vine. Sometimes I see a painter or a poet sneak into the garden and pluck one away.

Last night, there was a show-and-tell, in which the writers read and the artists showed slides of their work. Most of all, I enjoyed listening to the artists describe their work. They are unapologetic about their obsessions, and unquestioning. “I’m interested in furniture.” “I’m interested in props.” “I’m interested in machines that either work, or work metaphorically.” “I’m interested in myth-making.” “I’m interested in making a life-sized Colossal Squid.”

Writers seem less quick to articulate what motivates them. I’m interested in words? Writers also seem less able to move rapidly from one interest to the next. A painter might be doing collages involving the human body and cigarette butts, and then they’ll move suddenly into a new phase where they etch scientific data onto sheet metal. Then maybe they’ll film themselves rolling in oil, or something like that.

Perhaps one can learn something from visual artists about giving in to curiosities, exploring them unabashedly, and then moving on to something new. Perhaps I can learn to say, when faced with that ubiquitous question “What do you write about?” that I’m interested in methamphetamine, goldfish, and making up lies about the people I love. I can tell them I’m leaving my taxidermy phase and beginning to explore the elderly. “I’m interested in using familiar marks on paper to create a gigantic story that will, when read, seem like an actual place with actual people in it.”

Woah–I just blew my own mind.

 

Lighthouse bids bon voyage to A-Ray

Ms. Amanda Rea, the Lighthouse muse, yarn spinner, kid inspirer, and loony bin director, is off to Provincetown for the coveted seven-month winter fellowship that has been described by anonymous sources as tumultuous: ”Marriages explode there, relationships alter.  There’s something in the salt air and the end of the world feeling of isolation….” If that doesn’t sound like ideal conditions for writing a novel (or perfecting your signature), I don’t know what are. She’ll make it through, no doubt, and will be sending dispatches via this very blog (check out category “Dispatch from P-town”) from her new, trusty laptop.  Right, Amanda? Stay tuned…

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