Archive for the 'Stories' Category

I read a thoughtful obituary on Slate today about the passing of Tillie Olsen — writer, feminist, and mother — whose real story lies in what she didn’t write. Although Olsen was an activist and active feminist, her first book wasn’t published until she was fifty years old.

After I finished the obituary, I found several other pieces, these two in particular, that cut to the heart of what Olsen represents to many of us who admire her, and like Lorraine this quote knocked the wind out of me.

But Olsen’s theme – and her fear – was silence, the dream only dreamed. Olsen knew this firsthand. After beginning a novel in the 1930s about a migrant family, her writing career was delayed 20 years for sheer lack of time. She never stopped regretting all the stories never told.

“Well, I’m going to be one of those unhappy people who dies with the sense of what never got written, or never got finished,” she said.

How many women feel — have felt — the same?

I do, sometimes, as I realize that all the time I spend doing so-called frivolous things like reading and writing cut into the mopping, laundering, and child-watching that I’m obliged to do, simply because if I don’t no one else will. I’m one of those saps who thinks she might someday make it as a real published writer, if not even as a career than as a passion (because if Dawn Eden can do it, I can fucking do it). I have a pile of blank journals that have been given to me annually by friends, each inscribed with requests for that novel I ought to be writing. I have a hard drive full of my own poems and short stories, and made a habit of writing a little something every day for probably close to ten years. Bits and pieces, heres and theres, whatsits and doodads of thought and story line and no time to put it all together or refine, refine, refine as I want. Sometimes I wonder how much time I could spend on “real” writing if I weren’t blogging, or if I would write at all anymore without the immediate gratification of instant publishing and instant audience. I quit playing piano shortly after Ethan was born and, as I explained to my mother tonight as Ethan played yet another round of Christmas carols from memory, I lost it. I can plunk out a song or two but something is missing. I wonder if writing is like that.

Several years ago I gave my mother a journal requesting that she write down some of her stories, an autobiography for my sisters and I to keep so we may know her better despite the weird confines of parent-child relationships, generation gaps, and personal grievances. It’s an easy platform, full of writing prompts and lined paper, and I eagerly searched it out to see what and if she had written. I discovered she hid it from me so I wouldn’t read it until she was ready. I hoard my “real” writing too, knowing that to reveal it before it’s ready is a painful exposure of all the blemishes I’m too busy to wipe clean, lurking about the reader explaining the rough parts raw because I haven’t found a way, or the time, to fix them.

Just tonight I received an email from an old family friend wondering where my novel is, and it’s here, it’s right here, but I don’t have the time to concentrate. Maybe when I convince somebody to buy me a laptop. Maybe when I’m fifty.