Of Quills & Vellum

            I have a very distinct memory of the first time I wrote my name. I was about three years old, and my family lived on a hill several miles back into the woods. Our closest neighbor was a mile away, an older woman who kept her vicious pet geese in line with a plastic wiffle-ball bat.

            The woman’s house caught fire one morning. She and her geese were unharmed, but her home was no longer habitable. My mother—good southern woman that she is—prepared enough casseroles to feed a platoon for weeks.

            I made a card to send with the casseroles. I drew on yellow construction paper, painstakingly rendering the woman’s house and evil geese in crayon. On the back, I wrote my name by myself for the first time. The e was backward.

            In kindergarten, I recall Miss Margaret gently tapping the back of my hand, reminding me not to grip the pencil so tightly. I remember learning the graceful curvature of cursive in first grade, in awe of being able to write the same language in two different ways. The callused depression notched my middle finger before I was ten, a comfortable groove my body was thoughtful enough to provide for me.

            The plane of skin along the side of my hand, from the tip of my little finger down over my wrist, is almost constantly stained with graphite. I am never without notebook and pencil—there are three of the prior, seventeen of the latter in my purse right now.

            I write everything in longhand. The notebooks containing the roughest drafts of A Thin, Dark Line and As Darkness Gathers have their place on my shelves.

            I cannot begin before a computer screen. The technology makes me feel distanced from my work. I need to feel the curve and connectivity of each letter as they are shaped by my fingers. I need the tangible texture of the paper and the sight of empty lines waiting to be filled. A blank screen has never been able to evoke inspiration in me, and the click of the keys, while mellifluous, isn’t as moving to me as is the glide and scratch of lead on a page. A blinking cursor is no comparison to tapping the end of my pencil against my upper lip.

            Writing is a tender, unrefined endeavor, and it is never more raw, more immediate—more organic—than when I rely on the timeworn practice of setting ink to paper.

The Cryptology of Love Songs

I couldn't fathom poetry until I went to college. 

I grew up devouring words, but they were always words arranged in prose. Even without metrical structure, I could still hear and feel the rhythm of language, the cadence and lyricism. My mother read to my sister and me every night before we went to bed, and I loved lying next to her, listening to her voice shape a story.

But poetry as a form always seemed beyond my grasp, as if it were written in a language I'd partially learned but couldn't achieve full fluency. Of course, I learned poetry in school, even had to quote the requisite "Whose woods these are I think I know..." before my elementary school class. I tended to read poetry as if it were a telegraph. "I sometimes hold it half a sin. Stop. To put in words the grief I feel. Stop. For words, like Nature, half reveal. Stop. And half conceal the Soul within. Stop" (In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson). I could read poetry in only the basic sense, a struggling novice linguist translating one phrase at a time. 

It was in the second semester of my freshman year of college when it happened. The South was in the grip of winter, when the cold is wet and lingering. I was sitting in my little windowless office on the top floor of the oldest building (it has since collapsed) on campus, bundled from nose to fingertips to toes. Between learning the Krebs cycle and finding the tangent lines of polar curves, I was working on my latest literature assignment:  reading T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

I imagine cryptologists have this moment of breathless euphoria and sharp disbelief when they ascertain the key to the code they're attempting to solve. Perhaps they stumbled upon it by accident, perhaps it was hard won by tireless figuring, but whatever the case may be, what is before them is suddenly decipherable when once it was incomprehensible. The riddle has been unraveled, the enigma untangled. 

And the pieces come together to form a whole.

My nose was red, my fingertips numb, and my scarf was pulled up so high my glasses were beginning to fog. I was tired and hungry and lonesome and homesick. But I read Prufrock and the words finally meant something, and they created a vivid image in my mind. That first stanza unlocked some crucial perception within me I'd spent years missing, and I could then navigate the hitherto labyrinth that was poetry.

Perhaps I was too distracted to pay attention to the form of the poem and instead read the words themselves rather than the shape of them, but poetry suddenly wasn't a disjointed collection of words, and the line breaks didn't leave me feeling as if something meaningful had been severed and I was aching to grasp what was missing. It wasn't until later that I learned the poignance and power of those breaks. But in that moment, I felt as if I had discovered something vital. 

I write fiction, but I still maintain an awe over poetry and a love for it. And these words still move me:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                            
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.