Taken to Task

Writers, we are taken to task and misunderstood, like most artists. Did one of Monet’s dancers feel overlooked because he did not put her in the forefront? Was Mozart’s wife sure that the funeral dirge was written with his father in mind or did she wonder that she was implicated? Surely all of D.H. Lawrence’s lovers thought they were, in one respect or another, the basis for Lady Chatterley.

No matter the creative side of it, when a writer’s husband, sister, daughter, lover, mother, reads her work, they will find themselves, whether they are there or not. Because we bring all of our history and our emotions into every work of art that we experience and the closer one is to the artist, the more likely we will think the work is intentionally personal.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the “intentional fallacy.” I will not discuss it in any depth for fear you will fall into a deep slumber. But I do want to explain something about the creative process: we start out with an idea, sometimes an intention, but most times with just an image, an overheard phrase, a color, a single musical note. And then we start and during the creating, the work changes, alters, moves beyond any intention originally considered. Artists rarely end up where they were headed.

All too often, I find buried in my disorganized piles of work, a poem or a story, and as I read it, I do not recognize it; do not know what inspired the work when I wrote it; am surprised. I welcome the retreat of the original impetus so that the art can be born.

Will you find my friends, family, loves, in my stories, in my poetry? You will find what you are looking for. So often we can only see what we are looking for.

Everything in my life informs my work; the stranger at the book store, the play I saw three weeks ago, the poem in the New Yorker I read last night, the dog chasing the phantom in my house. Everything and everyone goes into the clay and shifts and alters and slips beneath my fingers into something I didn’t even realize could exist. That is what I do. I watch and listen and pay attention. A very good teacher, many years ago, told me the most important thing I could do was to pay attention; to attend.

I try to pay attention and I do pour it into my work. But please understand that I have stirred the paint of my life with characters from Odysseus and I’ve melded my daughter with Audrey Hepburn and my son with both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas (simultaneously). So if you find yourself in my stories or in my poems, it is only because I noticed you; I paid attention and some detail or characteristic was so compelling that I was inspired.

I show up to my life; I attend; life gives back what I am seeking.