Essays on Childhood

Today is my day on The Blog Tour, where writers and authors answer questions about their writing processes. My friend Suzanne Farrell Smith posted about her work last week. She is a wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent writer’s writer, and I urge you to check out her process here: http://suzannefarrellsmith.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/my-writing-process/

An absolute must-read is her collaborative work with Cheryl Wilder in the journal Hunger Mountain: The 7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life. I can do no better describing The Blog Tour than to quote Suzanne:

“We writers share these things, but informally during workshops and at conferences (and, for a handful of established writers, in printed interviews), but not so much through our open-forum blogs. With the hashtag #MyWritingProcess, you can learn how writers all over the world answer the same four questions. How long it takes one to write a novel, why romance is a fitting genre for another, how one’s playlist grows as the draft grows, why one’s poems are often sparked by distress over news headlines or oddball facts learned on Facebook… ”

I am an enrolled graduate student in my second semester pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) degree from West Virginia Wesleyan College; my concentration is in the Creative Nonfiction genre. You can read about my published and soon-to-be-published writing projects in detail here, Elizabeth Gaucher. My Twitter handle is @ElizGaucher.

What am I working on?

My MFA work is my primary focus right now. In my first semester I worked closely with Dr. Eric Waggoner, whose take-no-prisoners rock and roll style became a viral sensation nationwide when his essay about the Freedom Industries chemical spill appeared in The Huffington Post. This semester I am mentoring with Professor Richard Schmitt whose work, “Sometimes a Romantic Notion,” was chosen for The Best American Essays 2013. I am truly humbled by these opportunities.

I write personal essays throughout each semester, and I continue to search for the unifying element that will thread it all together. I thought it would be experience in the natural world, but that hasn’t been it. I thought it might be some family history stories, but that isn’t exactly it either. I think I am avoiding something major, but that hasn’t shown itself. For now I keep writing and revising, waiting for the mystery to reveal itself; sometimes I think that’s all you can do, be patient and persistent and wait for The Muse to talk to you.

I am also working on my second River Town story. My first story, “They Hold Down the Dead,” centers on a 16-year-old girl named Lillian Conley who lives on the hill above the river with her wealthy family and finds herself drawn into a dangerous mystery tied to Indian legend. The story I am working on now is called “The Letter Opener.” This story is a prequel to the first and is about Lillian’s mother, Lorraine, not long after the Civil War.

Me and River Town!

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

A lot of my work blends childhood experience and spiritual awareness. I started an online publishing project called Essays on Childhood, and through that I help other writers find their voices for some of their untold stories.

I’m also digging into the experience of leaving my home state of West Virginia. I left it a long time ago to go to college and stayed gone for over ten years, but I came back. Why I did that and why I left again, for good, is the focus of some recent essays. This idea of place — what it means and why we return to it and why we let it go –fascinates me.

I’ve been told that my work is “unsentimental” and that that is a good thing. I wasn’t sure what to make of it the first few times I heard it, but then in one of my MFA seminars I heard this: Your work is sentimental when it gives the reader only one way to feel.

I am glad I’m not doing that! That’s just plain boring.

Why do I write what I do?

This question was harder to answer than I expected; and I think it’s turned out to be very simple. I want to understand life, and I want other people to have moments of understanding and connection through my work. In a self-centered way I hope my writing will allow others to know who I am, and in the Big Picture I hope that my writing will add to a body of work that connects all of us through those recognition moments in human experience . . . those moments when you are reading and for awhile you feel less alone.

How does my writing process work?

I do a lot on a laptop computer. When I wrote A Rebranded Life: Spirituality and Chronic Illness, I went down in to my parents’ basement to do the work. In that place I could be isolated and in complete quiet. It also had the unintended but I think powerful effect of putting myself, quite literally, in a place where I lived long before I became ill. Physically being in that place amplified my feelings of loss, of grief, but also of safety and love.

When I was writing “They Hold Down the Dead” for River Town, I started using the cloud computing available through Google Drive. Drive touts itself as “One Safe Place for All Your Stuff” and I have found that to be true. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the terrifying world of saving my drafts on a hard drive that may or may not want to work with me tomorrow!

I need quiet surroundings to write well. I love to be alone, but life rarely affords any of us not residing in a monastery total peace, quiet, and solitude. I like to get up early before the sun and I work as much as possible when I have my house to myself.

I’ve finally given myself permission to just write without self editing as I go, crazy random “mental shenanigans” to loosen up that part of the brain that has things to say that are so often censored. Here’s a brief insight into this exercise:

What if one of the things you can never stop doing is thinking about James and the Giant Peach? And how in the library of your mind the book cover is gone and that becomes your new hallmark of a great book and there’s a guy from high school who will never shut up about some animal he trapped when you try to tell him about the greatness of this book?

It’s like he is everything that is wrong with the world and doesn’t even know it. And your coverless book is everything that’s right, this worn out old crazy book about a peach carried by spider’s or was it silk worm’s strands high, high, high above the ocean by greedy seagulls who a little boy risked his friend to trick into being snared by the silk threads.

About how he escaped his alleged family who hated him. About how even though the peach was only a peach after all even though it was giant and would one day disintegrate or be eaten like every other peach in the world, this one was giant, and carried a child to a new and luminous and distant life. I can’t stop thinking about it.

This kind of early a.m. writing puts me more in touch with the parts of my mind that want to say things I don’t usually let them say. Those subjects, when drafted and revised and shared, can be elements in the most effective stories.

Finally, there is a saying, “The best writing is re-writing.” I’ve come to see revision as an act of love for my work, not as a grueling task. I believe it is a privilege to receive readers’ feedback and to earn their honesty when something is not working. I think it’s essential to listen and respond to those kinds of things in order to grow as a writer.

NEXT WEEK

Rachael Hanel lives and writes just outside of Mankato, Minnesota. She is a former newspaper reporter and copy editor and teaches Mass Media at Minnesota State University, Mankato. We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter, is her first book for adults. She blogs about death and grief’s role in culture at www.rachaelhanel.me. You can find Rachael on Twitter at @Rachael18.

I invited Rachael to The Blog Tour because she is a dedicated professional writer, frequent blogger, and generous with her talents. We can all learn from her self-discipline and willingness to engage and share in the writing community.

Shauna Hambrick Jones is a native daughter of West Virginia and a proud graduate of WV Wesleyan College’s MFA program. She has been published in Vandalia, Wesleyan’s literary journal; Connotation Press: An Online Artifact; and Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Magic of Mothers and Daughters. She’s a self-described grateful wife and mother; lover of words, Texas Hold ’Em, Prince’s music, and reading in the bath until her toes are waterlogged. Connect with Shauna on her blog, Mental Shenanigans, or on Twitter, @ShaunaGJones.

I invited Shauna to The Blog Tour because she is a personal friend and we studied together in the WVWC MFA program. She also has an attraction to baring her soul through her writing. She is devoted to her work, and she takes amazing risks that pay off. She’s someone to listen to, someone to read.

Vernon Wildy, Jr., is a resident of Glen Allen, Virginia. He has published his work on sites such as Esse Diem for the Essays on Childhood, The Man Cave Podcast, Intentional Walk Review, and his own poetry blog, I Got Something to Say. He published his novel, Nice Guys Finish Last, in 2011. Connect with Vernon on Facebook via his author page, and on Twitter, @VernonWildyJr.

I invited Vernon to The Blog Tour because he understands that writers need community. Every Wednesday (just about) on Twitter he tweets a Happy Writers’ Wednesday (#WW) to his writer friends and associates. It touches me that he is so loyal and so constant in his efforts to thread us all together, even in a brief occasional social media moment. He also brought up a story about his adolescence that was painful and real and honest for the Essays on Childhood project. Read his essay, The Jersey, and get to know this authentic storyteller.

Anne Clinard Barnhill

Anne Clinard Barnhill grew up in West Virginia and graduated from Alderson-Broaddus College in Philippi. Her debut novel, At the Mercy of the Queen, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2012. Her second novel, Queen Elizabeth’s Daughter, is forthcoming in 2014. She is working on a third and as-yet-untitled novel, set in West Virginia.

She is also author of At Home in the Land of Oz: Autism, My Sister and Me, a memoir about growing up in West Virginia in a time before anyone had heard the word ’autism.’ What You Long For is a short story collection published in 2009 that also contains stories set in the mountains. Books are available from Amazon, www.jkp.com, www.mainstreetrag.com or, if you’d like a signed copy, from the author directly at acbarnhill@yahoo.com. Her first chapbook of poetry, Coal, Baby, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Read Anne’s 2011 essay, “Winter Solstice,” and her 2012 essay, “Melungeons and Mystery.”

Anne’s essay is inspired by her early experiences camping in West Virginia. Editor’s note: Anne allowed me to title this essay. My choice reflects my favorite element of this piece, the patient but firm and final voice of a loving father.

Staying | by Anne Clinard Barnhill

When I was seven years old, my father took the family camping for the first time. We had no equipment that I can recall. There’s a snapshot of my mother, my sister and me all looking groggy as we stretch from sleep in the back of a 1960 station wagon. The wagon had been Dad’s idea. Since the back seat folded down, he figured my mother and he could sleep back there, I could sleep at their feet and my two-year-old sister, Becky, could sprawl out on the front seat.

His plan didn’t work quite the way he’d hoped. It took about two minutes for my little sister to crawl back with the rest of us; then, I wormed my way between my parents soon after. No wonder my mother looks exhausted in the photo — her black hair is all messy and my sister looks like a wild child. I’m not exactly the picture of perfection either.

In spite of that inauspicious start, however, our whole family fell in love with camping. Over time we acquired a camp stove, a lantern, sleeping bags and one of those tents that attached to the back of the open station wagon. That covered area became the ‘bathroom’ for my sister who was in the process of potty training. It was also my ‘dressing room’, providing more space than the crowded tent.

We bought camping dishes and silverware, pots and pans, a coffee pot (the kind you had to brew over an open fire) and many other outdoor accessories. My dad built an enormous black box with drawers and shelves in which to store said items. This behemoth, which could have housed my sister and me, rode on top of the station wagon. My father, standing at 5 feet 6 inches, somehow heaved the black monstrosity onto the car and secured it in its place. He must have been incredibly strong to be able to lift that box. We never had any problems with it moving or falling off. The black box stayed with us, useful as ever, for at least a decade. It retired to ‘Pop’s Place’, a camp my dad bought at the Middle Fork River where he later put a trailer. The black box took its place on the deck, holding all the supplies needed for a picnic.

I often felt sorry for my dad, the lone male among us three girls. He had to do the hard work mostly by himself. Such things as setting up the tent, hoisting the black box, starting and tending the campfire — these were his chores. He also had to put up with our feminine desires about where to set up camp. Since we usually camped in West Virginia state parks or national forests, there were campgrounds set up with bath houses, playgrounds, picnic tables and sometimes, even a pool. My mother invariably wanted to locate nearest the bathroom. I, on the other hand, wanted a woodsy view with atmosphere; my sister always desired a place close to the pool. Around and around the campground we’d drive, looking at each available spot, sometimes lamenting that someone else had beaten us to the absolute best area. Poor Dad would circle and circle until finally, we came up with a place to please everyone.

When we’d graduated from tent to trailer, this search for the perfect spot finally drove my dad to lose his patience. Dad had planned the trip of a lifetime — two weeks at the Outer Banks in North Carolina, then up to DC where we would see all our nation’s capital had to offer. After that, we’d head to New York City for a couple of days. The pinnacle of the trip would be onward to Montreal, Canada, to the World’s Fair where we would spend a whole week. He’d planned this six-week trip with great precision and care.

Somewhere in Canada, we found a rustic campground. As was our custom, we drove all around to find our little niche. We finally located a good site but there was one small problem. Dad had to back the trailer between two large trees to arrive at the designated trailer position. He did so with extreme caution. Once things were settled, Mother and I got out of the car and roamed around. We decided we didn’t like this spot. We told Dad we’d have to move. He mentioned that it had been hard to get in, but we were convinced this would not be a good space. So, he very reluctantly and carefully pulled back out and around the camp we went again. We tried another area but didn’t like it as well as the first. Dad took the wheel yet again and we returned to our original lot. Those two trees were still there and Dad gingerly maneuvered the trailer back into place. Mother and I were still not satisfied. We complained and begged and were convinced there was a better location. After much pleading from the three of us, Dad once again agreed to drive between those trees in search of the perfect lodging. He twisted in his seat to look back, put the car in reverse and gently stepped on the gas.

A terrible crunching sound. Dad hopped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the trailer. The doorknob was on the ground. He didn’t say a word, but backed the trailer into its original space. He began to repair the door as the other three of us got out of the car.

“We are staying right here,” he said in a low voice.

And we did.

Esse Diem

Read. Think. Speak. Write.

#MyWritingProcess

Essays on Childhood: “Staying” | by Anne Clinard Barnhill