What Does My Writing Mean to Me?

(This essay was part of a grant application for A Room Of Her Own Foundation--www.aroomofherownfoundation.org)

“Being a writer means that I make sense of the world through stories.”

I write that sentence on a snowy Saturday in January; I stare at it while a layer of white softly conceals the ice leftover from last week. The meaning of the words is as buried for me as the ice. What does my writing mean to me? I can only think of what it does not mean—it means that I’m not a banker or an office slave. But I’m only treading on the surface of the question, like the new snow.

First I write some drivel about how being an artist is to accept some degree of insanity, then some proselytizing on how artists aren’t appreciated in this culture and that together we are joining a struggle for artistic respect. But that answer seems so cold and impersonal. The more I dig the more the more opaque—and frightening-it becomes. The excavation is too daunting; I want to hide under a blanket. How can I say anything that doesn’t sound like “liberate your inner artist” rhetoric?

I think back to my childhood. I got my discipline from my father, but it was my mother, my artist mother, who gave me permission to create. She mowed the lawn in mandala patterns. She had impromptu funerals for potatoes that fell through the grill and perished on the coals. She started a folk band, a clown troupe; she painted my bedroom in art-deco stripes and made my red taffeta prom dress on her old sewing machine. She drew elaborate caricatures on hard-boiled eggs and returned them to the refrigerator. Though she wasn’t paid for her artwork until 25 years later, she cleared a path for me—she taught me that there is no other kind of life but the one that gurgles up from the pit of your belly. She also taught me that while all people have been given artistic talents, not everyone is called to be an artist.

As a young girl I admired Hemingway and London, male writers with the “bad boy” image who were able to excuse a flamboyant lust for life and over-the-top lifestyle choices solely because they were writers and people expected it of them. Women writers, however, still seemed confined to the landscapes of the heart. It left a void that I wanted to fill—what would happen if a woman, with her intimate knowledge of emotions, made art with the kind of high adventure of her male contemporaries? At 11 years old, I knew my calling.

I was a smart child, and thankfully my family never put limitations on me for being a girl. Sure, helpful relatives reminded me that I had a sharp intellect and that I could do anything I wanted to do…like… go to Harvard and be a famous lawyer. Or become a brain surgeon. Or work for a newspaper—a practical way to make a living as a writer. I tried on the lawyer fantasy for a while, then the doctor fantasy. I even spent a semester pre-med while taking literature and theater electives. Posing as an intellectual, it didn’t take me long to understand I didn’t belong. People who have not been called to be artists don’t fully resonate with the need to create. It’s not just a hobby; artists aren’t just “quirky,” as my father regarded my mother. It’s a compulsion that is the result of filtering the world through a different lens.

As I flexed my new writing fingers I was unwilling to compromise or accept a life of mediocrity. I knew I was supposed to have experiences and make stories from them. So, notebook in hand, I set out to live the kind of life that Hemingway would be proud of. I was a stage actress. I was an exotic dancer. I spent my 20’s living in a van and traveling with the Renaissance Festival. I hitchhiked the U.S., shaved my head, hiked the Himalayas, and wrote my first novel at 27. I gave birth in my living room attended by midwives. I was a human rights observer in the West Bank and published my first book, Live From Palestine, a month after my 30th birthday.

And for many years my fiction accurately reflected my life; my characters were beauty queens and exotic dancers, they fell in love in the Himalayas, they traveled to war zones, they gave birth and shaved their heads.

But as I continue to mature as an artist, I’m discovering that art that endures is not just high adventure or aesthetics—but art that moves, bothers, compels, inspires. It isn’t as simple as adventure vs. landscapes of the heart. It isn’t enough to lead a crazy life and write about it. It isn’t enough to manipulate words and make lovely sentences. I don’t want to just write, I want to write words that put their finger on universal truths and push hard.

I stop typing. That seems profound: I am a writer because I accept a social responsibility to move the culture forward—or at least to throw a spotlight on where it’s stuck. To be a writer, then, is to sound an alarm, to say that the earth is round or moves around the sun regardless of who is standing there with an ax. “So as an artist I have been called to walk a difficult road. Artists often take us where we don’t want to go—or where we think we want to go but aren’t strong enough to go alone. Never challenged, a society might forever rest upon the lowest common denominator, banning and condemning their greatest works of art. Great art can shift paradigms, and great artists intuit which paradigms are ready for shifting.”

I stop writing, get a fresh cup of coffee and check on the baby, still napping, then return to my words. So art worth producing is art that stretches me as a person? Is this what my writing means to me? Yes, I think—when I enter my stories I’m entering a crucible. My life of travel and adventure lends itself to exotic locations and gives my work its style, but when I accept my own stories and write them down, I’m really accepting self-examination. When I allow my characters to evolve, I evolve. To write is to put myself at the mercy of life’s lessons—like inviting a Zen master with a mirror to live in my office…indefinitely.

I laugh at the image; I don’t want to look in that mirror. The mirror has always been there for me, even without the monk. The mirror shows me where it hurts. The books (and essays) I’ve avoided writing are always the ones with the most potency. An act of creation, like birth, is accompanied by pain. But pain serves a purpose, I tell myself. It shows us our fears and our limits and can give us courage to surpass them. Giving birth can be empowering. For me, facing the pain of birth taught me that despite fear my body knew the steps. I carry an ancient wisdom in the marrow of my bones. In a society afraid of pain, to birth a child is to confront our fear of death. In the same way, to birth a work of art is to confront our fear of life.

What I’ve written hovers in front of me beside the flashing cursor. I reread my first sentence, trying to remember where I was going with all this. “Being an artist means I make sense of the world through stories.” Yes, I think, it is a gift. Making art from pain gives it meaning, just as making art from joy celebrates joy. Through stories I make sense of a world that is mostly senseless. Seeing the world through this lens, my life is given purpose.

My wrist cramps. I look up from my computer and watch the snow fall outside my drafty Victorian windows. The elbows and the crotches of the bare crabapple fill with white in the circling snow. I single out a flake and follow its progression; it doesn’t fall straight down but instead swirls and spirals as if refusing to land. And I realize that all the flakes are spiraling and dancing, like an airborne ensemble against a bright, white sky. Watching the snow I wonder if the answer for me, too, is in the spiral, in the way that an artistic work needs to first meander through the mind of the artist, to float and be blown. Maybe the truth is somewhere out there in the convoluted pattern of the falling snow. There is no straight down, it seems to tell me. There is no quick and easy answer. I think again of my mother, mowing the lawn in zig-zags. Sometimes finding answers requires a less direct trajectory. Sometimes snow falls sideways. What I make of that is what makes me an artist.

And the meaning of my first sentence finally becomes clear: Being a writer means that I make sense of the world through stories. I look up and notice that the sun has begun to shine, like a round of applause.