Circles in Time and Space

I spent the week at the Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, sleeping on a back-killer dorm mattress, consuming cholesterol, and “workshopping” the creative writing of former strangers in the Pleasants Hall classroom. Shoving apprehension to the side, I have eagerly anticipated this week since February, when I answered the call of the brochure that mysteriously showed up in my mailbox at work.

Getting to Hollins is a circle back in time for me; having driven the route through the rolling hills farmland of northern North Carolina and southern Virginia many times to visit Emma at Roanoke College a few years back. The reader board outside one of the small Baptist churches that dot the roadside still reads "Exposure to the sun [sic] prevents scorching." The new bypasses around Danville and Martinsville mean missing the roofless brick mansion that vegetation has been reclaiming for decades and the wedding cake house. I am sorry.
 

As I walk around the antebellum campus of this small women’s college, my eyes leap to more circles and arches than I have ever noticed in one place. The circle is a feminine image, so it fits. I wonder if it was intentional. One of the first people I meet, sitting in a rocker on one of the huge covered porches the first night, is a woman who turns out to be a nearly life-long friend of one of my friends. The circle theme begins early in the week. The memoir workshop I choose for my “Writing Camp” week is full of circles and arcs; and women. We are seven women and Jim McKean, our instructor. I connect immediately with Jim; though he lives in Iowa and has for decades, he is from Washington. A six foot nine soft spoken giant, he played basketball for Washington State against UCLA's Kareem Abdul Jabbar (Lew Alcindor back then), just a few short years before I cheered the UW Huskies on.

Jim is an egoless professor emeritus at a small Iowa college. And I think his students over the past 40 years are among the luckiest on the planet. The week with him was not only a writing lesson, but a lesson in the arc between people. Jim heard our questions and our comments and responded to them—to us—at the point of our experience. So many teachers skim over the stories of their students' lives—that which makes them unique—in a time crunch to get the intended lesson plan into their notebooks by the end of the hour. I am reminded of my father, on this Father's Day, and the hours we spent side-by-side on the brown sofa with my algebra book on his lap. "Do you see it, Honey Patoozle? Isn't it beautiful? Ah, isn't it beautiful?" At the smallest [fake] glimmer of light in my eye, his face would light up. I GOT it! And we would be off on the next problem. I saw the same twinkle of passion in Jim's eyes this week. The joy of teaching the craft that he loves above all else. I hope he saw some glimmers of understanding in our eyes—genuine ones.

We learn about and discuss story arcs—the threads that run through a story—and whether promises made in the opening lines of our memoirs circle back around to fulfillment by the end. Today I find myself musing on promises I have made to myself—where to live out the coming years and what to do there. I add working at a small college to my short list of places I would like to work. I discover a thread running through the list, that at the moment includes only "retreat center." Perhaps I could make omelets. Jackie makes the slowest omelet that ever hit a saute pan. And it is delicious. I wonder if the college girls appreciate the wait. At 47, Jackie has worked at Hollins since she was 16; and her mother worked there 50 years. Circles. She says she guesses she is too old to do anything different now. I would say, "Never too old, Jackie," but why would she want to leave? Except to give me her job.

I worry that having my writing critiqued will be discouraging—I’m not accustomed to such scrutiny, and am relieved that it is helpful. Determined to engage in the full experience that I paid a pretty penny for, I put my name of the list to read one of my memoirs before the whole group of poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction. I stand before my peers and instructors for my first ever public reading in Hollins' Rathskellar. I get through it without a stumble. I am satisfied with that. A good enough reward for the leap beyond my circle of comfort.

An unexpected bonus this week is that the usually omnipresent cell phones are out of sight and out of earshot. The writers—ages 30 to 65—in my group, with our stories that range from the tantrum thrown by a six-year-old when told the majorettes would not wear the sequined short-shorts in the Christmas parade, to heart-wrenching stories of abuse, were connected only to one another during our hours together this week. Thank you to Jim McKean, Tori, Laura, Margaret, Tekka, Elizabeth, and Donna for opening the circles of your lives to the examination of strangers; and for the connections that can be made when we trust others with our stories, be they magical or tragical. I dedicate this quote by Isak Dinesen to the Tinker Mountain memoir workshoppers; “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story...”


It is dangerous to use the superlative "most" when reflecting on a week packed full of learning and affirmation, but when Jim said to me your writing is a garden...well, I will just say it is most gratifying to know I got across what I intended. And what an incredibly beautiful and knowing way to express it to me. Meanwhile—back in the actual garden—a second pepper spontaneously aborts; I pick the first of the grape tomatoes from the loaded vines, which pigishly cross the fence to compete for space with Gwen’s tomato plants; and there is a tiny purple eggplant. The flowers fight to survive the dearth of rain; and this morning I find the first tiny puff of blue on the balloon flower. Sparrows have found the new feeder, suctioned on the window outside the hearth room. Smudge Cat is intrigued.

I am glad to be home to my garden. And I want to be back in the garden of learning with like-minded lovers of writing. I want to have time stretching out before me to write, and to read about writing in the books on my new reading list. I want to know how to make time and space to muse and make memory lists and to write, while so many of my physical and emotional hours are engaged in my day job. I want to live in the arc of my passion. The Hollins' motto is "Levavi Oculos," lift up your eyes. Perhaps this will be the year I get beyond tunnel vision, and look up into the eye of the next chapter of my story.