By the nature of our work, writers create in solitude, but out of this withdrawal comes the gift of connection.
“The word,” wrote Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, “preserves contact.” One May, I was reminded again of the inherent power of story to connect. I had been recruited to teach creative writing in Ireland to a class made up of American and Irish women, and before I left I was laden with anxiety, an apprehension that centered on the bicultural nature of the class. Would I be able to understand the Irish brogue? Would I, an unknown American, be accepted as a teacher in a land where poetry is the native tongue? What was I getting into? Lost in anxiety, I had forgotten the power of story to transcend any division created by culture. Then, for ten days, in the village of Kenmare, County Kerry, I sat in the center room of a stone cottage and listened to stories written from the heart.
The first day of the class, without any directive, the group formed a circle, that classic configuration for storytellers, and we settled in. For the first assignment, I gave an in-class exercise that began with the phrase, “I remember…” With no time to succumb to page fright, the writers took up pens and sailed off to their individual interior worlds of memory.
Mo wrote about holding the weight of a shriven breast in her hand as she bathed her beloved grandmother. Eileen wrote about her childhood on a farm and about the small square of treasured green silk her father gave her to clean her wee glasses and the fly-away-Jack he invented to keep the crows from the crops in Stephen’s field. Kate wrote a remarkable stream of consciousness piece about the day when – in her former profession as a nurse – she held an amputated limb for the first time. Iva wrote of Harpies and fear. Margaret composed a piece about a hen that pecked flesh from one’s neck and held little pigs beneath her speckled wings, and wept when she realized she was, in fact, writing about her mother.
Lorraine wrote about her father’s service station and the ties it promulgated between three generations. Vera, the vicar’s wife, wrote about a young man with a playgirl tattooed on his bum who performed Striptograms, and the old dame who bared her tit at him. (Days later she would confide the tattooed boy was her son.) Pam wrote of her childhood in South Africa and the courage it took to leave her family so she could pursue a dream. Cornelia wrote of loss and life struggles: cancer, the death of a husband.
Each day, we returned to the stone cottage, a haven situated fifty feet away from Our Lady’s Holy Well and Shrine and yards away from a Druid’s Circle more than 3000 years old, and each day the class formed its own circle. Together we drank from the well named memory and dove into the deep sea called imagination. We plummeted into white water filled with risk and danger. We shared writing and bore witness for each other. And it didn’t matter where we lived or in what country we were born. What counted were the stories.
They were fiction and fantasy and memoir. They spoke of courage and fear, desire and despair, of sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, lovers and husbands, of soaring off to distant stars, of senses come alive.
By now, my initial anxiety had long since dissolved. My only question was How could I have forgotten? How could I have forgotten a truth I’ve seen demonstrated again and again, the lesson I had learned so poignantly during the two years I had taught creative writing to women in jail: Words unite us. Stories connect us.
How could I have forgotten that there is within each of us a deep yearning to share our stories, and it is through the telling of these stories that we build relationships, that we reveal ourselves? How could I have forgotten what E.B. White said so perfectly? That all writing is communication and creative writing is the Self escaping into the open.
Stories cross borders of geography, sex, age, culture and race. In a time when connections seem to be breaking down at a frantic rate, our stories hold the power to forge community and create bonds. They are catalysts to open our hearts, dissolve preconceptions and connect us to our world. Through them we dare demonstrate who we are.
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Pablo Neruda said, “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.”
To convey to others what we are.
That is what we yearn for. That alone is worth the journey to the dark and daunting place of isolation that is the territory of the writer. And when we have the courage to face the darkness, we come out with stories that shape and connect us. As Naruda said in the same speech, we come forth to “dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.”
How could I have forgotten? Through stories we sing the music of our lives.
Stories have always been the magic.