On Being Married to a Scientist

At work, I'm surrounded by writing couples, poets and novelists and writers of creative nonfiction living together in what I assume to be a perfect harmony of the arts. I imagine writing desks set in the middle of gardens swelling with blue hyrdrangia, coffee in thick hand-thrown pottery, wordy conversations in worn leather airchairs set by the fire-- a world in which getting it down on paper takes priority over the mundane.

Me, I'm married to a scientist, who is such a good man. This morning he sat at our breakfast table, spooning up Honey Nut Cheerios and blueberries, while discussing the inevitable pollution from Marcellus Shale drilling. It seems that the rivers have been rising since the drilling began. Those in the Marcellus Shale camp identify road salt runoff as the culprit. My guy, wrinkling his brow in concentration, says "There's a spike in the bromiated compounds, and that doesn't come from road salt." When I ask him to explain, he uses words like hallogenated along with a couple of abbreviations like THM's.

"You are speaking in a language I don't understand," I tell him. His clear blue eyes register surprise, and he begins again, patiently seeking to enlighten me.

We've been married for a long time, long enough to include the growing of four children, the death of parents, and plenty of worse along with the better. He still looks like the boy I fell for in high school, a broad-shouldered, strong-limbed athlete. I'm sure I look less like the girl I was then, although that's who my husband still sees when he looks at me. One of the remarkable surprises of my life is that he's loved me unconditionally every day, even when I am wild-eyed with worry, spouting recriminations, sobbing until the pale skin around my eyes splotches with red welts.

Who am I to him, I wonder, in the deep quiet of his soul. I hope I am his soft place to fall, although sometimes I make myself small, threatening invisibility. He listens happily to my classroom tales, my curriculum plans, my department news. One night, while waiting to pick up our youngest daughter at the movies, we sat in the mall restaurant, drinking Tangqueray martinis, outlining a novel...me making notes, he urging the ideas past dark marks on a napkin.

At dinner the other night, I mentioned that one of my former students had messaged me on Facebook after reading one of my blog posts. "Would it be lame," she wondered "to tell you that you are really good at writing?"

"What did you tell her?"

"Ha! I told her I wrestle with confidence in my writing every day. Tell me! Tell me more!"

He chuckled as if he had no doubt that Sarah was right, but the truth is that my husband doesn't read what I write. He has no explanation.

"You don't read what I write."

"I know," he says with a duck of his head.

If I'm jealous of writing couples, sharing of my work tops the envy list. Of course, in my fantasy, there is no other editorial will influencing my own expression, no questioning voice or red pencil. In my marriage, my husband is innocent of infringing on the creative me, simply respecting that his wife writes. He's proud of my choice to teach, even though I've compromised our finances by turning away from much more lucrative positions to stay in the classroom. For my birthday, he bought me an e-reader so I'd never be without something to read.

After all these years, we live inside each other, boundaries now blurred between us, with almost a single will moving us forward. But yet, a watery shadow steps out of the us, taking on a separate flesh when my words meet paper.

Paper Armor

The words grew up around her, intertwining with her legs and arms, braiding through her hair. They protected her, creating a paper armor made of twenty-six letters, crisp in their blackness against the white page. She could live inside them if she had to.

Sometimes she did, pulling words over her head like sheets, burrowing into them in a refusal to rise and take on the day. Words had always comforted her; as long as she could remember, she'd held a book in her hands, safe passage ready at the moment the pages fell open, although she hadn't always needed them as much as she did now.

And so she sat still, letting the words sprout from her skin, the tender shoots sending twirling, burrowing tendrils.

Learning My Lesson

I've been wrestling with this piece for years. I wrote it from the heart, snapping words onto the page like so many aces, but that initial winning streak ended quickly. Once out of my imagination, taking form in black Times New Roman on the standard-size page, the subject resisted me, wiggling its form, flipping over just out of my reach like the rat snake that lives in the corner of my garage.

In its first incarnation, this piece was about reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood when I was 11 years old. Capote's words marked me as a writer, giving me a direction I wouldn't understand until many years later, and I wanted to send up flares to light my path. So, first, I wrote about what I remembered best--encountering the book on top of my father's stack of reading material in our blue-tiled bathroom.As I wrote, I was temporarily content with the word picture I'd created of the precocious reader I'd once been. I revelled in the pictures created by my words, the snap of one lego-like word into the next.

So the piece waited, patiently stored in my computer docs. Years later, after reinventing my creative nonfiction course at a new school, I had the thought to turn my Capote piece into a discussion of essential truth in modern nonfiction. I wrote and researched, pulling in quotes and examples, highlighting the great Oprah Winfrey/James Frey debacle caused by Frey's "lies" in his memoir A Million Little Pieces. Mixing creative nonfiction techniques with scholarship, I created a hybrid of sorts that pushed the boundaries of conventional form. When our scholarship committee sent out a query for writing to be workshopped, I volunteered and sent my Capote piece off for reviewing.

I don't know what I expected. Academics don't always do creative nonfiction well. Brilliant colleagues have been known to lean against my office door, asking "How would you define creative nonfiction again?" Suggestions were made at the scholarship group that I should rework my writing to be more instructional, less emotional.

Ahh...and I knew better, too. A cardinal rule for writing workshops in my classrooms is to follow where the story takes us; so, if a well-intentioned criticism from a well-intentioned participant will derail your story, ignore it! Shortly, most of the creative nonfiction lay on the cutting room floor, and the pathetic remains went back to the document waiting room.

Those who know me well understand that Capote is just under my skin, so this troublesome piece of writing hasn't been far from my creative thoughts. I decided recently to give it another try, this time going back to the original. Then came the query from a former creative nonfiction student, now taking a class in online publishing, for a "piece of creative nonfiction, one" I "might have just lying around" that he might publish in the creative nonfiction section.

I thought the Capote piece might just do the trick, as it indeed has been "lying around." The problem is that I'm a different person now, and I'm finally arriving where Capote has been leading me. Words that sync together with a vaccuum "whoosh" aren't enough anymore. As I write, I the advice I give my students grates in my ears:

Show, don't tell.
Sometimes we don't know what the focus is until we find it.
There must be layers, vertically and horizontally.
The reader must be able to find your personal discovery and a universal discovery.

I am stuck in the mire of my own philosophy.

My piece is no longer straightforward. It has been deprived of sunlight, its leaves a sickly yellow, its twisted roots now drawing strength from the dark underground. My story has becomes less about Capote and more about my father's alcoholism. Bruised images of sponges being stuffed into weeping mouths flicker behind my eyelids, and I write about the shelter words built over me and around me.

I'm stuck in the quicksand of my own writing, my own life, and no matter how hard I try to pull my weighted legs from the muck, I struggle vainly, sinking, sinking, sinking until the wet sand stops my breath.