There is a moment when you notice that light in your mind has changed.

“She lived her art. She looked like her art. She had the vocabulary of art." —George Lange on Francesca Woodman

So, I am moving my writing stuff to a working studio. I have ordered a desk for the computer. It's an art studio, too. It's at the other end of the house. I bought a bookcase for the books I will need while writing, and can rotate them accordingly. I had two working studios when Johnny died and then I moved into my bedroom after that. It's never really felt right. But I think I was comforted by it, because Johnny was gone and the house was empty and I was so damn alone. (And very sick. Emotionally and physically ill for nearly a year and a half after Johnny died.) Johnny died. I keep repeating that. And I came unmoored. The house was uncanny. Only one room felt safe at the time. I had to slowly reclaim myself and my house. I had to look to the future, too. I could not look back. It made no sense to look back.

I already knew by the end of 2018, that I was never going to remarry, that I was fixed in my desire and need to create things and spend the rest of my years working on my art and writing. One of the things about grieving is how we build solace and attempt to comfort ourselves. We will go the path of least resistance. That's okay, but at some time, we have to face what is really going on with us. I might have made this step earlier if Covid-19 had not struck. Or not. I will never know. But I have made it now. Being alone is not going to destroy me. I have my muses and inspirations. I have my work.

Other things I ponder, that I am no longer depressed. I am no longer a victim of any trauma, and I have known many traumas. Of course, depression will return at some point and I will be disappointed but I will deal.

Today I thought of Francesca Woodman as I made the decisions and set in motion these plans. I have been studying her work. I have been thinking of art and how best to do it. Yes, plans, plans, plans. They had been rumbling through my mind since the end of January. I became fascinated with Woodman a few years ago, her art, her use of low light and the few resources she used to do her art. That she started so young. I was once very young and an artist. I had a scholarship to college for art and instead studied Anthropology and Art History, later Biology and Psychology. I read myself through the entire 19th Century at the same time. My mother was always slightly disappointed that I did not go to Art School but she never made a plan for that. But that's another story. My sister did go to Art School and is a beautiful artist, but she also read herself through the 19th Century, too. How we both love 19th Century Literature. For much of our lives, that was our art.

Woodman's art is still very relevant. This is what I have discovered. Her low light, her delayed or long exposures are still curiously current. She captured time in a way that bothers people I think. I want to replicate her desire for the image of time. But I also want to do some photography work related to my themes. But I want to know things, new things and the things she knew.

Woodman was not a writer or storyteller in the traditional sense of being a storyteller. Her art was her "talk" and in that art, one sees trauma, too, but one does not know exactly what it is. She was vague on purpose. But I am interested in her trauma. It eventually killed her. A suicide at 22 years old is not normal. She suffered from depression. She suffered from rejection and strangely the idea that she would not succeed, all at 20 years of age. There is something odd in that predicament. She had experienced a failed love affair. But looking at her in this photo makes one wonder how such a beautiful creature could throw herself off a building.

I often look to Francesca Woodman. Because I remember being 20 years of age. In some ways, I have had to embrace my 17 year old self in order to reinvent my life and move into the future that I have left. I call it the "Wildflower" role. It's worked very well, and was born out of my CBT sessions. Before Francesca Woodman died, she experienced many good years of creating good art. My sister and I have been exchanging long discussions on art, writing, social media, politics, history, the past, and even regret. We made a list of words that we hardly ever use in our work, our diaries, and even our letters. Shame was one. Boredom another. Regret, too. I've always found regret to be a waste. Even failure is not a word I use a lot.

Art is about choosing. I've had some bad habits on choosing. It always led to delays and procrastinations. And anxiety. But it never led to self-loathing. I suppose this is why I write about Brian Molko and am interested in Francesca Woodman, why I study them outside their gorgeous creative work. Depression runs in my family. But I need to understand their self-loathing, their pain.

I am moving out of this bedroom and corner this month. By May I will be in the new rooms.

There was a moment when I noticed that the light in my mind had changed. The thing is I noticed.

I am committed to practice.

When I first started writing professionally, I was thrown into the lion’s den, so to speak. I knew absolutely nothing about anything. I honestly don’t think I even knew how to write well. And there I was with contracts. Looking back, I realize now what a teachable moment it was, and that I was able to face challenges because I was, indeed, teachable by a very good teacher, my first agent. Over the years, I have realized that writers who are teachable are the ones who continue, not only to write, but to grow as writers. Sometimes teachable means being both self-reflexive and adaptable. BUT, rereading and making notes on Louise DeSalvo’s collection of essays this past week has given new meaning to the word, teachable. Because I think we are now talking about being creative and making choices and just practice. I don’t think there is enough emphasize on how we practice our work, how we really get from Point A to Point Z in our process. What works and what doesn’t work for us as creatives, and why something doesn’t work is really a key to our success in finishing a solid, satisfying project. DeSalvo’s book is being used along with other books on developing habits. I have very bad habits and over the years I’ve changed how I practice work, which I realize has been negative. Did you know it takes at least two and half months to develop a new habit or break an old one? And it’s hard to work on more than 3 habits at a time! Things I have learned. Keep notebooks on what I am writing and why, and the choices I make and why. Keep writing journals on content. Read my work from the beginning out loud a lot. Establish a good working process and keep to it. Divide the process into doable tasks. Develop habits to promote finishing those tasks. Take joy in process. No one really wants to hear about unknown writers’ processes. Smiling. But DeSalvo’s book is full of known and successful writers’ processes, presented in essays that show why practice is everything.

Elizabeth Enright's Dream Became My Dream.

 

One Saturday, (how appropriate) while I was in the Greenville library (at around age eleven), I was sitting at a table full of kids and they were all talking about a "thick red book" with all three of these books compiled in one volume. They were younger but I asked if I could look at the book.  I was so curious about "this Melendy family, four children, who lived with their father and a housekeeper named Cuffy in New York City that I could not resist asking all sorts of questions. The oldest child, Mona, was around my age, well thirteen years old, close enough I thought, and so I checked the book out and went home with it. 

People, I never returned this book to the library and only recently parted with it, giving it to my younger sister, because she loved the stories, too, and I was feeling generous. The "thick red book" was one of my beloved treasures. I've mentioned previously that I never really got to read age appropriate fiction. I was an advanced reader and I sort of missed out on a lot of good books. And this book was so dear to me that I clung to it for years and years, rereading right through high school. Sometime last fall, in a conversation with my sisters, I realized that in some ways, I still write four siblings, a father, and a housekeeper. It's perfectly Freudian. And people who know me personally, know this about my fiction. In fact, the books I am writing now both have four siblings in each tale and housekeepers. I'd write six siblings if I thought an editor would not ask me to cut a few of them, but I know editors pretty well. 

There is some psychology going on here about this book and what it represents, and the fact that my mother had sisters, and that my husband had great-aunts who were sisters, and I had sisters. All of this seems to matter to me. I understand sisters really well and what I don't understand I want to explore. I suppose we do write what we know or want to know, whether it's a fantasy set in Middle Earth or a spaceship in trouble on Mars. Authors who are paid to tell stories, really can't lie. That's the irony. Their fiction exposes them, not only the stories they choose to tell, but how they tell them. Elizabeth Enright's dream has somehow mingled with my dream in a long twisted history.