For Juanita.

In the introduction to On Fire, Larry Brown wrote, “Writing was a curveball that I never saw coming. It’s such an improbable and foolish-sounding thing to say in front of anybody: ‘I’m going to become a writer. I’m going to learn how to write a book.’” (Brown vii)

Brown goes on to say in that same introduction, “It’s all just stories, no matter how long they are or what form they take. And any book in progress is kind of like a friend who comes and stays with you for a good long while, who lives in the house and inside your mind. It stays there through meals and sleeping and waking and cutting the grass and tending to the kids and taking out the garbage. When the book is being formed in your mind and on the page, I mean the actual accumulation of the work itself, day by day or hour by hour, it has a life of its own and it is living for that period of time with you.” (Brown viii)

The novel lives with you, and so do your family and friends live with you.  Let’s not forget them. Gary Hawkins’s documentary The Rough South of Larry Brown, the documentary I’ve referenced all month, is not just about the writer Larry Brown; it is also about a marriage and what a loving spouse has to do and put up with when the other spouse wants to play with characters who only exist in the imagination, when the spouse wants to hold up in a room with people who don’t really exist, when the spouse can’t pay attention to conversations because he’s listening to voices no one else can hear. In the film Mary Annie Brown articulates the sacrifice a family makes to support the work of the writer in the family.

Is your novel living with you? Do your characters have their own place at the Thanksgiving Day table? In front of the television? Do they sit on your porch and watch the neighbors? Do they ride shotgun in your car? Do they distract you when your sweetheart is whispering sweet nothings in your ear?

Are you thankful for the people in your life who encourage you to write, even in small ways? Who put up with you when you’re writing and when you’re not writing and a bear to live with? Do you wish the folks you love were more supportive? More interested in your work? More interested in your goals?

I’ve been fortunate. My family has always encouraged me to write and been proud of my determination and my successes.  My husband, my son and daughter-in-law, my daughter and son-in-law (who designed this blog!), and my oldest granddaughter, who,when she was hardly walking and talking, pointed at a big bookstore banner and squealed proudly, “Geekie’s book!” 

One of my most avid supporters was my mother, Juanita May Burch Arnoult: November 16, 1923 – November 24, 2009. She never doubted I could do what I dreamed of doing. She loved to tell stories herself, and she always had a host of characters in her head. I think of her when I talk about the voices I hear all the time, the ones that distract me from the real world, the voices of characters is my novels and short stories and poems.

My mother was schizoaffective. I was sometimes jealous of the voices she listed to over me. She was never jealous of the voices I listened to sometimes over her. She also never begrudged me using in my creative work some story she told or something she did. She’d gladly let me give a piece of her away to one of my characters to see what they would do with it.

Even though my novel Sufficient Grace is not about my mother, even though it is not autobiographical in the strict sense, the novel would not exist without my mother. Juanita’s symptoms and behavior can be spotted in cameo in several places in the text. And her resilient spirit is present throughout the book–in the lives of so many of my characters and in the way Gracie still has unestimable value as a person despite her illness. 

My mother was such an interesting woman. In bits and pieces, she is worth at least forty novels, and God only knows how many stories and poems.  She never minded me using her life as fodder. And I’m thankful, because it is one way I can keep her with me.

When I began this November tribute to Larry Brown, I had no idea my mother would pass away on the anniversary of his death. Juanita and Larry have something else in common. I learned a hell of a lot about storytelling from both of them.

Exercise: Try this exercise from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity: Draw a circle. Inside the circle put the names of all the people who support your desire to be a writer. You may have met some of these folks on your last airplane flight.  Put the names of those people who don’t support your desire to be a writer outside the circle. Some of these folks may love you the most. The folks inside the circle—be grateful for them. Thank them. The folks outside the circle—stop looking to them to be your support for a while. Take the pressure off of them. That way you won’t be disappointed and they won’t feel like they’ve let you down.  One day, they may step inside the circle. In the meantime, find some other way they appreciate your talents. Give them a big kiss. If no one appreciates your desire to write, appreciate it yourself. Write anyway.

Read: Big Bad Love, short stories by Larry  Brown.

Thanksgiving break tomorrow. So here’s the scene storm for the week, plucked from my mother’s rich life:

watch

rope

grief

break

strut

baby

clip

draw

laugh

listen

Works Cited:

Brown, Larry. On Fire. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1994.

—, Big Bad Love. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1990.

Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: Tarcher/Petigree Books, 1992.

Hawkins, Gary. Dir. The Rough South of Larry Brown. Downhome Entertainment and Blue Moon Film Productions, 2008. DVD.