This is an old blog post of mine, from last Thanksgiving:
Lily Tomlin
I looked at Ursula K. LeGuin last night and marveled. She has been obsessively writing since she was five. That's sixty-nine years. She says the only things she knows how to do are writing and housework. That's why she taught writing; nobody's interested in housework, anymore. I can relate.
She had the sense to "get the other stuff out of the way, so I could write."
There's the difference.
I allowed myself to be seduced into believing that ANYthing was more important than my scratchings!
It's hard to focus, when scared of homelessness, listening to gunfire, beaten and raped, alienated from other writers...
I didn' make it my Reason To Be.
I wish I had, but that's blood under the toilet.
Apparantly, I am making it my Reason To Be, now.
So, everything's changing.
I wondered, last night, as I smoked a cigarette before the lecture.
I'm going to be fifty, a year from this August 25th.
I wonder how much time I have left.
I always wonder this. I feel like I'm running out of time. Every day feels like it could be my last.
I'm frantic to catch up to myself.
It drives people crazy, of course. It makes me intense.
Like my emotional intensity isn't hard enough on people, already!
I feel It coming: the terminus. I can almost see it, in front of me, waiting for me to get to it.
I want to leave a body of work that might be useful to others. I want to speak, beyond my grave.
I want to help the next ones get something done that I couldn't do.
This isn't about being famous, recognized, etc. It's about my primal need to mother, to nurture, to educate. I crave feeling I've been useful and helpful.
I want to assist others to go beyond where I got stuck, to avoid being stifled.
So, I write. I learn. I dig in my singular past for the most precious, most vital bits of my experience.
I know what I want to write for This American Life now.
I want to write on the subject, "Most Likely To Succeed."
For me, "success" would mean that one, other woman found her Voice and helped heal us all.
Marianna Dengler did that for me.
I need to mother another woman writer into her rightful place as midwife to our species.
