I mentioned in my last post that this blog will give me a chance to flex my writer muscles. (I love to feel muscley.) There are many reasons why this is important--writing is a good exercise for anyone, it's what I do for a living, etc.--but the most important reason is that I've been working on a novel for almost 5 years now and it's still not complete. Writing a book is a goal I've had all my life. From the time I could conceptualize it, I told people I was going to write a book about a boy who wants to escape from Edna, Texas. Back then the working title was "The Stagnant Pond" and it was going to be an allegory with fish, turtles and other aquatic life representing the different people and forms of life I thought existed in Edna. For example, I was a tadpole who developed into a frog and then hopped my way to bigger waters; my enemies were the predatory fish who threatened the lives of all tadpoles. You get the drift, I'm sure.
My dream still endures, but I've put aside "The Stagnant Pond" for higher literary fare. But what I've come to realize is that that original idea (or maybe I should say the worldview that originally inspired that idea) endures on my current project. I'm very concerned with Poverty--and when I say "poverty" I don't mean just people with money, I mean all forms of poverty--spiritual, economic, mental, educational, etc.--that seem to be in overabundance in this day and age, particularly in the South. I witnessed this firsthand growing up in Edna and I'm so very thankful for the things I heard and saw. I learned that Poverty is most overt and apparent in those who live in poverty (big "P" versus little "p"). I developed an endless fascination with the most invisible elements of our society. There was a family back home (I'll call them the Hickeys for the purposes of this blog, and that is the name of the family I use in the book) who lived in the north part of the county and who everyone knew as poor, inbred scoundrels. The narrative was so pervasive that all you had to do was mention that name Hickey and images of run-down houses and cars, of unkempt hollowed-eyed children, of sister sleeping with brother, of petty crimes, etc. all came to mind whenever the name was mentioned. When I was living in Austin and in college, two good girl friends of mine lived together and they were so dirty and trashy--their place was always cluttered and filty, dust sat on the shelved, rotten food was sometimes in the fridge--that I called them the "Hickey Sisters". I made this joke not only to them but to all our friends and acquaintances from back home and it made everyone laugh hysterically, without any further explanation. Narratives are often deep and lasting for many of us, especially for those who grow up in the small-town south, and I'm fascinated by these narratives and how difficult they are to change or escape. This is especially true for those mired in Poverty.
The idea for my book emerges out of this concern and it centers on a nineteen year-old boy named Dickie who lives in a trailer house with his mother and her medically-afflicted dog, Lil Man. His father is long absent. His mother is a maid/dog keeper. They are under threat of being located to the public housing in the black part of town--a move which will forever seal their fate as "sub-human" elements of society. This is something Dickie is acutely aware and struggles against. The trick is--or tragedy, I should proabably say--is that although he is aware of what's happening to him and his family, he doesn't have the skills to overcome and is destined to commit the same acts that have long kept his family where they are. This is a generational story--there's the grandmother Nana, Aunt Cindy, and cousin Tate--who because of their Poverty have been reduced to the basest form of human beings. In their despair they cling to the most simple and basic things: a perverted version of Christianity, sex, a windvane. Because they live moment-to-moment, from dollar to dollar, they are unable to see past the here and now and can only reflect on the past and what's happened to them. And thus they are always forced to repeat. The cycle of Poverty, plain and simple.
It is this cycle that Dickie sees in his own mother, Beverly, who ran away from home at the age of sixteen. She did this because she had an awareness--the same one Dickie now has--that unless she takes bold action, she is destined forever to be cast as a Hickey and all the things that means. She had dreams and through his short life, Dickie has watched these dreams slowly whither and die to the point that she's left being a maid and servant to a woman who raises champion Boston Terriers. Beverly seeks validation through being associated with dogs who win trophies and even though she spends a good part of her week scraping up dog shit in kennels. Long-gone is her dream of baking fabulous wedding cakes.
Dickie is at a point where his awareness is growing. The crisis that's causing this is their impending eviction and removal to public housing, which is, in their minds, populated by nothing but black people. This is a project I've worked on for so long but which seems to always be just beyond my reach. While I've got a great setup, great characters, etc., I'm having problems with really knowing and understanding what these people yearn. That's the key: the yearning. Of course they yearn to have more money, to live in a better house, to be accepted, etc. etc., but how do these yearnings (I'm speaking for all the characters) manifest themselves in the world in which they live? I can't for the life of me figure this out and it's preventing me from figuring out the point-by-point plot of the book. So this blog is also created in an effort to keep my mental faculties strong, to be nimble with words.
In my experience, creative works don't emerge from just one place. A book isn't just a story that goes from point A to point B; it's an entire sensual experience, complete with sounds, smells, tastes, memories. Thus, it's important for me to keep all my creative abilities humming together harmoniously and so I've also re-taken-up oil painting and piano playing, which I'm sure I'll write more about in future posts. Blogging is fun!
