I love this so much! Not only because serendipity is my favorite word because it feels magical or mystical or like a gift from the gods. Thank you for sharing what inspired the poem and thank you for that tuned-in woman who noticed this! It makes it more fun that it wasn’t you that noticed!! Makes us all want to get out in the world and notice, create, and connect!!!
I remember when I was a modern dancer in high school that periodically a single move would infect everyone's choreography across the entire dance program-- a particular lift or jump or way of leaning in or reaching out. And it was all entirely unconscious, I think. We were all just on top of each other all the time, like puppies in a pile, and we couldn't help passing ideas around like a bad cold. Except it was good. A good cold?
The weird thing about writing, for me anyway, is how disembodied it is compared to that. I'm inspired by all sorts of authors I've never met and likely never will. Sometimes I don't even realize an idea or perspective has wormed it's way into my consciousness. It will just start popping in, and I have to really think about it. Like, where did that come from? All this to say, I don't have a clear answer to your question. Though I can say that your process has informed me. I'm now working on writing all the different stories in my memoir as discrete documents, even if they end up being contiguous in the end, so that once I have them all drafted I can more easily swap them around until I get the right order for the final draft.
I find that I can be writing or reading poetry on a particular theme or idea and then it turns out that the part of a novel or nonfiction book I’m reading are also looking at similar themes—but it’s entirely by chance I’m reading these alongside one other. It becomes like they’re in conversation with each other.
Your YCMTPB book inspired my recent spate of short story writing. Here’s one directly following, and quoting, your work:
Maggies Smith asks herself, in her divorce book, this same question several times, each time answering a little differently, helping the reader move along with her journey. Every book begins with an unanswerable question. What is mine?
What is my question as I write these words? And does it have to be unanswerable?
Perhaps my question is this. Why do we all walk around as if we are whole, as if everything is clear, and easy, and good. When inside we are, all of us, a little broken? Why do we share the masks we wear, when we are all so naked underneath, and it’s in the nakedness that we connect?
What unexpected, serendipitous connections have you noticed in your own life and work?
A woman who lost her love over 50 years ago is reconnected with her lover by photographs shortly before her own death because I wrote a book about my mother.
I knew only a few things about my mother: She was a rodeo performer in the 1930s, earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and lived with a woman companion who had a son my age. She was estranged from her family and left her companion to marry a man, then died shortly after when I was nine.
When I arranged the puzzle pieces of her life, I realized that my mother had most likely lived the early part of her life as a closeted lesbian. As part of my healing process, I wrote a novel inspired by her life. I used her name, Ruth, and the name of her companion, writing The Winter Loon, a story of a woman’s secrets and choices of who to love and how to define family.
Before publishing the novel, I decided I should see, just in case, if her companion was still alive. In 2016 she would have been in her 90s. What did we do before the internet? Yes, she was alive.
I always felt she had abandoned me after my mother died, but after writing the novel, I realized she had no choice. I was curious and called, reaching her son who said after 50 years, “Of course I remember you.” He told me his mother was okay physically but had late-stage Alzheimer’s. He encouraged me to visit since she might remember me. He lived with his mother, still on the Mojave, near the town where we grew up and went to school together.
I gathered all the photos I had of my mother and drove from Oregon to the desert. In her own way, she did remember me. I sat with her for two hours sharing the photos. I’d ask, “Do you know who this is?” She’d answer in a long-drawn-out voice, leaning forward, “Ruth,” pointing at her in the photo raising my hopes she’d tell a story. Then, lost in the tangle of compromised memories, she’d sit back in silence. I could tell she enjoyed the photos and left them with her.
The next day, her son and I drove to the canyon where we had lived as children. He seemed to have forgotten much of that period of his life and was moved to tears as I shared my memories without outing his mother. He called two weeks later to tell me his mother had died. She had held the photos in her lap as she spent her day in a wheelchair, and kept them on her bedside table at night.
Even though it was never spoken, can there be any doubt that our mothers were lovers in their youth?
I love this so much! Not only because serendipity is my favorite word because it feels magical or mystical or like a gift from the gods. Thank you for sharing what inspired the poem and thank you for that tuned-in woman who noticed this! It makes it more fun that it wasn’t you that noticed!! Makes us all want to get out in the world and notice, create, and connect!!!
I remember when I was a modern dancer in high school that periodically a single move would infect everyone's choreography across the entire dance program-- a particular lift or jump or way of leaning in or reaching out. And it was all entirely unconscious, I think. We were all just on top of each other all the time, like puppies in a pile, and we couldn't help passing ideas around like a bad cold. Except it was good. A good cold?
The weird thing about writing, for me anyway, is how disembodied it is compared to that. I'm inspired by all sorts of authors I've never met and likely never will. Sometimes I don't even realize an idea or perspective has wormed it's way into my consciousness. It will just start popping in, and I have to really think about it. Like, where did that come from? All this to say, I don't have a clear answer to your question. Though I can say that your process has informed me. I'm now working on writing all the different stories in my memoir as discrete documents, even if they end up being contiguous in the end, so that once I have them all drafted I can more easily swap them around until I get the right order for the final draft.
I find that I can be writing or reading poetry on a particular theme or idea and then it turns out that the part of a novel or nonfiction book I’m reading are also looking at similar themes—but it’s entirely by chance I’m reading these alongside one other. It becomes like they’re in conversation with each other.
Inspiration then a kind of dialogue between artists, writers, art and texts = magic.
Your YCMTPB book inspired my recent spate of short story writing. Here’s one directly following, and quoting, your work:
Maggies Smith asks herself, in her divorce book, this same question several times, each time answering a little differently, helping the reader move along with her journey. Every book begins with an unanswerable question. What is mine?
What is my question as I write these words? And does it have to be unanswerable?
Perhaps my question is this. Why do we all walk around as if we are whole, as if everything is clear, and easy, and good. When inside we are, all of us, a little broken? Why do we share the masks we wear, when we are all so naked underneath, and it’s in the nakedness that we connect?
What unexpected, serendipitous connections have you noticed in your own life and work?
A woman who lost her love over 50 years ago is reconnected with her lover by photographs shortly before her own death because I wrote a book about my mother.
I knew only a few things about my mother: She was a rodeo performer in the 1930s, earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and lived with a woman companion who had a son my age. She was estranged from her family and left her companion to marry a man, then died shortly after when I was nine.
When I arranged the puzzle pieces of her life, I realized that my mother had most likely lived the early part of her life as a closeted lesbian. As part of my healing process, I wrote a novel inspired by her life. I used her name, Ruth, and the name of her companion, writing The Winter Loon, a story of a woman’s secrets and choices of who to love and how to define family.
Before publishing the novel, I decided I should see, just in case, if her companion was still alive. In 2016 she would have been in her 90s. What did we do before the internet? Yes, she was alive.
I always felt she had abandoned me after my mother died, but after writing the novel, I realized she had no choice. I was curious and called, reaching her son who said after 50 years, “Of course I remember you.” He told me his mother was okay physically but had late-stage Alzheimer’s. He encouraged me to visit since she might remember me. He lived with his mother, still on the Mojave, near the town where we grew up and went to school together.
I gathered all the photos I had of my mother and drove from Oregon to the desert. In her own way, she did remember me. I sat with her for two hours sharing the photos. I’d ask, “Do you know who this is?” She’d answer in a long-drawn-out voice, leaning forward, “Ruth,” pointing at her in the photo raising my hopes she’d tell a story. Then, lost in the tangle of compromised memories, she’d sit back in silence. I could tell she enjoyed the photos and left them with her.
The next day, her son and I drove to the canyon where we had lived as children. He seemed to have forgotten much of that period of his life and was moved to tears as I shared my memories without outing his mother. He called two weeks later to tell me his mother had died. She had held the photos in her lap as she spent her day in a wheelchair, and kept them on her bedside table at night.
Even though it was never spoken, can there be any doubt that our mothers were lovers in their youth?