My friend Maggie Thach was kind enough to tag me in the Writing Process Blog Tour. You can check out her answers to these very same questions on Jim Ruland’s blog.
Here we go:
What are you working on?
Well, I gave birth just two months ago. So there’s the writing I did before Everest was born, and then there’s what I’ve been doing lately, and the Grand Canyon sits in between. I can’t even see the other side from here.
Pre-baby: A memoir. Essays. The occasional short story.
Post-baby: Sleep. Grocery lists. Little bits of this and that. Finding things that rhyme with “Go to sleep.”
I’d like to say I’m working on more, but finding an hour of quiet, hands-free time now is like spotting a unicorn in the wild. During those rare, lovely moments when Everest is napping, I have a decision to make: Do I sleep? Do some housework? Should I chip away at the marketing work that gives me a paycheck? Or write something creative that might result in payment eventually?
Housework usually wins, since I need clean dishes and laundry and such. The marketing work is a close second, because money is good. The creative work suffers the most.
Honestly, I should sleep more. I should be sleeping right now. I am so tired.
Also he should sleep more.
Why do you write what you do?
My mom. I was a writer before my mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, but her disease added a deeper purpose and a sense of urgency to my writing. It also changed how I live my life. Knowing that the disease might be genetic, I made a conscious decision to experience more while I still could and capture those moments on the page — and that’s pretty much the whole story of my memoir.
Also because Alzheimer’s steals so much from a person, I wanted to give my mom the dignity of being remembered. This book is my way of maintaining her presence in the world. I didn’t want her to be like a Monet in the attic, something beautiful that is never seen again.
How does your work differ from the other works in the some area/genre?
My story is not quite a travel memoir and not quite a grief memoir. It’s something in between, and it’s different because it’s mine.
It was devastating to witness the degeneration of my mom — as each day moved forward, she was erased a little more — but it was also transformative for me. Watching her die helped me learn how to live. I didn’t want to put things off anymore. I had to see the world, love radically, and collect memories. And in the process, I wanted to honor my mom by living out her dreams.
So I spent one year backpacking to 18 countries around the world, hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, whitewater rafting down the Nile, praying at an ashram in India, tending to abused elephants in Thailand, volunteering at a monkey park in the jungles of Bolivia, fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt. My trip was made mostly solo, and it involved quitting my longtime journalism career, losing all sense of security, and leaving my newlywed husband in California for the first year of our marriage. It also meant rediscovering home and what it means to be part of a family.
How does your writing process work?
I don’t have a process anymore. In the two months since Everest arrived, all red-faced and hollering, I’ve felt the itch to write but I haven’t had much luck actually doing it. Some of it is a time issue, since this kid is super needy and refuses to pull his own weight around here — but mostly I can’t string together coherent thoughts anymore. My brain is blurry, and my hormones are pinging around like crazy. So I’ve been keeping notes, lists and snippets of things on my iPhone, things to tackle later when the mom fog dissipates and my body returns to normal.
Also he is loud. Have I mentioned that? It’s hard to write when your ear drums are shattered.
Yep.
At first I felt guilty about not writing. Then I remembered an amazing conversation I had with Attica Locke, back when I was eleventy months pregnant and about to pop. She said to put the work on a shelf. Let it sit there for a few months, maybe more. Focus on taking care of my baby and taking care of myself. “The work will wait,” she said. “The baby won’t.”
So that’s where I reside now. I can only handle one thing at a time that is demanding to be fed. Right now it’s a human. Eventually it’ll be my book.
Continuing the blog tour: I tag Heather Scott Partington and Leigh Raper, both incredible writers and friends from my MFA program.
About Heather: Heather Scott Partington was raised in California’s central valley. She teaches high school English and lives in Elk Grove, California, with her husband and two kids. Her writing has appeared at The Rumpus, Bookslut, The Nervous Breakdown and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Heather holds an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Campus.
About Leigh: Leigh Raper writes both fiction and non-fiction and sometimes posts on her blog about pop culture at leighraper.com. Her work has appeared at Spilt Infinitive and in the Best of Spilt Anthology and on The Coachella Review blog. She is slightly obsessed with television, rocks out to classic ’80s hair metal, and plays fetch with a wicked smart Labrador Retriever. She lives in the hamlet of Palisades, NY, on a rural postal route 12 miles north of New York City.