Can creativity help us to embrace death?

My interest in fairy tales has been revived from reading my journals from forty years ago. At that time, I was investigating the art fairy tale. The Grimm’s fairy tales grew out of the oral tradition, but ones that Hans Christian Andersen and others wrote are part of the art fairy tale genre. I was interested then in exploring that mode in my own writing. I’d discovered that some of the stories I’d created fit there. Discovering this accepted category had heartened me to be do more of them and to believe in their worth.

I also was learning to respect my own writing process. It’s curious what happens at times when I’m writing. Feeling stuck, I’ll get fed up with the piece and believe it’s awful, not worth pursuing. But then I’ll get insight into what needs to come next, as with one story I’m working on, “The Doll,” and the text opens up again. I constantly need to remind myself that this is a normal process when I’m creating stories.

I wish that writing poetry was as much of a habit for me as eating or writing in my diary. I experience a deep sadness because so many incidents are lost to whatever poetic insight I may possess. Marketing my books, which means keeping an active presence in social media and other areas, takes up so much time (as does teaching memoir!), I’m left with little time to reflect much on life in a vital way.

But I’m also feeling delighted with the books I’m currently reading. They continue to help me find my way and to write. John Gardner, one such writer, is someone I’ve rediscovered. And it’s why he was so influential years ago when I read his The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers and Writing, and On Moral Fiction. He became my muse, and I wanted to read everything he’d written. That included his charming children’s stories.

I so wanted to emulate the voice that came through in them and his style of writing. His work also validated being a children’s author, which, at that time, I feared pegged me in a certain category that I didn’t want for myself. So now I’m picking it up again and re-examining the pieces I wrote then but never published. In my old age, I’ll finally become a children’s author!

I’m reminded of the interviews I also read then in the Paris Review with key writers. They inspired me and gave me direction. Joan Didion’s process of writing a novel struck a chord, especially since I’d been overwhelmed by the thought of writing one. She wrote in scenes and then put them together later.  I could get excited about scenes, whereas I’m still intimidated by the thought of writing a full-length story or novel, even though I’ve published four of them. Scenes give me the freedom to develop interesting things that strike me. After rereading some of Joan Didion’s interviews, I went for my walk, excited by the thought of, once again, just writing and enjoying the doing of it, exercising my talent, being haunted.

I’m also reminded of Joyce Carol Oates’ description of what happens when a writer finds her subject matter. She says, “I tell my students to write their true subjects. How will they know when they are writing of their true subjects? The ease by which they write. By their reluctance to stop writing. By the heady, even guilty, joyous sensation of having done something that must be done, having confessed emotions thought unconfessable, having said what had seemed should remain unsaid. If writing is difficult, stop writing. Begin again with another subject. The true subject writes itself, it cannot be silenced. Give shape to your dreams. Cultivate your daydreams and their secret meanings will come out.”

I hope all of my writing friends who read my blog have found their true subjects and will bring many new works to birth in this new year of 2024. I’m still finding my true subjects and am looking forward to uncovering children’s stories that adults also will enjoy reading. Saying this removes some of the darkness that may be awaiting us in this new year.

Having this to look forward to makes any potential health or other problems fade: as long as I have this creative life going, the problems can be integrated. Anything can be tolerated. Even the prospect of death itself: I have this fantasy of death approaching and me being so busy writing that I have to be carried off in the middle of a story!