Writing From a Margin
May. 28th, 2021 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraIn a Paris Review interview conducted in 2011 when she was 80, Alice Munro confides this to her interlocutors:
What happens in old age can be just a draining away of interest in some way that you don’t foresee, because this happens with people who may have had a lot of interest and commitment to life…
It’s a feeling that the capacity for responding to things is being shut off in some way. I feel now that this is a possibility. I feel it like the possibility that you might get arthritis, so you exercise so you won’t. Now I am more conscious of the possibility that everything could be lost, that you could lose what had filled your life before. Maybe keeping on, going through the motions, is actually what you have to do to keep this from happening. There are parts of a story where the story fails. That’s not what I’m talking about. The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing.
Yes.
I’m only 69, and I’m already feeling it.
Very little seems important to me.
Some things I know must be important because at one time or another in my life, they mattered enough for me to turn them into a habit.
So, now I just do them without haggling about doing them when my mind asks, What is the point?
###
On the last Friday of every month, I play Lady Bountiful at the Hyde Park Free Food Pantry. We supplement the dented boxes of Hamburger Helper, and two-day-old bread, and off-brand peanut butter, and freezer-burned chickens with veggies, straight from the community garden. I’m having a bumper crop of lettuce this year, so I donate that. (I don’t much like lettuce myself. Lettuce is the foam peanuts of the salad world!)
Traditionally, the people queuing up in line have been women with children.
Last year, though, there were lots of men. And maybe ten times the usual number of people waiting for handouts.
This year, the line is almost entirely women again, and the line is much, much shorter.
This is how I know the economy is improving.
###
What else?
Yesterday was quite lovely and warm.
I brought a bunch of lettuce over to Neighbor Ed, and we ended up drinking coffee and chattering for a couple of hours or so—shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, the upcoming NYC mayoral election, the true origin of Covid-19, the meaning of happiness.
Neighbor Ed actually listens to me when I chatter. I know this because he frequently disagrees with me.
Usually, these kinds of talk fests energize me, make me feel bouncy, at one with a lively, kinetic, kaleidoscopically shifting universe.
But I have been in a mood these last few days. And while I know moods are all about brain chemicals, and that there are simple ways to shift brain chemicals—You want more dopamine? Beat someone at Words With Friends. You want more oxytocin? Pet a cat. Etcetera—I’ve been finding it quite difficult to break out of this mood, which feels, cumulatively, like I have given Great Offense to Something or Someone without intending to. I feel misunderstood. And quite, quite lost.
I tromped. (You want endorphins? Exercise.)
Then spent the rest of the afternoon curled up on one of the Adirondack chairs in the garden reading The View from Castle Rock.
This is the short story collection in which Alice Munro recreates the lives of her ancestors, going back to their lives in Ettrick in the Scottish marches.
The title story in which she recreates the ocean passage of the Laidlaw clan from the Old to the New World is particularly amazing.
In another part of that Paris Review interview, Munro notes:
The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal…
I came to feel that was our territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men’s territory. I don’t know how I got that feeling of being on the margins, it wasn’t that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin. I knew there was something about the great writers I felt shut out from, but I didn’t know quite what it was.
I suspect that’s the commonality that all great writers share.
They write from a margin.
What happens in old age can be just a draining away of interest in some way that you don’t foresee, because this happens with people who may have had a lot of interest and commitment to life…
It’s a feeling that the capacity for responding to things is being shut off in some way. I feel now that this is a possibility. I feel it like the possibility that you might get arthritis, so you exercise so you won’t. Now I am more conscious of the possibility that everything could be lost, that you could lose what had filled your life before. Maybe keeping on, going through the motions, is actually what you have to do to keep this from happening. There are parts of a story where the story fails. That’s not what I’m talking about. The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing.
Yes.
I’m only 69, and I’m already feeling it.
Very little seems important to me.
Some things I know must be important because at one time or another in my life, they mattered enough for me to turn them into a habit.
So, now I just do them without haggling about doing them when my mind asks, What is the point?
###
On the last Friday of every month, I play Lady Bountiful at the Hyde Park Free Food Pantry. We supplement the dented boxes of Hamburger Helper, and two-day-old bread, and off-brand peanut butter, and freezer-burned chickens with veggies, straight from the community garden. I’m having a bumper crop of lettuce this year, so I donate that. (I don’t much like lettuce myself. Lettuce is the foam peanuts of the salad world!)
Traditionally, the people queuing up in line have been women with children.
Last year, though, there were lots of men. And maybe ten times the usual number of people waiting for handouts.
This year, the line is almost entirely women again, and the line is much, much shorter.
This is how I know the economy is improving.
###
What else?
Yesterday was quite lovely and warm.
I brought a bunch of lettuce over to Neighbor Ed, and we ended up drinking coffee and chattering for a couple of hours or so—shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, the upcoming NYC mayoral election, the true origin of Covid-19, the meaning of happiness.
Neighbor Ed actually listens to me when I chatter. I know this because he frequently disagrees with me.
Usually, these kinds of talk fests energize me, make me feel bouncy, at one with a lively, kinetic, kaleidoscopically shifting universe.
But I have been in a mood these last few days. And while I know moods are all about brain chemicals, and that there are simple ways to shift brain chemicals—You want more dopamine? Beat someone at Words With Friends. You want more oxytocin? Pet a cat. Etcetera—I’ve been finding it quite difficult to break out of this mood, which feels, cumulatively, like I have given Great Offense to Something or Someone without intending to. I feel misunderstood. And quite, quite lost.
I tromped. (You want endorphins? Exercise.)
Then spent the rest of the afternoon curled up on one of the Adirondack chairs in the garden reading The View from Castle Rock.
This is the short story collection in which Alice Munro recreates the lives of her ancestors, going back to their lives in Ettrick in the Scottish marches.
The title story in which she recreates the ocean passage of the Laidlaw clan from the Old to the New World is particularly amazing.
In another part of that Paris Review interview, Munro notes:
The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal…
I came to feel that was our territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men’s territory. I don’t know how I got that feeling of being on the margins, it wasn’t that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin. I knew there was something about the great writers I felt shut out from, but I didn’t know quite what it was.
I suspect that’s the commonality that all great writers share.
They write from a margin.
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Date: 2021-05-28 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-29 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-30 03:37 am (UTC)Which I've just done and it's at the bottom of one of three perilously-piled towers of books in my office!
I should at least be able to tell when I read it because, at least in my house, piles of books are like tree rings in the reckoning of time, lol...