Hello, readers. I wrote the post below before Good was murdered. Good was murdered. I have read the articles, the defense by MAGA, the responses from newspapers around the world by reporters who watched all the videos, and comments from all sides. It is not a capital offense to slowly drive away from someone—even if those someones were police officers, which they weren’t. Not even then is it okay to shoot someone three times in the head… and people bragging about it? This isn’t my country, the country founded on the ideals of respecting every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But here, what I was worried about before:

A couple of things: I am reading Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen, and this morning I found Allison K. Williams’s post “There Is No Closure: Stop Organizing and Start Writing” was in my feed on Tuesday. Despite a rich life deeply engaged in literature or because of that, Allison K. Williams wants closure with her writing.

They connected in my experience.

More than twenty-five years ago, in the summer of 2000, I arrived for the last time at The Flight of the Mind. It was my fifth workshop there and Gish Jen was the mentor/instructor of my group. She was a kind and generous workshop-leader. I learned a lot from her and wrote something good that year—that happened every year at Flight because it was an amazing opportunity to write. I remember Gish telling the story of how she came to be born in America. She said the State Department would not allow her father to leave the country and take his scientific background home to China. He was furious about this and refused citizenship for most of his life. That’s the way I recall the story but it’s not quite the story I find in this novel. The names are here, but Jen admits up front that she’s guessing and making stuff up. Even so, Bad bad Girl is payback to bad mothering, to imperfect, failed mothering. I’ve not finished the novel, but I am promised resolution and forgiveness. [I’m on page 239 or 324 this morning.] That the main character in this story mostly blames her mother for her awful childhood is typical. Somehow, it is always the mother who suffers the greatest burden of blame. In a recent memoir, Sherman Alexie* blames his sad childhood on the mother who slept on the couch and worked a job and sold home-stitched quilts in order to feed her children, not the alcoholic father who had to be picked up and carried home from bars stinking of sweat and vomit. The father mostly gets forgiven in this story too, though he’s the one who actually beats the backs of his daughter’s legs until she is bleeding and bruised and unable to attend PE for months. Her mother, a thesis shy of her PhD, clearly depressed, and eventually teaching 3rd grade to make ends meet, holds her daughter in place for this beating and isn’t apologizing. Like her husband, she favors the oldest son, a favoritism the mother herself experienced, a favoritism both mother and daughter recognize is deeply ingrained in tradition.

That’s the novel with “some truth to it” that I am reading. [It’s good so far.]

The Brevity blog post is something else. Allison K. Williams wants to complete a novel, but feels obligated to others’ writing first. She has set her own writing aside again and again in order to complete work on clients’ work first. Her book intrudes on her thoughts, nags and demands to be finished. She sets it aside. She contrasts the daily obligations we all experience with that need to complete creative work.

The closure of folding that laundry or running that errand, a task that can be checked off on a list, feels more satisfying in the short term. Writing my own work has no defined deadline and no definite destination.

No closure.

…Closure is the bane of every writer’s existence.—Allison K. Williams

Feeling it’s done, finding readers, and letting go. (It’s wise to remind ourselves that the laundry is never “done.” There is tomorrow. That’s also true for writers.)

I know the struggle to balance the expectations of others and to decide when something is complete or impossible, when to continue revising and when give up and move on. When I was teaching, I always put my students’ work before my own. I put all that work before teaching my older son to sew when he asked, but mostly our sons came first. I meant for that to be true but I think sometimes they didn’t feel that. I encouraged their interests, helped with school work, allowed their friends to trash the house. I was not a perfect mother; I could be harsh and impatient and distracted, but neither was I the sort of mother Gish Jen describes.

There was always so much to do! Even now…

The writing demands to be finished. A couple of years ago, a literary journal published a story I first drafted in 2004, and this past year another journal published a story that I began in 1991 in a graduate lit class taught by Shelley Reece, who allowed me to hand in fiction in place of an essay. My essays were solid, my fiction was new. Tony Wolk read that story too, but it would be thirty-odd years before that story was finished and published. I am quick, sometimes, with a first draft. It seems that figuring out the work can take decades. I have written several novels (five? six?) and had to set each aside. I had other obligations; the work was more than I could manage. My mother died.

One of my most painful memories is Mom holding up the manuscript of my second novel, flipped open to her marker on page 34, and asking, “Is something going to happen soon? Is there going to be a murder or something, because I don’t see the point.” She was annoyed, impatient. I told her no murder, only family drama, and took back my pages. She never apologized. I was once harsh about a scene in my son’s book. I hope I apologized. I hope he might forgive me for repeating the sins of my mother. I think it’s something parents do. No excuse, but explanation.

Gish Jen’s mother never apologized and that mother, like mine, has died, and, like mine, without answering all the questions her daughter had for her. I am familiar. My mother rarely answered questions. But then in her last months, her censor was careless and I figured out a few details. (Her “terrible” father didn’t remarry until after my grandmother remarried. He worked hard to maintain a relationship with his daughters, celebrating holidays and sharing music. All the years her step-dad cared for my bedridden grandmother—carrying her up and down stairs, bringing her coffee each morning in bed before heading to work—her daughters never once offered respite. Mom was “not good with sick people” she said, and the only memories of her care when I was ill as a child were juice and television and calamine lotion. But she took me to art lessons and was my first and in some ways my best editor.)

Allison reminds me to let things go. Make space from everything that pulls us from the writing. “We owe our writing that space. That stretched time of not-knowing, of wondering if we’ll ever be good enough, if we’ll ever solve that scene, finish that chapter.” It’s arrogance to think we are the only ones with answers. “Look at a giant pile of things you can fix and say, ‘Wow, that’s going to be a tough one, good luck!’ to someone less-capable than yourself.”

Like the writing that won’t let go, like the daily chores we call done and then must do again tomorrow and the day after, like the story that demands complete attention when that attention is necessarily divided, true closure is still waiting.

I don’t have that work and parenting excuses anymore. Repairing our rental is necessary if we are to pay our bills, but she’s still right. Look around. What have others done? What can be done in the hours I am not sanding and scrubbing and repairing and painting?

Reading books. I recently ordered a hard copy of a friend’s first book (SIFT by Alisa Hattman, published by The 3rd Thing) that I read as a digital ARC (Advance Reading Copy). I dislike reading books online and wanted to finally have Alisa’s surreal novel in my hands. The feeling of the thick french flaps and the gorgeous cover graphic by Barbara Earl Thomas (a fellow Flight alum) made me hunger for such closure.

I have set stories aside for years because kind rejections are still rejections and I have written entire novels will never be published and set them aside—maybe I can still fix them? It’s happened, after all.

For the sake of closure, this time I’ve set an arbitrary closing date for ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING. I will self-publish this summer, mostly because I want only to hold it in my hands. I will print 100 copies only because that’s the minimum allowed at some presses. In August, I’ll put them into envelopes and send them off. (Some few copies will actually be read or reread.)

I know Mom was a good mother, not perfect, but doing the best she could. She loved me and I still miss her and love her. Like writing, mothering is a process. She was a wonderful grandmother.

DAUGHTERS is complete. Maybe. Sixty thousand words might be the sweet spot or only the place allowing me to stop. I owe people closure: editors, friends who read and commented, authenticity readers. Myself.

.

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* Sherman Alexie made my husband cry. Alexie wrote and printed out his shortest book on one of my yearbook computers—he had all those poetic pages in his head. Amazing. It’s been over thirty years since he spoke to my students and my community. Alexie said, “I have naked pictures of your mother.” Gary responded, “I’d like to see them.” My mother-in-law had recently died. Gary claims he’s long gotten over their exchanges during the evening community reading. I haven’t.