Weaving Threads

Bohemian Rhapsody

“I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me.”

Queen’s classic was the soundtrack to life (especially road trips) with our large-in-body-and-in-personality Maine Coon “starter child.” He was a very PRESENT kind of cat (not like the superior, aloof type); he met us at the door, slept with us, and was fairly sure he had equal say in everything we did.

Here he is in all his glory, holding court.

But he sometimes went nuts. Not just ordinary nuts, you know, but run-around-the-apartment-so-fast-that-he-could-race-halfway-up-the-wall kind of nuts. And he hated the car, erupting with deep-throated, belly-aching meows for the entire five-hour trip back home. Once, when “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on the radio, the husband and I cranked it up and sang at the top of our lungs to out-catterwall the cat. He got quiet. And forever after, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was his song.

That song just fit him–a chiaroscuro of moods.

And here he is stopping to smell the “roses” . . . before he beheads them.

Music does that–fits a person or a situation or a place–in real life and, for many writers, in their fiction, too. Some writers are kind enough to give a reader the “playlist” for their work. Charles DeLint almost always tells what he was listening to as he wrote; he introduced me to Holly Cole’s Dark Dear Heart and the awesome Celtic band Lunasa when I read his novel The Onion Girl. Neil Gaiman says in his Afterword to American Gods that “without Greg Brown’s Dream Cafe and the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs it would have been a different book.” His most recent and most beautiful The Ocean at the End of the Lane was written to the soundtrack of Magnetic Fields’ Love at the Bottom of the Sea and lots of Leonard Cohen.

You can learn something about a character when you find the music that “fits.” You can use the “right” music to transport you to where you need to go in a story.

For Bohemian Gospel, I needed go to the thirteenth century. I wanted to hear what my characters would hear. I found Neidhart: A Minnesinger and His “Vale of Tears” (a collection of songs written by a court musician in the late Middle Ages) on Spotify. (You can get a taste of it here.) I also listened to a variety of Gregorian Chants. But it was Laura Marling and Iron and Wine who sent me deep into Mouse’s head and heart to help me feel her struggles and her wants.

Apparently Hemingway listened to Bach. (He liked Maine Coons, too.)

I wonder what tunes inspired Faulkner.

(Clearly, he was more of a dog person.)

But then . . .

“He’s just a poor boy from a poor family.”

Medieval Mouse

I love how Stephen King, in On Writing (which you MUST read if you haven’t already), talks about the writing process as one of discovery, comparing it to an archaeologist finding just a bit of uncovered artifact in the dirt and then painstakingly sweeping away debris, not knowing what might lie underneath.

And then story emerges.

At a theater conference in Alaska several years ago, I had the privilege of hearing the acclaimed playwright, August Wilson, talk about the origins for his Pulitzer Prize winning play, Piano Lesson. He said it started with a line that came to him–“Old Sutter fell down a well.” Wilson didn’t know who was speaking, didn’t know who Sutter was, and certainly didn’t know if he was a victim of accident or murder. These were the questions that drove Wilson to discover Boy Willie and Berniece and their rich family history and the battles they fought against the ghosts of the past.

Here Wilson is against a backdrop of his discoveries–snippets of dialogue and questions and lists of character names scribbled on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper as his stories emerged.

I was on the road from Nashville back home to Arkansas when Mouse came to me–a flash of a vision as I stared blankly out at the flatlands covered in defoliated rows of cotton. In my mind, I saw a girl, dressed as a monk, looking out over a massive medieval battlefield (she was watching one man in particular–I’ll tell you about him later), and I knew her name: Mouse. I didn’t know why she had such a strange name or what the battle was, when it was, or who was fighting.

It took more than a year for Mouse to tell me her story.

I confess I felt a bit odd having these silent conversations in my head. Me: You know, I can’t write a book about a character named “Mouse.” So what’s your real name? Mouse: Mouse is the only name I’ve ever had. Me: Why? Mouse (shrugging): No one bothered to give me another.

But then I remembered Wilson talking about his play Seven Guitars, which was supposed to be about these seven male musicians–a MAN’s play. Wilson had a fairly routine daily writing practice–into the studio early, writing at a podium, finishing a certain word count, leaving a thread of something (dialogue, middle of scene, etc.) to pick up and follow the next morning. Well one day, he walks into the studio and heads to the podium when the dudes in the play ask “What’s she doing here?” Wilson looks up and sees a woman with a chicken and a radio sitting there.

He’s as baffled as anyone and asks her, somewhat belligerently, “What are you doing here?”

She replies, “I want my own space.”

Wilson heads back to the podium and starts over. During the rewrite, he discovers that two more women have come to “claim space” in what becomes his self-defined “MAN-WOMAN play.” So much for the guys and all their manliness.

That’s a writer’s journey of discovery–painstakingly uncovering the threads of narrative even when (especially when) they lead us (sometimes trepidatiously, sometimes resentfully) to unexpected places and people and experiences.

A great model for writing–you’re along for the ride, NOT driving the bus–and for life, too, I think.

Weaving What?

If you came here looking for craft projects or how-tos on actual weaving, I am sorry to disappoint you. I am a crafty girl, and I suppose I could weave if we survived an apocalypse and I needed to make my own cloth. But mostly, I’m a writer and what I weave are stories.

I am also a secular-homeschooling mom (of two) and a college professor. I thought about calling the blog Spinning Plates or Three Rings in the Circus because, yeah, that’s my life. But plates and rings are inflexible things, separate and in their own little spheres. (Plus those fragile plates, up high, wobbling–anyone can see where that’s headed.) I like to think that the roles I play interact with each other–my experiences as a homeschooler change how I shape my college classes, what happens to me as mom and prof enrich my writing, and my writing fundamentally changes everything.

So . . . weaving.

Eudora Welty called the source of her stories, the patterns of her narrative, confluence—you know, when rivers merge but keep their distinctiveness even as they become something new. Like this:

Welty saw the world as an ethereal, fluid landscape that brought together past, present, and future; her experiences and research and imagination and the feel of words in her mouth and the meanings of them in her mind working like magic to weave author and characters and readers into the same narrative tapestries.

Confluence/weaving makes a nice, organic, flexible pattern for seeing the world and all the stories in it and how they (and we) all touch each other if we can only learn to follow the threads.

And so here I mean to follow the threads of the writing life, of teaching writing, of living while writing. If you’re a writer, I hope we can inspire each other. A homeschooler? I hope we offer each other encouragement. If you’re a teacher, I hope you’re a life-long learner like me and that we can share ideas.

“All serious daring starts from within.”–Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings.

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