Carrie Lamanna

practicing the art of resistance writing

If I write this…

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Several months ago I took Isabel Abbott’s Unapologetic Writing class. I was trying to unlearn all the negative lessons I had internalized about what truths it was appropriate to speak and write. I wrote a lot and kept it all to myself. Most of what I produced was process writing—writing to help me work through the hurt and the anger and the fear. One piece emerged as a manifesto of sorts for my unapology—my taking back of apologies past and writing what needs to be written. It’s not a graceful poem, but it’s jarringly true, and at this moment that’s what counts.

photo of handwritten version of the poem in this post

If I write this
you might not like me anymore
and I might not care
because I might not be the same.

I might go out and get a tattoo
smoke too many cigarettes
drink gin and lie down in the street naked
if I write this

I might remember the way they grabbed me
out of the long line of girls returning from gym class
pulled me behind the stage and held me down
on a table there to hold props.
Till I screamed and they ran.
I might remember my clothes
thrown at me as he ordered me to get out
his laughter as he said no on would want me now.

I might remember I am broken, angry,
not fit for the PTA and garden parties.
if I write this
I might go out in the rain and dig in the dirt
ripping up roots of deep buried weeds
waiting to rise up in place of all I have planted with my soft hands.

If I write this
I will know that feeling
the one that seeps in at night,
that surrounds me in the shower like tiptoeing fingers of doom
that makes me mutter “shut up” to the empty room.

If I write this
I can’t stuff it at the bottom of the hamper with the bloody sheets and come to dinner.

If I write this
you will have to know with me because I won’t remember to be silent anymore.

Anxiety is a dirty little liar that will steal your life

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Here’s the dirty little secret about anxiety. It creates your fears and then pretends to keep you safe from them. Like an abusive partner, anxiety says you are a loser, that no one really likes you or loves you, that nobody’s really your friend, that everyone is using you, pretending to like you. Everyone, of course, except your anxiety. Anxiety says it will protect you because it is the only one who really knows you, cares for you, loves you.

At first you try not to believe your anxiety when it tells you to skip the party, cancel that lunch date, ignore that job opportunity because it will only end badly. So you go to the party but spend most of the time in the bathroom or standing in the corner intently scanning the books on the shelf  and hoping no one will notice you. You apply for the job, but tell yourself you don’t really want it. You have lunch with your friend, but when she asks how things are going, you say everything is great and blather on about the weather, the food, that new TV show. It’s safer that way. People can’t hurt you if they can’t get close. But then, anxiety moves closer. It fills the void like carbon monoxide, tucks you in, lulls you to sleep, and then smothers you with the blanket. It’s banal until it’s deadly.

At least, that’s how it is for me. Sometimes I don’t leave the house for days. I cocoon myself in projects that justify my solitude. I clean and organize the kitchen cupboards, the bedroom closet, or my desk. In springtime, I consume myself with weeding and pruning the garden. I am desperate to be alone, just me and my anxiety that whispers, “I will protect you.” Even the prospect of making a simple phone call can send me fleeing to a pile of rubble in the back of the closet, which in my mind, must be organized right now. That phone call will have to wait.

When I was young, my favorite part of swimming lessons was learning to dive. Most of the kids were afraid to plunge into the water headfirst. They would stand at the edge of the diving board and balk at the last second, which often led to bellyflops, coughing, and flailing arms. I longed to break the water with my outstretched arms, to make way for my head to enter, and for water to fill up my ears. The indoor pool was so noisy. The echoing voices of parents and kids, instructors shouting in order to be heard, and the constant shrill blast of their whistles. All of it went away the moment I entered the water. I learned to dive so deep I would touch the bottom with the palms of my hands, right myself and then push off the floor with my feet to return to the surface. And every time I wondered how long could stay under without drowning? How long could I shut out the world? Would anyone notice if I failed to resurface? Would I want them to?

My anxiety has been on the verge of bubbling over for months now. I’ve used the spring cleaning and gardening tasks, real and imagined, as a means to stay safe from real human interaction including ones I’ve deliberately sought out. The result is that I am heading off to my annual writing retreat with no writing to share. Every time I sat down to work on my submission, anxiety told me it was safer to do the laundry or organize the bookshelves. The thing you have to know to understand the  nonsensicalness of this is that this writing group is comprised of the kindest, most supportive and generous readers and human beings a writer could ask for. So who or what was my anxiety protecting me from? Where was it conjuring up this fear from? As I asked myself these questions, I found myself going back to a quote from Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers:

A part of you is refusing to write, and if that part of you is so strong that it is calling the shots, you had better start listening to it. Find out why it refuses. That ‘it’ is you.

“That ‘it’ is you.” The kindness I know from these writers exposed my anxiety for the fraud it is. My anxiety was keeping me safe from myself, from the part of me that experienced past hurts and makes me fear future ones. My anxiety convinced me I not only had to hide from the world but also from myself. Deep down it’s not the sharing that keeps me from writing, but the opening up to myself about the hurt that is necessary for the writing to happen in the first place. My anxiety has been calling the shots for years, keeping me from family, friends, and myself. It’s the shadow surrogate of all who have injured me, pushing me deeper and deeper underwater, drowning me in the false security that I can out-swim the hurt with silence.

This is painful to write, but it’s the pain of sucking in air after rising up from the depths. The only alternative to the pain is death. Next week I will arrive at my retreat where the pool is not deep enough for diving and a porch full of friends watch over you while you swim. It is my chance to keep writing, keep breathing, and trusting that there are people who won’t let you drown.

view of the writing retreat center porch and pool

 

Writing in traumatic times: Thoughts after one week in Trump’s America

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Ursula Le Guin’s viral quote from her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards has become the mantra for the writing group I belong to:

We will need writers who can remember freedom.

For many Americans, last Wednesday morning felt like the end of freedom. I know it felt that way for me. I tried to go about my daily routine. I took the kids to school, checked in with my clients, put the dishes away, brushed my teeth, but I did it all with a sense that there had been a fundamental shift in what it meant to be an American—that daily life was now just a thin veneer covering over a great rift valley. I cried a lot. When I finally sat down at my computer to work, I found myself on Facebook because that is where my friends were. We were all there compulsively reading and sharing every article we could find that might offer a way to make sense of Trump’s victory. And we kept asking one another the same question: What do we do now? In the days that followed, as the tears subsided and we turned toward collective action—rallies, protests, petitions, donations to progressive organizations—I kept going back to Le Guin’s quote and the advice my writing group leader gave the group the morning after the election:

We have to write through this.

Because there is no other way. Writing helps us make sense of a traumatic world. I began by reading the words of others. Then I wrote some of my own. I wrote angry screeds I didn’t share with anyone. I wrote comments on like-minded friends posts to work through my feelings and lend support. I read more articles. Then I began responding to comments on my posts that came from Trump supporters. If their comment indicated a desire for dialogue, I responded. If someone was hostile, I asked them to step off because, well, that guy who told me if I didn’t like Trump I was unAmerican and could get the hell out, well, fuck that guy. As I told him, every day of this presidential campaign I have been wearing my grandfather’s World War II Navy dog tags. I wear them to remind myself that he went to war to fight against the kind of fascist hate that Donald Trump represents. This is why our internment of Japanese Americans during the war is so painful for our nation to confront. It exposes our hypocrisy. At the exact moment we were fighting hate and xenophobia abroad we practiced it at home because we allowed our fears to rule our national policies.

My grandfather's World War two dog tags

Wearing his name around my neck also reminds me of a story he told me when I was young. My grandfather was the child of Italian immigrants. They were poor, and he went to work in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania at age 13 to help provide for the family and worked there all his life. When he was an adult worker his mine hired a new foreman, a man from England. During this foreman’s first role call of his new workers, he called out my grandfather’s name. When he answered the foreman looked him up and down and said “Lamanna, huh? I hope your papers are in order.” To this my grandfather replied, “I was born here. I hope your papers are in order!” He was lucky he wasn’t fired on the spot. But the foreman knew the solidarity between the miners as workers was greater than their allegiance to their individual ethnic backgrounds. The Appalachian miners who had long roots in that region of the country were not going to abandon the immigrant miners and side with the bigoted foreman. I am not arguing that there were no bigots or xenophobes in that group. There were likely many. I’m arguing there is power in solidarity. Power when we recognize that when one of us is threatened, all of us are threatened. Whites who voted for Trump gave into their racism (because we all have it), their xenophobia, their fears, and abandoned their fellow Americans.

So no, I won’t get the hell out. Just because my family’s whiteness and citizenship is no longer questioned—because I had the privilege of assimilating, a privilege not extended to non-white, non-Christian immigrants, a privilege never extended to African Americans whose roots in America go back as far as any white person’s, a privilege Native Americans extended to white settlers who then betrayed that trust by systematically stripping indigenous communities of their rights and humanity—I will not use it as an escape route. I will not abandon those who are directly threatened by Trump’s America. I will stand with them in any way they ask me to. It is time for those of us who want to be white allies to start listening to the oppressed in this country. They must be our leaders in this fight.

Here are some things I am doing right now to get started.

Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

The poetry of an ordinary life

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It’s been almost a year and a half since I began my obsession with Marie Howe‘s poetry. She has a way of revealing the emotional meaning of everyday moments and objects by focusing on their materiality. She doesn’t turn away from the ordinary in favor of the philosophical because the meaning is in the thing itself. The description on the back cover of her book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time sums up this idea:

Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her child down the playground slide, the speaker in in these poems wonders: What is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy.

In the Catholic Church, Ordinary Time is the part of the liturgical calendar not part of the Christmas or Easter season. In other words, Ordinary Time is most of the time. And it is not a time of insignificance where our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual life stops or slows down. Nor is it simply a time of preparation for the holidays, the special times. It is where we live and love and die through the folding of laundry and cleaning of sinks. It is where we come to know God and ourselves. Whenever I need reminding of this, I listen to Howe read her poem, “The Gate.”

I am participating in Andrea Scher’s Brave Blogging course, and one of the lessons included an interview with poet Maya Stein, whose 10-Line Tuesday poems reminded me of a writing practice Howe assigns to her students. Both require the poet to place a singular focus on an object or moment without turning away. Stein uses the limits of only ten lines to maintain her focus. Howe requires her students to come to each class with one sentence describing something they saw or otherwise experienced through the senses, and they must write that sentence without the use of metaphor—they must focus on the thing itself, they cannot turn away, they cannot intellectualize or explain. Only after they master this practice of describing things can they use these things as metaphors for something else.

This writing practice of staying with the thing itself is much like meditation. Meditation asks the practitioner to stay with whatever feelings arise without trying to explain them because the act of explaining is a form of distancing, of easing the the intensity of both pain and joy.

On May 16, the Church will enter its long stretch of Ordinary Time that lasts until the Christmas season begins in November. While I love Easter and the rebirth of earth and spirit that happens in Spring, it is all for naught if we can’t figure out how to live in the ordinary time of Summer and Fall, of growth and harvest, because if we can’t we starve. So I am preparing for ordinary time by following Howe’s assignment to write one sentence each day describing something from my ordinary life. My goal is to work up to a point where I can reflect on the materiality of my life half as beautifully as Stein does in an inch of vinegar:

You’re saving it, apparently, for a salad you keep forgetting to make.
In the bathroom’s mirrored cabinet, a flick of nail polish left at the bottom
of a small glass jar. There’s a rumpled bag in the garage holding a clutch of dirt
that will likely not root the plant you’ve yet to purchase from the garden store.
These leavings, these leftovers, this clinging to the maybe useful – the house
is full of both optimism and neglect, a store of Lilliputian portions
incapable of meeting your large and shifting demands. The coupons
you are so scrupulously stockpiling. The last dregs of living room paint.
A spool of thread down to its final three loops. A candle with less than an hour left
you hold onto, nevertheless, certain you will need that light somewhere.

In the meantime, I’ll continue training myself to be fully present with the ordinary.

plates, cups, and piles of paper
An empty mug stained with the morning’s coffee and crumbs from a cookie stolen from the Easter basket sit next to the piles of things that live on the table each day until dinner.

© 2017 by Carrie Lamanna Writing, LLC

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