Category: Writing

Fathers

9/8/2013

At our readings, after we have shared excerpts of our stories, we invite the audience to ask questions. Inevitably, someone wants to know whether the four of us would consider writing another book together — and how do we feel about the topic of fathers?

My response has always been “never,” but recently I’m not so sure.

My mother has been dead for sixteen years. My father is eighty-four and still lives in the house where I grew up. But even though it’s just minutes from where I live, I rarely see him. My relationship with him was painful, difficult, damaging. Yet something has changed since he read our book.

Although I had been writing stories about my mother for years, it terrified me to publish them, mostly because of the thought that my father might read them. I never told him I’d written them, and when our book was published, I didn’t tell him about it. But somehow he found out. And without my knowing, he asked my brother to order a copy for him, and he read it.

One day he called and told me. He said that he admired my honesty, and that he was shocked at some of the things he had never known about me. He apologized for not being a better father. Then he asked if he could buy seven more copies to send to family and friends.

I brought the books to him, and we sat at his dining room table. He thumbed through his copy and read a few passages aloud. I listened to my words being spoken by my father. He read softly, slowly, and with gentleness. He was not angry. He was sorry.

Since that day we have been talking, hesitantly, and in circles, around the things we know but cannot yet say. This is a man who had hurt me, a man I feared. Now when I’m with him, I am nervous but not quite scared. Neither of us knows where we are headed. Maybe some day I will write about where we end up.

~Vicki Addesso

0 Comments

On Second Thought

7/30/2013

0 Comments

It wasn’t until my mother’s second reading of my section of our book that she told me it made her sad. The first time she read it (as I waited for days, edgy and unsettled, terrified about how it might make her feel), she seemed to like it. “Some of the early scenes were a little upsetting,” she said on the telephone, “but it ended up so nicely.”

I tried not to think about the brash histories I’d written and my damning observations: my mother’s submission in the face of my father’s temper, the persistent yearning I carried for an emotional connection with her, and my often misguided activities as a young woman that I insinuated were the result of her passivity. But my mother was happy that our book had been published, and she bought copies to give to her friends.

Then, a few months later, without my knowing, she read it again. This time, she told me she felt bad about the kind of mother she’d been to me. She wasn’t angry; she didn’t try to defend herself. She knew it was all true, and it filled her with regret. “I wish I had a second chance,” she said.

I sat holding the phone, reeling. I searched frantically for words to obliterate the sentences I’d written. “Oh, that? That’s not really what I meant,” I wanted to say, but how could I? I’d written exactly what I’d meant. What had I been thinking?

The fact was, I hadn’t been thinking — not about how my mother would react to my stories. I put her aside while I was writing. It was the only way I could be honest in how I presented my past.

My mother’s response was to be expected. What saved me was the way our story ended: she and I finding each other, establishing the kind of mother-daughter relationship that had been thwarted decades earlier. She was redeemed, and so was I.
~Susan Hodara

0 Comments

The True Line

5/22/2013

4 Comments

As I recall the scene, my two sisters and I are standing side by side on a ridge overlooking red cliffs and desert sands in an Arizona recreation area close to the border of Nevada, where my sister Abby lives with her husband. We are there to spread our mother’s ashes, which Abby had been holding on to until the three of us decided what to do with them.

In my memory, we open the bag of ashes and take turns flinging them over the ridge, but the breeze blows some back to us, where they settle on our faces and clothing. I can hear my sister Linda saying something kind of mystical about this being a signal from our mother, and that’s what I related in the story I wrote in our book.

But after Abby read the story, she told me Linda hadn’t said that at all, that what she did say was a piece of ash had gotten under her contact lens. I like that remark. It’s more specific than my vague spiritual recollection, and it reflects Linda’s self-absorption. If I’d remembered the line—and if Linda actually said it—I’d have used it in my story.

My sister Abby has a different memory of the same event. She believes what I remember didn’t happen. I can’t change what seems true to me; I can’t adopt someone else’s memory because it would make a better story. So the contact lens line will be lost to history, only to appear in the deleted e-mail I got from Abby when she questioned my version of the incident.
~Joan Potter

4 Comments

Guilt

4/8/2013

6 Comments

I was writing about a night when my mother was drinking heavily. She was telling me a story I had never heard before, a secret about her own mother. I sat at my computer and typed, but I wondered: why am I writing this? I felt ashamed, guilty, not because of what my mother was saying and doing in this piece, but because I was writing it.

What belongs to me? What am I allowed to reveal?

I feel safer with fiction. There I can disguise, exaggerate, maneuver people and events into place and have it all make sense. Life isn’t like that. You have to take what you get and it doesn’t always make sense. My mother was a good mother, but on the night I was writing about I didn’t think that. I wanted her to stop drinking; I wanted her to be quiet.

When I read this piece in our writing group I was nervous. I thought, “I am making a mistake.” I was ruining the mother I had been sharing with the others those past months. When I finished reading they were quiet at first. Then Joan said she felt sorry for my mother. Susan found our intimacy touching. They seemed to understand; they did not judge her.

We talked about the writing. I listened, took notes, crossed out words or whole sentences.

But what I really needed to know was this: am I allowed to betray her?

~Vicki Addesso

6 Comments

A Writer's Gang

3/23/2013

0 Comments

I have an armchair in my office. It’s a comfortable spot in which to read, research, and reflect, but my Aussie mix sleeps in it just about every day while I write, unless she’s unlucky and one of my other two dogs grabs the chair first. It’s prime property. I’ve lost out. Do I care?

The truth is, if my dogs need a place to rest, sleep, or simply keep an eye on me while I write, that’s fine with me. They are accustomed to being close to me and have learned to take long naps either in the chair or on their two beds near my desk. Whenever I jump up, they’re quick to wag their tails as if in approval of whatever I’ve just written. If they hear the doorbell ring or the UPS truck at the gate, they’ll run downstairs, barking in unison. They are a force to reckon with; all three send out the message that visitors are not welcome. When the coast is clear, they return upstairs, reassume their places, sigh, and close their eyes.

In Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of A Dog she posits that families with dogs resemble more of a gang than the traditional pack: “If we are a gang, we are a merrily navel-gazing gang, worshipping nothing but the maintenance of our gang itself.” My dogs are cooperative and respectful. As much as I require my own undisturbed space when writing, they understand that they belong in it and are there to protect it.
~Lori Toppel

0 Comments

Forward>>

Fathers

On Second Thought

The True Line

Guilt

A Writer's Gang

Authors:

Archives

Categories: