Jo-Ann Mapson

Winter Inventory

Years back when I was in therapy--a thrill-filled adventure I highly recommend--my therapist gave me homework. On recipe cards, I was to write down my accomplishments for the past year. As a full time mom with a bad case of writer's block, this presented a trial for me. Eventually I found some things to fill the lines. They didn't seem particularly earth-shattering: I'd made a new friend, stood up for myself once or twice, and with regard to writing, I'd gone so far as to buy a new ribbon for my typewriter. (You can tell this was a LONG time ago!) I felt silly making the lists, but when he read them out loud to me, I began to realize their importance-that one small step after another eventually leads to the destination. This inventory business is something I still do when I am between books, or bogged down and feel life is going nowhere. I get out the recipe cards, write down what I've done over the last year, and gain perspective on my busy life, which too often feels like running in place.

I don't know why it is I tend to denigrate my accomplishments. I think it's partially due to being female, growing up Catholic, and made to feel that thinking good of myself was bragging, and therefore a sin. It's a terrible trap to fall into, like that old story where a man walks down the street and falls into a hole over and over before he finally learns to step around it and continue walking. I look in the mirror and think, Holy Mother of God, I'm fifty years old, aren't I entitled to like myself? It's true, I eat too many doughnuts and can't fit into my Donna Karan leather blazer that cost too much, but hey, doesn't it look terrific in my closet? Who cares, really, if I'm a size twelve or a ten? Give me a nice soft Ralph Lauren sweatshirt and I can stand up straight with the best of them. Well, there's rationalizing and then there's self-esteem, which is prologue to the fact that it's February and so far I think I'm doing well. So take that, inner demons. Go back to your cave and sing songs around the campfire. Here, you can wear the Donna Karan jacket. Only a demon never gains weight.

Lately I've gotten mail from people I knew over twenty years ago. They say things like, Oh, my God, you are doing what you said you would do all the way back in junior high school! Or, was I ever wrong to break up with you, really wrong, you are beautiful and apparently rich, since I saw your picture in People Magazine.… Then there are the letters from total strangers asking, "teach me to write." My response to these invitations is I don't remember anything of junior high except when Mark Jolly took back his Saint Christopher medal and made me cry. I love my husband and not even Antonio Banderas could tempt me to leave him (the idea of letting Antonio Banderas see me naked would give me a stroke and I don't mean genius). I wish that a photo in People automatically resulted in a big bank account, but alas, it does not. I think only Stephen King and John Grisham have become jillionaires from their writing. I probably wouldn't be any good at being super rich anyway. I like bargain hunting. It's like when I'm asked to parties. I'd like to be the kind of person who enjoys parties, but I'm shy, and I don't drink. Therefore I usually I end up in a corner with the family pet or reading a story to a child. Having a friend over to watch "The Osbornes" with me is about as "party" as I get. Whole days go by with me not leaving my house on the Hillside. I love sitting in my office writing, glancing out the window and spotting a moose destroying the lilacs I plant every summer so they can destroy them every winter. It's a dream to me, living in Alaska, getting to write for a living, teaching talented writers in the MFA program. When it comes to "teaching writing," I like to think of myself as a riverboat guide who's been in the canoe before, but certainly isn't expert. As my buddy mystery writer Earlene Fowler periodically asks me "Can writing really be taught?"

The short answer is of course it can. After all, Janet Burroway's fiction text is the gold standard. She clearly explains point of view, character, and setting in time-tested ways that really work. And for those who prefer the more organic approach, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is the perfect read. Pam Painter and Anne Bernays' book What If? is one of my favorites for pushing writers to try new approaches. I guarantee if a student will commit to trying one What If exercise a week for a year, she will find herself writing long past the assignments. It's also a sure-fire writer's block toppler. Sometimes I think writer's block is laziness, but when it happens to me, I know that's not true. Then I think of how I've worn this rut in the story world, heading down the same old path to find stories to tell, and I think writer's block is maybe like getting a wheel stuck in the rut. So I take a little inventory, and make my way through the wilderness, and pretty soon there's a new story waiting for me.

Here's an example:

Shortly before I wrote Bad Girl Creek, I was "blocked" worse than this winter's insidious sinus infection that lasted four weeks and used up three boxes of Dimetapp. I had written a hundred pages of a story, and my then-editor wasn't enthusiastic, which is a lot like finding out your bank account is overdrawn and the check you just wrote might as well have been on Kleenex. My agent and I decided we could do better, so we turned her down, and I was without a contract for about six months-in writerly limbo without a paddle. Things weren't great in my life at the time, either. An inventory exercise would have revealed lots of mistakes and much confusion, and many, many doughnuts consumed in the search of unfound happiness. My girlfriends saved me. Writer Jodi Picoult forced me to write pages every day and e-mail them to her. Mystery writer Earlene Fowler brought me tabloid papers, hot tamales candy (guaranteed to remove even the most cemented-on crown), and marched me out to discount shopping malls to keep me moving. Their support allowed me to collapse this version of myself I'd been clinging to, and in the process, let go of my fear. When I sat down to write, Bad Girl Creek was there, filled with sad, sorry, sassy, spirited women who could only make it with the help of each other.

I remember very clearly reading chapter one to Earlene on the phone. I was about a page and a half in, and had just revealed that Phoebe was in a wheelchair when I heard her laugh. "What's so damn funny?" I said, feeling fragile and uncertain and wanting to pelt her with hot tamales. Earl said, "Oh, Jo, listen to you! Already the story is complex. It's wonderful. You can't not write this book." And just like that, writer's block toppled with a pitiful creak, never to be heard from again. A week later my agent had sold Bad Girl Creek to my new editor, and that is the end of that little epic that once seemed taller than Mount McKinley.

They are my friends, and they are writers, but how can any one person teach another how to reach down into the deep well of experience, pull up that dripping muck, and examine it closely? That feat takes pure bravery, and no one person can make another do that-not even a really good therapist with clever homework assignments. Writing's a choice, not a dare. It doesn't pay well enough to make the Mark Jolly's of the world come crawling back with their Saint Christopher's clutched in their sweaty little hands. If you're lucky, you have the support of your writer friends, those people who know how much writing means to you, and a stack of National Enquirers, boxes of candy, and the omnipresent discount store. If you live in Alaska, like I do, you sometimes make do with e-mail, phone calls, and wandering the home department at Fred Meyer waiting for the nice bath towels to go on sale. Yes, our winter darkness is a pain in the butt, and it feels really good to stand in the shower for an hour, postponing the inevitable sit-down at the keyboard and the blank humming screen.

But what if you think of writing as filling one index card at a time? Just like Grandma's recipe for Russian teacakes, take measured steps. Imagine your dream life as a story. For me, at that time, it was life on a mythical ranch with all my best girlfriends. No boys allowed. Well, that's not quite true. Our motto would be: Twice a night and gone by morning. For breakfast we'd eat crème brulee at the communal table. Forget sit-ups and abs of steel and worrying what men think. We'd wear holey blue jeans or muumuus and Ugg boots. No makeup. No pantyhose! We could have all the pets we wanted, including the itty-bitty purse-sized dogs our husbands forbade. Swaybacked old horses we never rode, but instead fed sugar and apples to, those muscular, sweet smelling, walking poems, would graze in our pastures. And how about a talking parrot; I've always wanted a parrot and Stewart will not give in on the parrot thing no matter how cleverly I beg. So there would definitely be a parrot. And we could grow flowers alongside vegetables, just to have something pretty to look at. Yes, our garden would blossom like a Matisse painting, an eyebath of color, a mental spa with no need for appointments and no need to reveal our cellulite. We'd spend our days talking and playing with the critters, and if we got low on money, well, we'd sell some flowers to those Mark Jolly men who needed to get their girlfriends to forgive them for being men, alas, a temporary forgiveness, but some is better than none.

That is how Bad Girl Creek was born, the first book I'd ever written in first person, the first in present tense, and the first in four voices. Then Along Came Mary, first person, past tense, four voices, and Good-bye, Earl, third person, past tense, four voices, who will be out next winter, the time when we Alaskans most need a shot of spring to get us through the months. But none of it could have happened without the gift of writer's block. And yes, it was a gift.

In a way, getting stuck taught me the art of meditation. When you're overwhelmed, when you hit the creative bottom, there is truly nowhere to look but up. At first you squint, afraid of this sharp-sided evil architecture, certain you'll sever an artery just by looking. Then you open one eye, and think that's not even a symmetrical stack of blocks-who the hell made this thing, anyway? I would have at least used the blue blocks and tried for a simple pattern, and this thing is butt-ugly. Why, with one good kick, it's history. And what do you know? Suddenly you are looking at building materials.

After writing nine books, I have to make myself go down to the well via new paths. When I start a new book, I like to have a few objects on my desk to ground me. Like a Bingo lady, I have my lucky tchotchke. With The Wilder Sisters, it was packets of powder "spells" I bought in a curandera's shop in Santa Fe. Love potions, statues of Saint Francis, and a rock I found on the side of the Rio Grande kept me in a New Mexico state of mind all through the pages. Finishing up Good-bye, Earl, I tucked the shells I'd found on the beach in Homer into the cabinet because they won't work for the next book; they gave their juju to the pages. So far for the book I'm writing now I have books of folktales, a Celtic primer, and some embroidery thread and a needle, one of the few that didn't get confiscated by the airport security geeks who thought I was going to hijack a jet with my mending kit. What that has to do with the story is still foggy, but I know that when I pick them up, I hear my character whispering, that somehow the needle figures in.

Students sometimes tell me they can't write with their husbands in the house, or they need a certain kind of music playing, or the moon must be in the seventh house, or they have to drink alcohol to see the muse. Newsflash, people: the muse is a portable entity. I've written on airplanes (without my sewing kit), in a Cincinnati hotel bathroom with my laptop poised on the edge of a tub because in the streets people were rioting; I've written in the car with my laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter (Stewart was driving). I prefer my cheap Office Depot phony wood grain desk, but sometimes I take my work into the kitchen, or my bed-the summer I finished The Wilder Sisters it was ungodly hot-and I wrote with the shades drawn after four p.m. The point is, just write. In the end, it's purely mental-you open your mind and let your heart fill it. No matter one's physical surroundings, one can eventually get to that quiet inner space where the words will come if you let them.

To me, the saddest thing I can hear a person say is that they would love to do what I do, but they "can't write." Teachers, critics, or worst of all, your own internal censor, has driven this edict home. For a moment, take out the word write and substitute sing, draw, or dance. We start out our lives singing. Each artist begins with stick figures. What is dancing besides watching a kid automatically move his buns in response to music? There are things we know how to do until someone tells us we don't know how to do them right. Writer's block. No matter who suggests it, no matter what you feel inside, if you want to write, eventually you'll fall victim. Here is another piece of my therapist's advice, a little something that has just about become cliché, but at the time, seemed terribly profound. It's a little piece of paper I keep propped up on my computer monitor that reads: "Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like nobody's watching."

Just write.

More later,
Jo-Ann

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