The Writing Room
Today, The Writing Room has a visiting writer facilitating the group. Ellen Ann Fentress, a friend of Ellen Morris Prewitt, our writer in residence. I was thinking about The Writing Room in a conversation with Marta Szabo, whose Authentic Writing workshop was a game changer for me many years ago. I came across one of the first essays I wrote in The Writing Room, which coincidentally was about The Writing Room:
What Matters? (Oct 2018)
The moment is fixed in time: I’m sitting at the table by the large picture window in Café Puccini. An aria is playing on the jukebox, which is overshadowed by conversations all around us. Columbus Avenue is alive with early Friday evening activity. The whole night looms ahead of us. Right now, it is the gloaming, when manmade light competes with the waning natural light. The week is ending and the beginning of something new is palpable. My back is to the wall so I can observe each person and notice every table is full. My husband of a few months is at the counter, wearing the wool blazer with tiny emerald checks that we found at a second hand store. The smell of old wool stitched into it. He is ordering red wine for us, which will come in thick glasses. His college buddy, now my roommate, sits across from me adjusting his black framed glasses. The linoleum tabletop is freshly cleaned and still damp in the corners. Evening is arriving and my heartbeat is slowing. Freeze. Right there joy was framed. I felt it. I feel it now. I remember the exact moment so out of step with countless others.
I’ve had more of those moments. The ones I remember when the world rushes in and I pause and I am able to articulate joy as it arrives. The moments continue to be out of step from the hustle of life. I had one yesterday, I walked through the large blue kitchen into the living room with its tin ceiling on my way to the bedroom and as I passed through, the light, the fall’s slanted light graced the red oilcloth on the lamp table in a certain way, I caught it and said aloud, “Thank you.” I knew enough to welcome joy in its fleeting visit. The poet, Jane Hirshfield wrote, “How fragile we are, between the few good moments.”
Three months ago, I began a new chapter in my life; I left New Orleans behind and moved to Bay Saint Louis. I don’t want to call this transition magical because it would deny all of the pain and loss that led me to gather up my belongings and make this move. The beginning had everything to do with the ending of so much of what I had clung to for years after a series of major losses. In hindsight I should have, like my dear friend says, let that shit go. But I’m loyal to a fault. I don’t end relationships when I should, I don’t put down my dogs when I should, I don’t give up when I should. I keep on keeping on until every voice in the world shouts it out of me. I’m stubborn that way.
But this is different. This is the first major endeavor in my life that I have undertaken alone. I’ve been married or with a lover at all the major junctures of my life. I went west with husband #2. I started writing with husband #1. I built a career as an investigative reporter with husband #3. I adopted my son while I was with a lover. But this move, this buying an African American landmark on the Mississippi coast and opening the doors to The Writing Room, to bringing music back to the Hall, to figuring out the bar, and the large blue kitchen and the ancient-ness of the place and the spirits up in here, this was me, alone, placing one clumsy foot in front of the other.
The day of the closing I sat around the table with the agents, buyers, title people, and when we were done, I drove to my friend’s house where I had spent the night. I was alone. I came inside and started crying – heaving and sobbing. There was no one there to hear but me. And yet, often when joy comes, it arrives quietly, intimately, and it is only me.
I am sitting now in the Hall, looking out the front door that I have propped open. Today The Writing Room is open, but I am alone. Perhaps this won’t happen, this workshop I had hoped to foster here at the Hall. Maybe it’s The Writing Room for a table of one. That would make me sad because I truly enjoy being in the company of other writers who share their stories, offer feedback to mine, and are willing to expose themselves in ways that most people are not.
