I went to see Natalie Goldberg in April when she was in Austin doing for a book signing for Old Friend from Far Away.  I was interested in hearing Natalie talk about her book on writing memoir for three reasons.

1. She’s one of my American idols. I started using Writing Down the Bones when I was a freshman in college. It not only gave me a writing practice, but it gave me permission to believe I was a writer, something I’d been both claiming and doubting since I was about ten.
2. Her book, Long Quiet Highway about how she created the writing practice in Bones and about her struggle to find her life’s work and to determine whether her path should be writing or Buddhism, is one of my favorite memoirs.
3. I have the draft of a memoir I wrote about my pregnancy and I’ve yet to achieve the distance or the energy to revise it. I was hoping that hearing Natalie talk about writing memoir might inspire me to go back to work on mine.

Here’s the thing: I’m at home with my 2 1/2 year old son Cavanaugh and I write (or do the business part of writing: submitting, creating author platform, looking for markets, etc.) while he takes naps and sometimes after he goes to sleep at night. He’s not in preschool yet. By the time my husband gets home from work, I have limited brain-power.

I keep wishing that I could just let the writing go for awhile. It doesn’t fit in right now. But it has never fit in. And that’s my problem. If I don’t write, I get jangly inside. I lose my center and I feel as if I have strayed far from my life’s path. When I do write, I go into a zone that excludes anything else and I get angry when I’m pulled out of that zone. The anger is not particularly advisable when a sweet little person who relies upon me wakes up and wants some attention.

So I went to Natalie so that she could answer a question I haven’t been able to answer for myself, so that she would tell me what to do. She didn’t.  I didn’t really expect that she would. I just hoped. Her humility, straightforward manner and refusal to mince words, and her calm honest presence helped anyway.  Just as her instruction to “Go for 10 minutes” freed me up as a freshman (you mean I don’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. everyday and write for nine hours straight to be a real writer?), I was reminded that maybe I don’t have the time or energy right now to write or revise the way I’d like, but it doesn’t mean I have to leave my life’s path altogether. I can just walk it, slowly, mindfully, accomplishing a little each day until I begin to reach some of my destinations.