I wanted a writing focus. My poetry brain disappeared about the time I got pregnant. The burgeoning being in my belly pulled me to the earth, asked me to pay attention to what was right in front of me, to look at the world for what it was instead of trying to make it into something else. No comparisons. No metaphors. No evaluative hindsight. As helpful a practice as this is for living in the present moment, I have felt un-moored since then. My way of processing the world, both by writing poems and performing them, was lost. How was I going to find my way back to myself or to who I was becoming now?

I hoped the writing group would do it. We took turns submitting work and having it workshopped. I brought poems I’d wanted to revise since grad school. Then children’s stories. Then essays. Just reminding myself every week that I was a writer, that the way I operate in the world is by putting things down on paper, helped me. Here I am, Sonya Savitri Fehér. I write. I read other writers. I offer my evaluation of their work. I know how to do this. Every week, a reminder of who I’d been for the last two decades. We set intentions for the following meeting: I will write, submit, edit …. We reviewed our goals from the previous week. Had we achieved what we’d hoped? What work was there left to do? Each time the group gave me a way of moving forward, one goal, one week at a time.

It took months for me to build up to it, but eventually I began transcribing the memoir of my pregnancy with generalized anxiety disorder. I had 300 pages. The group read some of it and offered comments. Then we started readying for the annual Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference. I read about how to pitch my book. I left my son for the longest blocks I’d been away since his birth: Friday night, eleven hours on Saturday, another seven on Sunday. I met with agents and editors. I heard all about platforms and social media. I started a mama blog.

Though five agents want to see the memoir upon completion, the revision required to take the first draft to something that is actually a book requires more of me than I had when I pitched it a year ago, and more than I have now. On a good day, my son takes a nap. During that time, I sit at the computer and work on writing or the business of writing. I submit poems. I work on articles or essays. I write blog entries. I have event spent time indexing the memoir transcription so that when I have longer than one and a half hour blocks to work with, I will be ready to work on the book again.

So, here I am on another Monday, having a writing group with all the voices inside my head. I hope you will join us.

Natalie Goldberg

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.