Ever since my first writing workshop, I longed to publish a book. To this end, I tried to write many—novels, stories, poems, essays. Most I managed to finish, though I succeeded in publishing none. At age fifty-six, after nearly forty years of trying, I found out that my manuscript BOOK of POTIONS had been accepted for publication. But this book, excerpts of which appear below, was not a book I tried to write.
When I was in my mid-forties, my only child left for college. Having defined myself as a mother for so long, I panicked that, without a child at home, I wouldn’t know who I was, wouldn’t know what to do with myself, that I’d sink into a torpor and do nothing, be nothing. During the previous summer I’d finished a collection of stories and started another novel, my ninth and tenth tries. But that fall, alone in my house, I felt stuck in the wallow between motherhood and whatever came after, and I was terrified I wouldn’t write at all.
Throughout all those books, all those tries, I’d been a labored sort of writer. Very deliberate, very finicky. Slow. Writing fast just seemed so sloppy, so reckless and unserious. However, during this period of in-betweenness, in a state of panic and depression and desperation, I decided to try writing as fast as I could, the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. A single page, dashed off in a blank journal with the City Lights storefront on the cover. I did this not for the usual reasons (to spur creativity or bypass my inner critic or overcome a block or unclog my brain or produce material for a book) but for one reason only: to see a page covered in words, words I had written. After enough of these, I got the message. I write. I resumed work on my novel and put the journal in a drawer.
Years later, while poking around that drawer, I came across the journal and started reading it, for the first time, mostly out of curiosity. What I found was, in many ways, a revelation. The words covering each page were not simply words or random nonsense.
I awoke on the edge of a field, a snow-covered meadow plated with sunlight, and the sky was bright white and unnatural, and the silence was white, too, a ravenous silence, and the birds had all gone away, and the squirrels were burrowed in the deep (“I Awoke on the Edge”).
What was this place, with its snow and its silence? Why was the silence ravenous? I had no idea. Much to my astonishment, each page was a stand-alone set piece and possessed an odd logic.
No introduction needed, just state my name. Well, if you insist on a few words, say I’m middled-aged, which you can see for yourself. My hair, my skin, a map of experiments (“No Introduction Needed”).
Page after page offered up a scene or scenario, sometimes a dialogue, sometimes a narrative, sometimes an emotional dispatch, all of them intensely rendered.
Right away this writing showed me how frightened I was. Of the world, for one thing. It just seemed so scary. Why did war and soldiers, for example, keep coming up? I’ve never written about war in my life, don’t feel remotely qualified to do so, but there it was.
…cover all the windows and the mirrors, lock up the knives and the silver, because they’re coming, armies of them marching in formation with their jackhammer steps (“Move That Hatchet”).
The threat of climate change was also hovering nearby, but so subtly you could almost miss it.
Remember when the ground was moist, when the green of spring ignited into orange, into gold, and all the withering winter browns? Now the green has settled over us with the dust, settled into an eternal season, like a sickness we can’t get rid of, all this never-changing green (“The Green”).
The world was a problem, absolutely, but I, too, was a problem. Why was I so passive, sitting there in the audience when I wanted to be on stage?
They brought her in to sit in the audience. They brought her in to listen. They brought her in to look pretty and keep her mouth shut (“They Brought Her In”).
Why did I feel so alienated? Why did my neighborhood seem a strange place, my neighbors strangers? And, oh, the anger. I knew, on some level, that I was angry, but I hardly knew how angry, nor what about. In this regard, I find a piece like “Give the Child a Knife” hilarious.
“Give the child an axe and she’ll cut off your head. Give the child a cliff and she’ll push you over. Give the child a thread and she’ll strangle you.”
It’s just so extreme, violent and merciless, but that’s the way many of us feel. Extreme. And mean and vengeful, like we’d love to push someone down an elevator shaft or walk them to the ends of the earth, to punish them for how they’ve disappointed us.
So these pieces were showing me my own concerns; they expressed a ruthless self-probing, a self expressed, a self interrogated. Writing this way, quickly and without conscious intention, had delivered me to myself, helped me set down, define, and see, who I was. Not just, or even primarily, as a writer. No, these pieces were telling me something about the person I was. Clearly, I was tormented, enraged, frustrated, ashamed, hurt, resentful, bewildered. But they were also showing me what a gift my imagination was, morning after morning, getting me in touch with all this anger, alienation, resentment, shame, and anxiety, and allowing me to describe it in language. Each piece became a map of a place, a place inside me where I could go to figure out who I was, to see who I was, and to be there with myself. And those maps eventually became my first collection, BOOK of POTIONS.
I wish I knew where the language in these pieces came from, but I don’t. The thinking and the articulation of the thinking were not that of my other writing, not at all. Reading these pieces was like reading the work of someone else. I’m still amazed by this. It seems like a language of desperation and anguish, partially. Without meaning to, I must have been reaching to express things in myself I wasn’t letting myself know. Things that were weighing on me, obviously. That I felt ignored, for example, taken advantage of, invisible. That I had ignored myself, tragically. That for me, and I assume for many others, being a woman is a difficult endeavor. We’re asked for so much and given so little in return:
…a woman sees all the tiny outstretched hands even when her eyes are closed. She sees them and she can’t ignore them, she can’t forget them, and she gives them what she has every time, not because she has so much, but because they ask (“God, I Can’t Stand”).
The better part of the glory goes to the men, and we get to smile and clap for them. We long for the spotlight and are ashamed of that longing. And on it goes.
I must have been reaching to make the abstract concrete, to articulate my complex states of mind. As if I needed to manage the chaos of my inner world by translating it from pure feeling into a series of vividly described scenes. To accomplish this, the language had a great deal of work to do. And if I managed this in language, to make tangible my torment, then maybe writing it down could get it out of my mind, and I could leave it on the page.
Obviously, I wasn’t thinking at all about form when I was scribbling these pages. The writers you might assume influenced this work—Baudelaire, say, or Kafka, his parables—I read long after I’d written the pieces. Eventually, I decided on a portmanteau, “potion,” which I imagined as a literary equation: potion = poem + fiction. The pieces have the lyric intensity of poems, as well as the imaginative, associative leaps. They also have narrative qualities and certainly count as fictions, since virtually nothing in the content is true. But as statements about my inner life, they are absolutely true. And I think they communicate this truth far more effectively than mere description, no matter how precise.
If the pieces land, as it were, it will be because readers might recognize, in the work’s obsessions, an honesty, a vulnerability, and a ruthlessness, and they will relate, even if it makes them uncomfortable. As it did me. In certain ways, the book still makes me uncomfortable. It exposes me, not only to whoever reads it but to myself. I’ve grown comfortable with that discomfort, though, able to live with it, the way you might live with an old injury, the twinges, the stiffness, all the creaking your bones make as you go. Because in the end, I wasn’t trying to write a book. I was trying to survive. To survive, somehow, by writing. Perhaps for this reason—survival—the work I wrote at that time ended up a reckoning. Perhaps even an exorcism of sorts. And that reckoning ended up a BOOK of POTIONS. A book made up of urgent unintentions, a book that in its way wrote me.
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