The book I hadn't written

What living water does to works-in-progress

Moved house last week to Wimberley. Evenings you can stand out on the balcony overlooking the water. Nothing bites.

I braced for mosquitoes. Doesn’t water mean mosquitoes? That’s the deal I thought Texas offered. In South Austin you’d get eaten alive every summer evening, and that was an ordinary neighborhood. There were no stagnant pools anyone could point to. Just slews of unholy no-see-ums rising out of nowhere at all hours.

Here, beside actual water, nothing.

This water is alive. There are fish, frogs, turtles, birds, bats, dragonflies, whatever else is down there, and the larvae get eaten before they get their wings. A healthy ecosystem is full of deaths.

Inside, I have three projects open on my desk. One is a typewriter activity book. Another is about the writing process. The third is a book of prose poetry. I sat down to it braced to be rusty, because it had been a while since I’d written one. But in a few days of dedicated time, I had the draft, from start to finish — exceedingly rough, but whole. Now the next phase, living with each piece, excavating, inhabiting, expanding, rectifying.

The hardest part was how confronting it felt. For years I’ve held my own work at arm’s length. Everything was a creative project or an experiment. This one isn’t an experiment. It is based on my experience. For some reason I must have interpreted the writing school advice don’t be sentimental to mean keep your distance.

This week I also sat with editing clients, reading pages people have poured their whole perspective into. It’s funny about writing — the big picture is easiest to see in everyone’s work but your own.

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The Understory

A few lines from Thursday’s Typewriter Social love letter evening, as it came out:

dark wine of the body 
where passion gathers 
deep with salt and urge, the way insects bite into trees 
and can take the whole house down 
with enough time and the right wind — 
when you know a person 
beyond the veil of your own desperate needs,
who you see reflected, 
that what I lurch for is where you too want to go — 
intoxicating to the daytime self, 
the cheerful conversationalist, 
but sobering to the dionysian, 
the rip-me-limb-from-limb, 
consume me, 
let my inner blaze be kindled, 
let the wide world be fed by the tension, 
the quaking thirst, 
the terror of being utterly free — 
water the fields with what I contain, 
the lurching fabric of the rooms I contain, 
my unseen personalities, de-corral them, 
ignite into each other, flame to flame, 
eye to eye, yesterday’s suffering thrown careless into the other — 
make me free, make me subterranean, 
make me swell, pendulum, well, 
sincerity swept from the corners of desperation

The Understory is a place to share works-in-progress. What are you working on? Leave a draft or excerpt in the comment section. Just paste it in.

I'll open next week's Understory with a few of yours.