Keynote Address
National Writers' Workshop
Hartford, Connecticut
April 1, 1995
You may have expected to hear an old man who has learned his trade and may have accumulated some wisdom along the way.
April Fool!
You will hear a young writer who is still trying to learn his craft.
Sixty-one years ago Miss Chapman looked down at me and said, "Donald, you are the class editor." So much for career planning.
Forty-seven years ago, after having survived infantry combat, college and a first marriage, I found myself in the City Room of the old Boston Herald, determined to learn the newspaper craft and get back to writing great poems.
Now, at 70, I will return to my writing desk Monday and still try to learn the journalist's craft. Then Tuesday through Sunday I will try to learn how to finish yet another book on writing, how to plan a new novel, how to write a great poem.
Chaucer said, "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." I now believe Chaucer did not speak with complaint but with gratitude.
The Japanese artist Hokusai testified: "I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything--every dot, every dash--will live."
My bones may creak, I may live on a diet of pills, I may forget names, but when I shuffle down to my computer I see Miss Chapman standing in the corner of the room, nodding the encouragement.
A lapsed Baptist I am here to bear witness for the writing life. I will not speak for writers; I only speak for this individual apprentice to the writing trade.
And I will evangelize. I hope you are failing in your craft. I hope you have not yet learned to write but are still learning.
If you are confident of your craft and are writing without terror and failure, I hope you will learn how to escape your craft and write so badly you will surprise yourself with what you say and how you are saying it.
My writing day begins about eleven-thirty in the morning when I turn off my computer and go out to lunch. I have written and now I will allow the well to refill.
I usually know the next morning's writing task, not what I will say and how I will say it, but the territory I will explore. I am in a state of susceptibility. Fragments of language and images come to me in their own way, on their own time. I do not press; I live in wait. The fragments that sparked this talk - "bear witness," "selfish delights" - were scribbled on a 3X5 card during a performance of the Borodin Trio: dreadful performance of Mozart, good Mendelssohn, great Shostakovich.
I do not consciously seek, I lay in wait, accepting the lines and images that float through my mind, sometimes making mental notes, sometimes scribbled ones.
I live in a curious and delightful state of intense awareness and casual reflection that is difficult to describe. Perhaps it is like those moments in combat when the shooting and the shelling stops and you can hunker down behind a rock wall and rest. In a poem I wrote a few weeks ago I found myself saying that I was:
Among the dead, the dying,
more alive than I have ever been.
At that moment in combat I celebrated life, noticing the way a blade of grass recovers from a boot, studying how the sky is reflected in a puddle in the mud, even enjoying the perfume of the horse manure the farmer will use to nurture the spring planting - if there is a spring.
My writing has made me a better reporter on my life. I pay attention to my living. Minnie Mae and I go out shopping, and in the supermarket I realize she has become her mother. I seize that moment and explore it in a column published March 21st.
A reporter might know what the moment meant and know what to say about it. Writers cultivate not knowing, nurture ignorance, welcome the terror of the blank screen when they do not know what they know. Writers write for surprise, for the discovery of what they did not know they knew, as I did in this column.
It didn't come on gradually, the way I might have expected. It happened in an instant.
I had a cart full of groceries and was heading out the door at the Market Basket when I realized Minnie Mae was not behind me. I turned, and her mother was at the cash register.
She had paid for her groceries, but she was putting her money away, sorting out her coupons and holding up a line of eye-rolling shoppers.
This had always made Minnie Mae furious. In the mid-1950s when her mother lived with us in New Jersey, Minnie Mae would get jumping-up-and-down mad when her mother did the checkout line routine.
I thought this was funny and said, "Hi, Katie" - her mother's name - when Minnie Mae got in the car. She wasn't amused.
She didn't realize she had become her mother.
When she exits from a store, museum, theater, she comes to a full stop outside the door. Her mother did that.
When I hit a pot hole in the road she gasps. Her mother did that.
When she watches television she just "rests her eyes." Her mother did that.
When I serve supper or dessert, she always says, "Don't give me too much." Her mother drove Minnie Mae crazy when she said that - night after night after night.
Still Minnie Mae refuses to admit her transformation. She does not think it funny. She does not even think it interesting, worth exploring - in a sociological, scholarly manner, of course.
I think it hilarious. I can not keep from giggling, can not refrain from quoting Minnie Mae on her mother's idiosyncrasies from thirty years ago, can not resist repeating what Minnie Mae said then: "If I ever do what my mother just did, tell me. I will never become my mother. Never."
Then, leaving a restaurant one day, I stop to talk to this person, to nod at another, to grab a hand, to joke with a waitress, I look up in the mirror that stretches across a wall.
I am my father.
I couldn't be. He didn't have hair. He wore a watermelon under his shirt. He had this great smile and these glasses that kept you from seeing his eyes, and he wore the smile and specs as a mask. You never were quite sure what was going on behind the salesman's smile.
He snored. He sent out envelopes stuffed with newspaper or magazine clippings. No note. He gave people mottoes or inspiring quotations. He kept notebooks of lists and kept score on his life. He was on the telephone with his friends every night. [I thought we should have buried him with a phone in his hand.] (My editor cut this out. No problem. If it is important, it will return.)
I vowed I would never be like my father. But there he was in the mirror.
I remember the lines from the Robert Lowell poem "Middle Age" in which he says his father left:
dinosaur
death-steps on the crust,
where I must walk.
My daughter Anne is visiting with Karl. She shows me her new book of lists. We shop and I knew where she would turn and why. She instructs me on my computer and I hand her yellow Post-its before she asks for them. She laughs and says her colleagues think she is crazy the way she marks things.
I don't. She does it the only right way. The way I do it. The way her grandfather would have done it if he had lived long enough to use Post-its.
He would have loved computers. And e-mail. He would have been on line morning and night, checking up on friends in Florida and Alabama and Idaho and Iowa and Utah and New Hampshire, as I have just done.
Minnie Mae has become her mother and I have become my father and Anne, God help her, is becoming her father and mine.
If you read my mail, you would know this is hard news: front page news on the human condition. Readers create their own drafts as they read mine, they read the family history of their own blood. Reporters and writers - indeed all artists - set up shop where there is birth and death, success and defeat, love and loneliness, joy and despair.
After I leave my writing desk, I lead a double life. I am a mole, living an ordinary life of errands, chores, conversations friends, reading, watching TV, eating and - at the same time - I am a spy to my life, maintaining an alertness to the commonplace, the ordinary, the routine where the really important stories appear.
I am never bored. I overhear what is said and not said, delight in irony and contradiction, relish answers without questions and questions without answers, take note of what is and what should be, what was and what may be. I imagine, speculate, make believe, remember, reflect. I am always traitor to the predictable, always welcoming to the unexpected.
This paying attention is not always comfortable. Reporting on the self can bring terror as well as celebration, pain as well as pleasure.
And in writing those words, what I have submitted for my April 11th column begins:
The morning our 20-year-old daughter Lee took sick with her last illness, I was trying to write a letter of sympathy wondering what I could say, asking myself if it would make any difference.
Five days later I knew. It made a difference.
I discovered it was better to reach out than turn away, to say the wrong thing than say nothing.
But in living through Lee's loss and others I also discovered I had something to say to others who suffered the loss of someone they loved.
Pain is better than forgetting.
It is almost eighteen years but Lee is still with us. The pain is not so much lessened as it has become familiar, like the pain that continues in the leg that has been amputated. Her death is part of us.
I steel myself pretty well for the expected moments of pain. Her birthday in March, her deathday in August, Thanksgiving, Christmas, even, these days, listening to an Albinoni oboe concerto knowing it is not her practicing in the next room.
But there is no protection from the blindside hit. Lee waves from a passing car. She appears ahead of me on a street in Sienna, wearing a backpack, I rush to catch up with her but she turns a corner and is gone.
She stands in the shadows, just outside the living room. I hear her counsel when I have a problem and pay attention. At the concert I sit beside her in the center of the orchestra as she invited me to sit beside her during an orchestral rehearsal at the University of Massachusetts and we are again surrounded by music.
It is not all tears. We laugh at the same old jokes - and some new ones. Every submarine sandwich I eat, I share it with Lee. It was her favorite.
When I was dying in a heart attack, Lee stood - in the blue jumper she had made - waiting at the end of a brightly lit tunnel, smiling.
But, I often say in a letter of sympathy, people will want you to get over it, snap out of it, buck up, forget.
Of course we have to get on with life, to find salvation in routine that suddenly seems trivial, to fulfill our responsibilities to the living. But not to forget.
It would be the most terrible sadness if the memory of that person who has died were erased.
It is far better to remember, to mourn, to weep, to rage, than to allow the one who is gone to disappear.
In a way I welcome the pain. I hurt; I remember.
So, I say in my sympathy letter, they should learn to accept the pain, even in a way welcome it, by comparing it to the terror of forgetting.
And as an elder of the tribe who has experienced loss, I write for them to remember in their own way, to mourn in their own way, to do what would be appropriate for the person who has gone, and, more important, to do what needs to be done for the living.
I could sleep on the floor of the waiting room as I slept in battle. Minnie Mae could not sleep. No right, no wrong.
The night Lee died we went to a musical in which her sister was appearing in the chorus. Lee would have wanted that, no matter if others approved.
We - her immediate family - chose cremation because it was what we thought she would have wanted and it was, we discovered what each of us wanted for ourselves. We paid no attention to the relative who said, "I don't know how you could burn her up."
We did what we had to do.
We could not handle a formal funeral, bringing the family from afar, after her quick dying, so we had a private service at the grave side.
I wept - frequently - and Minnie Mae did not. No guilt, no public measuring of pain. I dream of Lee and Minnie Mae does not. That does not mean that one of us mourns more deeply than the other. No guilt. No keeping score.
We love in our own way; we grieve in our own way.
And in this terrible loss we have found strength. When we are tested by other events, we have a measure of our ability to survive.
And we were also reminded that life is fragile.
In my letters reaching out I tell others what Lee's passing taught us: to listen to each other and to ourselves, to live the gift of life with caring and celebration. Today. Right now.
I am a bit uncomfortable reading that column. It is easy to publish such personal material than to speak it. On my first typewriter at the Herald, the capital "I" had been filed off. We were told never to write personal pieces but I have found that the more personal I am the more universal I become. In my column I cover aging from the front.
Much of my writing day is finished when I get up at 5:30 in the morning, read the Globe, grab a bagel with old cronies far younger than I am, walk, and sit down at my writing desk.
I write easily, and that is no accident. I remind myself that John Jerome said "Perfect is the enemy of good" and follow William Stafford's advice that "one should lower his standards." I write fast to outrace the censor and cause the instructive failures that are essential to effective writing.
I write for surprise. I start a column with a line or an image, an island at the edge of the horizon that has not been mapped. And I do not finish the columns unless I write what I do not expect to write forty to sixty percent of the way through. My drafts tell me what I have to say.
This is true of my non-fiction books, my fiction, my poetry. I follow the evolving draft.
One evening in 1944 I dug a foxhole and found my comrades were the bones of World War I soldiers. I have been trying to deal with that ever since and have written poems directly on the subject. The other morning, when I expected to write a page of non-fiction, this poem that pays homage to all the soldiers who came before me and after appeared on my screen:
Draft after draft, what I had to say came clear as a print in the darkroom grows shadows that come clear in developer. As I listen to the poem - and my first readers - I add, cut, change a word, shape the line, always listening to the poem, to what it is telling me. In this concentration of craft, I am lost to the world. As Bernard Malamud said, "If it is winter in the book, spring surprises me when I look up."
Flight of Dreams
A sudden
lightness
in the air
I am
on patrol
between Houfalize
and St. Vith
high on fever
fear
Calvados
my unexpected
living
pink light
before dawn
and in black
winter trees
gray German
shadows
a sudden
rising
winged
and dark
as the trees
where they
slept
dreams
of soldiers from
other wars
struggling
upwards
just before
light
My goal these days is
Nulla dies sine quingentis verbis - never a day without 500 words. I count the words. More than 802. It is 11:30 and so I pack up, ready for the next writing day to begin.
I look back at that thin - no longer skinny - young man in the Herald City Room so long ago and realize that I did with dumb instinct what I do by design today.
After walking on my first by-line when the cleaning women put the first edition down to protect a scrubbed floor, I developed a healthy disinterest in what I had published.
I felt no loyalty to what I had said and how I had said it. When I learned how to write a story the way the editor wanted it, I experienced a playful desire to unlearn it, to see if I could do it differently. I kept saying I wonder what would happen if ....
And today each draft is an experiment. I try short ledes and long ledes, telling the story all in dialogue or with no dialogue, starting at the end and moving backwards, using a voice that I have not tried before, making up words when the dictionary fails.
I sought mentors, asking people at other desks how they were able to write a story I admired. I asked the best reporters of I could go along on my own as they reported a story. They were surprised and said yes but when the union got wind of it, I was told to knock it off.
I looked at the assignment book and free lanced stories that were not scheduled to be covered. I tried features on my own and surprised editors with stories they did not expect - and often did not want.
I wrote weddings and fashions for a suburban weekly, volunteered to review books, free lanced on Saturday for the sports department, took graduate writing courses at Boston University and wrote stories so experimental I could not even figure out what they meant.
I drove Eddie Devin, the best editor on the City Desk home at 1 am, put a fifth of whiskey on the kitchen table, handed him a week's carbons of my stories and was taught how I could improve.
He was older than I was; now my mentors are younger than I am. My principal mentor is Chip Scanlan. No whiskey and no carbons, just FAX and America On Line but I'm still learning how I can improve. This talk was radically revised after he read it a draft I thought was finished.
I read compulsively to see what other writers can do and I still do today; I hunted down craft interviews such at the Paris Review Writers at Work series and copied down the lessons I learned about my craft and I still do that today.
Like Bernard Malamud who said, "I love the flowers of afterthought" I learned to love revision. The Saturday Evening Post - the big market then - wanted to buy my article and have a real pro rewrite it.
I fought to rewrite it myself. The draft was 5,000 words long. The editor's letter of criticism was 8,000 words long. I wrote a new draft and he came up from Philadelphia to give me a day-long individual seminar, then suggested he have someone else write it. I got up at 3 am for two mornings and wrote it before going to the paper. It was published.
I was stupid stubborn. In one prize fight I was knocked down 13 times and won.
I believed - and still believe - it is my job to educate editors - by example. I propose new ways of writing old stories by showing them a draft or at least a lede. When they didn't listen I wrote it their way - and when possible wrote it my way and submitted it somewhere else.
I was and am, a cross-writer, exploring the possibilities of fiction and poetry, books and articles, columns and textbooks. Each genre illuminates the other.
I realize I had energy - and still do. My energy comes from the writing. I write and I find myself saying what I do not expect, in a way I haven't quite said it before. I am energized by surprise.
I write every day - nulla dies sine linea - and I count words but the real reason I write is because I love writing. Annie Dillard said,
"There's a common notion that self-discipline is a freakish peculiarity of writers - that writers differ from other people by possessing enormous and equal portions of talent and willpower. They grit their powerful teeth and go into their little rooms. I think that's a bad misunderstanding of what impels the writer. What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect. You don't do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field. I'm sure it's the same in every other field.
Writing a book is like rearing children - willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with cat-o'-nine tails to go to the baby. You got to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk. There's nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do."
I write because I love writing.
And Minnie Mae, who makes leftovers from leftovers, reminds me that nothing is wasted when you are a writer. Remember that line the editor cut from my column, the one about my father being buried with a telephone in his coffin? Well listen to what surprised me a few mornings ago:
Long Distance
Father was always on the phone,
listening to strangers.
After I left home, we made
peace on the telephone
and became good at distance,
a careful reaching out.
When he died, I told Mother
we should bury him with a phone
at his ear. Mother laughed,
but disapproved.
The phone rings. It is Dad,
calling long distance.
That poem told me what I had lived but not really known until it was spoken by the poem: that my father who listened to strangers better than he listened to his son, became close to me when I became a stranger, living far away and talking to him on the telephone long distance. And now that he is a quarter of a century dead and I live in the decade of life in which he died, we are closer than ever.
The poem was a surprise and it offered me a strange comfort, a different vision of the life I lead.
I wish you such surprises.
And I wish you a craft you can never learn - but can keep learning as long as you live.
Donald M. Murray is a writer who publishes novels, poetry, a newspaper column, and textbooks on writing and teaching writing.
He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire where he inaugurated a journalism program, designed an advanced composition course, helped establish a graduate program in Composition Studies, served as director of Freshman English and as English Department chairperson. He twice won awards for his teaching and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of New Hampshire 1990 and Fitchburg State College in 1992.
As a journalist, Murray won a number of awards including the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on The Boston Herald in 1954. He was an editor of Time before free-lancing as a magazine writer in New York City for seven years. He has served as writing coach for The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, and other newspapers. He writes a weekly column, Over Sixty, for The Boston Globe. In 1991 Boston magazine selected him as best columnist in Boston.
Murray has published two novels, and his poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry. His books on the craft of writing and teaching writing include A Writer Teaches Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 1968, 1985) Learning by Teaching (Heinemann, Boynton/Cook 1982, 1989), Writing for Your Readers (Globe Pequot Press, 1983, 1992), Write to Learn (Harcourt Brace 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1995), Read to Write (Harcourt Brace 1985, 1990, 1993), Expecting the Unexpected (Heinemann, Boynton/Cook, 1989), Shoptalk, Learning to Write With Writers (Heinemann, Boynton/Cook, 1990), The Craft of Revision (Harcourt Brace 1991, 1994).
In addition to writing his column, Murray is finishing a book for teachers, Write to Teach Writing , for Heinemann, working on a novel and a collection of poems.
You can write Don at :
39 Mill Pond Rd.
Durham, NH 03824
or call him at
603-868-2383
or fax him at
603-868-3146
or send him e-mail
at dmurray060@aol.com
