High Tide in Tucson (22 page)

Once in a while I've heard people in my profession claim, with the back of a hand thrown across their foreheads, that it's a curse to be a writer. I am inclined to tell them: Get real. It's a curse to be one of those people who have to put asphalt on the highway with what looks like the back of a janitor's broom in the middle of July. I've never done that, and I'm deeply happy about it. But I have held about twenty jobs in my life that I might call a curse, including babysitting a pair of twins named Aristotle and Alexander, who had the energy and will of spider monkeys and a language of their own invention; also, scrubbing toilets for people who spoke of me as The Cleaning Lady. (I was barely twenty years old; in no other setting did I get called, at that time, a lady.) If there's no statute of limitations on this list, I'll even mention picking tent caterpillars off my Dad's apple trees for the salary of a penny
apiece. (Caterpillar disposal, involving gasoline, was included in the price.)

Writing is no curse. The writing life has incomparable advantages: flexible hours, mental challenge, the wardrobe—you can go to work in bunny slippers if you want to. The money, well, that is sometimes a snag, but if you keep your nose to the grindstone the benefits accrue. You can support yourself. And in time, if you're truly blessed, you'll begin to get
mail
. You'll bring it home by the carload, tear it open, and find out everything you've ever done right in this world, and wrong. The mail will bring you more applause and brickbats and requests and advice and small, perfect bouquets than you can ever answer or even acknowledge. Its presence will cheer you on gloomy days, and guide you through the straits of your own conscience. It will stand as proof that you're blessed.

I have received, entirely unsolicited: advice on dog racing (“conventional wisdom has it that the outside post positions are bad and—over the long haul—more low numbers come in than high”) and natural pest control (“I have never had success combatting flea beetles with diatomaceous earth”); information on how to order foam clothing; a Christmas card from the Dan Quayle family; and outlines for approximately ten thousand novels based on other people's relatives' lives. I've received works of art that I adored, many of which are hanging on my walls. After publishing a novel called
Pigs in Heaven
, I received via U.S. mail more pig-oriented items than you might have imagined to exist. (I'm pretty sure I'm going to call my next novel
Mustang Convertible Dreams
.)

I've received this information on how to live forever: “I suggest a petition to Masauwu, Spirit of Death, Owner of Fire and Master of the Upper World. Sanction may be gained to the
sipapuni for shelter during the destruction of the Fourth World and re-emergence to the Fifth. Even if it doesn't work, it's worth a shot.”

Also this useful tip: “Dear Barbara Kingsolver, It appears to me that your last name is to be derived from
Gundisalv
, a name compounded by the Visigoths of Northwestern Spain from the Old Germanic elements
gundi
, meaning ‘battle,' and
alf
, meaning ‘elf.'”

(When I passed this on to my relatives, they started calling me the old Battle-Elf.)

A New York City reader wrote: “Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Your novels have to be the most implausible, coincident ridden, knee jerking exhibits of liberalism and corny sentimentalism that I have ever read. P.S. I like them pretty well.”

And a befuddled fan in California wrote: “…I am very interested in animal consciousness, as well as dreams, and I bought your book
Animal Dreams
because I believed it to be a book I had heard about on the radio once, called (as I am now aware)
Animal Dreaming
. When I sat down and saw it was fiction and that I had paid $20 for it, I thought: Mistake!”

I haven't found a use for this information: “Dear Ms. Kingsolver, I am 23 years old, have 3 tattoos, and 2 college degrees that are doing me no good.”

This one was slightly more upbeat: “I lent my library copy of
The Bean Trees
to a friend who normally hates everything (seriously, she's very depressing). She loved it! That is, until it was stolen from her car. We had to pay the $16 replacement cost plus library fine.”

There is a type of letter that comes from remarkable adolescent girls, like this one: “Dear Mrs. Kingsolver, I wrote you before that I was writing a novel and you encouraged me to do so. I finished it. It's called
The Little Cabin in the Woods
. Then I wrote
The
Dark Crystal
, followed by
Sky Eyes
, and
Fireball in the Night
,
The Clue, Blue Dawn, The Princess Bride
, and
Emily
, which is a hypothetical look at what might happen to me if my parents suddenly died.”

There are also ever so many assorted requests from people who would like you to do them some small favor. For example:

Photos

Interviews/Statements

Biographical Data

Your comments on the book

Reviews

Career Plans/Goals [Apparently they are still expecting me to do something productive….]

Best, of course, are the letters that go straight to your head, like this one:

I walked on air for days, imagining someone actually reading my book four times, scanning it for every alliteration and metaphor I'd buried in its pages. Then I considered the return address: South Padre Island, Texas. I've been to South Padre Island, Texas, and so I know. If you lived there, you would have no choice but to read whatever washed up on shore, or otherwise fell into your hands, four times at a dead minimum. My hunch bore out a few years later when I heard from the correspondent again:

I'm grateful beyond words for reader mail, which keeps me going through the days when I can't believe in myself, or literature in general. That is the blessing. And perhaps it's also the curse, if the writing life is cursed, because readers tug on the
writer's solitude and complacency. One of the few pieces of advice I ever give other writers, if they ask for it, is to try to write with no one looking over your shoulder. It's heaven, if you can do it. But inevitably they come, those ghosts and battle-elves peeking in through the study door left ajar, and even if they are not allowed a vote, they force the writer to answer all the disparate voices rattling inside her own psyche. The compliments must be accepted, and so, too, the thoughtful complaints. Once in a while a letter rocks my foundations, causing me to question once again the things I thought I knew about art and responsibility.

This was one of those:

I replied to this letter with a brief, inadequate response, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. Oddly, in the same week I got another letter addressing the violence in
Animal Dreams
from a different perspective, from a Sister of St. Agnes, in Milwaukee:

The sentiments in the second letter don't change the significance of the first. I can't in good conscience ignore either one. I don't know whether my convictions about art—and particularly, art that contains violence—will ever be allowed to settle into a comfortable position. They have been revising themselves for a long, long time, roaming restlessly over the options, continually exhorted by the ghosts that bless and curse.

 

As an adolescent girl, I had a secret yellow notebook I filled with stories. They were written in a crabbed cursive, set mostly in places I had never been, like Mexico and the Andes, and the protagonists of these stories were always boys. What's more, they were almost always maimed in some way. One of my heroes, I remember, had been blinded, and yet he still managed to canoe across a lake and climb a mountain. Another one had a clubfoot, and he won a scholarship to leave his small folkloric village and study art. When I was eleven, I'm sure I didn't know what a clubfoot was; I think I had some vague idea that if someone clubbed you on the foot, then you would have a clubfoot.

I was very much like that girl who has written
The Princess Bride
and
The Dark Crystal
and thirty-five other novels and is now wondering how the plot possibilities will open up if she knocks off her parents. When I was her age, I wasn't remotely conscious of what it took to make good writing. I was just looking for drama and impact, and the only way I could see to get that onto a page was to write about events that, if they happened to you in real life, would tend to make a big impact.

I didn't realize that it's
emotion
, not
event
, that creates a dynamic response in the mind of a reader. The artist's job is to sink a taproot in the reader's brain that will grow downward and find a path into the reader's soul and experience, so that some new emotional inflorescence will grow out of it.

Of course, the writer has to do this for many readers at a time, without ever having met any of them, knowing nothing about them except that they're human and have mostly all lived on the same earth. So it's a challenge. Lacking the skills to pull that off, it's common for beginning writers to fall back on the
put-out-his-eyes-and-make-him-climb-a-mountain tract. Some years ago as a judge in a fiction contest, I read the unscreened entries of a few hundred aspiring writers and, I swear, three out of four contained unfortunate wretches trapped in wheelchairs in burning buildings.
That
job was a curse.

In time, with practice, you learn that violence isn't a necessary component of exciting art. You can substitute metaphor and imagery for the clubfoot. And then comes the question: If you don't
have
to, why would you
want
to create violence in art? Are there any good reasons? Maybe yes. Maybe no.

To some extent I agree with my correspondent who wrote that inventing violence, even for the noblest of motives, might necessarily be promoting violence as entertainment. The equation of fun-for-pay with the infliction of pain makes me very uneasy. Very often it's done with a cast of morality thrown over the whole thing, as though that might redeem it—for example, in the genre I call Slice & Dice movies, to which teenagers flock in droves. For an hour and a half you get to see attractive, terrified young women and a good deal of spurting blood; then the colorful criminal is apprehended and we get to see
his
spurting blood; so justice was served. It wasn't really okay that he was going around damaging people with farm implements, so it's not really condoning violence. But then, I wonder, why did we have to watch? And more to the point, why did we
pay
to watch, enabling legions of grown-ups to earn their living fabricating the realistic illusion of terrified young women spurting blood?