Minkgirl Muses

WAVE

When I started my new job 9 weeks ago, I had this little schtick I would trot out for friends and acquaintances who would ask "Are you excited?" or "Isn't it going to be great?! This is your dream job!"

"Yes, I am excited" I would offer, "but I also feel like a novice surfer, eager to catch her first wave, but wondering if instead I will be smacked silly by an unforgiving ocean."

Imagine...It's twilight. I paddle out into the big blue, amidst a scattered company of expert surfers, full of puppy-dog eagerness to get up on my board and show my stuff. I've never actually done this before (except in those silly land simulations where they have you wiggle around on the sand), but I'm hoping with the right combination of focus, effort, and luck, that I'll stand up on my board at exactly the right moment, catch the crest of the wave, and enjoy a glorious ride to the shore. That's what I'm hoping for. But what I'm expecting is that I'll miss the right moment, be sucked into the wave, and that instead of elevating me, the wave will crush me down to the sea floor, and I'll wind up with a mouthful of sand.

And the joke was - since I knew this was going to happen anyway - I wanted to just drive out to Ocean Beach and fill my own mouth with sand (skipping the ocean part) - just get it over with.

Well, I told this story for a few weeks, and then I forgot about it. But it didn't forget about me. The wave that has been moving toward me for the last 9 weeks finally caught me this week, and just as I expected, even though I am sitting on dry land, metaphorically I am coughing and sputtering, trying to clear my mouth of seawater and silt.

I think a lot these days about human energy - how much it has been able to manifest in the world throughout history - and yet also how none of my friends seem to have enough of it right now. Everyone I know, despite elaborate life architecture and their best truest efforts, seems to be getting crushed down into the earth at least once a season.

I think a lot these days about the phrase "Work/Life Balance" - a odd term that I think comes from the corporate world (and which implies that one is not alive at work), but which seems to have infiltrated nearly every work environment, even the alternative ones.

I think a lot these days about my foremothers - my great-grandmother and her friends - and how they probably would have laughed and scoffed at this phrase. "Life is Work" they might have said. I doubt most of them would have thought to want some "Me Time" at the end of a day of kneading, baking, sweeping, feeding, scrubbing, scouring, carrying, cooking, scraping, hanging, ironing, fetching, serving, mending, and minding. They probably wanted less from their lives than we do. But maybe they weren't so twisted and tormented. So guilty and grasping. Maybe they never thought "of course" as the cold waters closing over their heads or felt as oddly comfortable as I am with the feel of grit between my teeth.

You can't turn back the clock though. In our post-feminist, pre-apocalyptic, 21st century urban environment, inside this global pressure-cooker, there seems to be only bigger/faster/stronger/higher/harder waves coming at us, with no calm in sight. Are they even surfable anymore? Is the only solution to find a little protected cove and cut yourself off from the rest of the ocean? Is the storm ever going to pass?

Photo by wentloog

Labels: Career Anxiety, Community Muses, time

faith

Labels: Career Anxiety, Faith

ELEMENTARY

It's been 3 weeks since I've blogged. I feel bad about it, because to honor the Jewish New Year in September, I made "fresh start" plans including the goal of writing twice a week. And then I immediately failed to live up to my own goals. How surprising! But of course, that's the way life is. Maybe this is the universe's first gift of the year to me - a reminder that human plans are mere scratchings in the sand. What matters is that you keep picking up the stick.

But, today is a 21 day, the beginning of the 2nd month of my 37th year, so it's a fine day to refresh, renew and try again. And anyway, I tell myself that I haven't been writing because I've been busy changing my life. Or rather, my understanding about the context in which my life takes place - which in my overly cerebral case is basically the same thing.

For the past 3 weeks, I've been working almost obsessively on a job application for a full-time tenure-track teaching position at the University of San Francisco. I taught for this department last fall, just before coming to England, and the experience confirmed my suspicions that a university environment might be the landscape in which I could finally make use of all my skills and interests, while living a fairly comfortable life-style at the same time. This was my first academic application for an American university (I've done about 5 for schools in the UK), and it was quite arduous getting all the materials together - letter of application, graduate transcripts, letters of recommendation and support, and the terrifying "Statement of Teaching Philosophy." This last piece was the most troublesome and painful to achieve - it felt just like writing essays for college or grad school admission - trying to figure out how to say that you're cool and interesting with succinct and stylish language while avoiding cliches and hyperbolic metaphors about the value of art.

If it wasn't for Lord Limescale, I might have given up on the whole project. 5 days before the mailing deadline, I finally sat down with some sketchy notes with the goal of hammering out a killer STP. Nearly 9 hours later I had about 5 paragraphs written in a voice that was not my own, which felt wooden, forced, and most importantly boring. When LL came home from a long day in the Chicago salt-mines, I begged him to read what I had written, and he confirmed that I was going about the project in the wrong way - trying to write in an imagined "academic" tone for a mysterious audience whose expectations I had no way of knowing. He dug through some older drafts, pulled out a few nuggets and proceeded to make me an outline laced with simple, direct instructions like "write about this here, and don't use too many big words." His final words of wisdom were: "Persuasive writing is like cooking. Keep your wits about you, and follow the goddamn recipe! Small adjustments are fine, but don’t throw a handful of oregano into the masala." Sage advice for so many situations.

His generous assistance gave me hope and the will to try again to say what I mean and feel instead of what I think others might want to hear. It's amazing how desire ties us up in knots. I really want this job, and that want drew out all my insecurities, and made me doubt who I am and what I know. But by embracing my fear and working through it, I was able to approach the project with some curiosity and a little bit of humor. The best I can do is the best I can do. Whether or not I get this job is actually out of my hands (although I wouldn't mind it if you took this opportunity to make a sign for luck and a mental wish that the hiring committee accidentally spills coffee on all the other applications and decides to choose me because they're too embarrassed to ask the other candidates to resubmit their materials!) But perhaps more important even than whether or not I get the job, is the fact that I learned something significant about myself and my motivations for making art by engaging in the application process.

The title of the USF theatre department is the "Performing Arts & Social Justice Department." Kinda grand. While I love their mission of developing socially conscious artists, I've always felt like a bit of a poser suggesting that I am one of those. I am at best, an accidental activist - the kind of person who goes to political marches because the friends she's made brunch plans with are going and it sounds cool. I always feel good about it when I get there. I get engaged by the issues. I usually think "hey, I should participate in more direct political actions, because I really enjoy the collective spirit and believe in their effectiveness in changing the way people think and behave." But at heart, I am an introvert. I tend to take the easy way out and send money or a letter addressing issues I care about rather than getting out and mingling with others. And at heart I am a privileged middle-class white girl. The troubles and tribulations I have had to deal with in my life are paltry compared to what the average African woman my age has lived through (provided she lives this long.) So it takes more to knock me out of my comfortable little life than it might a person who is living closer to the edge to begin with.

But one thing that has always moved me is people. The phrase "the personal is political" has always rung true to me - even though I think it has been widely discredited in our apathetic age. I remember two years ago this fall a young schizophrenic woman, who was essentially living in a homeless shelter and who had been unable to access appropriate medical support, stripped her 3 children naked and threw them one by one off the pedestrian pier on the Embarcadero into the Bay. This incident haunted me for months. I imagined the children bobbing in the water, the 7 year-old reaching out for the 10 month old and maybe trying to hold her aloft for a moment before they both succumbed to the cold and the waves. I imagined the rescue workers desperately trolling the waters around the pier, both hoping and fearing to find what they were looking for. And most of all, I imagined the woman, "waking up" to what she had done at some future time and the terrible inescapable anguish that would engulf her for the rest of her conscious moments. This event lodged in my imagination and forced its way into my consciousness at the most inconvenient moments. I found myself having nightmares for weeks, crying in budget meetings, having to pull off to the side of the road when an unexpected wave of grief hit me. I know a big part of my reaction had to do with the fact that I shared something with this woman - we are both mothers - but of course I have every advantage and every support, while she had every obstacle. And I felt tremendously angry and disappointed with myself and everyone in my community that we had failed this woman, failed to recognize her deep need before it was too late, failed to be the village that one actually does need in order to raise healthy successful children.

Where I meet the phrase "social justice" is in the simple non-intellectual plane of empathy - the place of "co-feeling." Facts and statistics have always sailed right through my head, but imagining another human being facing their darkest moment creates inescapable images that lodge in me like hot lead. The question is how to transform that co-feeling into some kind of action that will contribute to changing the circumstances that created such a tragedy in the first place. And after wrestling 6 rounds with my STP, I think I can truly say that I believe this is what theatre can do in modern America - manifest characters and their stories in a way that penetrates our information-saturated brains and marketing-perverted hearts so that we care about another person's dilemma enough that we actually get off our asses and do something to help them.

I already knew this in some inner chamber of my heart, but having to write about it for others made it crystal clear to me, and also helped me understand the ambivalence with which I have approached mainstream theatre-making in the past few years in a new context. I don't know what the future holds - if I will get this job or another like it, when I will make a play again, how the recent realization that I don't ever want to direct Shaw or Marivaux or O'Neill will affect my career - but I do know that being in touch in a deeper way with why art matters to me is a good outcome for 3 weeks of work.

I'll leave you with the opening of my STP. May your next 3 weeks be as full of revelation as my last 3 have been.

Be well.

"When I was younger, I made theatre because I found it exciting and challenging to imagine fantastic worlds and then try to manifest them using the imperfect materials of bodies, wood, light, and paint. But now when I make theatre, I am motivated by a desire to give witness to what I see happening in the world and to conceive of alternative ways of being. I believe that theatre can function as a significant tool for social change, but not in the splashy sense that it will cause people to quite their day-jobs and riot in the streets for justice. Rather, I think theatre’s chief value in modern America is that it can create empathy and understanding between people by telling compelling and complex stories in imaginative and emotionally engaging ways. And I believe empathy has revolutionary consequences.

I can read in the paper about a woman who has lost her young children to the state because she left them in a locked apartment while she went to work. I can be shocked or saddened by this story and still go about my day and do nothing to help her or her children. But if I spend a few hours with this woman, in the body of an actor, if I hear her stories and watch her struggle with the economic and social challenges she faces, if I meet her children and see where she lives, if I try on her shoes for a time, I will not be able to forget her so quickly. I may walk out of the theatre with a visceral understanding of how fine a line there is between us. And the truth of that may inspire me to do something I have never done before, like write my congressman about the lack of affordable childcare, or volunteer at a shelter, or simply offer help to my neighbor when she needs someone to unexpectedly look after her kids."

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process, Rebirth

CALIFORNIA GIRL

Well, it's finally happened. I've gotten a job interview. A letter came in the post this week from a UK university drama department, and I'm on the shortlist (which is ironic, since I'm so tall) for a job I applied for back in June (apparently they're not in a hurry to hire.) As it turns out, this is the job (out of the seven that I applied for) that I felt most qualified for and drawn toward, and I think my application letter was actually pretty good. I've finally worked out a couple of kinks in my approach, such as how to couch my eclectic resume in the best light and how to sound enthusiastic about teaching without sounding insane.

Now I don't have any illusions that I'll actually get the job. Because let's face it: I'm 5 months pregnant, although the belly looks more like 7, and I can't start until April! But it will be a really good experience to go to the interview, which is an all-day affair and involves me making a 15-minute presentation about my research, teaching, or professional practice (yikes!) And it has bolstered my confidence somewhat to finally have a foot in a door somewhere, even if I don't expect the door to stay open very long. Because honestly, people in this country aren't terribly friendly. I don't know what I was expecting, not a red carpet exactly, but maybe a little enthusiasm about cross-cultural exchange and collaboration. Around most Brits, I feel like an overzealous extrovert, which I most definitely am not. But I don't think their lack of warmth is just because I'm an American. I think that's just how they are. An Australian friend of mine was over for dinner last week, and she said "Oh, God! You've got to know someone in London for like a year before they'll invite you over to their house for tea. And forget dinner. That's like asking someone to sleep with you!"

So, out of the frying pan and into the fire. Because while I truly love San Francisco and feel like I can count many people there as friends, I've never found the Bay Area theatre community to be especially welcoming or encouraging. Sure, if you stick around long enough, people except you. But there are a lot of fish in that small pond, and not enough bugs to go around. Yet compared to London, the San Francisco theatre scene is a non-stop orgy love-fest. Yes, there is lots of theatre in London, and lots of artists making it. But they all seem so secretive, like they're part of the Masons or something. There is this ubiquitous undercurrent of competition and suspicion about what other people are up to. Maybe it's like this in New York too. I don't really know. San Francisco is the only place I've ever practiced theatre (aside from college and grad school), and the word on the street is that Bay Area-ns are more collaborative than most other US theatre-makers. And yet to me, they never seemed collaborative enough.

As I "prepare" for this interview, imagining how I'll respond to my inquisitors' questions and what aspects of my experience and my agenda I want to put forward, I have come to realize that I am at heart a "California girl." It's ironic, since I was dying to leave the joint just a few months ago, but in considering what I have to offer a group of eager young British directing students, I think my best asset is my laid-back West-Coast attitude toward art: what it is, how it's meant to be made, and what it's for. No matter how much I want to be ambitious, there is and has always been some deep part of me that understands that all ambition is bullshit. That part will never allow the ego who loves to spin stories to get too far ahead; "If I get this job, then I'll get a good review, and maybe that bigger theatre will hire me, and then I'll be able to work with a better class of actor, and then maybe someone will notice how good I really am, and then..."

"No, no, no," whispers my inner Buddha. This is false thinking. There is nothing real in any of this. What is real is beauty. And people gathering together in a room to share themselves, despite their exhaustion from their day-jobs, and their anxiety about their finances, and their fear that they aren't really artists and never will be. What is real is the whiz and whir of the brain as it latches onto something that amuses or disturbs it; and image, an idea, a phrase, a snatch of song. What is real is the inexorable passage of time and the fact that the stage, like the patch of ground I am standing on, will be wiped clean again and again and again, and while the echo of the life that has marched there before may still resound, nothing tangible will be left behind.

I think it is easier to believe in the true nature of things when the sun is shining, which may be why Buddhism is bigger in sunny California than it is in rainy London. Nonetheless, if you want to live a life in the theatre, you have to pace yourself. There are ups, there are downs. Okay, mostly there are downs. But in between the long-awaited ups we live by the memory of those great moments of passion when everything was clicking onstage and we could feel our hearts beat in time with the audience. If you love the sun, you know that it always returns - even if you have to live through 40 straight days of rain (as I did during my first San Francisco winter) before you see it again. To my future inquisitors, I will say "I plan to teach British theatre students to believe in the sun. And of course, to believe in themselves."

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process

ARTISTIC RANT #1

I had a meeting today with an eccentric English director - someone who has a name in this country and who has worked with a number of famous people. He's also been asked to be a guest lecturer a lot, especially in America, which is where I first encountered him while I was in grad school.

He is a nice man, the kind of person who probably fancies himself a mentor for young artists, and he was kind enough to take time out of his busy life to meet with me. But at the end of our 2-hour meeting in a museum cafe, I wanted to shoot myself in the head.

I haven't indulged in too many moments of abject despair about my (currently non-existent) theatre career since crossing the pond 6 months ago, but today I made up for all that restraint. In the tube on the way home, my mind was a jumble of ineloquent curses and whiny tantrums:

Fuck fuck fuck it all. I'm never going to fucking get anything going here or anywhere else. Theatre is beat. This is bullshit. My career is going nowhere. I should pack it up and become a fucking preschool teacher. Fuck fuck fuck.

What did this man say that so stimulated the wrathful demons inside me, you ask? I have no idea. Really. Except that he did chide me a bit for being "unfocused", for being interested in too many things, and also for being too effusive, too enthusiastic. "Talk a little slower my dear. Don't try to tell everything at once." And maybe that's all it took - being chided took the piss out of me. It made me feel like I'm an eager-beaver graduate all over again, a newbie, fresh off the bus and dazzled by the lights of the big city marquee. It made me feel like I'm never going to get off the bench and back into the game.

And I can't believe that after all the time I've put in in the trenches - slaving for peanuts in non-profits and schlepping my ass here and there between 1,001 jobs, that I am still not qualified enough, not juiced up or hooked up enough to get the attention of anyone in theatre in this godforsaken country. It's like being in junior high all over again and having to find my clique. Where are my people? Where are the people who, like me, value collaboration above self-aggrandizement? Where are the people who would rather focus their energies on actually engaging with another person than trying to impress them with 120 straight minutes of name-dropping? Where are the people who aren't feeling so protective of their hand-built sandbox that they're not willing to invite the new kid over to play a bit and maybe share the toys a little.

It's humiliating all this selling of self. I sucked at it in the small and relatively low-key pond of San Francisco, and I suck even harder at it in the giant ocean that is London. I think in the back of my mind, I had some kind of ridiculous fantasy playing that in coming over here I could hopscotch over all the facets of the business of making theatre that have always plagued me - networking, proving your value as an artist by affiliating yourself with impressive people and institutions, using others (either literally or figuratively) to get a leg up. I was hoping that I would bump into some people like me who are just looking for space and time to play and people to play with, and that we would dance off together in a blissed-out creative haze.

But that isn't happening. And while I'm certainly capable of scraping some folks together and putting on a show myself, what I want more than anything is to be IN CONVERSATION with some other artists. I wish I could take out a personal ad:

36-year old over-educated director/dramaturg/teacher/dance-lover seeks artists of any discipline to connect and make art with. I love talking, listening, and brainstorming about the world and where we fit into it. You love long converations over coffee, taking creative risks, and know where we can rehearse for free. Let's get together and see where it leads. Let's dream something up and make it happen. Let's become intimate with each other's questions and then invite some others to chew on them with us.

One of the things that I got so fed up with working in non-profit theatre was how slowly things move - you have to fundraise at least 1-1/2 years out for any given project. Your organizational vision grows by leaps and bounds, while your infrastructure grows by dribs and drabs. It takes years for a play to go from the page to the stage, and often they never make the leap at all. Somehow I thought things might move faster here, but so far it feels the opposite. I've been here 6 months, and it feels like another 6 could pass and I would be in the same place - a person who wants to work but who can find no work, a person who wants to play but who can find no playmates.

I have to think the universe is trying to teach me something here. Maybe today's feeling that I'm trying to drive with the parking brake on is a warning that I'm not ready to "go back to work" yet afterall. Probably there is more discernment to be done, to figure out which of my interests and enthusiasms deserves my full attention. Most likely the eccentric English director hit the nail on the head when he metaphorically reduced me to a puppy fresh out of the box. Maybe my legs aren't strong enough yet for standing in this brave new world. Maybe I've distracted myself with work all these years to avoid the fact that I'm still afraid to do what it is that I most want to do. Whatever that is.

I read a book once called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - the kind of book you could read over and over and still not fully grasp. The bit I remember is something that I think comes from the Noh tradition - no matter how much mastery you think you have achieved, you must still approach every task and every problem from the perspective of a beginner. That way you will continually refresh yourself by testing your skill in the present moment, rather than repeating yourself or relying on tricks or shortcuts.

That's hard for me. To feel like a beginner. To accept that there is only the long road. Very hard.

But that's how it is today.

Be well.

directing
art
job search

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process

WHAT DO YOU DO?

It’s the million dollar question – the one that makes new graduates shiver and sweat – the one that can turn a cocktail party into a Kafka-esque ordeal – what do you do? Most of us work diligently to craft an acceptable spiel or a series of spiels in response to this seemingly innocuous, yet craftily impertinent question. “Well, I’ve been in marketing for quite awhile, but I’m really eager to shift into event planning. I’ve discovered that I’ve really got a knack for…” “Actually, I’m at home right now with our baby and I’m loving it. But after my 3-month maternity leave, I’ll be back full-time with Schnapps, Schneppel & Slivkowitz…” “I’m a free-lance (fill-in the blank), and it’s fantastic. Yeah, the money is shit, but it’s great waking up each morning knowing I’m living my dream…”

Blah, blah, fucking blah, blah (as my husband Lord Limescale would say.) These are the stories we tell, the white lies we design to highlight our good-points - the aspects of our lives that might make others appreciative or even envious - and down-play our weaknesses, inconsistencies, and doubts. Here are some of the sound-bites I’ve used in the past to explain myself and the specific nature of my scrapings and scratchings on this earth:

“I’m a director.”

“I’m a free-lance performing arts teacher.”

“I’m a drama teacher, but I also do arts administration and direct.”

“I’m a theatre director and dramaturg, and I’ve been working for a non-profit play development organization for the past 6 years. I also teach.”

Notice a trend? Over the past ten years, the answers have gotten more and more complicated. It usually required a full five minutes of follow-up explication before I’d get the “oh, I get what you do” nod. And even then, nobody really got it. “What’s a dramaturg?” “What theatres have you worked at?...Oh, I haven’t heard of those.” “How many jobs do you have?” I sometimes used to wish I was a lawyer, or an accountant, or a dentist. Something concrete with a clearly definable job description and an accepted sense of professionalism.

And now, none of these things is even true anymore, at least not in the present-tense sense. I last directed a developmental workshop of a play nearly a year ago. It’s been just over three years since I directed a full-length play. I haven’t taught anyone anything (except how to say “yes, please” and “no, thank-you”) in six months. I’m not producing, managing, facilitating or administrating anything at the moment except one unruly three-year old and one six-room flat. I am, in fact,…a full-time mommy. And while I expect and hope that this condition will be temporary. And while I claim to value the hard work and social contributions of my full-time mommy peers. The truth is. I hate having this as my spiel. I hate telling people that I am not doing anything right now except tending to my home and my family and waiting for inspiration to strike me about what to do next. And I hate that I hate this. What greater purpose is there, really, than taking care of other people. Than making a family. A home.

“We are human beings, not human doings.” My mom used to speak this quote a lot. For awhile I had it up on my bulletin board. And I believe it. I do. But truly, I am addicted to doing. And like any addict worth her salt, I am committed to hanging on to my addiction. I have a history of fiercely resisting any and all attempts by the universe and my own subconscious to slow my ass down. But I finally found the perfect solution to my workaholicism – I ripped myself out of the environment where I had the opportunity to do so much and plunked myself down in a place where it is hard to do much of anything – hard because I don’t know anyone, because my experience and work history are virtually meaningless in British terms, because I have a small child and one tenth of the support network I had back in SF. Some days I feel like an utter fool for having done this – those are the days when I read theatre reviews from SF Gate and feel engorged with envy and regret – “I could have been doing that!” But on good days, on sane days (which are rarer than I’d like them to be), I remember that I came here to reinvent myself and to discover (perhaps for the first time), what it is that I really want to do.

And yesterday, I had a tiny break-through on this score. I went to meet Mr. L, who runs the graduate program at a prestigious drama school in London. He is the first authentic academic contact I have been able to make (through a friend), and he was kind enough to take time out of his very busy schedule to meet with me, a slightly muddled woman with a teeming resume that tells too many stories at once. He was politely friendly in that uniquely English way, and he asked me some very insightful questions about what I am about. When I told him that I am interested in both new plays and devising, he pointed out that these are two very different aspects of the theatrical art-form. Touché! I went on to explain that the playwrights I have enjoyed working with in the past are highly collaborative, and relish engaging with and getting feedback from director/dramaturgs and performers. I told him that while I don’t consider myself a co-author necessarily, on many of the pieces I’ve worked on with playwrights, I’ve been given greater creative latitude than one might expect in a normal director/playwright relationship. I told him that I’m all about collaboration – this is my talent, my passion, and my driving motivation in making theatre – to interact with others – to have a conversation, creatively.

Now, in fact, I wasn’t quite as cogent with Mr. L as I’m being now 24-hours later. In actuality, I blathered on for quite awhile at a high rate of speed trying to find my point. Mr. L looked increasingly concerned and then shortly thereafter excused himself – I think I drove him off with my fast-talking, informal, American ways. But nevermind. It was a first step toward figuring out an authentic answer to the question.

“What do you do?”

“I have conversations with people. I like to be in conversation with other artists and with people in my community about things that matter to us. These conversations are most satisfying to me when they take on a theatrical form.”

Nevermind where or how or when these conversations occur. Nevermind who is watching the conversations from a distance or whether they pay me to have them. The point is the connecting with others and making sense of things. The point is self-expression and self-discovery and intimacy and amazement. The point is being after-all.

Be well.

art
directing
job search

Labels: Career Anxiety

I AM AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

One of the luxuries I allowed myself when we moved to London was the exorbitantly expensive shipping of four boxes of books. Choosing which books to bring, which to store, and which to give away was my very first moving task, one that I completed with the fortuitous assistance of my friend A. A is a writer herself – a brilliantly imaginative and poetic playwright in fact, so I felt secure in accepting her recommendation on each volume’s fate – “Script Analysis? Boring. Haven’t cracked it since grad school. Chuck it. The Playwright’s Voice? Well that’s important. Put that one in the ‘Take to London’ box.” And so we proceeded shelf by shelf with a miraculous rapidity and confidence that I experienced in no other part of the gruesome packing process.

When the books finally arrived 6 weeks after we did, I was ecstatic. I unpacked them and strew them about the living room (where they still sit as I haven’t managed to procure a bookshelf yet), and I’ve already dipped into the pile quite a few times – Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island has provided a humorous sense of perspective about our adopted culture. Ellen Gilchrist’s book of short stories Light Can Be Both Particle & Wave has been a faithful old friend on my nightstand – one whose characters and phrases I enjoy slipping on like a favorite bathrobe. Peter Brook’s Empty Space is as full of revelation as it was nearly 20 years ago, when I first read it in college.

And last week – due to an impulse that I have forgotten – I picked up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I also discovered this book in college – probably in a Women’s Studies class. And reading it makes me as angry now as it did then. Ms. Woolf acknowledges simply that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” and then goes on to prove in her slim volume just how impossible achieving these resources has been for her sisters throughout the ages. One could apply her maxim to nearly anything creative that a woman might aspire to: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to paint, to play the violin, to design buildings, to make theatre.

I guess I picked up the book because the longing for a room of my own has snuck up on me again – a dull unavoidable throb. Even now, in this time of not working, this “sabbatical” time, where I have no responsibilities to the outside world, and am expected by no one to produce anything on any kind of deadline – even now, I barely have enough time to think half the thoughts I want to think, much less make anything creative. When all is said and done, I have about 10 hours a week to myself, 10 hours to spend as I choose. Of course the temptation is huge to get a jump on the laundry, to just pick up the house for a few minutes before I sit down to write (because I think better with less clutter), to take care of those errands that are so hard to get done with Gman in tow, etc. etc. But even when I avoid all domestic temptations and use my time to its best advantage, it still isn’t enough – I’m still racing out the door 10 minutes late to pick up Gman because I wanted to read one more chapter, write one more page, look up one more interesting thing on the internet. And I never get back to any of it. I always think I will, that I’ll come home and sneak back to the computer while Gman is playing, that I’ll make a quick dinner and use the extra time to read just a bit more, write one more email – but it never happens. My thoughts are always left unfinished. My intentions left unfulfilled. It turns out that being a housewife is nearly as time consuming as being a working mother. And of course since I’m not actually producing anything with this time, it’s hard to argue for more time. And how much would it take anyway, before I would feel intellectually and spiritually sated – 20 hours a week, 40 hours, 60 hours? How much solitude, how many moments to look out the 3^rd floor window at the sky and the tree branches flickering, how many hours of reading and writing in my journal would be enough to make me feel fulfilled? I could noodle away a life with introspection and creative musings and internet research. And still never actually make anything.

And that is why I am so angry with Virginia Woolf – why she terrifies me so. Not only does she reproach me with her sheer miraculous creative output – but she also describes in her witty side-ways prose the deep and historical circumscription of women’s lives – how and why it is that we will always achieve less.

“If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex…we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been – that was the snag in the argument – no Mary…for, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children – no human being could stand it.”

Okay, now I don’t have thirteen children, and I do recognize that individual women are accomplishing a great deal – I hold as friends a whole slew of women who are doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, scholars and managers of companies. But. Still. As a group, we still do not achieve what men do – mainly because of the baby question, and the simple inescapable fact that someone has to raise the darn things.

“First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all.”

Yes, it is useless to ask these questions, to keep protesting – as I have for much of my life – how unfair it is to be a woman. It is a topic that I have endlessly bored Lord Limescale with. It is my favored form of whinging (fabulous British word for whining), and I can’t seem to stop doing it. I know my life is very very good, much better in nearly every way than woman of even one generation ago. But. Still. I cannot stop longing for the space and time (and money) to test my imagination fully, to see what might be possible if I could just sit still long enough and THINK.

Be well.

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process, Creative Women