Putting Pen to Paper

Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up. Truman Capote wrote lying down. Emily Dickinson wrote in secret. But I almost didn't write at all because in order to write, I had to complete three formidable, but essential tasks. First, I had to believe in the power of my own hands. Second, someone I trusted, someone who mattered had to look me in the eye and tell me I had the right stuff to be a writer. And finally, I had to find the source of my creative ideas.

Taking up a pen and writing was, for me, almost inconceivable because I was raised by people who have a firm grip on hammers, mops, steering wheels, and shovels. For them, a pen is something you use to write a check, add up a column of numbers, or itemize a grocery list. Besides, writing isn't real work because you can't get calluses from it. And at the end of the day, what do you have to show for it? A couple of sheets of paper? What good is that? A more sinister underlying suspicion is that living in your imagination is dangerous. It leads to crazy thoughts and worse. That's why the men in my family built buildings, butchered meat, planted gardens, added numbers in rigid columns, and rolled out sheets of pasta dough. The women picked up babies, scrubbed the kitchen floors, stirred pots of spaghetti sauce, typed other people's letters, and prayed.

And so, for me, there was no path to follow. Women in my family were taught to channel all their aspirations into their husband and children and not develop their own talents. My Irish grandmother relied so much on her husband that when he died and she was left with four small children, her only marketable skill was cleaning houses. Later, when her children were older, she depended on them. She never drove, she never voted. She hardly ever wrote, except to sign her name on checks. When my sister and I asked her what her life was like in Ireland, she laughed because she had no words to voice her experience. As much as I wished I could turn to my mother, she was inaccessible, caught up in her own turmoil.

My father's drinking was putting a strain on their marriage. On the way home from work, he stopped for a drink, which ended up being four or five. My mother prayed that he'd be drawn back into the protective circle of the family. When that didn't work, she drank with him at home. My father built a bar in the den, kept it well-stocked, and he taught me how to make their martinis extra dry with a twist. Two before dinner and a few glasses of Chianti with the meal. Then, if my sister and I were lucky, they both fell asleep in their twin lounge chairs. If not, we learned to keep clear of my father, whose anger was quick to ignite and whose needs were excessive and inappropriate. Then, my mother became pregnant.

And so I turned to books for solace and for answers, swallowing them whole, submerging myself in their worlds--Jane Austen, George Washington Carver, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Helen Keller. I could hide in their lives for a while and find some reassurance and comfort that others had more obstacles, more troubles than I did.

And then when I was 13, Sister Leon came to Saint Patrick's Elementary, a Gothic fortress set up high on a hill above the funeral parlor and McDonald's. Unlike Sister Elizabeth or Sister Brian Mara, she didn't ask us to copy prayers in precise cursive letters or memorize the Baltimore Catechism. She didn't rip out the girls' hems if they were a few inches above the knee or yank on the boy's ears when they didn't pay attention. And most importantly, she never insisted that we follow two simple and quite impossible rules: to automatically believe in God and to always obey His rules, which were endless. She simply allowed us to be children, sometimes wayward, sometimes willful, so in return, we adored her. Boys, who always punched each other and kicked around a wad of paper in the back of the classroom, were suddenly quiet and attentive. Girls, who usually spent time in the bathroom applying mascara and lipstick, raised their hands and asked questions. Sister Leon was unlike any teacher we had before. When she played dodge ball at recess, she tagged us hard. In class, she allowed and even encouraged digressions.

"Sister, do nuns watch television?"

She grinned. "Of course."

"What ball team do you like?"

"The Yankees."

One boy elbowed another. "I told you. She's smart. Not like you."

She drew me out of my books. When we talked, we looked each other in the eye. I was thirteen and tall for my age. She was short for a grown up. She tucked her hands into the wide black sleeves of her habit while she walked around the room, waiting for us to finish our work. When she leaned over our desks, pointing here or gesturing there, she smelled clean like soap. I drank in her calm, comforting presence.

Sometimes, back home, it felt like I was living on a fault line in crazy California. My mother gave birth to my little brother in January and my father was still drinking hard. Not long after that, one of our classmates, Chris, was thrown from his car on a steep, icy road and died instantly, along with his father. Most of us felt guilty. Chris was a quiet boy we made fun of. We should have tried harder to be kinder, but now it was too late.

When it was time to pay our last respects, Sister Leon led us down the hill from St. Patrick's to the funeral home directly across the street. Only our classmate Todd was at ease because he was the son of the undertaker and lived over the funeral parlor. I whispered a little prayer of thanks that the coffin was closed. One by one we stumbled by the casket and murmured farewell. Back in the classroom, Sister Leon set a tall votive candle and a silver crucifix on his desk. In silence, as she struck a long match and lit the candle, a sulfurous smell filled the room. We watched uncomfortably and waited for her to speak. His death was mercifully fast and he didn't suffer, she said. He was happy at last. She was sure of that. But we could help Chris with our prayers. Sister bowed her head. "Our Father," she began and we joined in, relieved. All week, Sister burned the candle for him. It wavered in the tiny breezes in the room as books opened and shut and someone walked past his desk. I stared at it, shivering a little.

Winter turned to spring. And still we talked in class.

"You're too hard on yourselves," Sister said once. "No one's perfect. It's an illusion. Everyone has a part of herself that she's ashamed of. Even me." Her admission startled us into silence. No nun had ever opened herself up to our personal scrutiny. It was a rare and courageous act. She held out her hands to us and stared at them in rueful silence. "I used to hate my hands. They're so big. I was ashamed of them."

We didn't believe her and told her so.

She smiled and tucked her hands into her sleeves, which meant another story was coming. Once, when Sister wasn't much older than us, she volunteered in a nursing home. She'd talk to the patients or read to them. One day she was holding out her hands to help an old woman into a wheelchair. As the woman grasped them, she said, "You've got such warm hands. So strong, too." Sister told us, "I learned a lesson from that. It was more important what I did with my hands. Not how they looked."

I would think about this over the next few years. How would I use my hands? Surely I'd do more with them than put on makeup or hold a boy's hand. I could go to college, become a teacher, and if I dared, maybe even a writer. I told no one of my dreams, but somehow Sister Leon knew. Sometimes after school, my friend Irene and I rang the bell on the convent door and asked to see her. After a long wait, Sister would walk towards us, smiling. Her questions always surprised us. "And how's your art?" she asked Irene. "And your writing?" she asked me. By naming our gifts and dreams, she gave them credence and validity. I held her trust in my heart. It was a beacon.

Others encouraged me along the way. Most notably there was Richard, the first man I truly loved and still love thirty years later. We went through college together and graduate school. "Find your bliss," the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell said. I did. I married Richard, even though it meant breaking away from my family because they disapproved of him and his religion.

After we had been married for a while, I admitted to Richard that I wanted to be a writer. His reply was immediate. "So, write," he said and those simple, trusting words gave me the confidence I needed to put pen to paper. For years, I did it on the sly in my free time after teaching and on summer vacations. Later when I changed careers and had a child, I wrote between editorial assignments and while my son napped. But that wasn't enough to truly make me a writer. I still hadn't faced my hardest task--finding my creative source. I wrote from my head, detached from my reality and my experience. A master of the opening sentence, I could never sustain the writing through to the end. I lost the thread. I grew frustrated, I faltered. For years, I could produce nothing more than disjointed stories, none of them complete. For a while, I went into therapy and read how-to-books by famous writers. Write what you know, John Gardner advised and so I did. That story became my first novel.

Robert Bly put it even more succinctly-"Your pain is your gift," he says. We must dip into the well of hurt, of disappointment, of grief and turn it into literary gold because that is the true stuff of our creativity.

More About P. A. Moed:

After rewarding careers in teaching and in publishing, Patricia Moed is now devoting her talent and energy to writing. For the past eight years, she has produced newsletters, brochures, annual reports, and promotional articles for profit and non-profit institutions. In addition to co-authoring a textbook, she has written short stories, poetry, essays, and two novels: More Sweet, More Salt and The Sweetness of Adversity. Two of her essays Bertha's Blessing and Nick's Gift have been accepted for publication. One of her short stories won an award from The Detroit Monthly/Detroit Women Writers. She has been granted fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, and she was selected to attend master classes in fiction taught by Lynn Sharon Schwartz at the Vermont Studio Center, Alice Adams at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, and Catherine Hiller at the Writer's Voice Program at the West Side Y. Her current projects include a screenplay and a short story collection, which is being reviewed on Zoetrope.com. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and son.

You can email Patricia at p.moed@worldnet.att.net.