AN ARCHITECT TOLD ME ONCE, “Write it from the heart and it will be great.” I was deep into a book about the friendship between a troubled young mother and a budding architect who was her friend. The book was about my real friendship with the real architect. He had asked me to write it. He was dying. It was his dying wish that I tell some of the stories that we shared.
On the rare occasions when I speak in public, and the even rarer ones when I agree to answer questions about my work, students ask me if my family and friends mind when I use my life as fodder for my work. “Several times they have asked me to write about them,” I answer. “My sister-in-law in Alabama once said to me, ‘Why do you never write anything about me? I certainly think I’ve had an interesting life.’ “ She had two kidney transplants when such things were fairly uncommon. One kidney came from her father and the second one from her mother. The week before the second transplant she and her mother moved into the most expensive hotel in Birmingham, Alabama, and went shopping at the finest stores. Since they are the same size—both are dainty, extremely beautiful women with tiny waists and feet—they figured whoever survived could wear the clothes. When people talk about steel magnolias I always smile to myself over the silly models they use in Hollywood. They should have seen Hilton Hagler and her mother buying shoes the day before they lay down on tables to be transplant subjects.
Another thing Hilton did was marry my brother twice. Both weddings were gorgeous. I was a bridesmaid in one and the maid of honor in the second one. Hilton was right. I did owe her a story and I wrote a good one for her. It is called “The Blue-Eyed Buddhist.” I left it out of my Collected Stories because I thought the ending was too sad but when we redo the book someday I will ask Little, Brown to add it to the stories.
The book about the architect and me when we were young is called Net of Jewels. He loved the title and painted a beautiful abstract for me to use for the cover but I couldn’t get the art department to use it. The architect had died by the time the book was published and never knew his painting wasn’t on the cover. The book is out of print right now. Perhaps when it is reprinted I can get the publisher to use it. Little, Brown has always been my publisher and I have been through many art directors with them. At the moment they have a great one. He would see the beauty of this painting so I will keep my fingers crossed that the book goes back into print while he’s in charge.
All of what I have written so far in this essay is to illustrate for young writers as well as I can how very strange and mysterious and yet simple writing really is. At the core of writing is this heart-driven desire to praise, remember, and love. “A process in the weather of the heart,” as Dylan Thomas wrote. Most of my teaching is about the outward process of writing, about training for the job, making yourself go back to the typewriter and rewrite, and all of that is helpful to a young writer. But the truth is more beautiful than that. “Write it from the heart and it will be great.” A student who wrote a story about trying to protect her younger brother from the bullies on the back of the school bus was writing from her heart. We wept with her, when, against her warnings, the boy kept going back there to take his punishment until he earned his place among the men. She was a young woman with two children and another on the way who had spent most of the last few years cleaning houses for a living. Somehow she had stayed close to her heart, to the real stuff, to what makes us care and weep. I want to lead my students to that place. I want to read what they write when they have found it.
SUMMER 2002