“It’s about this walk we are on”
When I lived in Tucson in the mid-1990s, I was working on The Hummingbird’s Daughter. It was probably one of my darkest experiences as a writer, even though that’s a book people think is full of life and love. But it was a book that took me twenty years to research, and a lot of those years were spent doing really mind-shredding things with medicine people and so forth. I was at the end of so many cycles in my life, including (or so I thought) my writing career. Things were just shut down. I found myself unable to read anymore.
I was so broke I didn’t even have money for food. My first novel, In Search of Snow, had bombed, and I made a huge mistake: I emptied my bank account to buy out my entire run so it wouldn’t be remaindered, thinking these first-edition peddlers would reimburse me. I was stuck with about three thousand copies, and since I had no money, I actually put a futon on top of boxes and boxes of my unwanted books. My bedside table was a box of books. My TV sat on a plank laid across boxes of my books.
There was a used bookstore I haunted, and one day I was just poking around in the poetry section and I saw a book called Cup of Tea Poems. I didn’t know that Issa, the author, is a famed haiku master. I just thought, “Oh my God, that’s the crap that my sixth-grade teacher made us write.”
And I started reading, and I found my best friend in the world in this man. He was just like me, in poverty and in crisis, and he was writing poems of friendship to the flea and the mosquito. So I bought it, a very cheap used paperback, but still a big outlay for me at that time. That encounter opened up everything that is now my bedrock rule about writing.
Issa was a mischievous writer, and a very naughty one. One of his poems was “Writing shit about snow for the rich is not hard.” But his rule—and now mine—was, simply trust.
I thought: “Simply trust? Kiss my ass! Do you know what kind of trouble I’m in? You can go to hell, Issa. I’m not going to trust anything. You’re full of shit. ‘Simply trust as this plum blossom flower fades and falls.’ Go to hell, man.”
But I kept wrestling with this ridiculous phrase: “Simply trust.” Thanks to Issa I started reading other haiku poets and then more, and more . . . Because, you know, seventeen syllables, you can read that. And I was walking down the street, my last six bucks in my pocket, arguing with a poet who’s been dead for hundreds of years. “Okay, Issa, trust what? God? Look where God left me. Life? Have you seen the books in my room? You? You’re dead. Myself? Give me a break.”
So a few blocks from the bookstore was a hippie store full of groovy stuff I couldn’t afford. They had a basket of those inscribed rocks: “Dream.” “Dance.” “Love.” So I dig through the basket and at the bottom there’s a little flat gray stone that says “Trust.” I looked at this stinking rock and thought, “Okay, Issa.” It was six bucks, and I didn’t want to spend that much, but I did. It was a Charlie Chaplin moment. It turned a key for me.
I found my priorities changing. I started thinking that sleeping on my books wasn’t pathetic. It was actually kind of funny. Bit by bit, I realized that it’s not about fame or paying the rent. It’s about this walk we are on. It’s a way of being and seeing and responding to the world and each other. I started seeing the world as this weird matrix of sacredness—not religion, but sacredness. To this day, I teach courses called “The Theory and Practice of Trust.” I tell my students, “I don’t care if you get famous or not. I don’t care if you get rich. I don’t care if you get an A in this course or not. This is about getting your black belt in writing because you cannot not write, because writing is the essence of who and what you are.”
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Luis Urrea, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of the novels Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and many other books of fiction and nonfiction. He lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois, and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois–Chicago.