This summer I started two blogs: one about my garden, and one about my writing and teaching. I haven't wanted to write too much about the teaching, namely because I tell all my students (I can't believe I have students!) to look at my blog, and then where am I?
But it's felt like a funny stretch for me, writing about my backyard and my devotion to my tomatoes, beans and peppers, and then also trying to keep up my fiction. I've always placed these in two separate boxes - writing is indoors, public, and professional, while gardening is outdoors, a private and amateurish pleasure. But I've known in my heart that they were linked, a kind of ying and yang. Writing involves sending my mind fixedly far away from the here and now. Gardening pushes exactly the opposite buttons - it is a radical rooting in the here and now - the smell of this tomato bush, the stink of the compost, the wet or dry dirt, the hidden bean harvest, the way my fingers learn to find little weeds and pull them out. It's an immersion in sights, sounds and smells - tiny little lacewing insects, flies, worms, birds, caterpillars, rot or growth on a plant. The information is here and now. And the product is for my pleasure only: no matter how hard I work to preserve the harvest, it will go. Eventually, no matter how delicious a meal is, it will disappear into the belly of one of my friends, to be absorbed into their bodies or gone forever.
Writing is the opposite - it is sitting alone in a little room, the quieter the better, and the only senses triggered signal distractions: a tea kettle, cold feet, the phone ringing, someone at the door. The world here has to come entirely from our mind. And it's not to be enjoyed now - what we make now might disappear forever. But the final product is a kind of everlasting pie - I can (hopefully) pass it around to a world's worth of "relatives" - and unlike a pie, enjoy it or not, it will last months, maybe years.
Writing and gardening, gardening and writing. What they have in common is that they are both labors of love, both hard work, and both kinds of "outsider activities" - work that we do that has no payoff, no paycheck, no title, no promotions. I'm not sure why I spend hours working the soil, turning the compost, or tying up tomatoes. I don't know why I spend hours in the kitchen sliding a knife through eggplants, peppers, onions and garlic, washing, slicing, coring and roasting. I know that I write because I decided to join an MFA program that has regular deadlines, but in the end, the answer is really just that I do it because I love it, because both of these activities seem wholly life-affirming, wholly creative, and wholly of use to living the kind of life that makes us want to not just survive, but live.
So I was thrilled when, researching the author E. Annie Proulx for a school assignment, I found out that before she'd ever published any fiction, she'd written about a dozen "How-to" books about gardening and rural living. Granted, as a single mom with four kids (albeit with shared custody), many of those were written as a source of cash. But how lovely to see that she'd written about the kinds of things that, against any logic that I understand, fascinate me. A book about how to make your own hard cider, another one about home-made cheese, a volume on bartering and one on how to build your own fences and walkways. Currently I have a cheese-making kit in my pantry, right next to the home-made vinegar crock I begged for my birthday. Yes, maybe an author has to be mercantile at times, but the fact that her area of expertise is a kind of radical homemaking, long before it was fashionable, gives me hope. There's something in us that cries to get at the root of things, to make things for ourselves, to not just read the book but write it, to not just eat the salad but grow it, and for Ms. Proulx, to not just travel the country but to tell its story - that's a mindset I understand.
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