Alison Hodgson

Expert on the etiquette of perilous times.

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photo: Sandi Gunnett

I’ve just returned from the Festival of Faith and Writing.

It’s wonderful to spend three days winging from workshop to workshop soaking in the words of all sorts of writers. Add to that seeing dear friends and friendly acquaintances and it is so rich.

And yet a fatigue always sets in. To start, it’s the introvert’s Olympics. I am an introvert in the strictest sense: I get my energy being alone, so constantly being in a crowd, even a crowd of fellow word nerds is exhausting. Invariably another fatigue overcomes me that can be best attributed to overexposure to over earnestness.

When you gather a pack of writers you will hear quite a bit about the difficulties the writer faces. God, and anyone who has sat down in front of a blank screen to write something true and good, knows they exist and yet, I’m really turned off by overwrought speakers.

When we talk about writing, no matter how it might feel, regardless of how scary it can be, at the end of  the day, unless we’re imbedded with the military, most of us are sitting in a chair and facing a screen in a safe and comfortable space.

And that is hard enough.

We don’t do ourselves any favors being histrionic.

The writers who resonate with me the most are those who are deeply serious about the world, but about themselves, not so much.

https://alisonhodgson.com/2012/04/106/

Fiction and Non

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I was talking with Eden the other day about writing and the fire.

She is an accomplished writer. When she was in Kindergarten she wrote a book for her dad, a memoir, as a gift for Father’s Day. The plan was originally for it to be forty pages (each page being a chapter) but she settled for twelve, I believe. She went on to write many more books all of which I stacked on top of the bookcase in the hall outside our bedroom. I walked right past it that last morning and I have wished, more than once, that I grabbed them on my way.

The other day I told Eden that someone had asked me to write a short account of the fire but I was having a little trouble.

She sat up straight. “You need to write her back and tell her (the editor) that it’s impossible; it’s going to be long or nothing at all. It’s impossible for it to be short. I was going to write a book about it but I decided not to because it’s too long.”

“You were going to write a book about the fire? When?” I said.

“In second grade.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Cuz in a book you have to write your feelings and all that stuff, but in a story you don’t have to. It’s just a story, such as:  ‘Henry held the frog. Henry thought the frog felt nasty.’ That’s random, but it’s something.”

I agreed. It was.

“In a story,” she continued, “you don’t have to say, ‘But I was really scared.’

Building the Story

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Today I’m working on a short account of someone setting fire to our home, of losing everything and rebuilding.

Long time readers and friends might have seen “short account” and registered a red flag.

I hear you.  I see it waving too. Short has never been my strong suit and I don’t feel ready to summarize the experience. We all know I can write about the fire and of losing everything, but when I think about trying to tell the story cogently and well my brain hurts and I imagine it looking like the picture above.

Because rebuilding was as much of the suffering as the fire, in some ways, I’ve only begun to mourn.  The story of everything isn’t finished.  I don’t know where I am exactly, maybe just breaking ground.

But someone wants me to tell the story. I’m being offered a wonderful opportunity and I don’t want to squander it.

Maybe I need to look at this “short account” as a blueprint. I don’t have to actually build a house today, just write the plan for what I want it to be.

New Growth

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It’s a peculiar experience walking through the ruins of your home.
This is the floor of my study about two months after the fire. It was one of the rooms on the first floor hardest hit. The roof burned away and the ceiling was on the floor. The knotty pine paneling had been charred or eaten away by flames, but so many parts of the room were intact, almost burned beyond recognition, but there still.
The weeks before the fire I was working on a book proposal. In the ruins you could see books I was referencing as well as pieces of a friend’s proposal I was using as a model. It was so strange to stand in that room, that no longer had a roof and walls, but to see paper that survived.

I had the study one week.  We had shuffled around the bedrooms to create room for it.  The girls moved in together and Paul and I traded with them, moving into a smaller room that had been Lydia’s and changed Eden’s into the study.  All the bedrooms we redid, repainting the walls and replacing the floors.  Everything was fresh and new.  The week before the fire Paul and my brother-in-law, David moved in my old oak desk, that was a little too big, but I was using until I found something I liked better.  Days before the fire they moved in the sofa that I knew would be a place for Paul and some of the kids to lounge.

The day before the fire I was planning the bookshelves for the hundreds of books that were stacked in the hall and dining room, waiting to move in.

There is a small study, also on the northwest corner of the new house.  Since we moved it has been the dumping ground of all our records, supplies for Eden’s home school and everything related to the build.  A few months ago I made some semblance of order but during the holidays it became the gift staging area and a new mess.

One of my excuses is that I have been homeschooling Eden and need to find a desk or table big enough for both of us to sit beside each other.  I haven’t found one that pleased me, so we’ve been doing school at the island or the couch, which is fine, but we’re constantly schlepping her books and notebooks around.

Today was the breaking point.  It wasn’t dramatic, I just hit a wall.  I’m working on a new project which means a new proposal and I need to spread out some papers and make room for a stack of books.  I need a desk.  I have a small, antique library desk that my brother-in-law lent me, but it’s not comfortable  and doesn’t afford a lot of space.

Never mind that.

I cleared it off and Christopher helped me move it in front of a window.  There are still baskets full of records that need to be sorted and piles of papers too, but this is it.   I’m claiming this space.  I’m writing in and through the mess.

How I Became a Minimalist In One Simple Step and You Can Too!

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Granted, I had some help.
This was exactly where my family stood and watched the fire. I know because the photographer had to walk past us with his tripod to set up some other shots. I hadn’t yet intellectualized that there is a “fire etiquette” since I was in the very early stages of discovering this, but looking back I would give Dave Odette from the Grand Rapids Press a gold star for leaving us alone and limiting our exchange to a look. He was doing his job and we were doing ours.
As I watched my house burn, I thought, “I can take this,” which might smack of hubris and a desperate attempt to get a handle on a situation which was clearly outside of my control. That might be true, but what prompted it was recognition that I felt no pain. Shock was a big part of that, of course and my subconscious instantly shuffled through my history of suffering trying to process the unthinkable thought: my house is burning down.
There was a feeling of embarrassment as if it was a big mess we had made, as if we were at fault. I remember willing the firefighters to get there and thinking we just needed a little help and then Paul and I could get it cleaned up. The firemen (no ladies on this job) arrived within minutes, but time has a way of slowing down when you’re watching your house burn.
We had many crazy thoughts, standing on that path, watching the fire spread from the garage, to the upstairs and outside to the cars and the trees. It occurred to me that not everyone gets to watch her house burn, that it’s a unique experience and that I needed to pay attention, so I did. And a fire is a fire; all of them, from a safe enough distance, are strangely mesmerizing, and the burning of our home was no exception.
What surprised me was the absence of pain, that this was not as painful as the death of my father, our son’s multiple and protracted diagnoses, depression, the loss of my childhood home in the aftermath of a massive embezzlement of our family business and the loss of my childhood itself with the death of Paul’s father to suicide.
I was in shock yes, but I was also clearer than I’ve ever been: “that” (our house and possessions) was stuff and could be replaced, my family, standing beside me, alive and physically unharmed, was irreplaceable. It was well with my soul.
How could I know that the actual burning is just the beginning of the suffering with a house fire?
I starting keeping a written record the night of the fire. Writing is how I think. Until I lay it down, it’s a tangle of thoughts, a confused clutter. Writing is how I examine my life, how I see. The day after the fire I wrote down our escape from the house, part of it anyway. I could only get so far because, in the writing, I realized something that was so elemental, such a picture of my life, all of life really and with it came the acknowledgment that we could have so easily died and I stopped writing. Bam! Shut the book.
I have written here and there, posting a pittance, trying to keep a record, but I have held back. My mind is a large house with an attic stuffed to the rafters and all the closets ready to burst at the slightest turn of a door handle.
There is no way (for me and for now) to tell this linearly. I’m going to open several boxes a week and go through it all. There might be a bit of a mess as I sort through everything, but I’m going to allow myself that.
“The light that was shadowed then
Was seen to be our lives,
Everything about us that love might wish to examine,
Then put away for a certain length of time, until
The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned toward each other.
The way we had come was all we could see
And it crept up on us, embarrassed
That there is so much to tell now, really now.”

John Ashbery “As We Know”



Oh, and I’ll get back to that minimalism, it wasn’t just a joke.