Too Much Imagination

Posted on April 13, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Rooster with red eyes

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

This episode, from page 254, illustrates one of the problems with the way my mind works: it automatically pictures everything that can be pictured. This helps with story creation, but it makes metaphors needlessly distracting, particularly when they don’t create a picture that makes sense.

“Helicopter parents,” the counselor said. “It’s one of our biggest challenges.”

I was sitting in an auditorium-style classroom, in a comfortable padded chair. That was new. College classrooms didn’t have padded chairs in my day. Around me sat people of my same age and situation: the men with thinning hair and the occasional streak of silver; the women with short, discreetly dyed, practical styles.

This group of steady grown-up types had come together for our children’s college orientation weekend. Our youngsters were off somewhere on a campus tour while the counselors sat us oldsters down and talked to us about parenting—

Specifically, about the need to stop.

“Helicopter parents,” the counselor said, “are the moms and dads who pop by campus all the time. They show up at class. They want to know things we’re not allowed to tell them—things about attendance or grades. We call them helicopter parents because they hover. They can’t let go of their children.”

My imagination presented me with the image of a college student. He had longish hair and a bored expression, and he was walking across campus to class. Meanwhile, his two anxious parents hovered along after him. They hung in the air a few feet above and a few feet behind him, their helicopter blades gently humming.

The image caught my fancy, and I smiled. I glanced around at the nearby faces to see if anyone else was smiling, but the other parents looked grave.

As a group, we were soberly dressed, but with a few well-chosen bright touches—chunky silver jewelry, perhaps, or a kelly-green cardigan over a linen shirt. I still know how to have fun! these touches said. I’m not old yet! But in fact, our definition of fun had changed considerably since our own college days, along with many other things about us. The close attention we were all paying to the lecture, for instance: that was something I didn’t remember from the old days.

“It’s important for you to step back now,” the counselor said. “You’ve done your job. You got your children here. And that’s great! But now it’s time for them to take over.” He paused while we all pondered that extraordinary thought. “You’ve given them roots,” he said. “It’s time to give them wings.”

Roots? Wings? My imagination spun for a second or two. Then it coughed up an image of an eagle whose claws had grown into the ground. He was flapping his wings, trying to fly, but the root-claws wouldn’t let him.

Roots and wings? That made for one very unhappy bird!

And once again, I smiled.

But once again, as I glanced around, I found that no one else was smiling. The other parents were nodding solemnly.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of rooster with red eyes copyright 2014 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

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The Creative Toll of Arguing

Posted on April 12, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Screaming Baby by Hendrick de Keyser, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

The excerpt below, from page 252, relates part of an argument Elena and I had over how much she had eaten for dinner. We had arguments like these almost daily that year; by this time, Elena was eating nothing voluntarily. They caused real problems for my writing.

“If you eat a second slice,” I said, “I’ll drive you to Barbara’s tonight. If you don’t, I’m not going anywhere.”

Cue the expected rise in volume.

“This isn’t a party, Mom! This is a study session! Do you want me to do well on this exam or not?”

I am stone. I am solid rock. I will not give an inch.

“You always do this! You always mind my business! You ruin every single meal. Well, if you won’t drive me to Barbara’s, I’ll fail. Is that what you want, Mom—do you want me to fail?”

The waves break over me, but they only push me further into the ground. I am not moving. I will not budge.

At this point, Joe finally intervened.

“Elena, you know it’s important to get enough food in your system,” he said. “You have to think of your heart. Just eat one more piece. Please.”

And Elena did it—not for me, but for her father. She ate standing, glaring at me, taking four or five swift, angry bites, and then dropped the second piece of pizza half eaten beside the first.

“There!” she snapped, and she stormed out of the room.

I don’t care, I thought as I listened to her clatter up the stairs. I don’t care that my heart’s pounding and my dinner’s ruined and I’ve got no help now with the kitchen. All that matters is that Elena has more food in her stomach. That’s the important thing. I made Elena eat. That’s what counts. It doesn’t matter how I did it.

But later, when I tried to write, I was too worn out. Stepping into that fantasy world meant making myself feel sorrow, joy, excitement, fear—all the emotions my characters were feeling. But I couldn’t do that. I was too exhausted to feel. All I could do was worry.

So Martin did nothing. He did absolutely nothing. He simply stood and stared at me while his computerized German shepherd shifted from foot to foot and let out anxious little whimpers.

Do something! I told him. I’m here for you now. I need help. I need a distraction! Distract me!

And perhaps it surprised my editor, but it did not surprise me when Martin embarked on a death-defying quest to rescue his mother.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of Screaming Baby (Cupid and the Bee) by Hendrick de Keyser, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, copyright 2014 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Anorexia nervosa, Creativity, Daily life, Elena Vanishing, Writer's block | Leave a comment

I hear about ELENA VANISHING for the first time

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Sculptures in Keukenhof, Lisse, The Netherlands

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

In the following excerpt, from page 245, Elena Vanishing comes up in conversation for the first time. This was in 2006, and Elena was a senior in high school.

Right at the beginning, Elena asked me to help her write her memoir. But I hated the very thought of it. At the time, I was having problems of my own, and I was struggling to write anything at all.

“I want to write a memoir,” she said. “About my time in the hospital. An eating disorder memoir for girls like me.”

“I think that’s a great idea!” I said. “You have a special gift for memoir, I think. You see the stories going on all around you.”

“The thing is, I don’t know how to start.”

Several years of visits to writers’ clubs and creative-writing classes had left me with dozens of minilectures stored away in my head. I found the memoir minilecture and started it rolling.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry so much about how to start or where you’re going to end up. I’d start first by capturing vignettes: little scenes, the details you remember, character sketches, the small stories you observed. That way, you won’t lose them. Then worry later about how to string them together. That’s the least of your problems right now.”

Elena was silent for a minute.

“You could help me,” she finally said.

It was a generous offer. Sharing anything with me seemed hard for Elena these days. But—did I hold it against my daughter that my own writing was going so badly? If I did, I disguised it well, even from myself. But I didn’t consider the idea—not even for a second.

“You know I’m not a memoir person,” I pointed out. “That’s your gift, not mine. My writing mind works best when it’s escaping to a world I can make up.” And I thought of what a writer friend of mine said whenever someone hit him up with a book idea at a party: Thanks, but there’s another book I’d rather write.

“This is your book,” I reminded Elena. “I think you’ll do a great job with it.”

“But I don’t have any time,” she pointed out.

I thought of Martin’s Word file, waiting at home. Neither do I! I thought. In spite of what you seem to think, neither do I.

But I didn’t say that out loud.

“I know senior year is crazy,” I said. “That’s another reason to record the little stories. Just fit in those vignettes where you have time so you don’t lose the details.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”

That night, as I lay in bed, I thought again about Elena and her memoir. It was touching that she thought of my writing skills with such faith. It had made me happy to be asked. But—write about the Summer from Hell? Me?

There’s another book I’d rather write!

Martin’s sullen face intruded into this reverie. Or maybe not, he pointed out, considering how little writing you’re actually doing.

Poor Martin! I told him in an agony of guilt. Don’t give up on me!

As I lay there, guilty and unhappy, a vision floated up in my memory of a glorious day back from the time when the girls were still at boarding school. Back then, I had a bad cold that had deepened into a sinus infection. I was feverish and thoroughly miserable. But the scene I had been working on the night before was boiling away in my brain.

Eventually, on that glorious day, I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I had to get out of bed. I pulled on my bathrobe, made some tea to soothe my aching throat, and shuffled upstairs to the garret room and my computer.

Marak’s goblins were meeting a traditional band of elves for the very first time—which meant that I, too, was meeting them for the first time. What did they look like? How were they dressed? What did my goblins think of them? What were these newcomers thinking of the goblins?

That day, I was nowhere, and I was everywhere. I hid behind trees, and I looked into the minds of strangers. I didn’t feel aches and pains. I didn’t even exist.

Not a sound or a worry interrupted my concentration. The girls were still happy at school. Joe was working late. Our old dog and cat were sleeping like the dead.

After a while, an annoying little problem began to tug at me. Misspellings were starting to appear on the computer screen. My fingers weren’t finding the right spot on the keyboard. And why couldn’t I see my hands?

I pushed my chair back and looked around. Night had fallen while I’d been working.

I had been with my goblins and elves for ten straight hours!

I didn’t feel like an author that day—not at all. I wasn’t published yet, and I couldn’t have cared less about genres or markets. All that mattered was that I had gone somewhere amazing and had seen things no one else in the world had seen. My house was a mess, and dinner came out of a box, but I was wildly, exuberantly happy.

And that night, the night after that glorious day, as I went shuffling off to find the cough syrup, I couldn’t wait to wake up and do it all over again.

Now, as I lay in bed and agonized over Martin’s stalled story, I recalled that day with wistful disbelief. My house was tidy, but my imagination was a total wreck. I was extremely lucky if I could forget my nagging fears and worries for as long as twenty minutes. And even when I did manage to forget for a little while, I seemed to interrupt myself on purpose. It was as if falling into my other world had become a dangerous pastime. I would get close to it, just close enough to feel the gravitational pull, close enough to find myself start to light up with interest . . .

And then I would jump up and run away from the keyboard to go iron a shirt or defrost a chicken.

Maybe if I were just writing something different.

If I can’t bring myself to care about you, I told Martin sternly, then the reader won’t care about you, either.

You always criticize me! Martin said. Nothing I ever do is good enough for you.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of tangled tree limbs in the National Tropical Botanical Garden, Poipu, Kauai, copyright 2016 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

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Writing Becomes Difficult

Posted on April 6, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Tangled tree limbs in the National Tropical Botanical Garden, Poipu, Kauai

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

The stress of dealing with my daughters’ acute mental illness exhausted my emotional energy and seemed to damage my imagination. Eventually, this led to crippling writer’s block. We see it coming on in the following two excerpts, starting on pages 226 and 240. They describe my attempts to write The Walls Have Eyes, which was a sequel to The Sky Inside.

That afternoon, I drove Elena to the high school so she could attend senior-class orientation. I was supposed to be working on a sequel to the book about Martin and his computerized dog, but for weeks, I’d done no writing because of all the hospital time. Now I was playing soccer mom.

Poor Martin! I thought while I sat in the car, and in my mind, I could see him standing there, waiting for me to join him on an adventure. His scowl was a good match for Elena’s hostile expression. Thirteen-year-old boys don’t like to wait.

I’m coming, Martin! I promised in a rush of guilt. Next week, I promise!
…

As the months rolled by, our days fell into a very unhealthy pattern. Dead tired, Elena dragged herself out of bed and outlined a day with far too many commitments. If I tried to persuade her to slow down or skip something, she chewed me out. For everyone else, she had a smile or a laugh—even for her father. Only to me did she show her constant exhaustion, misery, and bitterness.

I am the stepping-stone she pushes off to keep from getting stuck in the mud, I thought. Her anger toward me keeps her going.

But it brought me almost to a standstill.

Martin’s new story wasn’t going well. I didn’t know why. I was fond of him and his bright, affectionate dog, and I liked the colorful, dangerous world he lived in. But I couldn’t keep up with Martin on his adventures anymore. He would take off to go do something, and I would be left behind, asking myself, Why did he do that? Where did he go? Do I even know Martin anymore?

But this story was already sold. We already had the money in savings. I couldn’t back out on it now.

Guilt and worry started to needle me. I began to set word counts. Never before had I needed to force myself to write. But the next day, when I read what I had written, half of it would turn out to be garbage. I could tell that I’d written it only to fill up the word count.

So I began to set a timer: twenty minutes to start with. Any more than that, and I couldn’t stay focused.

Maybe it’s Alzheimer’s, I thought. Maybe it’s incipient dementia. Martin’s world is hazy now, and I can’t figure out what he’s doing. I can barely even spell anymore!

As the weeks passed, I developed elaborate writing rituals. First, I had to brew the perfect cup of tea. Then, I had to check my email. Then, I had to check three news sites, always in the same order. Then, I had to set my timer. Then, I had to play a game of FreeCell. (And the longer I took on my FreeCell game, the less time I would have to write.)

Finished with my game, I would check the tea temperature. Was it too cold? I would get up and warm it in the microwave. Then I would have to check my email again. Then the news sites, one—two—three.

Sometimes, this ritual ate up the whole twenty minutes.

Even when I did manage to get some pages done, it didn’t seem to matter. “Do you want to read what I wrote today?” I asked at dinner. But, as it turned out, nobody did.

“You know I don’t have time,” Elena said. “I have an essay plus thirty study questions to get through by Friday, and I promised Jason I’d help him with his college application.”

“Sure,” Joe said absently. “Why don’t you email it to me? I’ll read it at lunch.”

But I didn’t want Joe to read it at lunch. I wanted him to read it here, right in front of me, the way he used to do, while I peeked over his shoulder and read it along with him.

I didn’t want to send my story off in an email. I wanted to share it.

“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter. It mattered a great deal. The next time I sat down and opened my laptop, poor Martin wouldn’t get anything done. Why go on a journey, he would tell me, if nobody cares what I do?

They’ll kill you if they catch you, I would remind him.

I’m dead anyway. Who cares?

At which point, I would notice that my tea had gotten cold. I would get up and reheat it. And then I would check my email. And the news sites.

And repeat.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of tangled tree limbs in the National Tropical Botanical Garden, Poipu, Kauai, copyright 2016 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Anorexia nervosa, Characters, Creativity, Hope and Other Luxuries, Story creation, Writer's block, Writing craft, Writing distractions | Leave a comment

An Apology to Kate

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Alabaster head of John the Baptist in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

The short excerpt below comes from page 205. An earlier excerpt has already brought up the fact that my characters sometimes help me understand things about the real world. This one shows how I sometimes put a character between me and the real world and react to the character rather than to reality. I suspect this is a defense strategy. Also, I remember a writer—I think it was T.R. Pearson—talking once about how we writers understand our characters better than we understand real people. That makes a lot of sense to me.

When I realized that my daughter had to stay locked up in a mental institution where she very likely didn’t belong, what I felt was beyond horror. To know that my beloved child, who trusted me, was being held prisoner and that it was my signature on a form that had put her there . . .

My imagination immediately dredged up all the most ghastly images that anxiety and guilt could conjure and played them all for me in one long, gruesome ordeal. Outside was a honey-colored sunset and the long, inconspicuous process of twilight, but none of the mundane things I saw around me seemed to match what I was going through in my head. It was as if I were watching a movie about my hotel room while actually being somewhere else, somewhere very dark and scary that I couldn’t escape. And in that dark, scary place was this movie of a lit-up hotel room, playing on a little computer monitor in the corner.

Gray dusk congealed into black night. All the lights were on in that little hotel room on the monitor. But they couldn’t light up the dark, scary place I was in.

It isn’t that I stopped thinking. If anything, my thoughts spun too quickly. I was worrying, and I was regretting, but strangely enough, I wasn’t thinking about Elena. All I could think of was Kate, my Jane Austen girl from Marak’s goblin kingdom. She ended up locked in the caves underground, and for a very long time, she hated it there. She would go to the doors and argue and beg to be let out.

Now, as I staggered around in that dark, scary place, I could hardly bear to think of what I had made Kate suffer. How could I do that? I thought. How could I have been so cruel? And I found myself obsessing over how I could reach her—how I could apologize to my character for what I had put her through.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of an alabaster head of John the Baptist in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, copyright 2014 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Anorexia nervosa, Characters, Hope and Other Luxuries, Writing craft | Leave a comment

Fiction Writing As Dissociation

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Sun sculpture on side of house in Mendocino, California

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

The excerpt below, from page 181, is a follow-on to yesterday’s excerpt. Noticing how gloomy I felt, Elena suggested that I see the hospital social worker. So I did.

It wasn’t long before the social worker struck a nerve. She described my fiction-writing as dissociation. This is a psychiatric term for the disconnection of our mental state from our surroundings, and it can range from mild detachment while waiting for something boring to be over (such as daydreaming while waiting in a doctor’s office) to a complete shutdown into unconsciousness when challenged by trauma or the memories of trauma. At the time, I was particularly upset by the social worker’s comment because Elena was dissociating in a severe way. She had spent days unconscious and disconnected from reality.

Was the social worker right that fiction-writing is dissociation? Not in the sense that daydreaming is. It’s true that story creation pulls me away from the real world, but then again, so does any intense mental activity that demands all my attention, such as dedicated research, careful reading, or even nonfiction writing. And story creation helps me work through problems I’m struggling with in the real world, rather than helping me escape them.

The comparison of fiction-writing to daydreaming is understandable but unfortunate. Daydreaming is wish fulfillment, and we’ve all done it from time to time, but it has none of the intricacies of story creation. The first thing I start to do when I create is ask questions about the new world I’m seeing, and I have to find consistent, realistic answers to those questions. But nobody asks questions of a daydream. Daydreams don’t need to follow consistent world rules.

My reaction to the social worker wasn’t just colored by my negative feelings about dissociation, however. It was also colored by something every fiction writer goes through: a very common reaction to the word fiction. When the subject of what I do for a living comes up, a sizable percentage of people go out of their way to impress upon me just how trivial they believe fiction is. “I don’t read fiction,” many of them immediately say, and then they go on to observe that fiction is more or less a toy to entertain children. In fact, a certain number of them make a point to say at once, “I never read books,” or “I don’t have a single book in my home,” as if books themselves are toys.

This has always struck me as bizarre. Do these same people, upon finding out they’re talking to a chef, say, “I hate fussy meals”? Do they make a point, upon meeting a doctor, to say, “I hate getting checkups”? I suppose they probably do. But why? That’s what I’ve never understood.

“I feel so old these days,” I said. “Old and dried up. Ancient. It’s as if all the pain and stress have attacked me physically. Some days—the bad days—I can almost feel the cells shriveling and dying off.”

“Have you cried about this?” she asked. “About your daughter in the hospital, about her blackouts and her heart? About your other daughter? Have you given yourself permission to cry?”

I felt taken aback. I tried to be reasonable and evaluate the questions fairly, but then again—they just didn’t make sense.

“You mean, since we got here, to the States? Well—no.”

Obviously not, I thought to myself.

“And why is that?” she asked.

Why was that? Ask the small child sitting quietly in a corner of the room, working on her dot-to-dot puzzles. Ask Heathcliff. Ask Sara Crewe. Ask Florence Nightingale.

Laughter is always appropriate. A wry comment and a quiet chuckle are welcome even beside the grave. But crying is a special dispensation extended to widows and babies. Me, I needed to be doing and planning—not crying.

“Elena doesn’t need that,” I said finally. “She’s going through enough. And besides—well, we’re in public here!” And I tried to imagine myself breaking down in a busy waiting room. Nope. My imagination could picture monsters, but it couldn’t see this.

“It happens here all the time,” the social worker said calmly. “No one would judge you or bother you.”

I didn’t answer. Inwardly, I thought, Why would that matter? This is my code of conduct, not someone else’s.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” she persisted. “Why haven’t you let yourself cry?”

“Because . . .”

But how could I explain it? Why did I even need to explain it?

Why couldn’t this woman just leave it alone?

“Because it’s too much,” I said at last. “I can’t even let myself touch it. All I can do is kind of stand back and look at it for a while. Think about it: think about seeing your daughter, out of her mind. Think of your baby, whose little body you cradled and protected from birth, and now you’re seeing dozens of burns . . .”

I had to pause for a minute. But I found my stiff upper lip.

“So, you see,” I continued, perfectly calmly and reasonably, “there aren’t enough tears for that. If I start crying, you might as well lock me up in a padded room because I’m never going to stop.”

The social worker frowned. “You need to be able to cry,” she said.

What happened to not judging me or bothering me?

“I need to be able to cope,” I countered. “I could scream for the rest of my life, but how is that going to get the bills paid and the insurance arrangements taken care of? I was on the phone just this morning with our insurance company—again. I had to sort out charges from the military hospital for them. Who’s going to do that if I’m bawling in a rubber room?”

And the thought of the insurance company acted on my torn and injured feelings like a cool menthol lozenge on a sore throat. It helped me breathe. It laid soothing coats of logic and procedure over the burning pain inside me.

The social worker seemed to sense my change in mood. At my growing calm, she grew sterner than ever.

“So you turn to your writing,” she said. “To your books.”

“Well, yes,” I admitted, and the thought of my characters completed the job of helping me re-center.

It’s not fair to Paul and Maddie to say that they’re not real, I thought. They’re as real as anything else about me. Their love is certainly just as real, that true adolescent first love that makes the whole humdrum world we grew up with somehow look different overnight. And at the thought of those two shy, serious lovers, a little glow of happiness warmed me.

“But don’t you see,” the social worker said, “that you’re doing the same thing as your daughter? You’re both dissociating! Elena is dissociating by escaping into her blackouts, and you’re dissociating into your books.”

What?!

How dare she!

How dare she!

Did this woman have the foggiest idea what dissociation really looked like? Had she ever wandered, lonely and miserable, through a chaotic, paper-piled house while every single person in the world found other things to do? Had she ever sat next to the phone, hour after hour, single-mindedly willing it to ring, while the adults who had been closer than family—closer than family!—stepped away and closed off? Just stopped caring?

That was dissociation: it was pulling away from risk to safety—just flipping off the switch that says I care. And me, I had actually lived through the hell that happens when adults do that to a child. Is that what this woman actually thought my books were—just a spa where I hid to escape my obligations? Is that what she actually thought fiction was—nothing but a pretty little playground?

God, how I despise those people who put on their long “I’m a grown-up now” faces and sit in judgment of the value of fiction! They keep themselves safe inside their rigid little closed minds and live out their rigid little lives. And if anything that they don’t understand comes along, they shrill out their little judgments, and they attack it.

Dissociating into my books! . . .

I took a deep breath. Logic and reason—I needed logic, and I needed reason! I needed to think this through. Why would she attack me? Here was a thought: maybe it had been a bold gambit to try to shock me into tears.

Well, it was going to take a whole lot more than that.

“Dissociation.” I echoed the insult in my stiffest, most unemotional voice. “So that’s what you think my books are. Well, I like to think that there’s a difference between me and my daughter. I get paid to do what I do—pretty well, in fact. My dissociative states are going to put her dissociative states through college.”

And that was the end of my talk with the social worker.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of a sun sculpture on the side of a house in Mendocino, California, copyright 2016 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Books and reading, Creativity, Hope and Other Luxuries, Writing craft | Leave a comment

The Effect of Mood on the Imagination

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Redwoods in the Muir Woods National Monument, California

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

This excerpt, which begins on page 177, deals with the effect of mood on the imagination, a frequent issue in a book with as many emotional shocks as this one. Mood has a huge impact on creativity. As I’ve stated elsewhere, the novel you write while depressed or emotionally exhausted will be a very different work from the one you write while you’re feeling healthy and upbeat.

The results of the reader-mail project described below can still be seen on my website. Even now, my website is the hobby I turn to when I have a few weeks of leisure time.

Elena and I didn’t have much space in that little hospital room, and I had long ago exhausted the fun of exploring the different public spaces in the building. I was homesick for Joe and my pets and our house in Germany.

But at least I could go stretch my imagination in my various fantasy worlds. I had put together a complicated web project to occupy my time. I was moving the most interesting questions readers had asked me onto pages on my website. Thinking about those questions took me to new places. They were helping me stay calm and optimistic.

I brought up my email and rummaged through stored messages, looking for interesting questions.

Why does Paul carve Maddie as a tree? one reader had written. That seems like a weird thing to do.

Paul and Maddie were characters in my Scottish werewolf book. It was such a sad, sweet love story that my heart melted as I read the question, and my bad mood vanished at once. I loved Maddie for her frank, open nature, and I loved my poor woodcarver, Paul, for the suffering he had lived through. Together, they were my favorite story couple.

Maddie doesn’t care for it any more than you would, I wrote. She’s down-to-earth and has a very different view of herself than Paul has of her. And as I wrote, my imagination played for me a scene in the small, windowless sod house full of peat smoke.

The wooden figure was different. It still had a tree’s crown of leaves and apples, but the trunk had turned into a pale, slim girl. Leaves grew out of her hair, and her two arms stretched out to become branches. Maddie walked toward the doorway and turned the carving in the light, studying it with wonder.

“It’s you,” said a voice from the doorway, and she looked up to find Paul there. “At least, it looks like you,” he added awkwardly. “Do you like it? I had just finished it that first morning when I looked up and saw you talking to Ned, and then I looked down and saw you in the wood.”

Maddie examined it. The tree girl was slender and sweet, poised and graceful. Maddie could see that she was happy by the lift of her arms and her chin. Happy to be an apple tree, happy to grow where she was planted. The tip of one toe-root just showed beneath her long skirt.

“After I saw you,” he went on, “every block of wood I saw had you inside it.”

“But why would you carve me? Who would want to see me?” Maddie held out the tree girl. “Just me, I’m not fancy like this.”

Paul took the carving to look at it and then at her. She could tell that somehow he still saw the resemblance.

“You’re beautiful, Madeleine,” he said.

As I watched my two young characters, I felt again the love they had for one another—that magical first love that has such wonder in it. I’m glad I wrote their story, I thought. I’m glad I brought them to life. Maddie has such a generous heart, and Paul makes such a fascinating monster.

“Oh, hey,” I said to Elena over my shoulder, “I forgot to tell you, but your sister says she hopes you get well soon.”

“I don’t want anything from her!”

The tone was so vehement that it stopped me cold. My hands froze on the keyboard. Elena had been calm and philosophical for so long now that I had forgotten she could still sound like this.

“But . . . ,” I said.

“I don’t know why you write to her!” Elena continued furiously. “I don’t want you to tell her another word about me! She’s the reason I’m stuck here. I’m sick because of her!”

After all the time and all the hard words that had already gone by, I ought to be prepared for this sort of thing. But to run into such violent hostility between two of the people I loved best in the world . . .

Without a word, I went back to my questions and answers. But the color had drained out of my day.

How old are Paul and Maddie in the book? wrote another reader.

Who cares? I thought. Paul and Maddie aren’t real. They aren’t real, and they don’t exist.

Hopelessness welled up inside me.

My family is broken, I thought. My family is irretrievably broken. I’m the mother, and I’ve let my children become damaged and ill. Two children in the hospital—not one, but two! Hatred and bitterness—how did it happen? What kind of mother would let that happen?

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of redwoods in the Muir Woods National Monument, California, copyright 2015 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Hope and Other Luxuries, Reader mail, Website work, Writing craft, Writing distractions | Leave a comment

A Creative Mind in Crisis

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Warning sign in Norway

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

The episode below begins on page 159 and describes one of the worst nights of my life. Elena had just been medically evacuated from Germany to the United States. Her heart was very fragile. I had been staying with her in the ICU in Germany, where there was no bed for me, so I hadn’t slept in a couple of days. Elena’s new room in the United States was in a children’s hospital, and I had been thrilled to learn that there was a pullout bed in it for parents to use. We had just settled in, and I had taken out my contact lenses and lain down. (My vision is terrible without them.) Then Elena went into crisis. The staff raced her out of the room for tests and then raced her over to their ICU. I raced after them, almost drunk on sleep deprivation and barely able to see. None of us had any idea what was wrong.

But that’s not why this excerpt is here. It’s here because of what happens at the end. I routinely spend time with my characters in my imagination as a way to distract myself and calm myself down; it gets my head out of my daily worries. But during this horrible night, my imagination didn’t work properly. My characters, for the first time in my life, simply didn’t live.

I can’t express how bizarre this change felt. If my characters live in my books—if they seem like real people you could follow around—it’s because they’ve seemed real to me and I’ve followed them around for years. Before they come to life on the page, they’re alive in my mind.

But not that night. For the first time, most of my characters were the puppets readers imagine them to be.

This episode was a small taste of the severe writer’s block I developed later. That later writer’s block also came about as a response to a severe emotional shock. There is a relationship between good mental health and a properly working imagination. I don’t understand the technical aspects of it, but I’ve lived through what happens when good mental health goes away, and its effect on the imagination is devastating.

I suppose Jung would say that my character Marak is a manifestation of my animus. I’m well aware that the ugly goblin King is an important part of who I am.

Elena’s gurney stopped in a vast room without edges that I could see. A white shape detached itself from the vague scenery and approached me.

“You can’t stay here,” the shape told me. “No parents are allowed in the ICU at night.”

Completely bewildered, I tried to process this unexpected information. My brain felt for the edges of this new obstacle, but nothing like a useful idea came back. I couldn’t stay here: a big blank wall that my thoughts couldn’t get past. Dead end. It was a dead end. I was at the end.

“Where can I go?” I blurted out. “Where do I go?”

“There are waiting rooms and sleeping lounges,” answered the shape. Then it walked away.

I was standing beside the gurney. The only thing my poor eyesight could decode was the still form lying on it. Only my sleeping daughter had a face, half bad vision and half good memory: that face I had known and had watched for every quicksilver change of mood—for how many years now?

Forever.

That face was the only familiar thing left in my scary world.

I leaned in, close enough to see the face clearly. My sparkly daughter. My youngest child. But the face didn’t move. It didn’t respond.

I didn’t think I could bear it. My heart was going to break.

“Elena,” I whispered. “Elena! Please come back.”

My daughter didn’t stir. She was breathing quietly, frowning slightly: still, remote, and utterly impassive.

I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry.

“Elena, please don’t leave me like this!” I whispered. “I’m alone here. I’m all alone. Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t leave me here alone.”

Elena’s eyes didn’t open. But she rolled over, like a sleeper who has been disturbed. One thin hand reached up to touch my face.

Then the white shape was back. “You need to leave now,” it said.

So I went.

I blundered out into deserted hallways, where featureless black night pressed up against the windows. Somewhere in this building was a foam bed with sheets on it, all made up for me, but I had no idea where that foam bed was. It didn’t occur to me, in my sleep-deprived state, that I could go back to that room and that they would let me sleep there, even though Elena was somewhere else. It didn’t occur to me that I could go to the front desk and ask for my daughter’s room number. I was beyond such practical thoughts.

So, once again, I wandered hospital halls, as I had done on the night Elena was born. I met no one. I recognized nothing. Nothing disturbed the misery of that journey.

Dark glass windows lined the wall to my left. Night. I glanced outside. But I wasn’t looking outside, I was looking inside, into an unlit room. My bad eyes could just make out rows of foam chairs like the one in Elena’s room by the window.

For a little while, my slow-moving brain computed. Then it spit out an actual thought:

This is a sleeping lounge. It’s here for people like me.

I found the door and tiptoed inside.

One other person was using the room. A man lay cocooned under a dark blue blanket nearby, on a foldout chair of his own. He had the blanket pulled up over his face. I tiptoed past him, found stacks of those same blue blankets near the wall, and located a pile of pillows as well. I took a set, tiptoed to a chair that seemed a suitable distance away from the sleeping stranger, and arranged myself for the rest of the night.

My waistband pinched. I hadn’t taken off my shoes. But I couldn’t do anything about that now. I had gone as far as I could. I rolled onto my side, hugged my purse like a teddy bear, and closed my eyes.

No one was there for me—not my family and not the collection of kind staff members I had left back in Elena’s hospital room. That hospital room now seemed like a star hovering in the dark sky nearby, and it formed a constellation with the other star, the room without edges that held Elena’s motionless body. I felt those stars, not intellectually, but viscerally, as points of reference toward which I could navigate. But my exhausted brain and body both agreed: I had no strength to reach them. Not anymore.

Those stars were sealed off from me. I would find no comfort there. So, in a last blind, muddled attempt to shield myself from bone-shaking loneliness, I reached into my mind, toward the characters who had been my friends and companions over the years.

But even my characters wouldn’t meet me halfway. They stood around the walls of the pale gallery of my imagination, half wax doll and half astonished, so influenced by my own state of shock that for the first time, they had no life in them.

Only Marak, the old, ugly goblin King, the oldest of my character children, still had the strength to come to my rescue. Only Marak, that brilliant, pitiless schemer, still had a mind of his own. He assessed me through his tangle of rough, striped hair, slightly amused and a little worried and very, very wise. Then he came and lay down beside me and wrapped his strong, bony arms around me, and I could feel his hands with their knotted fingers clasping my own hands as they clasped my purse.

I’m safe now, I thought with more optimism than logic. Marak will protect me. He’ll do the planning for me. That brilliant mind is never without a plan for long.

I closed my eyes and sank without a trace into the dark, sad, featureless night.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of a warning sign in Norway copyright 2014 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Anorexia nervosa, Characters, Creativity, Hope and Other Luxuries, Jungian archetypes, Writer's block, Writing craft | Leave a comment

The Awkward Dance of the Imaginary and the Real

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Illustration from THE HOUSE OF DEAD MAIDS beside a photo of my daughter Valerie

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

The picture above combines two images. On the left is an illustration of the ghost, Izzy, from The House of Dead Maids, the novel I wrote to mourn my runaway daughter Valerie. On the right is a photo of Valerie herself, not long before she vanished from my life. The comparison is eerie, isn’t it? But Patrick Arrasmith, the amazing illustrator, had never seen my daughter. He created his image from my descriptions in the book.

Patrick Arrasmith seems to have read my mind—because deep in the back of my mind, Izzy was Valerie. The moment when Izzy first appears was, for me, the most important moment of that writing experience. That moment was the whole reason my mind made up the story in the first place. It allowed my missing daughter to stand before me and judge me for all the things I’d done wrong in her life. It gave her a chance to warn me: We’re not so different, you and I.

But I didn’t know any of that while I was writing The House of Dead Maids. I only knew that I had to write it. Only later, when I reread what I’d written, did I realize that images of Izzy and images of Valerie were interchangeable in my mind. That’s when I finally understood.

I’ve highlighted in previous excerpts from my memoir the various ways in which my real life and my imaginary life run in parallel. The emotions of my real life bleed into my imaginary life, and my imaginary life becomes a kind of three-dimensional Jungian puzzle in which my psyche attempts to work out the problems I’m facing, such as my runaway daughter accusing me over my failures as a mother.

I’ve also highlighted some ways in which my real life and my imaginary life intersect. Distractions don’t just break my attention. They actually intrude into the “film” I’m watching and cause things to appear that don’t belong in the story. That’s because my brain, always thinking in pictures, shows me pictures of distractions, too, until the interior of my mind becomes a cluttered flea market of disconnected items.

This excerpt, which begins on page 109, brings all of these ideas together. Better than any other episode in the memoir, it illustrates the weird dance that takes place, minute by minute, between my real and imaginary worlds.

The next afternoon, I was sitting in the very same spot, curled up in one of the big, overstuffed brown chairs with my laptop open on my lap. But, although sunshine flooded the garden room with light, I was seeing another place entirely. It started between my ears, at the top of my head, and slowly grew outward, increasing in size and color until the world in front of me blurred out. Then, although I was still dimly aware of Tor twitching his paws in his sleep, that other place was all I saw.

Rough stone walls had risen out of my mind and obliterated the sunlight. I was looking down a gloomy hallway in a bleak, dismal old house, half castle and half barn. The scent of stale air rose from dank, unopened places. It made me want to hold my breath.

Shadows congregated in this dim hallway, and dust, and cobwebs, until I found myself squinting to see. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could make out a figure standing in the shadows: a gray-faced girl in a ragged black dress.

This girl had been the very first of all this story’s ghosts. Her life had ended long before she came into my world. Everything that had made her human had fallen away. She had lost her fears and her joys. She had lost her eyes.

This poor little once-upon-a-time human had never shocked me, not even the very first time I saw her. But, no matter how many times I studied the empty black circles in her gray face, I never stopped feeling sad.

At the moment, I was rereading her grim story with great care, matching the image the words raised in my mind with the image the way it had looked when I had first dreamed it. If the words were wrong, they would form a fuzzy double exposure, and the image and the feelings it raised wouldn’t come into focus. But if the words were right, I could read the story just the way my readers would, and I would see exactly what I was supposed to see. Then my mind wouldn’t have to work to bring the image to life. The words would do it for me.

She stood very still in the dusky passage where the light was poorest. Like me, she wore the black dress that proclaimed her a maid of the house, but where mine was new, hers was spoiled by mildew and smears of clay. Thin hair, dripping with muddy water, fell to her shoulders in limp, stringy ropes. This was my companion of the night before—and she was dead.

I could see it all: the long, limp, wet hair and the mildew-spotted black dress. But wait a minute—was that right? Mildew was black, wasn’t it?

Could mildew be white? Or was it always black? Could mildew show up on a black dress?

Probably. Possibly. I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to wait for a copyeditor to ask. I clicked away from the Word file I was reading, pulled up Google, and typed mildew into the search box.

The phone rang: a double interruption. The eyeless ghost flickered and grew faint. I grabbed the phone with my free hand as I scrolled through the Google results, willing the ghost to stay where she was.

“Hello,” I said, scanning. This stuff was all about mildew in houses. But there, at least the Wikipedia article mentioned clothing.

“Hello, this is Dr. Petras. I have your daughter Elena here.”

Dr. Petras? Right, the child psychiatrist with the silly, droopy mustache. I had dropped Elena off at the hospital two hours ago, and she had intended to walk upstairs to her appointment after she did some volunteering. He must be calling to confirm that she wouldn’t be coming back to see him. Maybe he needed to talk about her prescription.

Did Elena still need that Zoloft? Her feelings about Valerie weren’t as raw now as they’d been a few months ago.

At the thought of Valerie, the eyeless ghost standing in front of me changed. Now my absent daughter stood in her place. Long hair, pale oval face, black eye shadow, ragged black clothes. The impression in my mind—the wistful sadness—remained the same.

But it’s getting better, I reminded her. You sent me an email just yesterday. You’re crazy about Clint, your new boyfriend, you told me. You wrote to say that you love me.

Meanwhile, in my ear, Dr. Petras had charged ahead. His voice was stern, like a reprimand from the boss. After listening for a few seconds, I realized that I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Ghost in the room, ghost in the Word file, ghost in my family circle—I couldn’t break free from it all quickly enough for him.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted into the flow of stern words, “but what is this about?”

“Your daughter has anorexia nervosa.”

Anorexia nervosa?

What?

The shadow of the lost Valerie slipped away like a raindrop. Headlines lit up in my mind. Somewhere in there was Karen Carpenter’s strong, expressive voice, half laughing, half crying, saying she had the blues.

“Anorexia?” I heard myself say stupidly. “My daughter? You mean . . . Elena? You do mean that daughter, don’t you?”

But . . . she’s the one who’s completely normal! I thought.

A woman came walking through my memory. Her pelvic bones were sharp points under a green minidress. Her knees and elbows looked like knots, and her rough skin sagged into hollow places and dipped from neck bone to shoulders. That memory blurred into another one: a ratty horse with hipbones jutting under its hide. “Bonny’s thirty,” a voice drawled over the image of the horse. “She can’t keep flesh on anymore.”

Was that anorexia? What was anorexia? Wasn’t Elena normal?

Dr. Petras had taken off again while I was caught up in my own confused thoughts. His tone was hard—almost rude. More than the words, the tone captivated me now. What could it mean?

“Anorexia nervosa,” I repeated, pulling out the one thing I felt sure of so far. “Okay.”

Because it was okay, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it always good to put the right words to something? If they were the right words, that is—and the skinny-horse woman loomed in front of me again. But that didn’t make sense. Elena didn’t look a thing like that horse and that woman. She had an adorable figure. For heaven’s sake, her bras were a bigger cup size than mine!

“So—anorexia nervosa,” I ventured again. “Are you sure?”

“This is very serious!” Dr. Petras said in answer. He sounded as if I was confirming his worst suspicions.

Suspicion about what?

Was Elena all right? Had something happened?

Anxiety surged through me, the anxiety that I had lived with every day—every minute!—for a solid year. The anxiety that was just now—just these last few weeks—beginning to go away. And the gray-faced ghost that was really my missing daughter drifted back into the room. She stared at me mutely. Accusingly.

Without eyes.

Muscles tightened in the back of my neck and sent fingers of tension crawling down to my shoulder blades—the tension that I had once thought would never let me go, the tension that had just started to release—just a little. And the warm, drowsy room, the blissfully unconscious cats, the almost-finished manuscript—the entire day, in fact, began to wobble in my grasp.

I could feel it shift. I could feel it start to slide down—

Dr. Petras said, “I’m putting Elena in the hospital, starting right now. I want you in my office in fifteen minutes!”

And the sunny day smashed into pieces.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Illustration from The House of Dead Maids copyright 2009 by Patrick Arrasmith. Illustration courtesy of Henry Holt & Co. Photo of Valerie copyright 2005 by Valerie Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

Posted in Anorexia nervosa, Characters, Creativity, Hope and Other Luxuries, Jungian archetypes, Writing craft, Writing distractions | Leave a comment

The Birth of THE HOUSE OF DEAD MAIDS

Posted on March 18, 2017 by Clare Dunkle

Church ruin in Ireland

My memoir, Hope and Other Luxuries, tells about my attempts to cope with my daughter Elena’s anorexia nervosa. But it also tells the story of my creative life from the beginning of my writing career. I’ve decided to share those sections of my memoir that deal with creativity, writing, and publishing here on my blog.

Yesterday’s excerpt dealt with the effect my older daughter Valerie’s depression and disappearance had on my imagination. Today’s excerpt, which begins on page 101, describes the effect that catastrophic event had on my story creation. It spawned an entire novel, The House of Dead Maids, set in a fictional world very important to me during my own bout of depression at the age of nine. The House of Dead Maids was peopled with characters both old and new, old characters who had mattered to me during my depression in childhood and new characters who were helping me come to terms with life after my daughter’s disappearance.

The House of Dead Maids also encouraged me to explore the relationship of that world’s author, Emily Brontë, to her own fictional world. Emily Brontë is perhaps the least judgmental of all Victorian authors. It’s a trait that still drives mentally healthy, morally strong readers crazy today. Those readers want judgment. They want the bad characters in Wuthering Heights to get punished. But Emily isn’t interested in that. Perhaps Emily’s own history of living with a “bad” and mentally ill family member explains why she didn’t feel the need to judge her characters as her Victorian neighbors surely judged her family. Certainly Emily’s ability to cope with the Brontës’ grief and shame was the reason I felt drawn to her at that point in my life.

Ultimately, my novel became a conversation with Emily—a conversation she would have understood. Emily and her sister Anne had had similar conversations in fictional form throughout their lives as they worked together to construct their shared fictional world, Gondal. Indeed, one might suspect that Anne wrote her shocking novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as a fictional answer to some of the themes of Wuthering Heights. Anne’s novel, while equally brutal in many respects, gave readers the clear moral judgment they wanted and the chance at moral redemption they found lacking in Emily’s novel.

It’s important to note that by this time, I knew that my daughter was safe. Valerie wasn’t communicating with us or her doctors, but we had found out that she was with good people. If I hadn’t known this, I couldn’t possibly have written fiction—or done much of anything else, for that matter.

Time passed. Our house was quiet. There was no reason to fight anymore. Elena spent her time at school or at the hospital, and Joe worked his long days at the office. Once again, I wandered through silent rooms, as I had after the girls had left for boarding school. Once again, I had no job. I had no projects.

But I was different now. The piece of my soul that Valerie had taken with her when she left—that part of me stayed lost.

My isolation was absolute. Why would I want that to change? What could I say to the people I knew?

“My daughter is gone. She dropped out of college and disappeared.”

“What? Valerie? Isn’t that your brilliant, funny girl, the one who seemed so wise when she was a child? Didn’t you say she graduated from high school with honors? Didn’t you say she was making As in college?”

“Yes, but she’s ill. She’s been ill for a long time.”

“Ill how? You never really explained that.”

“Just ill. Unhappy . . .”

“Unhappy how? You never really told us what was wrong.”

“She never told us what was wrong, either. Depression, maybe. The doctors weren’t sure. But why are we even talking about this? She’s gone.”

“Gone? But why? Why is she gone?”

Why was she gone?

Why?

That was the question I lived with every second. It pulsed through my arteries with every beat of my heart. I breathed and ate and slept that question. I couldn’t possibly bear to hear it spoken out loud.

So I let the walls of my house define me. I had no intention of reaching out for a life beyond their limits. I was content to remain alone. But when it comes to the imagination I have, I am never alone.

As I sat and drank my tea at the dining room table, I found an old friend sitting beside me. She had an oval face like Valerie’s, and dark hazel eyes, and like me, she, too, had felt no desire to leave home. She had long brown hair put up in a bun and terrible handwriting like mine, and more than anyone else, she understood what I was going through.

This hazel-eyed woman was the Victorian writer Emily Brontë, the creator of my childhood playmate, Heathcliff. She died of tuberculosis in 1848. But when we are truly great, we never really die.

Delicate kitty Tor was welcome in her shadowy company. Emily’s own animals had filled her house and occupied the first place in her heart. She had once told a classroom full of her pupils that she preferred the school dog to any of them.

Nor were my spiritual bruises over the loss of my daughter any obstacle between me and Emily’s presence. “Well, some may hate, and some may scorn,” Emily told me with casual grace, and it was obvious that she couldn’t care less if they did. Her own beloved, talented brother had drunk himself to death right in the same house with her, but she was strong and independent, a remarkable woman who had achieved remarkable things, and my imagination brought her to me now as a kind of sister.

I had looked up to Emily Brontë since I was a little girl, when my mother had first told me stories about her. I remembered hearing, breathless with wonder, how she saved a child from a rabid dog—and then walked home and cauterized the bite she’d received with a red-hot poker. The world as Emily knew it was a harsh, brutal place, but she had faced that world without flinching. And her antihero, Heathcliff, true child of his powerful author mother, had helped me face my freakish childhood without flinching.

Now, vulnerable and lonely, as I tried to pull myself together again, I reread her classic novel, Wuthering Heights, and I found its barren, windswept world a safe place to be. No one there looked down on my crippled spirit. No one there was whole.

New characters began to walk with me on the edges of Wuthering Heights’ stormy world. Half of those characters were already ghosts. I built a new world for them, and as I began to write, I poured all the pain of the last two years into my story:

Deep in the nighttime, when not a spark gleamed indoors, nor a star without, the dead maid stood by my bedside again and summoned me from sleep. She shook me as if to rouse me and take me with her, those chilly fingers sliding down my arm.

And that bleak, savage story healed me.

It sounds strange to say that something so grim and brutal could help heal the damage I felt, but it happened because my characters themselves refused to give up hope. Even in that grim world, they found compassion in unexpected places, and those moments of compassion shone out in the darkness there like lighthouse beams. Step by step, they guided me back to serenity and forgiveness.

Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle; text courtesy of Chronicle Books. Photo of a church ruin in Ireland copyright 2004 by Joseph Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.

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