In late winter I snuck away to precisely the middle of nowhere to turn forty in solitude and near silence. Approaching the threshold of midlife, I entered into what I am now calling my accidental sabbatical. A state of liminality in no way yet complete. When I started writing these stories, or rather, when these stories started writing me one year ago, my body went all in, every cell of me unknowingly shaped, stretched and formed by the telling of the stories that went into the making of me. I suppose it can be no other way. Being the daughter of Deaf parents, language has always lived under my skin. As my therapist who’s been doing Jungian analysis longer than I’ve been alive would say, “Joanna, you somatize everything.”
These homespun tales have turned out to be an intergenerational epic, from the grandmother who was my rock steady to the other who went crazy. Each chapter, still mostly unwritten, spills over into the next, muddying the lines of demarcation where one ends and another begins. Together they span an epicenter of mostly only a matter of fifty miles but their collective depths stretch into eternity and punctuate my love affair with the red dirt surface of things. In their loam I uncovered a kind of devotional love I hadn’t even realized was there until these stories started speaking, given my more familiar propensity to roam, most especially far from home. The louder part of me has always identified as a wanderer or, in the words of Rumi, a “lover of leaving.” Call me by my past life, the ghost with the most.
In the final days of fall when my writing practice pierced the places I’d both put down and painfully pulled up roots (a favored reactionary strategy), I knew I was touching into something that would require more from me. More in the way of fidelity and fortitude to venture into places both familiar and foreign, and to speak from there. Most of all, to keep returning. My body revolted. I slowed to a snail’s pace and wrote not a word, spending all of winter and most of spring tracing daily rhythms of tending my body in ways I never had before (because I never had to) and circling questions which might give way to answers about what it is that’s being asked of me as I enter the “second half of life.” Perhaps it was avoidance (another cherished strategy), or maybe it was life’s way of slowing me down so that I could finally, truly see. How easy it is for us to sidestep our missteps by staying busy or trying to outrun history.
The arrival of spring sent my dormant seeds sprouting into threads of interconnectivity. The phrase all my relations kept haunting me. I would say it out loud on long walks, while making meals, between client sessions or on quiet nights after my children were asleep. I began again writing the stories of those whose stories went into the shaping of me. The shaping of we. Growing larger, every word widening the lens on the stuck fiction of my singularity.
These stories on their way to you I have tended over the past months without the pressure of time, no weekly deadlines. I have my body to thank for making this necessity clear to me. And I have to be honest about the other part of me who would rather see these stories contained, not necessarily because of their subject matter, but simply because they are so deeply me. Isn’t it always a risk to let others in to see?
But here I sit again, my body and my night dreams allowing no choice but to set them free:
I walked alone along a starlit street toward a place I once called home. An open window drew itself in the night sky revealing the stunning contrast of luminous silver against the dense shadow of the moon’s surface, so close that if I stood on my toes our faces would touch. I knew this place. The immense view from my own interiority. The window opened, an invisible wind tousled the featherweight linen drapes and I heard these words:
The cattails in the dry riverbeds have no choice but to cast themselves out into the wide open as art, for that is what they know themselves to be.
It was the dream-maker reminding me of my own creative promise before I withdrew into the fertile dark of winter. Just as froward fledglings sometimes need a nudge out of the sheltered nest amidst the full, wild foliage of spring, I can take a hint. It is time again to return to scattering seeds along the surface of things. The surface on which I begin and end, over and again, will always be the red clay soil of the wild suburban prairie set atop the tragic fault lines of modernity.
Each of these stories, existing now in endless unedited pages, is a small, winding rivulet of a larger stream with no end and no beginning. We will skip to and fro across the wide expanse of time and space, settling into storylines that arc and curve across cracked red clay, spanning decades past to present day. I’ll be sending them to you in a slow, steady stream, like a message in a bottle Substack series. Look for them to land in your inbox at a pace of 1-2 per month on Fridays.
As I return to this revelatory work of writing and sharing what wisdom I uncover along the way, I’m bringing back audio voice overs, recorded by yours truly from a Harry Potter lap desk on the floor of my daughter’s closet beneath a mess of hanging costumes and play silks lit by a single strand of rainbow twinkle lights. Because it’s so much fun to record for you and there is something, of course, about giving voice and having it heard.
I’m also turning on paid subscriptions. If you enjoy reading these stories as much as I love writing them (even as they tear me limb from limb), then I hope you will consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this wild endeavor of mine for just $5/month or $33/year. Right now there’s no difference between the free and paid version of this newsletter, but as these tales from the red clay crypt turn more personal, I may put a select few behind the paywall. Sometimes an added layer of emotional safety (read: your investment) is all psyche needs to nudge the full catastrophe of the truth from its hiding place. Think of it as an all-access backstage pass.
Whatever poison you pick, please know that your presence here means the world to me. Each tap of a heart at the bottom of a post, every comment or share keeps the hearth fires burning and the creative juices flowing. And every paid subscription will make more of this work possible. Thank you for being here.
“Call the world if you please, ‘the vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world.” John Keats
Without further ado, I present to you the first in the series I’m calling Red Dirt Roads.
Before the sunny hillsides of California or Alaska’s frozen tundra endeared my daddy’s heart, there was the red clay soil of a military town in Oklahoma where transplanted bermuda took over native buffalo grass and spread like suburban sprawl. The dirt on which dad spent his boyhood carving makeshift roads for tin cars under the scheduled screams of low-flying military machines. The same clay I collected to make pinch pots with my cousin, Tiffany, my first best friend. In neon swimsuits we sat idly by as the blistering sun cooked our creations and browned our native skin. We counted our freckles with terracotta-stained fingertips. At fifteen, I carved the initials of my first love in a jagged heart joined with mine into the russet cliffs of “Lake Dirtybird,” so nicknamed for the murky red of its waters. Later I’d go searching those cliffs for that heart after he broke mine not yet knowing it was only the first of a string of heartbreaks to come. As a girl, I spent my summers under the wide Oklahoma sky learning critical lessons from the clay long before I understood: the heart must stay supple to keep from shattering.
Beautiful invitation. I love the way your weaving words take shape through your expression. I relate to the shapeshifting that writing offers to us. My creative expression has become a rhythmic aspect of my process, learning me INTO what I am stewarding through my Wholeness. A rhythm that demands respect for the mysterious pace and all the revelations that need to take shape in an order that makes no sense until the next layer opens.