Here I am again, in the early morning silence. The only sound that filters in is the rhythmic gentle thump of the clothes that twirl in the dryer. My golden retriever lies at my feet after having been fed and let outside. I’ve surfed some blogs and drink tea in the peace. I don’t care that dust has collected. I’m writing, even if it is only here in my blog for the time being.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m reading Tillie Olsen’s book Silences. In it she writes, “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless writing, the hope of it, was ‘the air I breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all.’ In that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing, and always “the secret rootlets of reconnaissance.”
This is how I write these days. This is how I get it done. I was proofing my graduate program’s alumni newsletter when one of the articles discussed writing while raising children. The author of the article, who is a fellow Spalding graduate who I don’t know personally, gave wonderful tips on how to manage parenting and a writing career. She referenced Silences. That’s when the light bulb went on. I knew I’d seen the title in my personal library, but I hadn’t yet set about reading the book, so I pulled it from my shelf and have begun. It’s the perfect book to be reading now that my novel is so near finished and I’m struggling to find time to get those last edits done. It’s the perfect book to let me know I must keep going, must keep scrapping for bits of time.
Well, I’d better go put my quiet time to good use while the red room is still quiet.
