Last weekend I went to a cafe to do some work and attend a meeting of the Desi Writers' Lounge writing club. I'd gone to DWL's book club meetings before -- quite regularly, actually, until they moved the meeting time up to when I'm still at work. But after starting this summer to write creatively for the first time in many years (doggerel sonnets and limericks to counteract boredom excepted), I'd lost the big mo. SRB encouraged me to go and see if it kick-started me. I didn't find the group until an hour after the meeting had started because apparently the format is an hour of silent work, followed by an hour of discussion. But when they started talking, I put away the proposal I was writing and introduced myself to the group.
My foray into creative writing started with a waking dream of Jack at 46, in a car with his teenaged daughter, fleeing something or someone. As I fleshed the story out, his stand-in character ended up living in Richmond, VA, in a US that's been effectively divided along the Potomac. The coast line has receded with rising sea levels and most everything east of Richmond is a kind of marshy archipelago regularly buffeted by formerly rare mega-storms. The southern US has become a kind of libertarian hell, in which the government is no longer able to provide services or do much of anything. Stand-in has been sober for 15 years, since the birth of his daughter flipped a switch that he'd been unable to flip on his own. He's twenty-years estranged from his family after doing something terrible and being overcome by shame. During a hurricane, while hunkering down in a shelter with his daughter, she goes wandering at night and accidentally sees the leader of the gang to which they belong killing another member of the gang. He notices that he's being watched but can't catch a clear glimpse of her as she flees back to her dad. The story opens with them two of them stowed away behind the false back of a trailer being towed toward the Potomac and an uncertain meeting with his parents.
The story started to unfold in reverse order. But I didn't get very far before, as I said, losing steam. One of the reasons for that is because I was fixated on the protagonist as being a real stand-in for Jack. That means thinking really deeply about what he might have been like as a middle-aged man, which means thinking really deeply about what he was like as a young man. How to create a character that is faithful to him? He would still be mentally ill, but would he have figured out how to adjust his own pH so it was a little closer to the water he swam in, to extend SRB's metaphor? There were other difficulties, not least with the world building, which turns out to be hard to do credibly (surprise!). For example, he's in a gang. Why is he in a gang? How big is it? What does it do? Inventing a political economy that makes sense is hard. Also, what the hell do I know about 15 year old girls?
Anyway the biggest challenge was imagining future Jack, writing his biography. And eventually that led me back to an idea that Mom had talked about for years: co-writing a book with Jack about living with mental illness. Not sure how much they ever developed it but I gathered that it would kind of a join memoir. And then I thought, what about writing a biography of Jack? A memoir of our family as five and then four? The struggle of, as Linc spoke about during the memorial service, a kid who was devalued and cast aside by society because he couldn't be economically productive? Who suffered because of the horrible lack of services for people with his degree of mental illness, and whose parents suffered through years and years of trying to find those services? I need to read
Stuart: A Life Backwards.
I read
this piece today, by a father writing about what it's like to have a very sick son, who stopped writing abruptly when his son died and only published the essay, unfinished, more than a year later. And I watched a
lecture recently by a guy named DJ Jaffe, about how society fails the seriously mentally ill. That guy keeps dubious company politically but the lecture was provocative and resonated with the struggle M&D and Jack had finding places that could take care of him, where he could take care of himself and thrive, and where other people could be safe from him because he was, frankly, dangerous at times. It reminded me that the most lucid and animated that I ever saw Jack after eighth grade was in the locked psych ward at Georgetown, after he'd come out of a coma. Other psych wards were awful and that one wasn't sunshine and roses, but he was safe there.
Something to talk to the fam about.
