Writing

When I was eight, I wrote a story. In the very first lines, the reader is dropped into the grave of a girl named Alice. She is stirring and waking. She discovers that she is a corpse, there are ants, worms, rot. She opens the doors of her front teeth; they swing heavily on the hinges of her desire to live again. Alice steps out through her teeth, out of the grave. I honestly don’t remember what happens after that. But it was a good story, of that I’m certain.

Alice never returned to the grave, but the story drew attention to the places in my mind that created it, shaped it, released it. Those places weren’t ready for attention. Are they ever? You are writer, they said. Write, they said. I was eight. I didn’t give a shit about being a writer. All I cared about was Alice. My characters are still my main concern.

My life has been like a sandpainting in a shot glass. I don’t understand how those layers of colors and shapes formed in there, but they did. They are the rich, raw, beautiful, and sometimes frightening landscape that is my life. I never stopped writing, but I stayed off the main roads. I wrote from the trails and fields where no one else seemed to be.

And then one day, Alice came riding along on a black horse. We sat down, and she told me stories. I wrote those stories down.

I write them down every time I sit at my keyboard, every time I hold a pen. I write them in my head when I walk my dogs on this wild New Mexico land.

Yes, writers write. But writers also live. Stories can live inside us for eternity, but they become something else entirely when they are shared. I’m done with the back roads, done with roads in general. It’s time to shout Alice’s story from the mountaintops.