I was sitting in a session at the Society of Early Americanists conference last March in Tulsa, my mind wandering as I listened to a paper (I confess my mind has always wandered terribly at these events). The spring after Trump's election, after the winter when I spent a lot of time contemplating the end of the world, the end of my world, Last Things in general, and the call for courage and resistance. And thinking abstractly about killing myself as a final refuge if needed. I don't recall the preceding train of thought, but it came to me all at once: what I wanted to write, while time permitted, the true book I wanted a chance to write before I died, was not an academic book but a personal one, or one that was both personal and engaged with everything I'd cared about as an early Americanist. It would be about the life of the seventeenth-century Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer (whom I am fascinated by and have written and published about before), but also about myself: her life and inner life freely reimagined through the empathy I have gained from my own life and inner experiences. A fiction, inevitably, but open and speculative about that; essayistic imaginings, not a novel. But then -- and this was the new part that shot through me and made me realize I could and needed to write this now in a way that I never could before -- interwoven in this personal/historical hybrid would also be the political: what all this meant about how to live now, about the power of women, about the power and agency and, hell, heroine-ism of middle-aged women in particular. About women being memed as monsters and not being silenced by that. About women loving and loyal to other women, even as those women were attacked: Mary Dyer loving Anne Hutchinson and me and so many others, yes, loving Hillary Clinton with our whole hearts. Unrepentently. Plus other less public loves I wanted to declare.
What all this would look like I am still figuring out. But in that moment of revelation I knew that within this framework I could talk about everything I truly care about. This includes some things that have made it (more or less safely translated) into my academic writing and things I rarely talk about, that only a few people who know me know would know were ever part of my experience. And because it would also be about our lives now, I thought that for all the weird and personal stuff there would be in it, there could be people out there who would want to read it, who could be moved. Whatever happens, it would be a testimony to our times.
Recently I have been reading Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm eager to read anything that offers courage and inspiration to be creatively daring, these days. Gilbert talks about her admittedly magical-thinking theory that there are ideas out there looking for a human being to say yes to them. Most often people don't.
But sometimes -- rarely, but magnificently -- there comes a day when you're open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, the feeling of falling into love or obsession.) . . . Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention. (36)That is pretty close to what happened.
I have had ideas in the past that gave me flashes of excitement, but I never took them anywhere. This one started taking form right away -- I made myself get out my laptop and sit in a chair (safely away from my office desk) and start drafting a couple of short, imagistic personal sections as soon as I got home, some writing that captured the feeling and scenes I wanted to convey, summoning myself as a religiously-obsessed young woman, struggling with identity and transcendence and desire. The first personal writing I had done in years. I still had language, it seemed.
Since the spring I have been drafting lots of pieces for the book. Just trying to respond to inspiration and actually write any piece I was thinking about, anything that called out to be written. Now my goal is to start to be more systematic, somewhat more linear, if not entirely. Early on I did come up with a five-part structure for the book, loosely tracking the trajectory of Mary Dyer's life as a framework, that has remained solid for me. I know generally what I want to focus on within each section, but I'm also discovering it more specifically as I write, and discovering what the pieces exactly are. In the broadest sense each section will contain multiple short chapters, lyric essays of a kind, some personal, some historical, some political, but lots of blurring and crossing between those. I think.
Mary Dyer's story -- her life, death, and afterlife -- is a fixed quantity (in its outward facts; there is however virtually no documentation of anything we might actually want to know about her -- how it felt to be her, what she loved, how she understood the innermost story of her life beneath the religious ideology that shaped it -- so it is all open to interpretation, to imaginative channeling). What I am coming to realize is that, while I know the past experiences I want to talk about, I also need to figure out the story of my life that I am telling here. Where do I come out? I don't yet know that, just as I don't know what is going to happen to America and the world. That is scary. I hope that by this summer I am further in my understanding. I have already begun to sense that the process of writing the book, of claiming a writer's voice, is itself a central part of the story.
It is hard to write about the present, to write up to the present. It makes me think of the early American journal/histories like William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, that start off in retrospective narrative but fragment as they come to the end, written year by year in the murky troubling present. The pathos of not knowing. I imagine any future reader who will know things I cannot. I just tell myself that I just have to do it, keep going. All closure is illusory anyway, right? Mostly a rhetorical act?
The folder is still called The Project in my Google Drive, as a name didn't come with the inspiration. More recently I have begun trying out thinking of it with the title Red Door (with a subtitle to follow), which is the title of one of the chapters talking about my most deeply sacred and painful experience and invokes ideas of passion and barriers and crossing-over, but that is still open.
The sections have titles: "Monster," "Convincement," "Erotics," "Persistence," and "Flag." (You might wonder the most about the last. A member of the Boston General Court was purported to have said of Mary Dyer's hanging, "She did hang as a flag for others to take example by." But of course there are multiple other connotations, which makes me love it.)
Oddly I did begin writing it in Google Docs rather than Word. This has the advantage of letting me work on it easily across devices -- with travel I expect to be using my laptop a lot. But also it felt like a separate space, away from everything academic that Word inevitably signifies to me, the aura of responsibility and judgment and (yes) failure. A sign that this writing was different. The rightness of that has stayed with me, although as I go on I'm going to need to figure out a better way to save drafts of things I revise. I've been learning a bit about academic software and when I learned what the new Scrivener 3 does I realize I probably need it, although it hasn't yet been released for PC. Going to explore this more after the holidays. (Yes, don't worry, I've downloaded the Google Drive folder to my PC periodically to be backed up on the computer's hard drive and its daily backup to my external hard drive.)
I am not the first or only person to find Mary Dyer relevant in the present. Some weeks before my revelation I saw this image (or something like it) that a friend had shared. It is by Christy Robinson, a nonacademic researcher and novelist of Dyer (and blogger). I love it, but when I saw it I only thought wow, that's awesome, so apt. It must have helped seed my inspiration, but it wasn't itself the source of it.
I still think it's apt. I only know that I am going much, much further. I'll write about the statue (by a famous woman sculptor, Sylvia Shaw Judson) eventually too.
A few weeks ago I came upon the realization that "persistence" has two meanings: the obvious one above, signifying continued or renewed effort, and another, something that continues whether we will it or not (think of "a persistent condition"). One is about agency, one is about things we have no control over. This project is, for me, about both of those. Looking back into the roots of everything that has persisted for me; commitment to persisting in writing this perhaps utterly crazy thing, in the face of all obstacles and looming destruction, to see where it leads. To bear my testimony, for what else is there to do?
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