Well Met 2 comments

By Brian Volck

I was working last week where I used to live, on the Navajo Reservation, part of a service trip with my parish. We rehabbed a trailer in Tuba City, hoed the sandy ground, and repaired doors and roofs in Moencopi, the Hopi village across the highway, pausing at times to look up and bask in the severe beauty of red sandstone walls under endless skies.

As always, I learned how to do some tasks better by doing them again. I know how I’ll rescreen a door more efficiently next time, know more about cutting shingle and laying linoleum. For someone who lives too much in my head, such chores come as gifts and welcome lessons, not burdens.

But the real gift is relation, meeting face to face persons who would otherwise remain forever beyond my life’s tiny orbit. There’s one in particular I must tell you about.

She’s thirteen, a Navajo girl with hardships I know little of beyond half-stories of family turmoil. She’s tall, a bit round in the face, with brown skin, waves in her long, black hair, and dark, attentive eyes. Her reticence and shyness are pure Navajo, perhaps accentuated by the novelty of our presence and her own newness to this part of the Reservation.

But we began talking about writing. Having heard I’d written some myself, she was confident enough to share some of hers.

“I want to learn how to do this better,” she said, reminding me that schools in town have no creative writing teachers. “I made some mistakes.”

This was my first clue what I was dealing with. Most junior high students would be grateful the writing assignment was handed in, not wondering how to improve it.

Then she added, “I want to make my writing come alive.”

“Don’t we all?” I thought. But I knew now I had something to work with. She was ready. Craft, like moral habits such as hospitality, can often be learned, though I’ve no idea how to teach them to the resistant.

As that underappreciated philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once noted, such complexities can’t be taught by prescription anyway, since no such prescription exists. They are acquired tacitly, typically passed by example from master to apprentice. The lesson is in the doing.

I couldn’t claim to be a “master,” but I was intrigued. She handed me a neatly bound story complete with hand-drawn illustrations. The subject was what one would suspect from a young teenage girl, but I was unprepared for what she did with it.

This is her first line: “So, you really do love her, don’t you?”

How did she learn to do that at thirteen? How did she know how to hook the reader from the start; to start by raising questions her story would address, if not fully answer; to go straightaway to that sine qua non of story: conflict?

And as I read, I asked how she knew that compelling stories can get by on a slender plot, but not without solid characters? What gave her the idea to reveal a character’s inner life by inserting her poems into the narrative? Was it mere chance her dialogue advanced the story rather than derailing it?

To be sure, there were things she needed to work on. The characters needed bodies, the scenes demanded an appeal to the senses to “make it come alive.” But, after a short discussion of how that might work, she seemed already to grasp it, wondering what a nervous tugging at the collar might reveal about her male character, what the “beautiful ring” the girl returned might look like.

“So, what you’re saying,” she summarized, “is that I have potential but I have to work at it?”

“No,” I said. “I have really bad news. You’re a writer already. You care too much about the work not to be. You write things down as they occur to you. You don’t let a draft stay finished. Of course you have to work at it. We all have to work at it. We never get it finally right, only as close as we can at the time.”

“You mean you’re still working on your writing?” she asked, incredulous.

“I’ll never be done. If I were, I’d have to quit.”

She seemed to absorb that as we talked about work habits, the disappointments of the writing life, the need to read as much and as often as possible. I gave her my address and email, urged her to send things my way. So many people have been generous to me with their time and attention. It was a delight to pass that gift along.

But it didn’t feel like a good deed, an eleemosynary treat. It felt like communion, a sharing of word-wonder with a young woman so very different from me in background and experience, who nevertheless understood, who was ready to learn, who will go far if she nurtures this gift.

There may well already be too many writers to make a go of it in a world where print, we are told, is dying. Yet I saw in this encounter a different calculus, an economy of surplus—how could there be too many writers?—rather than one of scarcity.

I hope I gave her something. I know she blessed me with her talent, her freshness, and her perhaps unintended reminder why writing is an adventure, not a task. I mean to take up her challenge, work at making my sentences come alive, essay once more the impossible craft.

I owe that much to her. She and I are fellow writers, each in our workshops, doing the craft.