It seems that I’m hooked on living a creative life. I always return to writing after a catastrophe or crisis. I return to it when I’m happy and fulfilled. When I’m bored or confused. It’s like home plate.
After my younger brother died, I stayed in bed for two weeks and wrote. It was terrible and unexpected. He died of cancer after a year-long battled that gave him a lot of suffering, and I witnessed some of it, especially in those last days.
It was traumatic. I don’t have much memory of the weeks right after he died, but I remember beginning to write a story. I wanted to write something about having the best sibling one could ever have. The one I had during our childhood traumas, because the two of us grew up in a very dysfunctional family, one that ultimately broke apart when I was thirteen. (Great age for a girl to lose her in-home father because he wanted to go and marry someone else.)
That story turned quickly into a novel of sisters. I always wanted a sister, so I invented mine. During that October-November, I did not get out of bed except for absolute necessities. I abandoned my business, pleading vacation. And I wrote faster than I’ve ever written anything. By spring, I had a completed novel, The Invisibles. And I had realized that creating is my lifeline.
Writing After A Heart Event
On May 27, 2021, I had a heart attack. That was followed by surgery to place two shiny new platinum mesh stents into my blocked arteries. The procedure itself was traumatic because I had to be awake and it very uncomfortable. But only a few hours later, I asked the doctor if I could get back on my laptop. He laughed. No one ever asked him that, he said. But I was serious.
I cope with adversity by diving into my imagination. It started in childhood when I ran out of library books to read (small town), so I began to write my own books.
Being hooked on living a creative life, I take refuge there. I invent some people and have them talk to each other. I invent relationships for them, and landscapes in which to have their adventures. I look up historical periods to put them into — time travel being my best way of being a tourist — and I set them amid the tall pines and the wide oaks and let them have conversations and conflicts. I find this process of retreating into my inventions mysterious and consoling. It makes me feel energetic and hopeful.
After a heart event, you lose energy. It’s a fact. For however long, you’re an invalid as you regain vascular fitness, adapt to MANY medications, and gradually get yourself moving again. But for me, the pen never stops. If I can’t sit up to write on my laptop, I’ll dictate onto the phone. It doesn’t seem to be a choice, but a necessity.
Why am I so — the only word I can think of is addicted — to my own imagination and the stories and words it spins? It seems to put me into a more encompassing consciousness. One that is beyond pain or discomfort, fatigue or confusion. I’m hooked, bereft without having a book in process. That’s why the minute I finish writing one, I start another.
I love how an imagined world grows up around me. Brighter and more colorful, full of love and desperation, revolving around the conflicts that invite resolution, writing new stories and poems enraptures me. I’m reimagining my own past, growing a wider and wiser consciousness. Creating puts me in helicopter mode — hovering over landscapes and histories. Maybe I visit the coastline of Italy, or fields of poppies on a Sierra mountain slope. I’m like John Muir skipping through the mountains and sliding down a twinkling avalanche. I am wide, I am home, I am eternal.
That’s why I’m hooked on creating. It’s pure exhilaration! Magical realism, fantasy, and time travel take me places I couldn’t otherwise go.
If I couldn’t create with words, I’d do it with pictures or melodies. I’d find a way. Invention is everything wonderful.
