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But when I’m writing, my body is lithe and young. I can touch my toes. I’m a gymnast or a dancer in pink ballet slippers who glides over the floor like a long scarf unfurling. When I am writing, I’m still the young girl who can lift herself into the spreading branches of an apple tree. This is so even though a long clock has claimed me.
Whether I am pessimist or optimist can’t be judged by what I write, by how dreary the subject or how happy the ending. My state can only be weighed by whether I am writing, whether I wake in the morning and reach for a pen or laptop—or turn over, pull a pillow over my head, and go back to sleep.
My last words won’t be a testament. When I’m ready for the end, psychic bags packed and ready to go, I will be done with words and words will be done with me. I will be past caring how to arrange my sentences, past tallying the miseries and regrets, past telling people where they can stick it, or specifying how my body should be displayed, buried, consumed, or on whom my things will be bestowed. Beyond is the word I’d choose. No longer in the thick of things.
Putting words on a page is fueled by optimism, by a compulsion and need that I can only understand in hopeful terms, some sense that words matter, that grabbing them and planting them is something more than trudging across this earth. Writing is like a whipping flag in the wind, a shape and mark and movement, an X for this time, this place, this me.
Writing is a continuation. We take one breath after another, one step after another, always one step away from something, one word closer to something we don’t yet know. What’s next? What’s behind the door? If I’m still curious, if I still want to know, then I’m still alive, not dead. Helen Frankenthaler’s leggy painting Stride, with its bold orange line bent in forward movement, captures the energy I feel when I write.
Many decades ago, when I began to write, I had no sense of where it would lead and no expectations of public reward. Writing was a mystery and a miracle. I didn’t know where words came from, welling up in me and spilling out. I had emerged from a practical family who could not fathom my direction. In their view, my writing was the height of delusion and should be stomped out, which they, en masse, tried to do. Their discouragement was relentless, and I carry their disdain in my head still. Who does she think she is—how preposterous for her to think her voice matters. And yet I persevered. I was surprised when someone spoke well of my writing, when I won an award in school or later got published. I have never had dreams of grandeur. All the real rewards come in the doing.
Nonetheless, I’ve come to a terminus, the end of certain ambitions that have animated my life, and I don’t know what comes next. I recently published a collection of essays, Studio of the Voice, and have been sobered by its fate. What little attention it has garnered is the result of my own stabs at publicity, pushing this enormous stone up the mountain of indifference, only to have it roll down and crush me. I love my book. I’ve poured myself into these essays. But now I must let go of the baggage attached to it, let go of my failure to successfully promote it. I find myself returning to my beginning, when I thought the gift of writing was all I wanted or needed.
What a different world it was when I first submitted my work for publication. I began as a poet, typing my poems on a Sears electric that roared and vibrated like a jet ready for takeoff. I selected a packet of my poems, folded in a submission letter, and walked my hopes to the mailbox. On the way I executed a ritual, counting the steps. I pulled open the door of the collection box, slid the envelope inside, and heard the whoosh as it fell to its fate.
Steadfast aspirant, I’d visit libraries and bookstores to look at literary journals, to see what divine works could emerge from the mysterious odyssey on which I had launched my little boat of poems. I wanted to learn the details, the techniques, about submission policies, see if I could envision my work in these pages. Most often the answer was no. Here were Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas. I’d mark the magazine I gripped in my hands as a dream journal. Someday I might be good enough to submit to it, but not now.
After sending my work out, I’d wait for months to receive an answer in the mail. Mostly my writing was rejected, but not always. An acceptance struck me as a miracle, as improbable as my having written the poem in the first place. And later I would hold and open the journal with my writing in it. The journey was over; my poems had found their heaven.
I didn’t know if anyone read my work. Much later in life, when I was also publishing prose, I received a note from a well-known writer saying she admired one of my essays. She took the time to write on beautiful cream-colored stationery rimmed in gold, an act of generosity. But in the main, I didn’t know whether readers had engaged with my work or not.
The details and techniques of publishing and publicizing have long since changed, for me and everyone else, with the dominance of social media and online publication. Long ago, a rejection that arrived by paper mail made me question whether I would ever again write something an editor judged worthy. Now, with social media, I became more aware of other writers’publications, successes, even their rejections. I could compare my “career” to theirs. The result could be awful—ushering in dark emotions that disturbed my writing life. I could see an online essay that was not mine generate more traffic and response than I did. Sometimes, conversely, my essay had more visitors. Was this information useful? Not for me. I preferred the early days when a piece was simply accepted or rejected. That was it. I wasn’t burdened by further information.
Now it was a changed world. If one of my essays was going live online on a certain day, I was filled with nervous expectations. Who would read it? Would I receive comments? Would it prompt enthusiasm, mild interest, or the silence of indifference? Would I be disappointed or buoyed by the response? Everything could be tracked and compared in an instant. I could contemplate which of my “friends” had read—or at least visited—the essay, and who had not.
I know that I am not alone in my disturbed response to the new publishing landscape. I also know that some writers seem to flourish. If I had grown up in this new reality, I might better handle the detailed stats, the likes, the reads, the comments—take it in stride à la mode Frankenthaler. I’m not addicted to seeing my work online, but I have experienced jolts of adrenaline when it has been praised. I have checked the website repeatedly, tallying responses, happy or high about friendly feedback, the bliss of connection, knowing I’ve been read, I’ve been seen—or sunk low when my hopes are crushed under the boot. It’s an addictive cycle not much talked about, the psychic shape of the current publishing scene.
I am a creator from within—my richest landscape is the interior. I am also an introvert, most at ease in solitude. Yet I have always faced a demand for public performances: as a professor in the classroom, presenter at a conference, live reader of my own words, subject of an interview. I have performed these duties with anxiety and, I’d say, unproductive self-effacement. With the dominance of social media, a presence on Facebook and myriad other sites is imperative. It’s also important to have a Substack and podcasts. I do these things even though I have never been gifted in putting myself forward. My natural posture is to recede and hope that the work will be enough. The publisher of Studio of the Voice, like many small independent presses, lacks the resources to do publicity. Selling my book is up to me, even though I don’t have the DNA, will, or skill to do it well.
Recently I’ve been asking myself, Why be miserable over my failure to successfully promote my book? How much time do I have left to live, and do I want to spend it being unhappy in this way? There are miseries I won’t be able to avoid—natural disasters, the death of animals and friends, my own decline and the decline of those I love. Trying to bring attention to myself and my writing doesn’t seem like pain I need to take on.
Several months ago my computer crashed, displaying the Blue Screen of Death. After it spent a week in the IT fix-it shop down the street, I learned that the drive was corrupted, and that the shop couldn’t recover all my data. What wasn’t backed up in the cloud was gone. Drafts of essays, journals, incomplete book manuscripts were most likely gone. This wipeout, coming on the heels of my depression over the fate of my book, made me ask, Who am I now, and what do I want to do with my writing? What is the point of writing books if no one wants to read them?
For decades, I expected that if my writing was good enough, it would be published and read. I wouldn’t be on the bestseller list, this I’ve known, but I’d have a modest, respectable career. I don’t think this is true for me anymore. I've fallen out of the dance line and can’t regain my place. I’m no longer a professor or an editor, no longer deliver papers at conferences, and have moved away to a coastal town where I live in anonymity. When I queried a local bookstore about staging a reading from Studio, I learned that such an event would not be a plus.
What is a writer’s life? Or what makes it a life worth living, and how does it fit my life now? Is it crucial, essential? Or an accessory I can do without? Can I walk away? For most of my life I’ve been a writer. If you take that away, what am I? Can writing be replaced? I don’t think a hobby will fill the void. I’d say my writing is essential. If I lose it, I lose myself. Rilke’s devastating final line to the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” comes to mind: You must change your life. Change for me must be a return to the beginning, when I wrote without expectation, followed where the words took me, and believed they would be enough. Perhaps age has diminished me—I don’t know. What I do know is that I am still fierce enough to change my life. I am not done with words, and words are not done with me.
A Dead Woman’s Memoir
Marcia Aldrich’s latest collection of essays is the award-winning Studio of the Voice (2024) from Wandering Aengus Press. She edited Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press, which also published her AWP-winning Companion to an Untold Story. Her first book Girl Rearing was published by W.W. Norton.
“Unlike Narcissus, who wasted away unable to leave his own reflection, my intention is to confront and capture a literal likeness, investigate emotions and expressions with irreverence. Gazing into a mirror, my reflection provides a range of opportunities for self-discovery. After a career as a designer and illustrator in the beauty, fashion and cosmetic field, I created a series of self-assessing, self-portraits, of which this is a part,” writes Alice Sherman Simpson, 83, author and visual artist.