Writing on an Empty Stomach

The company my husband works for has challenged their employees to eat for a week at the World Poverty Income Level: $1.50 a day person.

In our household, the challenge falls to me, the main preparer of meals, and if not preparer, certainly the main planner.

With just a tiny bit of hesitation, I accepted the challenge. 17 became a self-proclaimed vegetarian at age ten, in a family of mostly meat-eaters, so I have relied on a repertoire of vegetarian dishes that most of us enjoy. I knew the only way to pull of the challenge would be to eliminate meat from our diet. I allowed myself a cheat on eggs, since my chickens are producing at least two dozen a week now.

With this is mind, I planned our menu for the week:

Sunday: Quiche and Green Beans

Monday: Macaroni and Cheese and Baby Broccoli (on sale at the grocery store)

Tuesday: Black Beans (soaked overnight and cooked on the stove Monday afternoon) and Rice and Salad

Wednesday: Vegetable Soup and my homemade English Muffin Bread

Thursday: Black Bean and Cornbread Casserole and Salad

Friday: another family favorite, my One Pot Lentil Casserole

Sunday afternoon, I made one trip to the grocery store. I purchased no meat, no sweets, no snacks (with the exception of the store brand version of Ritz crackers for my husband, who often works through lunch and comes home starving). Because I am not starting my pantry from scratch, I also did not have to buy coffee, tea, butter, oil or spices. I stuck to my list, and spent just under $48. By my calculations, I was only technically allowed $40. 50; already I had gone over budget. In addtion to eggs, this amount didn't include milk, which we have delivered every Tuesday. I did splurge on an Angel Food Cake on the bakery clearance rack for $1.50. With the strawberries I purchased, I would be able to serve dessert one night.

Still, I decided, the lesson would be learned.

For me, it means that when I add cooking to copying Anna Karenina pages, my creative time begins to feel endangered.

Sophia Tolstoy did a good chunk of the cooking for her family. She likely had the help of a servant or two, but Leo was a particular eater. At some point, he became a strict vegetarian for philosophical and health reasons. He stopped drinking milk. Sophia had to plan his meals carefully and planned additional dishes for the rest of the family. And remember too that this was a time when most foods were produced at home. Jams, eggs, milk: all these were harvested at home. Bread too would have to be baked. Meat hunted or purchased at the market. The stove heated with a fire which must be regularly stoked.

While Leo Tolstoy wrote and preached equality for the peasants, his own creative time came at the cost of his wife's.

So why am I not feeling overwhelmed? Why am I feeling energetic and motivated this morning to get to my chores AND my writing?

The answer, I think, is twofold.

First, as Grace Paley once told a journalist, the best way to be a successful a writer is to keep your overhead low. If I can go to the grocery store and spend one-fourth of what I usually do, I am exchanging one kind of work for another. And is there perhaps something more grounding and more connected to my creativity in spending my time soaking and cooking beans, baking my own bread, cutting up the stale end pieces to make croutons, feeding and collecting eggs from the chickens rather than getting dressed in appropriate clothes and driving my car to a job so that I can make money to buy the items I need to feed my family?

The second part of my answer is something that I believe Leo Tolstoy himself may stumbled upon. In our over-fed, giant-portioned, dessert-every-day-because-we-deserve-it, can't-have-an-afterschool-activity-without-providing-a-snack, have we left room for yearning? For hunger? For wanting something? What drives us to get up off the couch, turn off the television, and create?

 

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The Silent Treatment

Yesterday, I picked up my pen and resumed copying pages for the first time since March 9th, well over one month ago. My hands felt stiff and unfamiliar with putting words onto the page. It took the whole chapter to reacquaint my mind with the story.

Alexey Alexandrovitch has decided not to divorce Anna, and to allow her continue her relationship with Vronsky, provided she does not bring disgrace to them publicly and that she agree not to bring him into their home. Alexandrovitch's decision is not made in a spirit of forgiveness or compassion. No, he has decided that granting a divorce would be the compassionate choice, because she would be able to go off with her lover. Alexandrovitch wants to punish his wife. Part 3 of the novel ended with Vronsky and Alexey Alexandrovitch passing each other at the front door of the Karenin's home. Anna has summoned Vronksy there, because she thinks her husband will be out. In the opening of Part 4, Vronksy mentally rationalizes Anna's tiresome jealousy, her change from the woman he fell in love with, her nagging inquiries into what he has been doing with his evenings. For the first time, Anna foreshadows her own death, a vision that comes to her in a dream. She will die giving birth to his baby. Both she and Vronsky are unsettled by this notion.

In the time since copyin the last line of Part 3 and the opening lines of Part 4, I have lived an entired life. I finished my short story collection, Three Sisters. I submitted the full collection to three book prize contests and individual stories to many journals and publications. I baked bread, sewed curtains for the bathroom, visited my son at college, and took my 2-year-old nephew to the park to play in the dirt and collect rocks in an abandoned water bottle. I watched movies, smart movies and really silly movies, and the entire season of The Voice (I am torn between rooting for Joshua and Meghan). I began a creative writing workshop for middle school students. I went on dates with my husband. I saw 17 off to the prom.

This past month has been about my story.

I suppose this made returning to Anna Karenina more difficult. I can only describe yesterday's labors as maddening. I use this word intentionally, as this is how Sophia Tolstoy was seen at the end of her husband's life. And no wonder, I thought yesterday as I copied Vronsky's thoughts about how annoying Anna had become. Sophia had been driven crazy by the constant presence of someone else's stories in her mind, stifling her own voice. I began to think of Leo's actions as a form of emotional abuse, a placing of his hand over his wife's mouth, silencing her screams.

When I finished Three Sisters and snapped my laptop closed, I felt a sense of something completely unknown. At that moment, it didn't matter if my book was published. It didn't even matter if anyone ever read those stories. I had heard my own voice for the first time, maybe ever. It would not be an understatement to say that the moment I heard the click of my laptop changed everything for me. I have a voice. It is my voice. I recognize it and know how to distinguish it from the many voices that have filled my head over the years, some of them not very pleasant. Even the kind voices--my husband, my children, my mother and sister, my friends--have always seemed a bit disconnected and so, not quite believable. It is easy to dismiss those kind voices as just that: being kind rather than truthful.

And so now, I am faced with a decision. Can I go on copying someone else's story without silencing my own voice?

 

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