the where of it

secret places

• Posted by Summer Wood on April 24th, 2010 filed in books, craft of writing, people
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photo by Kathy Namba

Yesterday morning we woke up to spring snow, a layer of white that melted well before noon. Beautiful! Except for the fact that we’ve got apricot trees growing in our new digs here in Taos, and the branches are loaded with delicate white blossoms that mean a bumper crop of fruit this summer — IF they can make it through spring without freezing.

It’s a long shot, I know.  One good year in seven are the general odds for apricots in Taos County.  Last year we were swimming in fruit, so I ought to quit being so greedy and just enjoy the snow.

Hanging out among the blooming branches of fruit trees is one of my most favorite, how’d-you-get-so-lucky kind of ways to spend an idle hour. Bees buzzing, sun streaming past the petals, the smell that’s too earthy to call ambrosia. Who wants to go to heaven when you can sit in the crotch of an apple tree here and let heaven settle around you?

My friend Lucy Gonzales wrote about that experience in a writing class I taught in Questa in 2002. Eight years later, she’s got a book out — Treasures of My Valley:  Humor and Survival in Early 20th Century San Luis Valley – that describes not just the joys of spring but also the hardships of growing up native New Mexican, and the resourcefulness and cooperation it inspired. She’s got tales of picking wild raspberries, wearing bloomers sewn from flour sacks, driving a tractor, raising five kids, burying a husband. She’s got a lot of stories. Lucy is 92.

But the story I love best is the way she describes her “secret place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about secrets in general and secret places in particular. One of the most provocative panels I attended at AWP considered the use of other people’s private details in fiction. What kind of responsibility do we have to the owners of those details when we borrow them for our own work?

Put another way, how much respect should we pay to the privacy of other people’s personal lives?

And places? Even our own places? Can we describe them without revealing their location? Can I say what they mean to me without insisting they mean the same for someone else?

I almost didn’t go to the panel.  Me? I’m hugely respectful of other people’s privacy (I thought). I rarely use details that arise directly from experience, my own or anyone else’s (I thought).  When I write, I take the kernel of a thought or an experience and cultivate it in my imagination (“culture it in a petri dish” is probably a more apt analogy, given the messy state of my mind) so that what emerges will, I HOPE, resound with the emotional truth of the original impulse while bearing no identifiable relation to that specific motivating detail.

But I went, and realized … all that “no sir, not me” stuff? Kinda bullshit.

All writers do it. Autobiographical or not — and I land far on the “not” end of the spectrum — we use the raw stuff of our daily lives as grist for the mill.

So the moral issue stands, for all of us. And sometimes it means a hard, hard choice. Abandon the felicitous detail — the one perfect capsule of meaning that motivates the whole story — or risk treading on something deeply valued by someone else.

Is there a way that the transformative power of art justifies this kind of theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking.

‘Cause, the way it feels to me? If I use a secret — my own, or someone else’s — I’m risking some kind of bad karma. I’m risking having that thought or secret or experience taken away from me.  Door closed.  Story over.

Oddly enough, I excuse memoirists from this exchange — on the basis that we each own our own interpretation of our personal history. Memoir carries in its membership rules the one that says:  this is how I see it.

In fiction, we are doing something different.

Aren’t we?