Writing comes from living, says Brakenbury
One has to live to write. It
is a lesson that Rosalind Brakenbury stressed during her recent reading
in the Tucker Hall Theatre; it is a point she continually emphasizes
during the fiction seminars that she conducts as the College’s
writer-in-residence. In her case, she has “lived” as a journalist, as a
mate on a schooner, as a teacher and as a mother—“living in the real
world,” she says, in order to gain experiences that can be translated
into words.
“You need to go out and immerse yourself in things,
just learn about the world,” Brakenbury said. “Sometimes it may involve
something like giving birth to children—that’s an experience. Sometimes
writers feel it is not a good idea to be employed in menial jobs, but I
think menial jobs teach you quite a lot about life and about yourself.”
Brakenbury opened her public reading with a selection from A House in Morocco,
one of 11 works of fiction she has published. The novel became an
exercise in perseverence for the author—“I got 29 rejection letters
before it was published,” she said. Publishers, she speculated, were
not interested in a novel that featured an Arab setting at that time.
As she read, however, exchanges between two key characters, Sarah and
Bill, seemed extremely pertinent. Bill, a would-be war correspondent,
is discontent in Morroco, which is, he says, too far removed from the
violent newsworthy confrontations elsewhere in the Arab world. As the
couple breaks up, Sarah chastizes Bill, “You want to go for the blood.”
She ends up with a Morrocan wind-surf guide, beginning her journey
toward an understanding of Arabic culture.
In comments to the
audience, Brakenbury said, “I wrote this book in 1991. It took 10 years
to be published.” She was about to give up on the novel when a friend
advised her, “Obviously this is very important to you.” She continued
her revisions, concentrating on creating a distance between Sarah and
herself as the author. “Ultimately, that process made for a better
novel,” she said.
After reading selections from Yellow Swing, one of her five poetry collections, Brakenbury shared a short piece from Windstorm and Flood,
a novel scheduled for publication in the spring. Written from her
experience living in Key West, Fla., the book revolves around
characters who, following a hurricane, pick up the material pieces of
their lives while reassessing their personal ambitions. In the
selection she read, a pastor, who is on the verge of losing faith, is
shown walking from a flood-ravaged street into his church building
while reflecting on the unsettling emotions of “feeling out of
control.” “It is absurb, at 60, to feel this way,” he says. Entering
the dark church, he becomes aware of whisperings, which turn out to be
the rustling of the wings of birds who have taken sanctuary in the
chapel. As the door opens, the birds take flight. The pastor watches,
obsessed with identifying each departing species.
Brakenbury
explained, “The book attempts to deal with chaos and mess and new
beginnings, along with the question of how do you connect with the
young person who is yourself” after many years have disappeared.
As a young girl, Brakenbury envisioned
writing a novel that was Homeric in its breadth and which drew out the
complexities of human relationships in a manner worthy of Virginia
Woolf, a childhood heroine. In each of the works she read, elements of
a human odessey were available to her listeners along with descriptions
that were virtually tactile in their vividness.
At William and
Mary, Brakenbury is attempting to help young writers arrive at similar
depths. She forces them to read aloud, suggesting that “you know what
is wrong with a sentence as soon as you hear it.” Some students, she
finds, are copying the styles of other authors. “I tell them that is
all right,” she said. “They will not get stuck there.” Concerning the
greatest struggle facing young novelists, she said, “The character that
is most like you in what you write always is the difficulty.”
Brakenbury
compared her stint here to a similar experience she had in Scotland.
“American students are much more chatty and forthcoming,” she
explained, a positive trait in terms of her writing seminars. She
encourages her students by telling them, “There has got to be a new
generation of American writers. It might as well be you.”
(Brakenbury
is serving as the College's Scott and Vivian Donaldson
Writer-in-Residence. Her reading was made possible, in part, with funds
from the Patrick Hayes Writers Series.)
