Inviting the Voice

This essay was adapted from a keynote address given at the Appalachian Writers' Association meeting at Morehead State University.

About twenty-five years ago I was standing in the living room of my little rental house in Lexington. We had steamed and scraped off the speckled green wallpaper but hadn't painted yet so the walls had what we like to call the Florentine Look—i.e., plaster and glue.

This was in the days when phones were tethered to the wall, and ours rested on my aunt's desk that stood in the corner diagonal to the front door.

My exact location is important because there seem to be lines of power involved in this memory. I was standing equidistant from the door and the phone right beside our coffee table, which was actually the battered black trunk my husband had packed his duds in for college.

It was summer, and our only air conditioning was in our bedroom and the little sun porch we both worked in at the back of the house, so I was hot and sticky.

I feel like I was wearing my amber-colored swimsuit with purple lilies on it, but that doesn't make any sense. Maybe it's the openness of the moment that makes me remember myself as physically exposed.

Twenty-five years ago I would have been thirty-four and had one son who was almost eight. I was teaching part time at U.K., Centre, and Transy—in different configurations, only one semester did I do all three at once—plus editing for the med center and writing the newsletter for one of its psychological clinics, the Rational Behavior Therapy Center. For them I wrote a column as a dog called Rational Ralph, but I digress. My husband taught piano lessons and played piano in the County Line Band. We were afloat but paddling hard.

I had been on the academic job market for three years and had had some close calls, interviewing at mla in New York and samla in Atlanta, but had never gotten an offer. I figure whoever read those letters I sent out could probably see between the lines that I really had another calling and, while much of me was desperate to be hired, some essential part was praying to be spared. As Gurney Norman likes to quote from the Good Book, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." This holds for God's revision—that is, woman—too.

Anyway, what bolted this moment to the sea-tossed floor of my mind is the phone. I think it rang and I answered it. Maybe not, though. Maybe I just glanced that way and knew it could ring, that if I stood there sweltering long enough it would ring and I would have the choice of whether or not to answer.

Suddenly I knew that writing is like that. It calls for you. You can wait for the call and answer or you can walk away.

A current of energy circled through me from cowlick to foot sole and back to crown. All my struggle with writing came down to this: when the call comes, would I be there to answer? Would I take up my calling? Nobody was going to give me permission or make this easy or reassure me that it was the right thing to do. If I wanted a voice, I was going to have to make myself available, to make it welcome.

I am tempted as I write this to walk the six paces from my stand-up desk to my journal shelf and hunt for what I wrote about that moment the day it happened. But doing that would break this flow, like laying down the phone while you go start spaghetti sauce and leaving the caller to languish. If I want to hunt that up later and weave it in, I can do so. For now the task is to resist distraction, even research. Especially research, which is like a live map and will haul you down roads you didn't even know were there...