Earth Works: Selected Essays

Letter to a Reader

141 ince you ask for an account of my writing, I will give you one. But I do so warily, because when writers speak about their work they often puff up like blowfish. Writing is work, and it can leave you gray with exhaustion, can devour your days, can break your heart. But the same is true of all the real work that humans do, the planting of crops and nursing of babies, the building of houses and baking of bread. Writing is neither holy nor mysterious , except insofar as everything we do with our gathered powers is holy and mysterious. Without trumpets, therefore, let me tell you how I began and how I have pursued this art. Along the way I must also tell you something of my life, for writing is to living as grass is to soil. I did not set out to become a writer. I set out to become a scientist, for I wished to understand the universe, this vast and exquisite order that runs from the depths of our bodies to the depths of space. In studying biology, chemistry , and above all physics, I drew unwittingly on the passions of my parents. Although neither of them had graduated from college, my father was a wizard with tools, my mother with plants. My father could gaze at any structure—a barn or a music box—and see how it fit together. He could make from scratch a house or a hat, could mend a stalled watch or a silent radio. He possessed the tinkerer’s genius that has flourished in the stables and cellars and shops of our nation for three hundred years. My mother’s passion was for nature, the whole dazzling creation, from stones to birds, from cockleburs to constellations. Under her care, vegetables bore abundantly and flowers bloomed. The Great Depression forced her to give up the dream of becoming a doctor, but not before Letter to a Reader 142 Earth works she had acquired a lifelong yen for science. When I think of them, I see my father in his workshop sawing a piece of wood, my mother in her garden planting seeds. Their intelligence spoke through their hands. I learned from them to think of writing as manual labor, akin to carpentry and farming. I was born to these parents in October 1945, two months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so I have lived all my days under the sign of the mushroom cloud. My first home was a farm near Memphis, close enough to the Mississippi to give me an abiding love for rivers, far enough south to give me an abiding guilt over racism. Across the road from our house was a prison farm, where I helped the black inmates pick cotton under the shotgun eyes of guards. My sister, Sandra, three years older than I, taught me to read on the screened back porch of that house as we listened to the locusts and the billy goat and the cow. By the age of four I could turn the ink marks on paper into stories in my head, an alchemy I still find more marvelous than the turning of lead into gold. My birth along the Mississippi, those forlorn black faces in the prison fields, and the country turn of my father’s speech all prepared me to be spellbound when, at the age of eight, I climbed aboard the raft with Huckleberry Finn and Jim. That novel was the first big book I read from cover to cover. After finishing the last page, I returned immediately to page one and started over. From that day onward, I have known that the speech of back roads and fields and small towns—my speech—is a language worthy of literature. Nor have I forgotten how close laughter is to pain. Nor have I doubted that stories can bear us along on their current as powerfully as any river. The summer before I started school, my family moved from Tennessee to Ohio, where we lived for the next few years on a military reservation surrounded by soldiers and the machinery of war. This place, the Ravenna Arsenal, would later provide me with the title and central themes for my book of essays, The Paradise of Bombs. The move from South to North, from red dirt to concrete, from fields planted in cotton to fields planted in bombs, opened a fissure in me that I have tried to...