Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life

Enormous Rage

Early November 1997. I am at Ucross, a writing retreat in northeastern Wyoming. I will be here a month; by the time I leave, I hope to have finished the first draft of this memoir. From my studio window, I see a small grove of leafless trees, the brown tufts of dried grasses, a gray sky. Snow flurries. Winter descended on the High Plains a couple of days ago, as I drove through the Black Hills of South Dakota. Yesterday, the day I arrived here, the temperature was in the single digits. But the sky was a brilliant blue; the first full day of sun I’ve seen in weeks. (Madison has suffered a fall of such unremitting gray that despite the cold, I feel as though I’ve left Wisconsin for better climes, the way people head to Florida or Saint Bart in January.) In the Big Horns—about an hour’s drive away—snow glistens on the peaks. I brought my cross-country skis with me. The whole prospect seems highly promising. n 5:00 A.M.Wednesday, October 15, 1986 Just woke up from a genuine nightmare. It started out fairly benign. MaggieThompson and I were out in the country somewhere, on some open land where a lot of Boy Scouts were tenting. For some reason, I was holding one of Helen’s antique Chinese plates. I threw it like a Frisbee; it landed on the roof of one of the tents, and one of the Boy Scouts helped me get it down.The plate didn’t break, which pleased me. I paid the boy fifty cents for his help.Then Maggie and I were in a house that was out on 289 Enormous Rage n the same land, at a big party.A lot of people I knew were there, including many who’ve had problems with their marriages. Stu and the kids were there, and I think Shelly too. Somehow the party faded into the background , and I was with a woman who was a psychiatrist. She was trying to help Stu and me resolve an argument about shopping.The woman was clearly on my side and kept asking Stu how he saw things and how he felt about things that had more to do with division of household tasks than about emotions or anything like that. Eventually Stu left, I think to go shopping. Then I had a conversation with some women about making quilts. All the women, including the psychiatrist, were helping me decide what kinds of fabrics to use. I was going to build the quilts from the kids’ sleeping bags and baby blankets. While we were discussing the quilts, Stu came back in, through sliding glass doors, with a gun. He said,“I’m not going to tolerate any more of this crap.” He forced me down and stuck the gun in my mouth. Or maybe he pointed it at me, and I was so afraid he was going to shoot one of the kids that I helped him or encouraged him to put the gun in my mouth, to protect the kids. I woke up when he stuck the gun in my mouth. n I’ve come to Ucross to focus on this memoir, but I’ve spent most of the past three days revising (yet again) my poetry manuscript, Some Poems Want to Be Stories, for a contest with a looming deadline. I’ve been writing poetry for eleven years, getting it published in little magazines for six. For the past three years, I’ve been working on Some Poems, sending it out in its various versions to compete in the cold, cruel world. Very occasionally, it reaps encouraging comments from one of the contest judges. On good days, these make me think that someday it might be published. On bad days, they make me think I’m throwing good money after bad. Every contest entry sets me back between twenty-five and forty dollars for printing, postage, and reading fees. Why do I do it? It’s the poetry biz. It’s the only way I know, other than self-publishing, to see a book into print. The odds against Enormous Rage 290 winning are huge. The big contests—the ones that offer, in addition to publication, cash prizes of five hundred to five thousand dollars— attract as many as two thousand manuscripts. Even in...