This is Nan Cuba. She received her MFA in fiction from the Warren
Wilson Program for Writers, is the founder and executive director emeritus of
Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center (
www.geminiink.org), was twice the runner-up
for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and received a Fundación Valparaiso Residency
Grant in Mojácar, Spain. She is currently an associate professor of English at
Our Lady of the Lake University. As an investigative journalist, she reported
on the causes of extraordinary violence in publications such
as
LIFE and
D Magazine. Her stories, poems, and reviews have
appeared in
Quarterly West,
Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry &
Prose, the
Bloomsbury Review, and the
Harvard Review,
among others. She is coeditor of
Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers
& Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008), and her novel,
Body and Bread, will be published by Engine Books in May 2013.
I’m sixty-five, and I’ve reverted to the womb. When I converted a bedroom into my office, I
consciously filled it with memorabilia and art, surrounding myself with artifacts
that stimulate and nourish. Everywhere I
look: faces, scenes, chatter. Stuck for
a piece of dialogue: glance at the bookshelf to the left. Need an image: look inside the glass-fronted
cabinet above the desk. If nothing else
works, check the window on one wall.
I’m a
phenomenon of self-discipline, a holdover from my Bible-belt upbringing. When I sit at my desk, I have no trouble
getting to work. So once, I tried
writing according to a specific schedule.
Fitting time around my day job, I rose at 4:00 a.m., read the previous
day’s product, then pounded out a pledged three pages. I loved being in the world when everyone else
seemed out of it. The dark, the quiet,
the stillness invigorated, sending me straight to my subconscious. Like an automaton, I stuck to my schedule
because I’d been trained that failing to meet a commitment meant
irresponsibility, flawed character, and worse, a father’s disappointment. I was proud, productive, and finally,
exhausted. After five months, I went to
bed with the flu, sleeping almost continually for a week.
Now, like
all my other tasks—planning classes, grading papers, running errands—I fit my
writing into life’s evolving demands.
Although I miss that wee-hour nether-world, I can produce whenever I
keep my appointment at the computer.
Like getting a haircut or attending faculty assembly, my writing
opportunities vary but are slotted into my schedule. I block out days on my calendar for upcoming
projects and announce this to my family.
When I start writing, I find eating, talking, even dressing an
irritation. My husband brings meals on a
tray. I have arthritic hips, so I sit on
a pillow, but eventually an ache forces me to rise and check the mail or take a
trip to the bathroom. If someone talks,
I share what I’ve been working on, watching reactions. Then I return to my computer. Instead of clutching a rifle like Charlton
Heston, my “cold, hard hands” will someday have to be pried from the keyboard.
I used to
listen to the local classical radio station, but I’ve switched to one that
plays jazz. My parents were characters
straight from Mad Men, a glass of
Scotch in one hand, a cigarette or pipe in the other, songs by Nancy Wilson, Sarah
Vaughn, or Benny Goodman filling our house, all of it topnotch background music
I still hear. I remember watching these artists
and others—Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Billie Holliday—on TV. Once, I took my daughter to see Dizzy Gillespie
at the Blue Note in NYC. Now, it’s
Coltrane, Simone, Monk, Parker, too many to name. Like the narrator in Baldwin’s
“Sonny’s Blues,” I enter every lick and pitch, listening to the haunting
messages, warmed and bothered, opening while I type.
Like these musical
idols, amazing writers also inspire me. Each
came to my house while I served as executive director of a literary center,
Gemini Ink (
www.geminiink.org), and I
collected their autographs on a door frame that now borders my bookshelf. Former teachers, role models, a few
friends—literary icons, all—they cheer me on.
What else? My grandmother’s sinister
ceramic Easter rabbits, my father’s knit booties and toy horses, a Michael Nye photograph
of two Indonesian women in saris, a pottery figure of the Mexica goddess
Tlazolteotl, an iron mask of Sophocles, a
former student’s pen-and-ink drawing, “The Poetess,” of what looks like a manikin
on a gurney in a torture chamber.
I sit at my grandmother’s drop-front secretary, an antique
my mother used in a room she called the study.
My wallpaper is a jumble of letters from the Greek and English alphabets. Even my paperclips have a special holder, one
passed from my grandmother, to my mother, to me: a ceramic bug-eyed baby bird,
its mouth stretched wide, its right foot glued at the ankle. I’m cushioned and surrounded. Ready to write.
