Who Wrote That?

A friend and I took our seats at the Writer’s Guild last week for an interview with Joan Baez. In case she’s before your time, she was a sixties counterculture icon, one of our greatest female chanteuses, a political activist and a tireless advocate of social justice.  

I was familiar with her back in her heyday but I didn’t know what to expect now that she was 83. When she came walking down the aisle and headed for the stage with her interviewer, I saw that she had let her hair go white. She took her seat and you could feel her presence. Her charisma. Her intelligence. I was excited as she picked up her book of poetry and began to speak. But I couldn’t have been more stunned at what she said:

“After doing a lot of work on my mental health and deep childhood trauma, I discovered that I have Multiple Personality Disorder.” The audience went quiet. The very idea that Joan Baez has a condition in which different personalities live inside a person and function independently, is jaw dropping. Each time she read a poem that night, she said, “This was written by Sasha (I’ve changed the name.) Or” This was written by Adam.” They were her alternate personalities that showed up when she was in her creative mode.

I was familiar with her condition. I once interviewed someone with the same disorder, but unlike many people who suffer from it, it appeared that Ms. Baez was not suffering. She seemed fond and protective of her alternate personalities. That was surprising, but what startled me was something else she said that spoke to my heart.

While she liked uncluttering her life, she told us, and getting rid of extraneous things she didn’t need, she never ever threw away anything that represented her creativity, whether she thought it was good or not. Poems. Songs. Paintings. She treasured herself too much to get rid of them. They represented parts of her essence, she said, the woman that she was and what she cherished most about herself.

That resonated with me. A few days earlier, I was searching my computer for a novel I wrote years ago. I came upon an updated version but there were things in that earlier manuscript that I wanted to find. It felt like an irretrievable loss, it was, as I kept opening files and coming up with nothing. When I gave up looking, I vowed to always hang onto the artistic expressions that reminded me of who I was and who I have become. To never judge what I wrote. To never delete ideas and creations that meant so much to me. To never think that something was too bad to save.

In my writing classes, before a student reads a piece out loud that they just wrote, they often talk about how bad it is. “This is all over the place,” they say. Or “It’s completely disconnected.” Or “It’s really terrible. I’ll read first so I can to get it over with.”

I remind my students, “What you’ve written is a part of you and abasing your artistic expression is an insult and a lack of self-appreciation.”

When I was in the fourth grade, I started writing poetry. I loved it, I loved rhyming, and I never thought about whether it was good or bad. I just wrote and I didn’t show it to anyone. That was the best gift I could have given myself because although I had no one to encourage me, I had no one to discourage me. It made all the difference as I kept writing and I got better and better at it.

In that same vein, we can appreciate not only what we have created but also the natural things that define us.

“I hate my thighs,” you might say. At least you can walk.

“My lips are too thin.” At least you can talk.

“I hate the color of my eyes.” At least you can see.

“My breasts are too small.” A friend of mine just had a double mastectomy.

Master painter, Pablo Picasso said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

Keeping things that spark a memory of a creative time in your life frees your soul. During Covid, I found three pairs of pink pointe shoes wrapped in their shiny pink ribbons in a nook at the far end of my bedroom. I picked up a pair, unwound the ribbons and the familiar scent of cardboard, satin and glue sent me back to the late nineteen hundreds when I danced with the Harkness Ballet company. I could never explain what that phase in my life was like so I had one of my pointe shoes bronzed and each time I look at it, it reminds me of a magical time when I was striving to be the best that I could be.

My march toward excellence continues. When I remove material from a chapter, I save it in a file. No deleting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back to retrieve something and used it somewhere else. Each piece of writing represents a risk taken. Each effort gives my life meaning and purpose. Each effort is a daring representation of the way I think and speak and express myself.

Author Kurt Vonnegut who was known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels, said, “We have to be continuously be jumping off cliffs and developing wings on the way down.”

Our treasured expressions, so precious and unique, symbolize our wings that keep us floating above the difficulties of our lives.