I WANNA BE A WRITER
A little more than twenty years ago I sat on my bed (no room for chairs in my tiny apartment) and realized that I had $30,000 (my mother’s estate) and no one dependent on me. Or so I thought. I didn’t realize how helpless one brother was. I should have stabilized him with a public guardian of some kind — a social worker. I didn’t realize he needed me as an intercessory because he was afraid of officials so he went out of his way to offend them. He seemed to be stabilized with friends. If I took him with me, there was no chance I could write. He demanded attention and I would be hundreds of miles from the VA hospital.
So I quit my job and bought a house in Valier for $30,000. I knew the town, though it didn’t know me. I had always intended to write but always had to work. This looked to be my last chance. Anyway, it was fun to set up a new household that was really mine. That was before the world began to change. If you think you can move north to a small town to escape the drunks, the abusers, the man-camps, the meth cookers, and all other disruptive types — that worked in 1999. Twenty years later, many stable, conscientious family men have died. And here come the others.
The first last and only book I wrote that was published was the one I had promised Bob Scriver (1914–1999) I would write. It was about sculpture, not a scandal tale, though there was and is plenty of material for that, both about Bob and about “Western art.” But I discovered blogging and posted both books and essays that way.
When I was a kid and managed some small achievement it was treated as a great event, but as an adult — once Bob and I divorced — there is an echoing silence. No one in my family reads what I write, though one cousin made a little “shrine” of my lone book because she worships publishing. No one said, “You know, I liked what you said in this place,” or “I’m not sure you got this part right.”
From the beginning I’ve written in a vacuum with one exception: warm little home tales or bits of history. People like those. These are NOT what I consider valuble. But now, on Medium I’ve finally acquired a few real readers. For them I am thankful! As nearly as I can tell, no one local reads my blogs, so for that I’m also thankful.
One little category about Blackfeet has found a niche in Academia.edu and Researchgate.com as semi-academic, quasi-anthro, remembered history. A narrative like “12 Blackfeet Stories” is a quick way to get a feel for generations of growth and change among the tribe.
So what do I make of it? Am I really writing? It’s really a matter of thinking, so am I thinking in a valuable and possibly useful way? I’m not making money even with Ev’s little Medium scheme because it draws me into a labyrinth of qualifications and registrations, which I suspect is the point.
Alas, I don’t write horror. Life itself is horrible enough. I’m not joking. Not long ago I turned and saw for the first time a great hulking shadow that is probably the eversion of the glamour and status of what I accepted as reflection from Bob Scriver. People I thought were friends were secretly rivals and had every intention of destroying everything Bob tried to achieve. They had assumed the worst and were acting on that assumption. A student I thought was friendly struck out at me, dropping his mask.
This was matched by indifference on the part of people I thought were enthusiasts. No one wanted the notes from the Unitarian Universalist years. Finally the Montana Historical Society took my archives and said they would just discard what didn’t fit their purposes. I asked them not to tell me if they did that. I hope there’s enough info in those boxes to convince them that the UU’s had a real place and impact on the history of this state.
Day by day the evidence piles up that we’ve understood the world all wrong. Corruption was not just the coach who took a percentage of the admissions to games, it was US senators taking millions of dollars to vote against the best interests of their constituents. It was not just dark money, but also the rewriting of the US law to remove all the guard rails against dishonesty and sedition.
What is writing compared to the enormity of that? What is writing in the face of 2% of the population dying — DYING — to protect the profits of people who have access to vaccine. How can anyone express the enormity and inhumanity of that by writing?
The answer is quite obvious if you live here: it is the history of the indigenous people across this continent from the moment first small pox germ (which earlier jumped from Africa and devastated Europe the same as the plague did. They lived it before we did.
Here’s a bit of perspective:
https://www.history.com/news/pandemics-end-plague-cholera-black-death-smallpox
Unless the safeguards and remedies we are learning now turn out to be as effective as the invention of sanitation or of antibiotics, we will have more plagues. Since the earliest days, stories have traveled with plagues, been locked up in the same quarantines. Must I write about them now, including the horror of inevitability? Today the Black Death germs still live on in the small rodents of the prairie. But antibiotics will deal with them.
The more horrifying development seems to be a return to medieval minds — as though the Enlightenment never happened — in fact returning to the idea that science is witchcraft, since the uneducated don’t get it. “I don’t have time for all that intellectual stuff,” say the business people.
My foundational thinking is not intellectual but rather feeling. In fact, there is a whole quiet movement or set of movements called art, song, and humanities that are beginning to be identified with the neanderthal step of evolution and that have been a bit threatened by both science and the over-elaboration of traditions until they became cages. There is a lot of quiet work happening that will trigger fine writing. I hope to keep up. I’ll take notes.
