Can I turn the canyon into a trampoline? I would say this is every writer’s quest, but Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf did not face an invisible amphitheater of internet editors.
I envy my weird sisters of old, writing for joy and survival. They writhed with humid words. They were offered no shade from a masthead. They lacked the green visors of style guides. Out under the awning, they were driven to prophecy. Publication was a dandelion on a far continent.
If their words were too viscous or silky, they pressed on. Their inboxes did not pile with ash. But spared easy rejection, they knew the canyon. Even without seat belts, they ran into road work.
Perhaps the slower pace of writing and wooing spared my strange siblings my amnesia. Infatuated with my speed, I forget the rules of the road as quickly as I can type.
Language cooperates, and I believe I have beaten traffic. My ideas dance jigs in puffy poet blouses, and my eyes turn as green as “go.” An editor types “Congratulations!”, and I forget every ticket that ever littered my dashboard. The orange cones give way to Queen Anne’s Lace, and I read the sign like the last chapter of Revelation: End of Road Work.
At last, I can write with cheetah freedom. My words will reach their destinations. I have found my people.
I am not proud of this, the easy way I make love to the mirage. But canyon children squint hard.
Perhaps there are hilltop yogis who burn clean with belonging. But here between the ditches, we worry our words are mutants. We each assume our misfits are the bleakest, nuclear orphans with no siblings.
I have indulged in this lament. These stories are as misshapen as my story. I was the good girl whose sunglasses came in a thousand shades of rose. I wrote, at eleven, about “the downtrodden,” seared by the face with the cardboard sign at the pizza parlor. I sang Sunday hymns all week and stowed away in the caboose of the Gospel train. I wore slap bracelets declaring me a “JESUS FREAK” and rode the mountain pass to seminary.
But I kept getting out and reading poems chalked into the asphalt. I was a Vassar feminist with a five-lane fundamentalist streak. I doodled black-and-white angels until I sidled up to rainbows who became family. I reread red letters and became freakier. I was on the path to be a pastor until I got a job at the cat sanctuary.
I wrote my way back onto the freeway, in a neon panel van with Jesus and my secular holy friends and all the broken cats. Our taillights were blinkered, and our GPS conked out, and we were in perpetual danger of running out of gas, although it never happened.
Everything I wrote towed an RV of rubble, the sacred and the profane and the guilt and the exuberance. I wrote to absolve my zealous youth, to gentle the girl whose right-wing turn caused accidents. I wrote peace treaties between the sides of my brain. I wrote my embarrassing past and forgivable future onto the same map.
I wrote about Jesus under cover of cattails, marrying two sanctuaries. The church and the cat shelter told the same story. I smuggled my freaky six-winged faith into blogs about ferals. I became an unmarked car full of God’s glow sticks. People came to the party. The cat sanctuary blog welcomed a thousand readers a week.
End of Road Work. I did it.
But roads are made for undoing. I got back out of the van. I chalked gawky stories outside the shelter. I wrote about faith and dandelions and grandfathers and evolution in the same eighteen-wheeled essay. I could not keep it in the cat car, and I had lost my ticket for the Gospel train.
It was too much of a Jesus jamboree for the literary, too psychedelic for the holy. My goody-gush made editorial eyebrows twitch. My feathery metaphors made God’s gatekeepers nervous.
“This is heartfelt, but I’m afraid it’s not our aesthetic.”
“We are impressed by the quality of your writing, but what does you mean that you ‘fill the sea’?”
“We recommend you submit this to a faith-based publication.”
“We are unsettled by your paragraph in which God wields a sledgehammer. Here are some Bible verses you might consider.”
I was Jesus Freak and Jezebel sharing the same wheel. I was the weirdest sister in town. I was declined by lofty people in opposite aeries. I crashed the van into the canyon.
The day I was rejected by my favorite journal, I threw my keys on the floor. If anyone could put up with me, it would have been these hazel-eyed angels. They lived mid-mystery. They were unafraid of allegory. I saw no orange cones around their camp, only the end of road work, the end of my searching, the integration of all my odd.
“We prefer meaty prose.” I had been weighed and measured and found dandelion. I had darkened their counsel without knowledge.
I knew nothing. I stomped into my hatchback and circled the block listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands.”
I sat at a stop light next to a Lexus with a sticker, “MY BICHON FRISE IS SMARTER THAN YOU.”
I let the Boss write all over my arms, “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”
I thought of Emily and Virginia. I forgave myself. I pulled back into the canyon. I saw road work ahead.
I asked myself how brave I am. Can I keep at it when the cones are orange and the lights are red? Can I keep my eyes green, writing for life rather than arrival? Can I keep writing sanctuary for the feral and freaky, the sacred and profane?
Can I turn the canyon into a trampoline?
We who gnaw pencils do not ride alone. Road Work Begins. Revelation resumes uninterrupted.
Angela Townsend (she/her) is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. Her work appears in bioStories, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Razor, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. She lives just outside Philadelphia with two shaggy comets disguised as cats.
Featured Artwork:
City Cracks
Fabio Sassi is a photographer and acrylic artist. He enjoys imperfections, and reframing the ordinary in his artwork. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy and his work can be viewed on his website.