I was at a writers conference in Seattle, Washington, when I heard my favorite definition of success. It was given by a woman who had published three novels. “But I bet you never heard of me. Has anyone here ever heard of me?” she asked the audience. A woman in the front row raised her hand. “Ladies and gentleman,” the speaker said, pointing to the woman, “I’d like you to meet my agent.”
She went on to talk about other writers that we had never heard of, writers who, according to her, were better writers than she or we or anyone currently publishing would ever be. She ended with this. “As writers, we need to have our own definition of success. As writers, we need to recognize that, if we are still writing—if we get to write—we are successful.”
I adopted her definition immediately and, wanting to share my success, began looking for writing retreats. I wanted to be part of a community of other successful writers. The man who cuts my hair, who is also a friend, suggested I go to a retreat run by another of his friends. “You’ll love it,” he told me after I had signed up for the first one. “You go to this beautiful place and they feed you beautiful food and you have no choice but to write beautiful things.”
He was correct. I loved the retreat and began to attend them on a regular basis. The retreats have themes: the Japanese cherry blossom festival, the Greek rites of spring, the migration of the Monarch butterfly. They also have rules: positive commentary only, never assume that the writer is the narrator or any character in a piece, always refer to “the narrator” and never to “you,” never write about each other. Every time the retreat leader says that we are not to write about each other, I am glad. I am glad because a girl named TC Trantz once wrote a poem about me and read it out loud in a workshop.
The workshop was part of an academic-year-long writing program at a tiny women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia. The campus was surrounded by mountain ranges and birch forests and ambling crystal creeks. I had found an apartment in a failed retirement community on a street called Carefree Lane. The retirement community had failed because it was right next to an airport. Planes would start taking off at 6:00 a.m., and, when they did, the herd of horses that lived for some twisted reason in a field at the base of the hill on which the airport sat would gallop from one end of the field to the other. Between flights, they would seem to forget about the planes; it was a small-town airport; the flights were not that frequent. The horses would graze their way back to their starting points until the next plane hummed and then roared and then screamed its way down the runway at which point they would turn and stampede again.
The roaring planes and stampeding horses would interrupt the delicate sleep of the retired people. They slept very lightly, it seemed. After I had been living there for about a month, the woman from the apartment above mine came down, knocked on my door, and asked me to please stop taking baths after 8:00 p.m. “The sound of the water,” she said very seriously, “is waking my mother.”
If it hadn’t been for the planes and the horses, I would have insisted on my right to take baths whenever I wanted, but I understood that the retired people living on Carefree Lane had already been shaken enough in their investment, and I made sure to take my baths well before 8:00, if ever.
When I had first arrived in Roanoke, I had decided I didn’t need a car; my apartment at the failed retirement home was only two miles from campus and there were no real hills; I rode my bike everywhere until one day I was passing through a wooded stretch lined with bright white birch trees, the black-edged eyes of lost branches peering at me spookily as I sped by—and just as I emerged from the shadows some guy in a pickup truck who had been driving behind me swerved just close enough so that his friend could lean out of the passenger side window and smack me on the ass. There wasn’t much force to it; it was the shock of it that made me fall over, but I know how to fall and fell well, and as I rolled back up on to my feet I grabbed handfuls of the rocks that had scattered to the side of the road and made ready to throw them at the retreating vehicle, but then I saw the gun racks on the back of the cab and threw the rocks to the ground and did no more than shake my fist as they hooted and hollered their way on down the road.
I picked the gravel out of my elbow and rode the rest of the way to school and the next weekend I cashed out an account that my grandparents opened for me when I started kindergarten and bought a bottle green Dodge Dart with a V8 and a darker green landau for $1400 and drove that to school instead.
Although I became close friends with at least two undergrads while I was in the program, TC Trantz was not one of them. She was loud and chewed gum with her mouth open and came over and sat next to you when you didn’t feel like talking. She was a good poet, though, and when she read her poems people got quiet and listened, and, in my case, tried to learn.
The workshop in which TC Trantz read her poem was one of two workshops that I participated in that semester, the larger one. Each participant in the grad program was assigned to a small workshop with three other grad students and a professor who wrote in the same genre, and a larger workshop of mixed genres in which graduates and undergraduates were also intermixed for a total of sixteen students. Writing out of your chosen genre was not required, but it was encouraged. I wrote more poetry for that workshop than I have ever written in my life before or since. I learned about formal poetry and wrote it: sonnets, villanelles, sestinas. On the day that TC Trantz read her poem, I read a sestina about the moon and international travel and metaphysical relationships. I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was kind of relishing the attention.
The poem that she wrote about me wasn’t really about me. It was about my arms. It wasn’t one of her best poems, either. It had a line in it about brown hills, rolling like the muscles in a woman’s arm, something like that. After she was done reading it, and everyone, including myself, had said what they liked about it, TC got all shy and blushy and asked, “Can anyone tell who it’s about?”
We all just stared at her, including the instructor, a fiction writer whose novel had been cast for a film that never got made and whose self-based character would have been played by Olivia Newton-John. The instructor just looked, but you could tell she sensed trouble, because she immediately picked up the next manuscript in her pile. “Next we have—
“TC Trantz cut her off. “It’s Emily. It’s her arms. Don’t you get it?”
I was still looking at TC when she turned to me to see the effect of her gift, and I don’t know if she caught my expression before I looked down at the table and did my very best to disappear.
“Oh my.” The instructor smiled sweetly. “Well, that’s very nice, TC,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to do. “I’m sure Emily is very flattered,” she went on, giving me leave to be flattered, rather than mortified, if I would take it.
My friend Brian, who had been laughing quietly at my discomfort, raised his hand. “I think that for next week we should all write poems about Emily. We could each take a different body part.”
The class tittered. I continued to want to die.
I do not know what TC Trantz was trying to accomplish by announcing her intention to the class, but if her goal was to make sure I’d never forget her, she succeeded.
