Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Born-Again Horsegirl

Trav and I walk Pine Hill most mornings. We've got a couple of long circuit walks that don't include it, but most mornings it's either Halcyon Way to the footpath behind the school, across Old County Road, along the field at Misty Meadows, and home by Pine Hill. Either that or the reverse.

Pine Hill is a dirt road. One end is directly across Old County from the little parking area at Misty Meadows. The other branches off the Doctor Fisher Road in the woods near the stockade-fenced lot where Bizzarro's trucks are parked. There are houses at either end, but between the Boucks' (who enter from Old County) and Porter's (who enters from the Doctor Fisher Road) there's about a quarter mile that's overgrown, deeply rutted, and passable only by all-terrain vehicles with good clearance. Hardy Vineyarders will use almost any nasty piece of road if it saves time or avoids traffic getting from one place to another -- think Cook Street in Vineyard Haven, or the stretch of the Stoney Hill Road from the Levins' to what used to be Chicama Vineyard. Among other things, this is our way of supporting the island's mechanics. But no one drives Pine Hill between Porter's and the Boucks'.

So a week or so ago I was surprised to see a white Toyota pickup (Tundra or Tacoma? can't remember) blocking Pine Hill just where it comes out of the woods near the Boucks'. House guest, I thought at first, though they've got plenty of room closer to the house, and overflow usually parks in a little spur a few yards toward Old County. Then I noticed the cooler on the ground near the driver-side door. And the beer cans. And the smashed liquor bottle on the dirt road.

The truck was gone the next day, and I brushed it off as an aberration -- until this morning. This morning Travvy and I encountered an E-Z-Go golf cart. While verifying the styling of the name, I learned that the manufacturer now makes "street legal" vehicles, but this was not one of them. There were several empty Heineken bottles under the dash, on the floor, and in the rear cargo space, where there was also a nearly full two-liter bottle of some raspberry-red stuff. I was not tempted to drink it.

Travvy stood stock-still and glared at it, tail curled over his back. He edged closer. He wooed vigorously, challenging the intruder to wake up and give the password. This is his standard greeting for tractors, lawn mowers, and my Miele vacuum cleaner. Finally he edged by, wooing all the way, and we continued up Pine Hill. Just before we got to the Baileys' (whose official street address, like mine, is on Halcyon Way), we found a cooler sitting in the road, next to another Heineken bottle. The cooler, I surmised, had bounced out of the cargo hold, unbeknownst to the occupant(s) of the golf cart, then a little further on they had run out of either gas or nerve or, possibly, both. The number of empties suggested the possibility of enhanced nerve but diminished navigational skills, especially if all that Heineken was consumed by one person.

What that theory doesn't explain was the box turtle in the road, about halfway between the cart and the cooler. Travvy was fascinated. The turtle, wisely, gave little clue that there was anything alive under the brown and yellow shell, but I detected watchful eyes and some head action in there. I shortened Travvy's Flexi lead and we passed the turtle by.

I'd never seen either a turtle or a golf cart on Pine Hill before. Could there be a connection between one and the other? Was the turtle perhaps in hot pursuit of the cart? -- Come back with my beer, you jackrabbits! I don't know. I do know that it's already been an eventful summer on Pine Hill, and we're still a week away from the end of July.

Update, same time, next day: The cooler is gone, but the golf cart is still there. There's a gas container on the seat, nearly empty. The bottle of raspberry-red liquid is gone, as are all the Heineken bottles. The turtle is nowhere to be found.

The morning after the morning after: The golf cart is gone. The cooler, the cart, the turtle -- gone, all gone.

Travvy Done Good

This summer we've been meeting for Rally practice at the Ag Hall Thursday evenings at 6:30. Karen sets up a course in the area between the two rings, and we take turns doing the course and working on whatever we need to work on. Tonight it was Karen and Nolan, Val and Toby, Katy and Dundee (with Fergus spectating), and me and Travvy. We practiced, watched and applauded each other, got pointers from Karen, etc., and pretty soon it was time to break down the course and pack up.

I tethered Travvy to a fence post. This gives him just enough room to lie down on his green saddle pad. I leave him with a couple of treats; he keeps an eye on me while I help pick up signs and traffic cones. Earlier Karen had noticed a guy with two loose dogs in the big field on the far side of the Ag Hall. Suddenly one of the two was at the far end of the pulling ring (to one of whose fence posts Travvy was tied) and running in our direction. Trav was between him and us. Owner was way off in the distance. Uh-oh.

I got to Trav about the same time as the other dog -- large, short-haired, brown, probably part Lab -- did. Trav was on his feet, wriggle wriggle, wag wag -- not having the over-the-top reactive meltdown I was afraid of. Other dog seemed friendly, but Trav was in vulnerable position so I got between the two of them and made a big fuss about how good Travvy was. The second dog appeared on the other side of the fence, wanting to meet the big fuzzy guy. Travvy was still fine, excited but under threshold and paying attention to me as well as the other dogs. Finally the owner caught up with his dogs and called them away. I gave Travvy hot dog bits and Charlee Bears (training treats) and told him more about how wonderful he was.

Our comrades were impressed. They all know how reactive Travvy can be, and here he was in a vulnerable position and acting like a mature, self-confident, friendly dog. Yay, Travvy!

On sunny days, the shadiest place on the deck is under the table. On really hot days, of which we've had plenty lately, Trav prefers to sprawl on the linoleum at the foot of the inside stairs. He's been sleeping on the deck at night.

Here's Travvy with Mike and Leo. Mike and Leo? you ask. Mike is the green object in Travvy's mouth. Leo is the yellow one attached to it. I put treats inside them, and Trav has a good time figuring out how to get them out. Mike is named after Michelangelo. Leo is named after Leonardo da Vinci. More than that I do not know and so cannot tell. Everyone I tell this to starts chortling and saying stuff like "What were they thinking?"

Yo, la Comtessa

Around quarter past two yesterday afternoon I parked under the trees in the dirt lot the West Tisbury library shares with the Howes House (HQ for the Up-Island Council on Aging) and who should be sitting in the adjacent pickup but Kevin Keady. Kevin, a longtime island singer-songwriter and maker of musical connections, works and lives at Pimpneymouse Farm on Chappy, so I asked what brought him way over here to West Tiz. Turned out to be the same thing that brought me to the Howes House parking lot: we were both part of "The World of Troubadours and Trobairitz: Poems, Songs, and Music." Kevin was the jongleur (juggler). I was one of the poets, the Comtessa de Dia.

Here's the comtessa. She was one of the 20 known female troubadours, who were collectively known as the trobairitz. Not much is known for sure about her life, but she flourished in the mid–twelfth century. The poem I read is a stylish, unmistakably angry missive to the lover who has dumped her, apparently for another woman.

Music was provided by Carol Loud on recorder, Deborah Forest Hart on recorders and hammer dulcimer, and Andy Wiener on hammer dulcimer, all in costume, and most spectacularly by Jessica Goodenough Heuser, a young soprano with a gorgeous, wonderfully expressive voice. She sang in Occitan, the language of the troubadours, and one of the four songs was the poem that I read, "A chantar m'es al co qu'ieu non deuria (I Must Sing of What I'd Rather Not)." Written Occitan looks like a mixture of Spanish, French, and a dash of Portuguese; hearing it sung was wonderful, and medieval!

Jessica explained that in fitting the lyrics to the music (a do-it-yourself challenge for the musicians, since the music was written all on one line; the verses appeared underneath, with no indication of what syllable went with what note), she found that most of the cansos worked in two tempo, but not the comtessa's. Her angry song worked better in three. It did indeed, though I have no idea why.

We poets read English translations, except for Joe Eldredge, who took a stab at the Occitan. He sounded pretty convincing, not that anyone apart from Jessica knew half enough to critique his pronunciation. He and Colleen Morris performed a tenso, a popular troubadour form that features two voices, usually one male and one female, in a debate or battle of wits.

The program was sponsored by the library, with Colleen the coordinator, and instigated and co-organized by Paul Levine, a retired physics professor who's become fascinated by the world of the troubadours and done a lot of research. We were all thrilled by the turnout, which filled the room and then some (taxing the air conditioning, but even taxed the Howes House was cooler than my apartment has been the last few days). Colleen wants to apply for a cultural council grant so we can do it again in a bigger venue, maybe Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven.

Women's Writing Workshop II

The 1984 workshop was a wave that I caught at the exact right time. I expected it to deepen my commitment to my writing, and it did. I hadn't expected it to propel me toward a whole new life, but it did that too. When I boarded the northbound bus in Washington, I'd lived in D.C. for seven consecutive years. This was longer than I'd lived anywhere other than my hometown, and if I added in the three years I'd lived there as a college student -- well, I had a history in the city, and I knew my way around. For one who rarely plunged into unfamiliar waters, this was important. And I loved my bookstore job, was good at it, and deeply believed in its importance.

Nevertheless, on my semiannual pilgrimage to Martha's Vineyard late that August I tucked a bit of wampum into my empty blue amulet bag, and a few short weeks after I returned to D.C. I knew I was moving back to Massachusetts. Not "decided to move" or even "knew I was going to move": knew I was moving. Writing was my compass, my North Star, but the propulsive power came from an unexpected source. On the last night of the workshop, our fledgling community was attacked from within, and I found myself in an uncomfortable no-woman's-land, not knowing whose side I was supposed to be on.

Out of the writing we had shared, the stories we had told each other, all the meals and walks and trips into town we had taken, a close community had formed, one rooted in writing and populated by writers. Tomorrow we would be leaving these new friends behind and heading back to our old lives. Could we maintain the connections that had so sustained and challenged us over the past nine days? Would we be able to keep writing? The last night's re-entry meeting was meant to ease the transition back to our "real worlds."

After reading a passage from To Know Each Other and Be Known, Katharyn asked each of us to say a little about what we were going back to, and we did, our voices rising and falling around the circle, like the waves on Cayuga Lake. One woman said that the commitment she had made to her writing likely meant that she would not be able to stay in her current well-paying job. Another would soon be traveling to England with an ex-lover. A third was waiting to hear if she would receive the financial aid she needed to go back to school next month.

Then Katharyn asked, "What is the most vivid memory you will take home with you?" Where to start, where to start? The workshop on body image, meeting Marge Piercy, a chance remark that made a big impression, the class where my work was critiqued . . . Again, our voices rippled around the circle. So many of my memories were shared by others; their memories sparked more of mine. Just as a welling in my throat made me realize that I was close to tears, someone was saying aloud that she didn't think she could speak without crying. I was beginning to believe that the connections between us would last, even when we weren't sitting in the same circles.

Two-thirds of the way around, the circle broke. The speaker said she had written some things down in case she had a chance to say them. I sat up, wary: no one else had read from a script. The woman spoke of not finding community here, of her disappointment at what she called the emphasis on "professionalism" and at the small number of lesbians; she said she felt isolated as a lesbian. A second, and then a third lesbian said that they hadn't felt comfortable either.

Of the sixteen workshop participants, four were lesbians. I was the fourth. Had I missed something important? I was confused, but I had to say something, and I did: I said that I couldn't deny the importance of the issues raised, but that since the workshop's opening night, when one woman spoke of being sexually abused by her brother as a young girl, I had come to believe that this was a safe place to take risks. And I had, talking about stuff I usually kept to myself, like compulsive eating, my relationship with my alcoholic mother, and my mixed-class background.

After we finished going around the circle, the meeting broke up, but energies were frazzled. We dispersed in our various directions, but nine of us drifted back -- not, however, the three lesbians, or the director, or several other women who had had enough. Some brought the remains of their food caches to share with the rest of us. We formed a new circle and we talked through what had happened, drinking soda and munching fruit, and eventually we came round to what the workshop had meant to each of us. It was one of the most thrilling discussions I've ever been part of, thrilling and hopeful, because none of us knew exactly what we felt or thought but we spoke it anyway, and every risk taken encouraged us all to push a little further. And collectively we felt our way toward a place where previously unimaginable things seemed within our grasp. All of us knew that this wouldn't have been possible without the preceding nine days, so we went to the director's room to tell her so.

I needed to understand what had happened, and explore my own evolving response to it all, so over the following weeks and months, I wrote an essay about the workshop. The final draft was never published,[1] but I still have a copy -- extensively annotated by comments by a sister participant I shared it with.

In the weeks after the workshop ended, I learned that one of the three women who orchestrated the confrontation had been lobbying hard throughout the workshop to be appointed one of two assistant directors for the following year's workshop. The director had turned her down.[2] That helped explain why nothing about discomfort, homophobia, or professionalism had been said at the Sunday night "how's it going?" meeting. Or at any of the other times when it could have been brought up, either in conversation or in a private meeting with the director.

The one who had been disappointed by the emphasis on "professionalism" was by far the least proficient writer in the group. She was also one of the workshop's two commuters. So many connections were made and deepened around the dorm and after hours that this must have contributed to her feelings of isolation.

In that untitled, unpublished essay, my anger, checked somewhat by my attempt to be fair, comes through clearly. True, confrontational tactics are often necessary. Civil rights activists, labor organizers, woman suffragists, and countless others have learned over the years that polite requests and cogent arguments rarely move a well-entrenched opposition. The three women at the workshop, however, hadn't bothered with less drastic measures. Most of the rest of us had been testing the waters, cautiously disclosing truths that made us nervous or had made us unpopular -- and learning that it might be safe to take greater risks. In the process we created a little community based on the workshop's motto: "To know each other and be known." And these three women had lifted their labyris and brought it down hard on the web the rest of us had created.

But that night among the wreckage we re-spun our web, demonstrating what Adrienne Rich called "the passion to make and make again / where such unmaking reigns." The miracle didn't neutralize the anger. I had witnessed scenes like this before, but never had I been so emotionally engaged, or acknowledged that plenty of the unmaking in my home community was perpetuated not by men, the patriarchy, or the Reagan administration: it was being done by women to women, feminists to feminists, lesbians to lesbians. Some viewed proficiency with suspicion and were quick to accuse anyone who desired it of professionalism or elitism. Their feelings of inadequacy were always someone else's fault. In myriad ways the lesbian community had encouraged my writing. Now it seemed to my muses that the community's support was conditional. I followed my writing northward.

[1] I never submitted it for publication. I solicited comments from several workshop participants, including Katharyn. Katharyn either shared it with workshop founder Beverly Tanenhaus or told her about it. Katharyn told me that if I published the essay, Beverly would sue me. Beverly was now a lawyer. I've never met Beverly. I have no idea whether she actually threatened to sue me. Katharyn might have relayed a threat that Beverly never made, or Beverly might have made the threat based on Katharyn's description of my draft. It was an unpleasant coda, and not atypical of the power-tripping that went on in the women's community.

[2] Early the following spring, Katharyn asked me if I would serve as the second assistant director. I jumped at the chance, and did it for the next three years, till my combination of Vineyard jobs made it impossible to leave the island for ten days in midsummer.

Women's Writing Workshop I

Funny how all the materials can be lying out in plain sight but you still don't see how they fit together. Writing not only makes connections among disparate objects, it reveals connections that were there all along. Yes, this is part of To Be Rather Than to Seem. I've split it into two parts, today and tomorrow, but it's all one piece, albeit one with a clear break in the middle.

I still have a copy of my initial inquiry to the director of the Women's Writing Workshops. It's dated 5 February 1984 and it's short: "Would you please send information on the women writers' workshops to be held this summer in Ithaca? I'm finally ready!"

Katharyn, the director, responded with a postcard that had one of her Raccoon Book poems printed on the other side. She promised to send the workshop brochure as soon as it came back from the printer. My copy arrived a few days later, a three-panel self-mailer with beautifully handwritten text. Featured on the cover panel, just under "Tenth Annual Women's Writing Workshops," was the workshop logo: three intertwined Ws, encircled by the words "To know each other" (on the top) "And be known" (on the bottom). To Know Each Other and Be Known was the title of a book about the workshops by their founder, Beverly Tanenhaus.

I loved Hallowmas Women Writers, my D.C. writers' group, but I was ready to test myself and my work with people I didn't know and who didn't know me. This was a big leap. I was still very much my father's and my mother's daughter: I knew that when you ventured out onto unfamiliar terrain it was easy to make a fool of yourself, and that plenty of people ate fools for breakfast and spat out the gristle. But ten days on the shore of Cayuga Lake, in upstate New York, writing, sharing writing, talking about writing with other women writers? The prospect overcame my terrors. To keep from chickening out, I sent my application and $75 deposit in early enough to qualify for the $50 early-bird discount.

In those years the workshop was held at Wells College in the village of Aurora, a bare blink of the eye on state route 90, which runs along Cayuga's south shore. We lived in the Dodge House dorm, ate in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled dining hall (sharing time but not tables with the other groups in residence), and met each morning on the second floor of the college boathouse, a big airy room whose comfortable chairs and couches we arranged in a circle. Thanks to all the windows, three of the walls seemed to be made of lake and sky as well as wood.

Each "class"consisted of two hour-long critique sessions, and each participant's work was the subject of one before the workshop was over. The day before our session, we'd leave copies of our work out on a table in the dorm for everyone else to pick up and read. The critique process was more structured and more focused than that of my hometown writers' group, and the circle was almost three times bigger: we numbered sixteen that year, and Katharyn was the seventeenth. She served as moderator, ensuring that the ground rules were followed. These ground rules were few, simple, and powerful. When your work was being discussed, you were a silent observer only. The others referred to you as "the poet" or "the writer." They discussed your work with each other, not with you. In the last few minutes, you got to respond, but until then the work had to stand on its own.

Nervous though I was, I volunteered to be one of the two whose work was critiqued that first Monday morning. Having sixteen sister writers bring their attention, experience, and critical faculties to bear on my work was a revelation. One woman might love a line that left another cold, or confused -- this provided plenty of grist for future revisions, but even more valuable was seeing all these people responding passionately to my written words, disagreeing with each other, expanding on each other's insights, having their own epiphanies in the heat of discussion. When the time came for me to become visible again, I was a little stunned. As the workshop went on, I learned that this was a not uncommon reaction.

No matter how carefully I wrote a line to achieve a certain effect, I couldn't control how a given reader would respond to it -- and this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. When I became a critiquer instead of the critiqued, this insight released me from worrying too much about having the "right" reaction to or definitive understanding of a work. My challenge was to respond as fully and as honestly as I could. This takes ongoing practice on several levels, from willingness to engage with a particular work to awareness of where one's own reactions are coming from. Morning after morning, as water lapped at the pier and the shore and sun danced on wavelets way out on the lake, we practiced and stretched and often surprised ourselves.

Since this was my first writers' workshop of any kind, I had little to compare this process to, but several of the other women had plenty. They told of workshops and classes where all work was held up to a certain narrow standard of excellence -- the standard might vary, depending on the aesthetic or political tastes of the leader, but it didn't tolerate anything that didn't at least aspire to conform. They told of critiquing as blood sport, where applause and professorial approval were awarded for a critiquer's stylishness and erudition, even if it was unfair, unuseful, or downright cruel. In nearly all of these tales, the instructor and a large majority of the class were male.

Our workshop's only requirement was attendance at the orientation meeting, morning classes, and the re-entry meeting the night before we left for home. Meals were included in the tuition for resident participants, so most of us ate most of our meals in the dining hall at more or less the same time. There we talked incessantly, in twos, threes, and larger groups. Food was a favorite topic from the get-go. It segued easily into families, class and cultural backgrounds, and living with an alcoholic, with which several of us had firsthand experience. Within twenty-four hours we got around to sex. Most of us arrived with the idea that we would spend a lot of time writing, or that we should spend a lot of time writing: here we were, after all, a world away from all the interruptions and obligations that kept us from writing at home. At our first-night gathering, one woman said that she never wrote much at workshops but she always wrote a lot when she got home. This let me off the hook of my own expectations and gave me permission to use the time however I wanted -- and with all these fascinating writers around, who wanted to spend all her time holed up in her room?

The workshop offered a variety of optional activities, and I took advantage of most of them: readings by the director and her two assistants; a reading and talk by guest writer Marge Piercy; a publishing talk by Nancy Bereano, then the editor of the Feminist Series for Crossing Press[1]; an afternoon trip to Smedley's Bookstore in Ithaca, where proprietor Irene Zahava spoke to the group about feminist bookselling and then, while everyone else browsed and bought, Irene and I got to talk shop.

Impromptu events were organized by participants and announced by handwritten flyers posted on the dorm bulletin boards. One workshopper who was working on a musical gathered several of us around a piano to sing a couple of her songs in progress. Another, a martial arts adept, offered a self-defense class on the lawn. Yet another offered a mini writing workshop on body image. First she asked us to pick the part of our body that we disliked the most. One? Just one? From the comments and nervous laughter I knew I wasn't the only one who had several to choose from. My top two were my boobs and my hair; for this exercise I settled on the latter. Then we were directed to let that disliked part speak, to tell us what it wanted us to know. We wrote furiously for 15 or 20 minutes. Reading the results aloud was optional, but everyone took the plunge, often to murmurs and even hoots of recognition. Then, for another 15 or 20 minutes, each of us got to respond to what our hair, breasts, hips, feet, or face had told us. I wound up with two new poems, "Revolt of the Frizz" and "In Cahoots with the Frizz."

On full moon night I was in my room thinking of falling asleep when poet Joan from Oklahoma came round to say she thought it was a good night to howl at the moon. She was decked out in a white bedsheet with bathing suit underneath. Within minutes most of us, likewise clad, were racing in the direction of the lake. Our path led across the lawn in front of the gymnastics camp's dorm. At least half a dozen astonished prepubescent girls leaned out their windows to wonder at our passing.

The rest of the time I went for walks, hung out by the lake and swam, found myself a grassy place to read or write. As writers we respected each other's solitude but were also pretty good at sensing when someone else was willing to be interrupted.

[1] Crossing Press was then located in nearby Trumansburg. Within a year or two it moved to the San Francisco area. Nancy stayed in Ithaca and went on to found Firebrand Books, a major player in feminist publishing in the 1980s and '90s.