Parting the Curtains

When I was writing Landscape in Lavender, I felt an urgent need to release my story into the world—even before I fully understood what it was about.  As if I were pointing a camera at an object and turning the lens, my desire to share my story only grew as the image came more sharply into focus.  Eventually,  after eight years of writing and revising, the long gestation period made my need almost visceral.  Happily, my book is being released this month, and my story will finally be born.

No matter how big my need to share my experiences was, the resistance I encountered threatened to grow even larger.   At the top of the layers of resistance lay my  feelings of inadequacy as a writer and even as a protagonist.  Was the writing any good?  Did the plot development have enough narrative tension?   In fact, did it have any narrative tension?  Would anybody care about my struggles as the protagonist?  Would any of my friends and colleagues take offense at what I had written?  These were my everyday worries. 

And I had another worry:  I knew that if I were ever granted the privilege of sharing my story, I would have to stop protecting it; I would have to loosen my tight grip on it and willingly abandon my control over it.  “You have to bless it and release it,” my husband, Dennis, likes to say.   Regardless of whether I did so with joy or with anxiety, I knew that the book would cease being just my story, the better to become our shared story as writer and readers. 

Just below these surface layers of inadequacy, though, an even larger layer of resistance radiated from what felt like the indifference of the universe.  The universe appeared to be rolling along just fine without my story; in fact, it was nearly drowning under the weight of so many other people’s memoirs, novels, plays, and films.  The universe seemed to say ‘No, I don’t need your story,’ and this was of course especially true when I submitted it to the more than 50 agents who rejected it, one after the other.  ‘Is the writing any good?’ I asked myself, time and again, with each and every new rejection.

Eventually I came to visualize the universe as manifesting a giant set of curtains pulled tight across my path as if to protect itself from the impertinence of my offering.  After months of being weighed down by this universal indifference, I began to realize that it was my job, and even my right, to force the curtains apart by an inch or two, just enough to squeeze open a narrow slot through which I could push my story.  It was a job that required will, chutzpah, and determination.  ‘I am a creature of the universe, and my story matters,’ I told myself on my better days.

Being of a philosophical disposition, I meditated on the situation.  If the universe is expanding in all directions at once, I ruminated, didn’t it also need to expand a tiny fraction in my direction, thereby growing broad enough to encompass my book?  With that perception, I set about to part the universal curtains.  It was, and continues to be, an act of supreme will.  I don’t mean that parting the curtains required me to set my will against the universe; rather, I had to use my will to get the universe’s attention.  I had to get it to acknowledge my existence, and thereby to embrace the existence of my tale.  First, I willed my story into existence, then I willed the universe into accepting my story, and now I find myself willing the universe into sharing it.

The watchword here, of course, is persistence.  Years ago, a work colleague told me, “Brooks, you have the tenacity of a bulldog,” and I regarded that as a compliment.  It takes tenacity to tell the universe you have a story to tell, and it takes the persistence of daily reminders to convince first yourself and then the universe to accept and broadcast it.

The curtain comes down on Landscape in Lavender in late fall, 1994, when I returned home to Seattle and found a wonderful mentor in Bill Talley, whom I worked for and eventually joined as partner in the landscape architectural firm of Talley & Kolb. Then, seven months after going to work for Bill, I met Dennis, and we have been together ever since, 31 years and counting! 

By the time I met Dennis, I had managed to resolve three of the major conflicts that propel my character’s arc in the book:  I no longer felt divided into two selves;  I no longer struggled with self-homophobia or the choice between satisfying my lust and pursuing long-term love.  One of Landscape in Lavender’s themes, however, haunts me to this day:  I have not yet managed to loosen and untie all the knots of racism that too often bind interracial relationships.  Sometimes I am blind to the racist microaggressions that Dennis continues to experience; sometimes I exert my white privilege without realizing how I’m impacting others. 

Thankfully, Dennis and I trust each other, because trust is the necessary foundation of any wholesome or functional relationship.  But that doesn’t mean that he and I trust others in the same way.  Wisely or unwisely, my white get-out-of-jail-free card leads me to trust strangers who enter our lives, while Dennis will admit no solid basis for trusting them.  They have my implicit trust, but they have to earn his, and it does not come quickly or easily. 

Trusting others is like parting those curtains.  Sometimes it makes sense to throw them open; at other times it is wiser only to push them an inch or so apart.  When we hold the curtains tight, we are acting for the universe as it acted toward me.  We are displaying the resistance that those strangers must break down if they want to come into our world.