Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'm supposed to be on vacation.
I should be lying on the beach right now, facing the Mediterranean Sea.
My toes would be curled into the sugar-white sand,
and I'd be getting the best tan in years.
Instead, I'm on the run.
I'm a fugitive,
and I've never been this scared.
But if I'm very careful,
I will not be caught,
and I will not endanger any more lives than I already have.
Her name was Gala.
She was from Chicago.
She had been exposed to a deadly virus.
She had no symptoms herself;
she was a healthy carrier, but infecting people across the planet.
Gala was not a real person,
but in the fall of 2007,
with those words,
I finally freed her from the confines of my imagination
and typed her into existence.
She'd been sitting there for four years,
and I could not contain her or the desire to write her story
any longer.
I was disgusted with my inability to sit down and do the work of writing,
the work that I had known I was destined to do since I was a child.
I had to find a way to unlock the stories in my consciousness,
including the story of Gala,
the modern-day Typhoid Mary.
I had to free Gala, her story and myself in the process.
In October of 2003, driving home from a business trip,
Gala had suddenly materialized.
She was right there, in my car,
having a very heated conversation with another character.
Gala was demanding to know
why she had been deliberately exposed to the deadly Omega virus,
and the other character was very calmly and rationally justifying her actions.
Don't worry. I wasn't having delusions.
I didn't actually see two women arguing in my car.
But I could hear their words in my head,
and as I made the two-hour drive home,
I began to speak as Gala and respond as the other character -
the infected and the infector.
With each word, each statement, more of the story was coming to light.
And I reached above me to the visor of my car
where there was a tiny voice recorder installed.
I hit "Record," and I continued this dialogue.
Now, the voice recorder could hold up to three-and-a-half minutes of data,
and it filled very quickly.
So, I reached over to the passenger seat,
where my clipboard and extra rosters from training that week were sitting.
I grabbed a handful of the rosters,
flipped them over to the back to write on,
and I reached up to that recorder and hit "Play."
Talk about texting and driving.
(Laughter)
I don't recommend anybody ever do that,
but I was truly not in command of my faculties at that moment.
I was possessed by the Muse.
This had never happened to me this significantly -
not before, not since.
The Muse is pretty powerful, but that day she was on fire.
When I arrived home that evening, I dropped everything at the front door -
my purse, my briefcase, suitcase, car keys -
and I grabbed those rosters and raced to my home office.
I quickly typed up about 10 pages of dialogue from this conversation.
Now, that weekend, I typed a few more pages,
and about a month later, a few more.
And within six months, I had the makings of a chapter or two.
But three years later, I was stalled.
What happened?
How did the Muse make such a dramatic entrance,
demanding my time and attention,
only to disappear and to abandon me?
Why couldn't I seem to get focused and get this story down?
Was I lazy?
Maybe I was sabotaging myself?
This wasn't the first story that I had begun.
The story of my writing career begins in 1976.
It's the American Bicentennial,
and I'm nine years old.
On the surface, everything looks normal, even idyllic.
On any given day,
you could find me rollerskating up the street to our local Baskin-Robbins
or taking swim lessons in summer camp
or watching Wonder Woman on TV.
I was the eldest of three girls growing up in the suburbs of Detroit.
My dad worked in home-improvement sales,
and my mom was, then, still a homemaker.
Everything looks normal, like a normal childhood.
Except it wasn't.
There was something percolating under the surface,
and I had begun to immerse myself in a life of fantasy.
In my dreams, I was somebody other than Lisa Ann Gallagher,
somebody who was not unhappy.
But that year, I read a book.
It was my mom's copy
of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," by Betty Smith.
Now, books and stories were an essential part of our family life.
My mom read,
her mother read voraciously,
and I was reading by the age of three.
And my relatives - both the Irish ones on my dad's side of the family
and the Jewish ones on my mom's -
they were all consummate storytellers.
But this story, this book changed my life.
I knew, while I was reading this book, that I was reading my own truth.
I knew that, like the protagonist in this story,
I, too, was going to grow up to be a writer.
Now, in the book, young Francie Nolan is caught telling a lie by her teacher.
But instead of reprimanding the child, her teacher says to her,
"In the future,
when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened.
But write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened.
Tell the truth, and write the story.
That way you won't get mixed up."
I knew that statement was for me.
Not that I was a liar,
but I knew that I had begun to confuse reality and my fantasies.
My dreams and my life - they'd begun to merge.
I was daydreaming in school
and avoiding social activities with my sisters and friends
in favor of time alone with my thoughts.
And reading that book at that moment
was like a hand reaching out through the mists
and offering a way back into life.
But realizing that I was destined to grow up to be a writer
was both comforting and terrifying to me.
Comforting because it placed my fantasy life
in a context I could understand
and created an outlet to use them for good.
But terrifying because it meant that I was a writer.
You see, I had just read "Annabel Lee," by Edgar Allen Poe,
and learned about the life and death of Ernest Hemingway.
And shortly thereafter, I read "The Bell Jar," by Sylvia Plath.
And then the works of Orwell and Tennessee Williams.
And in my teens,
I was introduced to Lenny Bruce and Anne Sexton and Charles Bukowski.
Wait. I'm one of those people -
that group of miscreants and malcontents,
that bunch of drunks and derelicts and suicides -
a writer?
It scared me to think that there was any connection
between myself and those troubled authors,
but it scared me more to think about the stories going away.
And so I began writing that year.
The next year, fourth grade, I won a young author award for a short story.
By 11, I was writing sequels to my favorite books -
sort of an early version of fan fiction.
In my teens, I began to write poetry,
and when I was 16,
one of my best girlfriends and I started an all-girl punk band,
and I took some of those poems and transformed them into lyrics.
And then as I approached my 20s,
I started to get serious about long-form fiction.
So, I've been calling myself a writer for almost four decades,
but I wasn't, really -
but I wasn't doing the work.
I was coming up with story ideas,
and I had to find this way to unlock those stories.
I went to the computer and I googled something -
I don't remember what -
but my search quickly led me to the website
for a month long write-a-thon program
that was starting in just about a week.
You write 50,000 words in 30 days' time;
you get encouragement from your peers;
track your progress;
and jump-start your story idea.
Oh, and you don't edit or even spellcheck as you're writing.
You just crank out 1600 to 1700 words a day.
As I sat and began to create a profile for myself at the website,
I realized in that moment
that in telling myself and others all these years that I was a writer,
I was only telling a part of my story.
I was a storyteller.
I was a storyteller who wanted to be a successful writer.
I wanted to be a successful writer,
but I struggled to find the motivation to do the work,
and I had struggled to do the work of writing
even though I had known since I was nine years old
that I was going to be a writer.
Once I signed up at the website and got it all started here,
I realized that what I lacked
were the tools and resources to motivate myself.
As I found those resources, the motivation came.
It opened up this new possibility for myself.
And I see now
that writing and storytelling are actually two separate things.
Writing is the work.
Storytelling, that's everything else.
That's the fun stuff. That's the Muse.
The fantasy, the art, the connection.
If I want to be successful as a writer,
I have to love the work as much as I love the ideas.
And I love stories.
And my favorite stories, the most important ones,
are the ones that we each are living.
You have to know your story.
You have to fully live your story.
You have to share your story.
And you have a moral imperative to do all of the above.
Why?
Because Hemingway,
because Bukowski,
because Virginia Woolf and Fitzgerald and all the other tortured souls
who dared to put pen to paper and tell us their stories.
It's not that we owe anything to those writers and their legacies.
But if they could fully know, live and share the stories of who they were
in the midst of the deepest personal pain,
the most intense addictions,
the most crippling of social disorders,
and the world is a better place for it,
what might we lend to the world by knowing, living and sharing ours?
You have to know your story.
Well, how do you learn your story?
Is it in your thoughts and emotions?
Or that which you're told about yourselves?
Is it what you like? What you hate?
Or whom you love?
Does it evolve every year, every seven years, every quarter-century?
Is it passed down through your DNA or picked up with your experiences?
The only way to know your story is to start telling yourself your story.
Tell it in journals, in love letters, in blogs.
Tell it in the mirror.
Start with the facts:
I am. I know. I have.
Don't go out and buy a fancy journal.
Don't wait for a right moment.
Tell yourself today who you are.
The more you know your story,
the more comfortable you'll feel in your own skin,
the more confident you become,
the more patient and empathetic you'll be.
And when something comes up, you get a better feel
for whether this is something you should be involved with or steer clear of.
Want to rob a bank or run for president?
I don't think so.
Know yourself as well as any character in a book or TV show.
What's your past?
What have you overcome?
What makes you laugh?
What drives you crazy?
The moral imperative of knowing your story
is that your story is a part of the story of all of humanity.
Your story is part of your family's story,
your community's story,
your nation's, your tribe's.
When you know yours,
you begin to know theirs and mine and ours.
You have a responsibility to fully live your story.
Now, whether you're 21 when you figure this out, or 40 or 99,
when you know it, you have to live it.
When I realized my own true, full story -
that I was a storyteller struggling with the motivation to write -
that moment freed me.
It reflected reality, not just my hopes.
I found the motivation, and I do the work.
In October of 2010,
I published my first novel, "Flower of Fire" -
the story of Gala, the modern-day Typhoid Mary -
and last year, I created a coursework called "AfterNovember,"
and began mentoring other authors.
If you tell your friends that you're a musician,
but you haven't sat at the drum set in five years;
if your story is that you have cancer,
when your story is you're fighting cancer;
if you know that you're adopted,
but you don't embrace the mystery along with what is known -
It's easy to say, "Live a full life," and, obviously, we all should.
But we should also be living our stories, our true stories.
If you have a fantasy, weave it into your reality.
If you have a secret, a dream, a plan,
tell it to yourself as part of your larger narrative,
and then live it.
Today, I can tell people, truthfully, that I am a writer
because I know I'm not just coming up with the ideas,
I'm doing the work.
And I know that the work does not lead to addiction,
to depression,
to despondency.
And neither does my story.
The moral imperative of fully living your story
is that you give license to everyone you meet to do the same.
You have a responsibility to share your story.
Be truthful. Be funny.
When we share our stories,
we create a mosaic of infinite possibility.
When we blend our stories, we create magic.
Real magic.
The kind that defeats the darkness.
We share the history of the human race;
we exorcise our secrets, and we let the light in.
The world is a brighter place
when we share the stories of who we are and how we live.
We offer a hand out to those in struggle
and a way in to those who've told themselves, wrongly,
that they were different and didn't fit into our world.
Tonight at our social, when you introduce yourself to people,
don't just say, "Hi, I'm Jim."
Say, "Hi, my name is Jim,
and I've always wanted to be a photographer."
"My name is Natasha.
I'm a pediatrician, and I just got back from Barcelona."
"My name is Lisa.
I came of age in the Detroit punk scene of the '80s.
Today, I'm a writer, living in the beautiful Black Hills."
Nobody's going to be able to respond to your introduction
by just saying, "Hi, I'm Beth."
You just invited them to tell you something about themselves
by sharing part of your story.
Think of all the great artists and performers and public figures
who really share themselves with us.
Joan Rivers, who told us that if you want to be a satirist,
you can't be part of the party.
She also said, "I've had so much plastic surgery,
when I die, they'll donate my body to Tupperware."
(Laughter)
Joan knew who she was,
and she made a life and a career out of telling us who it was.
And we laughed and occasionally cringed.
But how many other kooky young girls
heard her story and decided that they would become a comedienne?
Or author J.K. Rowling,
who has called her younger self
"a know-it-all with a weakness for funny men."
And she spun an exaggerated version of herself at 11
into the character of Hermione
and a multi-million dollar literary empire.
There are many examples
of those who fully live and share themselves
with their community and their world.
There are many examples of those who do not.
And for those most troubled of souls,
sharing their stories -
like Hemingway did,
like Sylvia Plath -
it might not save themselves from their darkness,
but maybe it will save those of us who are their audience -
those they invited with their stories -
to share ours.
Thank you.
(Applause)