Guest Blog: Joanna Chen, Entry Three
The following is reprinted from Garnet News. VCCA Fellow Joanna Chen, who lives in Israel, is writing a six part account of her residency at VCCA. (All images, Joanna Chen)
Earlier in the week my daughter, Emily, sends me a text message. I’m in the zone, sitting in the studio here at Amherst, listening to Patti Smith and writing a new chapter. What she has written stops me in my tracks. We’re all safe. Don’t worry. I immediately worry, checking the wires for news from back home in Israel.
Earlier in the week my daughter, Emily, sends me a text message. I’m in the zone, sitting in the studio here at Amherst, listening to Patti Smith and writing a new chapter. What she has written stops me in my tracks. We’re all safe. Don’t worry. I immediately worry, checking the wires for news from back home in Israel.
There
have been three knifing attacks in Israel, one in Jaffa, an area I know well
and where I recently took an Arabic course. I watch a video online, freshly
posted and unedited, of a man running along a street, close to a fish
restaurant I’ve eaten at a number of times with my three kids. A man’s voice
yells out: “Give it to him! Give it to him!”
There have been three knifing attacks back in
Israel, one in Jaffa, an area I know well and where I recently took an
Arabic course.
I
learn later that the 22-year-old Palestinian attacker was bludgeoned with a
metal rod and then shot dead. I’m out here in my little writing bubble,
disconnected and distant, writing about the past but also about the present I
share with others, both Palestinians and Israelis.
Part
of the goodness in being at this residency is the sharing that goes on between
artists, musicians and writers. Patricia Aaron, whose studio is just below
mine, paints in layers of wax and paint, fusing each layer with heat before
adding another color over it.
After
the layers have set, she takes a ceramic tool, or even a fork, and digs down
deep below the surface, without knowing exactly what hue or tone will
emerge. This is what I’m doing here at Amherst with words, layering the
story of my life and of others, allowing the sentences to settle.
This is what I’m doing
here at Amherst with words, layering the story of my life and of others,
allowing the sentences to settle.
Afterward,
I go back into those sentences and dig into them, deeply. I often don’t know
what will be revealed. Being so far away from home has enabled me to look at my
life more closely, to see things I couldn’t see before, like stepping back a
couple of paces in order to move forward.
Ree
Davis, a writer in the adjoining studio, gives me a great piece of advice.
“Write forward,” she says, and I’ve taken these words to heart. This is what
I’m doing here.
The
work is slow and painful. Years of working in foreign journalism has
conditioned me to quick publication times, words that are here today and gone
tomorrow. This is different. I want these words to last and to resonate. I’ve
stopped obsessing over word count and instead am editing, which often feels
like I’m taking an axe and chopping off chunks of words. There are questions to
be answered. The poet C D Wright once said that good writing has a hand, a
breath and a lexicon that resonates for the reader. Will the reader sense these
in my work, my hand as it hesitates over the keyboard, the sharp intake of
breath as I retell my brother’s death, the words unsaid?
Patricia
told me that the layered work of her paintings is subtractive, not additive.
It’s a paring down, a distilling of color and tone so that only the essential
is visible to the eye. So I choose my words carefully, I hold them up to the
light.
I
do the same when texting my children and husband. I tell them I miss them, and
I mean it. My hands are accustomed to baking cakes, peeling vegetables for
soup, packing little cookies into boxes for my son to take back to his boarding
school. My hands are accustomed to holding other hands but right now I reach
them out towards the screen while we are Skyping, I let my fingers form heart
shapes and hugs, I put an ink-stained finger to my lips and blow a kiss to my
daughters and to my son.
I
sleep in the studio again.
I
dream it’s dawn, but instead of the sun rising there are birds flying across
the window of my studio, moving slowly by my window so that I can see the
outline of their bodies, the soft curve of their wings through the mist. I look
for the sun, but, in fact, it’s not the sun that rises but the faces of people
I’m writing about. The work continues.
********
In
NOTES FROM AFAR, writer Joanna Chen sends us weekly dispatches from
Amherst, Virginia during her six-week residency at the Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts. In Notes, Chen
explores challenges and advantages particular to women writers, the allure
and the reality of leaving her partner and children to write and the
importance of personal space as she charts her own creative process in the foothills
of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains far away from her home in Israel’s Ella
Valley.
NOTES
FROM AFAR is the first in a pilot series focusing on women in the arts and
one that we hope will become a regular feature.
Joanna
Chen has written for Newsweek, The Daily Beast and
The BBC World Service, among others. Her lyric essays have been published
most recently in Guernica, Narratively and The
Los Angeles Review of Books, where she writes a column.
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