As I’m sure you’re aware there’s a lot of work that goes into putting the Summer Fishtrap Gathering together. Of our eight programs, Summer Fishtrap is by far the largest and the most complicated. Mike starts pulling together faculty lists 14 months before you all get here, and there’s lots of discussion about themes, craft talks, scholarships, meals, volunteers, lodging, promotion, sponsorships, registration procedures, insurance, budgets. All the sexy stuff. It’s the flagship, the cornerstone. It’s not just the reason we’re all here tonight, but the reason we’re here at all.
Summer Fishtrap started this organization. We want it to be relevant and innovative as it was when it started in 1988 without breaking with both the tradition and intention set by Rich, Kim, and local and regional writers, some of whom are here tonight.
We want this place to be welcoming to anyone who wants to write. Anyone who wants to learn. Anyone who needs a safe place to build community. Anyone who comes to be inspired by this special place that means so much to all of us.
And this year we are holding Summer Fishtrap in a new space. A place we hope will be our home for the next 32 years.
So, all this to say that sometimes I don’t sleep too well.
Early this spring, I had a dream. Now normally I hate it when people tell me their dreams, because mostly they’re not interesting. So when I share dreams, even though I am certain MY dreams are fascinating, I keep it to the basics. Nouns and verbs. Single statements. For example:
I dreamt I drove my car into the ocean and it turned into a submarine.
Or.
I had a dream I was taking my geometry final and I forgot my pants.
Or.
I dreamt I was opening for Queen and they wanted me to do a Shakespeare monologue.
Yeah, I made that last one up, but you get the gist. Most of the time, I don’t remember my dreams at all. This time was different. And I am not making it up. I told several people… Because it scared me a little.
In my dream, the staff was setting up for Summer Fishtrap. In the way of most dreams, the setting was the lodge, but not. There were lots of little rooms and macrame wall hangings (my age is showing), and tons of boxes. And it was snowing. Mike was running from room to room, BoDean on his heals. I walked outside and ran into Ursula. She was small and a little bent over, wearing a yellow sweater and had reading glasses hanging from a cord around her neck. She looked up at me and said, “Take a walk with me.”
We walked down a path through the trees until we came to a bench. We sat down and she said, “You’ve said enough about this place. You need to talk about the work. It’s about the writing.”
And I woke up. There was actual heart pounding. It was so real! I told my mom. I told BoDean. I told Mike who suggested I write it down to share with you.
I’ve come to the following two conclusions about that dream. The first? I am being haunted by Ursula K. Le Guin.
I’ve spent the past 18 months reading Ursula’s essays, interviews, poetry, novels, and memorials. I’ve watched video clips. I’ve had dinner with some of her friends, her documentarian, and with people who teach her work. I’ve written about her, spoken about her, and sometimes felt she was in the room when we were talking about how her work could inform our programming this past year. I actually hear her voice when I read her words.
While I never got to meet Ursula, what I’ve gleaned sounds very much like Neil Gaiman’s Paris Review tribute after her death:
“The thing about Ursula K. Le Guin was that she didn’t actually look like a rabble-rousing, bomb-throwing, dangerous woman. She had a gentle smile, as if she was either enjoying herself or enjoying what the people around her were doing. She was kind but firm. She was petite and gray haired, and she appeared, at least on first inspection, harmless.
The illusion of harmlessness ended the moment you began to read her words, or, if you were so lucky, the moment you listened to her speak.
She was opinionated, but the opinions were informed and educated. She did not suffer fools or knaves gladly, or, actually, at all. She knew what she liked and what she wanted, and she didn’t let that change. She was sharp until the end.”
The second conclusion? She’s right. This week is about the writing.
It’s funny, me being up here to talk to you about writing. I feel inadequate. I stand before you an impostor, full of hot air and pretense and insecurity. You who are the real world-builders, tale-spinners, dream-weavers, and muse-catchers. I don’t belong here. I am a fake.
But how I love words. I love their sound, their rhythm. The gaps between, the meter, the waltz and rhumba. But I am no great composer. At best, I’m a back-up singer in this world you all play in. A tambourine player.
But here I am. The back-up singer opening for Ella, I stand in front of you, as you wait for the headliner. In 20 minutes, you’re going to forget I was here.
But I know this, too. I know that many of you feel the same way tonight. The butterflies are circling, waiting to invade as you head to bed tonight. You’re taking workshops from writers you admire, who put together words to create work you love. Oh the life of the impostor!
But we’re not alone! Even Neil Gaiman had to swallow a couple of times the first time he reached out to one of his idols. In an email to Ursula, he wrote:
“You have no idea how nervous I am at the idea of writing to you. You’ve been one of my heroes since I bought A Wizard of Earthsea with my pocket money at the age of 11. Your SF shaped my head as a teenager, and told me that anything was possible and that events occur in context. Your essays on writing shaped me as a writer.”
I can feel the stress from here. World-renowned Neil Gaiman. And he wrote that in 2014.
But then, I think even Ursula was familiar with this feeling of insecurity too. She never stopped practicing. She regularly posted on her blog until just a few months before she died, her last post a poem she wrote in 1991. See if you hear it, too.
When the Soviet Union Was Disintegrating
by Ursula K. Le Guin
i
The reason why I’m learning Spanish
by reading Neruda one word at a time
looking most of them up in the dictionary
and the reason why I’m reading
Dickinson one poem at a time
and still not understanding
or liking much, and the reason
why I keep thinking about
what might be a story
and the reason why I’m sitting
here writing this, is that I’m trying
to make this thing.
I am shy to name it.
My father didn’t like words like “soul.”
He shaved with Occam’s razor.
Why make up stuff
when there’s enough already?
But I do fiction. I make up.
There is never enough stuff.
So I guess I can call it what I want to.
Anyhow it isn’t made yet.
I am trying one way and another
all words — So it’s made out of words, is it?
No. I think the best ones
must be made out of brave and kind acts,
and belong to people who look after things
with all their heart,
and include the ocean at twilight.
That’s the highest quality
of this thing I am making:
kindness, courage, twilight, and the ocean.
That kind is pure silk.
Mine’s only rayon. Words won’t wash.
It won’t wear long.
But then I haven’t long to wear it.
At my age I should have made it
long ago, it should be me,
clapping and singing at every tatter,
like Willy said. But the “mortal dress,”
man, that’s me. That’s not clothes.
That is me tattered.
That is me mortal.
This thing I am making is my clothing soul.
I’d like it to be immortal armor,
sure, but I haven’t got the makings.
I just have scraps of rayon.
I know I’ll end up naked
in the ground or on the wind.
So, why learn Spanish?
Because of the beauty of the words of poets,
and if I don’t know Spanish
I can’t read them. Because praise
may be the thing I’m making.
And when I’m unmade
I’d like it to be what’s left,
a wisp of cheap cloth,
a color in the earth,
a whisper on the wind.
Una palabra, un aliento.
By the way, you don’t think she’s haunting me? I just discovered she posted this, her last post, on my 50th birthday.
Ursula also said this:
“Writing is my craft. I honor it deeply. To have a craft, to be able to work at it, is to be honored by it.”
So we will work on our craft and be honored by it. We will face the fear. We will make the stuff. We will let go of the perfect draft, the desire to be brilliant. We will be brave and vulnerable and write the words that need to be written. And this week, we will do it together.
Ursula had this to say about writing workshops:
“The writing workshop… was invented long after I grew up. But that’s true of a lot of things, including texting and kale chips, in which I am less interested.”
OK, we needed to lighten up for a minute. She also said this:
“Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.”
This is why we’re here. This is the reason we come together every summer. To write. To do the work in a community all working on the same craft. And whether this is your first Summer Fishtrap, or your 32nd, we’re all here, in this place, together for the first time.
You’re came here to write. To learn. To be inspired. But I also know that you will inspire with your words. Therein lies the magic of this place. These are your people. They speak your language and they need you, too.
One more prescient thought from Ursula before I go. I think of these words as a challenge, a commission:
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality … Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable, but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Now let’s get some writing done.