The Divine Flow of a Misunderstood Muse: Art, Age and High School Grace

I sit on my front porch in Nashville most mornings and meditate. I’ve studied a few types of meditation since 2011 and landed in 2019 on Transcendental Meditation but had been short-changing my sits from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Last week, I decided to get back to 20 minutes. The difference was astonishing. Somewhere after the 10-minute mark, I stopped making lists and putting stage outfits together and going over the newest song I’d written, and I dropped into light and sound. Maybe it has been a conversation with The Divine (or The Source, or Universe, or Spirit or God or whatever the F it is that connects us all).

I also had deep and long conversations (or wordless connections) with people who had died that were profound. I could be the old cynic that I am and explain it with biology and science and that I made up the ‘magic’ of the other voice coming in, it was me wanting that to happen and I made it up. OR, I could go with my gut and call it what I called it: Spirit. Flow.

This is what I was planning on writing about today. Flow. When I first got sober, my old dog, June, died of cancer and I had to put her down. I’d lost a marriage, then lost a very complicated relationship I had bet everything on, I was in a new town and alone and in my 40’s and childless and almost broke and I had to put my dog down. I sat with her as she passed, talking her to the next place. After, I drove straight to an AA meeting.

I was in my first few months, and I was shaky. I was working on the 2nd step – “Came to believe that a Power great than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” My old Catholic judgmental God had to be fired and I’d decided blithely (just to get onto the next step) to call my Higher Power “Flow.” Flow like the river. Like creativity. An ease I longed for, that I only knew in that strange trance of creating. A few months later, totally randomly, I was asked to adopt a Redbone Coonhound with trauma issues whose name was…wait for it…Flo. Yeah. You can’t make this shit up.

I’ve been experiencing a lot of Flow lately. Guiding voices. My dead father, in my meditation, actually apologized to me, an acknowledgement I never got that I wrote about in my song “Grief is a Lonely Land.” My creative projects are flowing. I’m writing every day, whether a poem or songs. I’m allowing. One door closes and another opens and, like I always have done, I walk through.

*. *. *

10 years ago, I had a co-writing session booked with Rod Picott, a great songwriter. I told him just the exoskeleton of a story about someone I knew in high school. I think what I said was I remembered her as the most popular pretty girl, that we’d been friends in junior high but didn’t really hang out in high school. And she was a kind of town celebrity because she’d gone off to LA and had become a model and married a rock star drummer and there were a divorce and stories in the music magazines and VH1 and rumors, and that she landed back in our hometown. All of this was true. I ‘heard’ she ran with a fast crowd in high school. I didn’t know if it was true. It was gossip. She did move to LA and marry a famous drummer. And she did move back home. And from what I could see on Facebook, in her 40’s at that point, she was naturally beautiful with a radiance about her. I told him she was the Prom Queen (I was wrong, she was the Homecoming Queen). He said, “Everybody wants to dance with the Prom Queen. Everybody wants their chance.”

We didn’t finish the song and we both forgot about it for 10 years. Then one day, I found the old work tape and the chorus and started writing again. I decided Homecoming would give me more high school imagery (football, cheerleaders). I put the Queen (inspired by Heidi but now a character, a stereotype) on a Mustang as being driven around the field – that was culled from memory. I called Rod and said, let’s get back to it.

I didn’t know that much about Heidi’s life story, and to be honest, I didn’t really know her very well in high school. I’d call her maybe a good acquaintance at that point. I knew of her as smart and very kind to everyone. But I’d only sketched out a few details to Rod. He didn’t know her at all. So, we created a universal type. “I heard one night up on Tower Hill/ she rounded third base with a college kid.” It was a cool line. There was a place in my town Skyline Drive, but it didn’t rhyme, so we named it “Tower Hill.” We had the character run off to LA to “make it” and end up with a drummer in a heavy metal band (culled from what I knew of the real person). And in the end, she ‘licks her wounds and comes back home.’ It was just a good line we wrote, creating more of a fiction, that this character didn’t get what she went out there, or got something else, and came back to their town. A storyline that many songs and movies are built upon: a dreamer’s journey that goes south. The chorus changed to “Everybody wants to dance with the Queen / Everybody wants their chance to be seen,” which to both of us, spoke to that universal thing we ALL went through at that age. We mythologize the Prom Queens, the captain of the Football Team, and we all want to be seen by someone. As we age, we all learn the quiet kid in the back who never talks sometimes comes back as the most successful. The popular girl may have a very sad story to tell. The Class President was deeply insecure. And in our own insecurity, we craft narratives around these archetypes, and those narratives keep us, at 16, stuck in our own insecurities. The dream is as false as an LA tan.

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That was the song to me and Rod. The false myth.

The trouble is that the false myth cut close to the human behind the song and she was recognizable and it hurt her. Her name was Heidi Benson. Now she’s Kai Shanti. She heard the song and was hurt by it. I’ve never had this happen. She has a blog and posted a public “Letter to a Friend,” and messaged me about it, reaching out. I read it immediately.

It was honest and generous and extraordinarily vulnerable. It was also a kind of apology, as if she’d hurt me back then. It was an olive branch. She wrote of her truth, her journey and, though we have led very different lives, there were so many similarities that I was stunned by her humanity and grace. I immediately sat down and wrote her a private letter. My own apology, and amend, my olive branch, an opening to a connection.

* * *

There is always the perceived popular girl, prettiest girl, popular boy, rebel, class talent, class clown, rich girl, poor kid, pothead, deadhead, hackey-sacker, smoker’s gang, band geeks, goody two shoes, best this, best that… That’s what high school is.

I don’t know about you, but I hated high school. I was ambitious and creative and felt very out of place and stuck in a town I wanted out of. I loved my family and I was safe and secure and my parents did a wonderful job creating home for us with all the tools they had. I grew up with amazing siblings I am very close to and we have worked through most of our demons together. I was not an easy kid to parent. I was headstrong and thought I knew everything and had rage I wouldn’t understand until my 50’s. I had mood swings. My parents called it “artistic.” I know it now as depression. I was bullied in junior high school by the popular rich girl who was mean (and, looking back, probably as scared as I was, unhappy, definitely troubled, and so many reasons for her own trauma) and went into high school vowing to never be bullied again, so I kept a distance from people and went to work on my Big Dreams.

I found my friends eventually and we are still bonded, but we didn’t all go to school together. Terry, Bill, Laura, Katie, Greg. We survived the 1980’s together. It was like a John Hughes movie. Seriously - my prom dress was ugly, so ugly, because I was inspired by Molly Ringwald and one made for me. I didn’t have a boyfriend so I took some guy I met from Regional Choir who I didn’t really like. I was never on any Prom or Homecoming court. I ran for Class President with a bunch of other girls as a team – oh the thought of it is so humiliating. My father, ever the idea guy, and his own Class President and always popular and handsome, thought, because my name is Amy, I should run with the whole line-up and call it The A Team and he made business cards for us to hand out. I mean, talk about super uncool.

The line up won. Except me. I lost to…..wait for it… Heidi Benson.

*. * *

Bob Dylan broke Joan Baez’ heart and you can see it happening on film in Pennebaker’s “No Direction Home.” Previous to Baez, he broke Suze Rotolo’s heart by openly cheating on her with Baez. Rotolo went onto become an artist of her own. I don’t know of anywhere she wrote anything about Dylan, but I’ll bet she pulled from her own history and memory and subjective truth to create art.

Baez wrote the song “Diamonds and Rust.” It is clearly about Dylan. He knew it. He wrote a lot of songs that were inspired by people. How about “It Ain’t Me Babe.” He didn’t write anyone’s name in the lyric, but I’m sure whomever it is about knew it and had her own feelings. Baez wrote the song about Dylan. I don’t know… was she angry? Was she hurt? Did she just use the story to create art? How did Dylan feel? I’ve never cared to look. It’s a wonderful song and I’m not listening to it thinking about Bob Dylan. It’s my own “ghost” that comes around again. For decades, writers have debated who “You’re So Vain” is about, and I think Cary Simon finally copped to the truth, but it doesn’t matter to me, as the listener, because I’ve got my own guy I’d like to say those words to.

And that’s what art does. I teach writing. I teach that the more specific a writer is with the detail, the more universal the song is. If you tell me the exact color of the couch you lost your virginity on, even if I didn’t lose my virginity on a green plaid couch with cigarettes stuck in the cushions, I’ll see my own deflowering. If it’s a good song, there’s a catharsis, a turn. Where we can all feel it together about our own lives.

The first time I heard the Miranda Lambert hit “The House That Built Me” (written by Tom Douglas and Alan Shamblin) I had to pull over to the side of the road and cry. I think I played it again and again and again. That song changed me. None of those details are mine. There’s a front porch and a dog and an old house. I didn’t grow up with a front porch and that tree and that dog. But the chorus, the emotion and longing behind the words was mine.

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here, it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself…

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I know that feeling and we all did and we made that song ours and that’s why it’s a hit song. It’s songs like these that taught me how to write. That made me want to be a great songwriter. To just write ONE thing that is part truth and history but becomes mythological and true.

Kelsea Ballerina has a song she co-wrote called “Homecoming Queen.”

Look damn good in the dress
Zipping up the mess
Dancing with your best foot forward
Does it get hard
To have to play the part?
Nobody’s feeling sorry for ya

The singer, the protagonist, the “I” in that song has a point of view. Is it anger? Or just exhaustion with the make-believe. “What if I told you the world wouldn’t end / If you started showing what’s under your skin? / What if you let ‘em all in on the lie? / Even the homecoming queen cries.”

That’s what I was trying to do with my “Homecoming Queen.”

“Everybody wants to dance with the queen / Everybody wants their chance to be seen.” There are details in that song that were made up, some are from other friendships, there is no “Tower Hill,” I read Judy Blume books on Teresa Savidge’s pink canopy bed.

“Homecoming Queen” (song by Amy Speace, Rod Picott) from The American Dream

However….it hit Heidi (now Kai) hard and I completely see why and I am so terribly sorry for that. There is a human behind the character. Maybe there was a real Mary in “Thunder Road,” and even though Springsteen wrote songs of redemption, maybe the real Mary wants a say. Maybe the girl who loses her virginity in some Springsteen song seems a little bit like a girl he knew in high school and her truth is she was raped and hearing that song brings up old trauma.

* * *

Are we artists responsible to the Muses of our work? That’s a really heady question. And I’m sure has been debated by people much smarter than I am. Maybe. Maybe not. Ethically? Maybe not. Artists are selfish thieves, we steal snippets overheard out of context and use them in our work. I watched my father take his last breath, holding his hand, telling him I loved him and staring at his face. I wanted to be a witness to the moment that Life, that mystical spirit, actually left his body. I desperately wanted to understand the instant of division between living and dying. Because I loved my father fiercely and didn’t want him to go. And because I am a writer, I wanted to see something, I wanted to write about it. I wrote a poem later about that moment – “I am scoring my father’s dying.” I wonder if my sister, who was also there, having her own experience, would think this awful and selfish. Goulish, perhaps. But I felt closer to my father watching his soul pass from one world to the next. And I’m grateful I was there. And I’m grateful that the words came later to make a poem out of it.

Are we responsible for the harm done? I may have thought differently before Friday and Kai’s letter. But now, I believe so. Maybe one could argue that art is art and leave it. But I am first a human. Second, an artist. And if, in my human fallibility, trying to create art, I hurt someone else, well then, yes I’m responsible. Or, if not responsible, then I must be respectful. Maybe Dylan wouldn’t apologize. Taylor Swift certainly doesn’t. I did not write a song from a wounded place. I have no ‘shit to work out.’ But in crafting a character, I stole from truth and that creation hurt someone. So yes, I am respectful of that and sorry for the fact that it hurt someone I never meant to hurt.

* * *

My first ex-husband, hearing a new song of mine after we separated that was thinly veiled about the person I was secretly with, said to me sadly, “you never wrote a song like that for me.” I have so many songs that are about him. I have albums about our divorce, and other huge heartbreaks. “How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat” is a song cycle inspired by Shakespeare. And it’s a breakup album. The person who I wrote those songs about knows it. He sees himself in them. We’ve never had that conversation about whether it hurt him or not. Maybe I should have. “American Dream” has a few songs directly inspired by my recent divorce. And one, ”Glad I’m Gone,” that is purely fiction written with Gary Nicholson. None of those lyrics are autobiographical. It’s actually the opposite of what I was feeling. But it was nice to step into that character and try it on and I love the song. I don’t know if my partner thought it was about him. He never said anything and I never asked him if he listened to the record.

I am not a purely confessional writer. But I take from my life. It’s all I know. I write about joy and about love and about heartbreak. I write about the rain. I write about towns. I make shit up completely and write songs that people assume are autobiographical. After years of therapy and work around it, I wrote a poem about being date raped. I didn’t know what form it should sit in to make it palatable until I found the ballad form. And I call it “The Ballad of the Forgotten Night.” It healed something in me to write it. We take from our lives and from the people we know and the places we have lived.

Maybe all artists are narcissists. And somewhat callous in our thievery. For the sake of something we craft. That does not make us saints. Or devils. But when I hurt someone, I want to know and I want to know what I can do to make an amend. First: Do. No. Harm.

*. *. *

Flow. Let’s get back to Flow. Because that’s what I was going to write about. And that’s what this may really be about. Divine flow. Kai and I share a strong faith in the Divine. We both have survived some seriously hard shit, hard public breakups, falls from graces, and then rebuilding and rebirth. We are 58 now. Mothers. Creators. I haven’t seen her in person since our 10^th reunion. And our 40^th is this summer and I’m very regretful that I cannot go. But maybe, my own God or Goddess or River or Higher Power brought me this moment of grace and connection and I have hope that we will find a deep connection out of this. Some more Flow. I think we all need that right now.

Kai. Heidi. My dear lovely friend who I met in Curtin Middle School in 7^th grade. With the long white blonde hair. The alabaster face. Tall and thin. A gymnast. Best friends with Nancy Petts with her dark curly hair and freckles. You were soft spoken and kind and made me feel included when I was the new girl in town. You and I both studied piano with Mrs. R and we did piano recitals together. You were really good. In high school, we were in choir together and you made State Choir which was a big deal. People liked you. You seemed kind to everyone. I never heard anyone say a bad word about you. I’m sorry I didn’t see you then. I’m sorry I didn’t see you as I wrote a song stealing your story. I’m sorry for all of our classmates who heard my song and needed to defend you. I’m sorry if I wasn’t kind. I’m sorry that anything that I did hurt you. Namaste, my new friend.

Pretty sure I know the next song I’ll be writing.

Extra Reading

Kai Shanti’s Blog: Letter to a Friend

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.