This monthly missive is a way for me to make connections with people interested in art and creativity in order to inspire a more satisfying and thoughtful daily life. I'm an author and editor, always on the lookout for inspiration.
After wrestling with the Airbnb lockbox, dropping an array of torn paper bags full of clothes and random food items on the floor and unloading the bouquets I’d been unable to leave behind, the first thing I did was scan the bookshelves of this stranger’s home.
After all, our bookshelves tell complicated and interesting stories about us, don’t they?
Yesterday evening as I arrived in Hudson NY, exhausted and frazzled, I pulled out both the familiar and the unfamiliar: Delta of Venus, by Anis Nin; Long Life, by Mary Oliver; Catskill Hotels, by Irwin Richman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro; Just Kids, by Patti Smith; Waking Up to What You Do, by Diane Rizzetto and Modern Japanese Stories, edited by Ivan Morris.
History, poetry, self help, short stories and erotica... One of my goals for the next the three days is to read from each of these random books. Let’s see what they have to offer me.
(TW: SA)
After waking well-rested (with a workout and a couple of half-caff-coffees warming my belly), I lay down to read Anais Nin. This one is new to me.
Along with other penniless writers of the time, Nin wrote erotica for an anonymous older man who paid well and demanded clinical stories of sexual activity, “without any poetry.” Over time, Nin became more and more enraged by this strict mandate.
In a letter to her patron she wrote:
“You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood…
…Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy… No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture…”
I cannot WAIT to read these stories and see how she’s revised them, I thought. My own writing is highly descriptive and I was eager to see how Nin had embellished the original tales to include those telling details — I call them “nuggets”— that would bring emotion back into the mix.
Published by Pocket Books Erotica for $5.99 in 1990 (not so long ago, really??), the collection begins with a story called “The Hungarian Adventurer.” The first few pages were intriguing, though not erotic (to me). And then enter the two little girls.
Oh no, I thought. Really? No!
But yes. First it’s the girls (unharmed yet exploited), then the adult daughters and finally the son. In a few brief sentences at the end, the baron’s unquenchable sexual appetite is condemned as folly and obsession. This from a woman who “created the female language for sexuality,” according to her publisher. Oh lord.
For the last two hours contradictory feelings have been whirling inside my head. I won’t parse them here in detail but what I will share is how this led me back to thinking about what we are and aren’t allowed to imagine, say, and publish.
I was transported back to the Italian restaurant in which my then-new agent lay down her fork and said, “Katrin, I hate to say this but some editors won’t even read that manuscript,” when I told her the outline of my novel based on Sho Fu Den.
Are those editors right? Are they wrong? Should writers be able to write and publish whatever they want? I still don’t know the right answer.
Back in early June when I left Key West, I decided to stop trying to write. My scholarship programs at the Key West Literary Seminar would keep me busy over the summer, and I wanted to immerse myself with abandon into a massive home renovation project.
I’m going to allow my creativity to lead, I decided. I don’t need to write a word if I don’t want to.
When I’m trying to write (vs. when I’m actually writing), it feels as if I’m pulling up weeds by the handful, sweat stinging my eyes and clouding my vision, and when I can finally see clearly again I notice my arms are full of decapitated peonies and the garden is an uneven hump of desiccated soil in which nothing will grow.
So instead of trying to write, I did art projects: wallpapering a mural, fixing old balsa wood light fixtures with rice paper, painting rooms, hanging pictures, and… completing the most epic art project I have yet undertaken.
The ceiling of the dining hall in Sho Fu Den was a mess of moldy wood. We hoisted it up by 23 inches and then needed to figure out what to do about the 43 stained ceiling tiles.
Inspired by the paulownia flower, a royal crest used by Jokiche Takamine (the first owner), I decided to try creating a stencil. Two wooden carvings of this crest used to hang on the estate’s massive wooden gates; they were hacked to pieces with a chainsaw and thrown into a dumpster before being saved and, eventually, restored. I used that original shape as my outline.
Getting the scale and the design right was tricky. My idea was simply to make a three layered stencil… but that all changed when the amazing artist Ray Fiero got involved.
A longtime friend, he surprised me by turning up at my house and quietly studying the space and the design… and trying out a few things and then… we got to work painting, with the help of my mother.
Resulting in this:
For months on end last year I felt like I was enveloped in fog. The hard work I was doing trying to find my way back to being inspired was exhausting me rather than leading me back out into the sunlight.
But within a few weeks of giving up those effortful attempts to re-engage — focusing instead on art — I found myself seeing through that disorienting fog and beginning to dream again. The stories quietly crept back in. I picked up a book and was able to read the entire thing from beginning to end. And then I picked up another. And another. An old character returned to me. I dipped back into my second novel and decided to see if it might sell in Germany.
Like a dandelion, hope has sprouted. It’s just a scraggly weed, but it’s a flower nonetheless. And so we forge ahead.
My beloved mother in law, Sheila O’Marah, was an eternal ray of sunshine. She died of a stroke the morning she came to visit us at Sho Fu Den, almost a month ago.
Marveling at the tiles on the ceiling, she exclaimed “Angel! What you’ve achieved!”
When I was applying to the journalism program at Stanford, she’s the one who gently suggested the main idea for my essay. She never once arrived at someone’s house without a basketful of gifts, mostly secondhand trinkets tailored specifically to you. Her knowledge of history was exceptional, and she could sure spin a tale.
Her greatest gift is that she was able to make everyone recognize the good within themselves. Because of this, she was an extraordinary teacher, the kind who changes people’s lives. Goodbye, beloved Sheila, I feel your sunshine on me, warming me.
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