Wildness and Mystery and Misery and Joy
We can learn a lot from the words of Julia Alvarez, both in the wisdom she speaks and in the lines she commits to the page, and in this issue we are fortunate to have a generous helping of both, as recorded in “The Wildness and the Mystery,” Renée H. Shea’s profile of the prolific, celebrated writer. “Maybe I’m going feral in my old age,” says the seventy-six-year-old author of the novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, most famously; the poetry collection Visitations, most recently; and a healthy shelf of books in between. “I find that the older I get, the more baffling it all is, the more the mystery deepens. I want wildness, some tangled-ness.” These days, with all that’s coming at us, I admit I sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by wildness, cowed by circumstance. But then I hear from authors like Alvarez, who aren’t afraid to march into the tangled-ness of it all, and their spirit ignites something inside. As she reminds us: “Even as our world darkens, there is a spark of joy somewhere, but you have to find it.” Six years ago Alvarez and I exchanged e-mails for a feature I was putting together on the creative writing fellowships that were then—but are no longer—offered by the National Endowment for the Arts. With characteristic grace she wrote: “None of us get where we want to go by ourselves. Along the way we encounter helpers, fairy godmothers.”
In Minda Honey’s essay “The Joy of the Tortured Artist: Why We Write, Even When We Hate to Write,” she expresses a feeling that is likely a lot more common than one might think: that the act of writing isn’t always all that much fun. In fact, at times it can be downright grueling, and it never gets easier. She writes, “Must I move through an apparatus of pain if I want to make myself known through language, if I want to receive even a modicum of understanding in this life?” Enter the helpers. In search of answers, Honey reconnected with her former professor, acclaimed author Laila Lalami, who sympathizes with the difficulties inherent in the act of writing. And then there is the same spirit that ignites: “There is also the joy,” Lalami says, “in doing this thing that I love doing, which is to create and to think and be in solitude with myself.” In these pages you’ll find encounters with the wildness and the mystery, even a little misery, and joy, but you’ll also find helpers. May they light the path that leads to where you want to go.
