businessmen at table eight. It was 1989, and we sold frozen strawberry daiquiris by the tankerful.) So hereâs this girl giving birth in the middle of the night and there are other girls in the room, girls who live on her hall, her co-conspirators come to help her. I looked at each one of them. I spent days thinking of their stories while I bused tables and ran the dishwasher and restocked the expediterâs table in the kitchen. (Parsley, parsley, parsley! We were all about parsley at Fridayâs. âTo have no green would be obscene,â another waitress told me.) I think the novel is going to be about the girl giving birth, but thereâs another girl in the room named Rose and sheâs come all the way to Kentucky from California in her own car and she has a secret. This girl has a husband. From there I start to stretch the story in every direction. What happened to Rose in California? Who were her parents and who was this husband and why did she marry him in the first place? Who does she meet and who will she marry later and where did he come from? I puzzled it out, went down dead ends and circled back, made connections and plot twists I never saw coming. All in my head.
While this noisy novel dominated my thoughts during shifts, my actual writing time was devoted to applications. I was applying to every fellowship program I could find, desperately hoping to land someplace that would feed me and put a roof over my head and give me time to put my fully imagined novel on paper. The stuff of dreams for people in my position is all contained in a single book called Grants and Awards for American Writers , which is issued yearly by the PEN American Center. If you want to know when a contest deadline is, or find out what prizes and fellowships are available, this is the place to look. I was down to being one of three finalists for a spot at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (now called The Radcliffe Institute) and spent a few extremely hopeful weeks before finding out I didnât get it. That was a dark day of waitressing (though, happily, I got the fellowship four years later). Just about the time I had enough seniority at Fridayâs to land the best section in the high-cash Friday night/Saturday night/Sunday brunch trifecta, I heard from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a residency program that offered small apartments and a stipend of $350 a month to ten writers and ten visual artists, from the beginning of October until the beginning of May. I was in. It was the spiritual equivalent of Charlie Bucket finding the golden ticket in his Wonka bar. I quit my job, packed up my car, and drove to Cape Cod.
I made a decision on the trip up: I was going to put writing first. I should have done this earlier, but there were always too many other things going on. Mostly I was falling in love, and then falling out of love, and then falling in love with someone else. Love, with all its urgency, wound up getting more of my attention than writing. Work got a good deal of attention as well, and by work I mean waitressing. On top of that I was a good friend and a good daughter. I budgeted in a certain amount of time to feel guilty about what I had done in the past and anxious about what I would do in the future. I didnât know exactly where writing fell in this inventory. I was sure it wasnât at the bottom of the list but I also knew it had never been safely at the top. Well, now it was being transferred to the top. I could see the genius in not having given one hundred percent of myself over to writing before. It kept me from ever having to come to terms with how good I was, or wasnât. As long as something got in the way of writing, I could always look at a finished story and think it could have been a little better if only I hadnât spent so much time on lifeâs pressing minutiae. How much better I never knew, because I never knew how much of myself I was
While this noisy novel dominated my thoughts during shifts, my actual writing time was devoted to applications. I was applying to every fellowship program I could find, desperately hoping to land someplace that would feed me and put a roof over my head and give me time to put my fully imagined novel on paper. The stuff of dreams for people in my position is all contained in a single book called Grants and Awards for American Writers , which is issued yearly by the PEN American Center. If you want to know when a contest deadline is, or find out what prizes and fellowships are available, this is the place to look. I was down to being one of three finalists for a spot at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (now called The Radcliffe Institute) and spent a few extremely hopeful weeks before finding out I didnât get it. That was a dark day of waitressing (though, happily, I got the fellowship four years later). Just about the time I had enough seniority at Fridayâs to land the best section in the high-cash Friday night/Saturday night/Sunday brunch trifecta, I heard from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a residency program that offered small apartments and a stipend of $350 a month to ten writers and ten visual artists, from the beginning of October until the beginning of May. I was in. It was the spiritual equivalent of Charlie Bucket finding the golden ticket in his Wonka bar. I quit my job, packed up my car, and drove to Cape Cod.
I made a decision on the trip up: I was going to put writing first. I should have done this earlier, but there were always too many other things going on. Mostly I was falling in love, and then falling out of love, and then falling in love with someone else. Love, with all its urgency, wound up getting more of my attention than writing. Work got a good deal of attention as well, and by work I mean waitressing. On top of that I was a good friend and a good daughter. I budgeted in a certain amount of time to feel guilty about what I had done in the past and anxious about what I would do in the future. I didnât know exactly where writing fell in this inventory. I was sure it wasnât at the bottom of the list but I also knew it had never been safely at the top. Well, now it was being transferred to the top. I could see the genius in not having given one hundred percent of myself over to writing before. It kept me from ever having to come to terms with how good I was, or wasnât. As long as something got in the way of writing, I could always look at a finished story and think it could have been a little better if only I hadnât spent so much time on lifeâs pressing minutiae. How much better I never knew, because I never knew how much of myself I was
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