It's a Town Where Girls are Allowed

On conspiring with curving banks and shores.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this as the intro to my weekly post:

My Loves,

My heart is both full and utterly broken at the beauty of Northern California. How could I have been so lucky to grow up here? How could I have been so foolish as to have ever left?

We don’t know ourselves until we know what we love.

I have not yet the words to write an essay for you about this place and me in it. So I have a poem to offer this week instead.

It took the wonderful, inimitable,

Jeannine Ouellette

to pull me back to writing prose about this love affair I’m having, have always had, with California, with water, with my body in the water. Thank you Jeannine, and all of my beautiful, generous friends at WITD. ❤️🙏

About today’s post: This is an exercise from Jeannine based on a chapter in Ocean Vuong’s new novel. I followed the exercise closely, so the opening words “It’s a town,” are the same as his, and the structure follows that of a particular paragraph of his. For those curious, I’ll post it below. Learning to craft our writing (or any other art) often begins with imitation. Breaking down the parts of how a master creates their masterpiece is one of the best ways to learn how to do a thing. Joan Didion copied full passages of Hemmingway, word for word to understand what it was he was doing and how. I would never publish the snippet below as is. I would edit it and find a way to make it wholly my own. But I loved it so much, and it gets to the heart of something for me, both my current and past experience, of a place I love deeply. And I felt excited about sharing it with you, which is such a joy.

So here you go. I’d love to know what you think. What resonated, what sounded true or good to your ears, to your heart.

It's a town where girls are allowed to be what we used to call tomboys but now I don't know what we'd call them, maybe unobjectified, or less likely to consider their bodies currency. It's the kind of town where what you know how to do: surf, bike, fish, swim, take apart an engine with your dad or fix a ding in your surfboard, is more important than what clothes you wear. But it's still a town where kids gather on a weekend night, barefoot in the cold sand listening to a soundtrack of crashing waves and Billie Eilish while they drink shoulder-tapped White Claw and Tecate around a bonfire and where girls should be careful, but often aren't, and even if they are, there are ways the boys make them pliant and forgetful, though sometimes the boys don't care about any of that, they just want power over something, anything in their life. It's where the streets try to line up on a grid, but the old railroad ties and the San Lorenzo River and the Pacific Ocean all conspire with their curving banks and shores, by which you'll find a left-behind beer can or KitKat wrapper, but not a plastic bag, because those were outlawed years ago and you either bring your own bag to the store, or get charged .25 cents for the paper bag at the checkout. It's a town where you might stand at the edge of the continent thinking about swimming, thinking about yourself here 20 years ago and how the earth mover still comes to push the sand around this beach and let the silty water of the river reach its tongue into the mouth of the ocean, the salt drying on its lips, leaving a crisp shell of sand that snaps underfoot as you press onward into the water that makes your skin pucker, your nipples rise and your blood cool until you swim far enough out to let go of your held breath, safe in the knowledge that you are finally home.

Ocean Vuong’s paragraph from his new book, The Emperor of Gladness, upon which Jeannine based her exercise:

It’s always a vulnerable thing to post a draft of writing. Though I did edit and craft this little piece, it was meant for a class and isn’t finished in the way I usually publish here.

But I also think there is something lovely about that. About the process of creativity and not just the finished product. I listen to a lot of jazz and I am often in wonder at how they do it, take their breath and swirl it around in my head and heart, years, decades, after the original intake of air is vaporized. I think of Chris Botti (if you’ve been here a while, you know he’s one of my favorites) and how he studied like the trumpet was his job starting at 12 years old, and he’s been playing now for 50 years. That is how he got so good. The practice, the dedication, the trying. I like to remember that, as I work on how to create what I feel in my heart in a way that moves you, stuns you, as Jeannine says, devastates you—in the most beautiful way.

Fifty years. I will be lucky if I write with dedication for a few hours a week, for 20 years. Thank you for being on this journey with me.

xoxox

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With so much love,

xo

j