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Letter from Joyce Archives
Look for the February 2004 release of The Usual Rules in paperback!
September 24 , 2008
Dear Friends,
I’ve just returned from Cleveland, Ohio -- a city I’d never visited before -- where I flew last weekend to attend a wedding. But the story of my relationship with the bride, and the unlikely way our paths crossed, actually begins many years before, in our nation’s capital. At the White House, in fact. I thought I’d tell it to you here this week because in my opinion, we can never hear too many stories where good old fashioned romance wins out. And for anyone who believes there might be such a thing as fate or destiny, this one should be right up your alley.
So. Remember back to the year 1998. Clinton was in the White House, though unfortunately, so was Monica Lewinsky. (Don’t worry, friends. I won’t be going political on you here. I just wanted you to picture the mood of the place, at the time in question.) Plenty of other things were happening too, of course, but on the weekend in question, I had flown to Washington to deliver a speech at the Kennedy Center, where twenty young high school writers were being honored for the accomplishment of having won a gold medal in the Scholastic Writing and Art Competition.
This competition, and the organization that sponsors it, The Alliance for Young Artists, has always meant a lot to me, because when I was a young person myself, in high school, I always entered my poems, essays and stories in the contest (even my art work; I was covering all bases). The prizes I was awarded over the years 1967-1971 represented the first and most important recognition I received for my writing -- beyond the support of my parents -- and helped me believe I might become a writer. And because the Scholastic competition did so much for me when I was young, over the years since I’ve tried to lend my support to the Alliance, and Scholastic -- serving as a judge on a number of occasions.
That particular year, however, the organization was celebrating a big anniversary -- its 75th year -- and I was asked to come to Washington to address the winners of that year’s competition: young people from high schools all around the country who’d distinguished themselves in the field of art and writing.
Looking out on the sea of faces at the Kennedy Center that day, I tried to give the kind of advice I would most have benefited from myself, when young. I told the students to be true to themselves, to hold fast to their goals even when the world did not reward them as richly as it did on that day, to remain forever as curious and ready to learn as they were then. Never stop being a student, I told them. (I know I still feel like one.)
I said something else that day too -- offered a piece of advice I give to writers at all stages in their lives, but particularly important for young people, I think. A person’s creative life may be the one place in which she can truly know freedom, I said -- and nobody should ever be made to forfeit that, in making art. I was talking about freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of imagination. As hard as it might be to do this, I said (and in my case, the year 1998 was a particularly challenging one in my own life as a writer, and a time when my own freedom to express myself was under fire) -- you must not let your creative life be restricted by worries about what your teachers will think of you, what your friends might say, or your parents. (Or critics and book reviewers, in my case.)
“Write as if you were an orphan,” I told the kids that day, though what I was talking about went beyond the state of parentlessness. I meant that as much as you might love your family, as much as you might want to please your teachers, or your boss, or your minister, or your friends, or the book critic for The Washington Post (who had just named my memoir, At Home in the World, “the worst book ever published”), you must not try to please them (or anyone else) when you write. Tell the truth, without shame or fear. Though doing that may feel scary, I said.
So... I gave my speech. I shook hands with the award winners. And then a group of us were escorted to the White House, where the gold medal winners and I -- along with Frank McCourt and Walter Mosely and Kathy Bates, the other speakers of the day -- were introduced to Hillary Clinton, who definitely wasn’t having one of her better days. Or one of her better years, for that matter.
Cut to six years later. I was living in Guatemala now, in the little village of San Marcos La Laguna, on the shores of Lake Atitlan, where I was running one of my writing workshops. A week or two before the workshop got under way, a young woman approached me -- an American, age 23, hailing from Nashville, Tennessee, named Melissa Warren. Melissa had been traveling around Central America for over a year at this point, but had settled in the village for a while, studying healing arts and working with kids. She told me she loved to write, and wished she could attend my workshop, but she had no money for the tuition.
I really liked Melissa, and I knew she’d add a lot to the workshop. So I suggested she work for me, serving breakfasts, and -- because she was a great dancer -- teaching salsa to the other students. (I hadn’t intended to include salsa dance in the workshop week, but suddenly this made total sense.)
Melissa also turned out to be a terrific writer, and a lovely person, and she managed to get some people up and dancing, who said they’d never danced like that before. She brought her dog Charlie to the workshop. We all loved them both.
So, we became friends. And over the years since, we stayed in touch.
A couple of years ago, Melissa -- living in Cleveland now, with her dog Charlie, whom she’d brought home with her -- wrote to me to say she’d met a wonderful man on E-Harmony, named Matt -- her soulmate. Then last winter she wrote again to say they were engaged.
Then came a note with a question: Had I by any chance been in Washington D.C. in the summer of 1998, delivering a speech at the Kennedy Center, in which I’d offered the advice to “write as if you were an orphan”? Because she was in the audience that day, and though when we’d met in Guatemala, she hadn’t connected me with that woman in the pink suit up on the stage (I dress considerably differently at the lake) she suddenly realized, that might have been me.
It turned out that Melissa had been one of those twenty gold medal winners who’d traveled to Washington from all over the country that weekend to accept their awards. She’d won in the poetry category.
“I always remembered what you said,” she wrote to me. In fact, it had been my words to disregard the concept of pleasing one’s parents that had inspired this good and loving daughter to select, as the poem she read out loud that day, not the sweet, lyrical verse she’d planned, about colors, but a tougher one, in which she wrote about her father. A man she loved deeply, but with full awareness that like every parent, he had his failings too.
The story might have ended here, with the amazing coincidence of our having crossed paths twice, in two such different locations -- Washington D.C. and Lake Atitlan. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Matt and Melissa moved in together. And on the day he was helping her unpack her books and possessions, she had taken out the program from that long-ago awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center. Of all the things they’d shared in their two years together, she’d never told him about her gold medal award, or explained about how special it all was. So special the winners had travelled from all over the country to be there.
“All the winners?” Matt asked. “Well, nearly all of them,” Melissa said. Maybe one was missing.
She wanted to show him the poem, but he kept pressing her to point to her name in the program. Finally, she did.
“Notice the name right above yours?” he asked her. (Matt’s last name, by the way, is Vincel.) And what do you know, the gold medal winner named, directly above her, was a Matthew Vincel. Age 17, hailing from outside Cleveland. Also a poetry winner.
At first she thought there was some other Matthew Vincel. It took a while to sink in that her soulmate was also a gold medal winner that year -- the one, of all the twenty, who had failed to come to the Kennedy Center.
“I was a football player,” Matt explained. “I didn’t even know my teacher had entered my poems in the contest, and when I won, I was afraid the guys might give me a hard time.”
If they had met that day, of course, they would have saved themselves the trouble of filling out those E-harmony questionnaires. Or, more likely, not. Because the person who is your soul mate at age twenty seven may not be the same one (almost certainly won’t be, in fact) you might have been drawn to at age seventeen.
So last weekend, I flew to Melissa and Matt’s wedding, on a lake a little ways outside of Cleveland. It was a beautiful weekend, full of loving relatives on both sides -- reminding me, in case I didn’t know, that the same situation that might make for good writing (namely, telling your stories as if you were an orphan) is not what you want for the rest of your life, probably. So I got to meet Matt and Melissa’s parents (her dad forgave me, for inspiring her to read the difficult poem), and the uncles and aunts and siblings and nieces and nephews and even Melissa’s grandmother.
Brides tend to be beautiful, of course, but this one, way more so than normal. As for the groom -- fresh out of law school, and beginning his career as a legal aid lawyer: I could not have imagined a better partner for this deeply lovable and gifted young woman.
Melissa is a massage therapist now, practicing a healing method known as Touch for Health; a number of the people in attendance at the wedding that day were clients who’d been helped by her. But I am also proud and happy to report that Melissa Warren Vincel has signed on to be my assistant, helping -- alongside my Lake Atitlan right hand woman Dita Zakova -- to run my Lake Atitlan Writing Workshops. If you have questions to ask about the workshop, or about coming to Guatemala, she’s the one you want to talk with. I told her I’m giving her a week off, in honor of getting married (though the couple took their honeymoon before the actual wedding). But starting next week, feel free to email Melissa and, if you choose, you can set up a time to talk. (Dita will continue handling the logistics of your arrangements in Guatemala: hotels, airport information, transportation, and any special needs while you’re at the lake.)
While we’re on the subject of the workshop, I want to let you know that I’ve made the decision to offer a $100 discount to anyone signing up now, who pays tuition in full. Just let Melissa know, when you speak with her, that you intend to do this, and as always, when you’re communicating with us about the workshop, send a copy of your email note to me, as well. (And then email Dita, as described in the workshop packet, to arrange your housing.)
(By the way: A number of people have expressed a certain uncertainty about which of the workshops -- February or March -- is best suited to their goals as a writer. I have now prepared an up to date letter laying out all of the information you’ll need to make the best choice. Just let Melissa know if you’d like to receive it. She will also have a brand new slide show up on my website next week, with pictures from this past July’s workshop with Ann Hood.
In other news: I wanted to let you know about an essay of mine appearing in the current (October) issue of MORE magazine. It’s about three topics of interest to me: my mother and my breasts. I could say more, but I’d rather that you read it for yourself.
Next week, I leave my little oasis of The MacDowell Colony, where I’ve been living for almost two months now. I’ll be headed to Chicago, where I’m speaking to a group of ninth graders at Hinsdale High School, who just read my novel The Usual Rules. Then I get to be part of a fundraiser for the Ragdale Writers’ Retreat. And then, believe it or not, I am off to another retreat, myself: Yaddo. (You might think, by now, that I’ve joined the witness protection plan. But my goal for this fall is to get my two books in good shape. One’s a memoir. The other’s a novel. I’ll hope to be sharing a little of the memoir with you soon, here.)
Finally, I wanted to say something about the letter I sent out a few weeks ago, in which I spoke of my support for Barack Obama, and my belief that there may never have been an election more important than the one coming up this November. Several longtime readers of mine -- women I’ve heard from and known, through their letters, for years, whom I like to think of as friends -- wrote to express their unhappiness and even anger at my choice to inject politics into a forum that has traditionally been reserved for stories about our lives and families, my personal experiences out in the world, and those of others I meet along the way.
To those who were offended by my words, I want to say that I take your letters very seriously, and thought a long time about what you said. I should never have assumed -- none of us should -- that because a person reads or likes my work, or comes to this forum, or takes an interest in how I bake a pie, we all share the same politics, and in fact, it makes me happy to know that my writing can speak to readers with enormously diverse backgrounds and points of view. In writing as I did, I made a too-swift assumption, and you were correct in reminding me of that.
Writing this now, I feel as passionately as ever about my candidate, and concerned as ever about the alternative. I can’t promise I won’t mention politics again, because to me, the issues involved in this race are ones that affect all of the things we talk about here: our children, our families, our homes, our values. Being a mother is one of the more political things a person can be, in my opinion. Just ask the mothers of the soldiers serving in Iraq, and the mothers of the ones who have died there. And the mothers of Iraqi children who have been killed and maimed and emotionally ravaged in that war, about whom we hear far, far too little. And the ones, here at home, struggling with no health insurance or home foreclosure.
None of this changes the fact that I owe you an apology. The reader who wrote to say she was sick and tired of movie stars and rock musicians coming out to endorse candidates, expecting people to be swayed simply by the fact of their celebrity, had a totally valid point. I’m not in the celebrity category of course, but if I ever sway one person’s vote, it won’t be because she likes my novels, or my columns. It will be because we’ve shared our ideas -- I’ve listened to her, she’s listened to me, and we’ve both informed ourselves with something more than sensational and frequently inaccurate television advertising.
Actually, there’s only one thing I feel a need to say here, and it is simply that I hope every one of us takes the time to research the facts behind the assertions of each candidate, and looks hard at their voting records, their backgrounds, and their policies -- not just their commercials, or the sound bites on television.
I want for us all, as voters, the same thing I believe in for our children: a good education. Nothing keeps us on a clearer course than pursuit of the truth.
Write like an orphan. Vote like an informed citizen.
With friendship,
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