Free Writing Is My Drink by Theo Pauline Nestor Page B

I now watched TV and slept
    in when a year earlier I would’ve been reading something way
    over my head, but I had a job , a career , which implied that all the reading and studying and sweating over seminar papers
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    T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r
    on Shelley’s Frankenstein had led me out of the wilderness of eternal poverty and identity-crushing restaurant work. In San
    Francisco, I’d always been strapped for cash, sleep, and time,
    schlepping in the fog from my tutoring job, via two trains and
    a cable car, to my waitressing gig in North Beach. Now I slept
    eight hours a night and commuted ten minutes through hushed
    desert to get to work.
    Within a year of my arrival in Utah, I began to acknowledge
    that my stay there wasn’t a temporary one. Yes, my spiritual and
    political beliefs might’ve separated me from the pack, but in-
    creasingly my life resembled that of the locals. Within another
    year, I married a transplant from California. Six months later
    we bought a house and then, of course, next came the inevitable
    dog. A job, a husband, a house, a dog, and somewhere in there I
    turned thirty: My footloose, angst-y twenties were official y over.
    Inevitably, the novelty of the peaceable kingdom waned,
    though, and restlessness and ambition soon flickered again.
    After work, I’d walk our dog along the red dirt roads that tra-
    versedthe terrain of black volcanic rubble and silvery blue sage
    across the street from our house. Beyond the lava and the sage,
    stacks of the white and red rock formed the very surreal Snow
    Canyon. Walking through this landscape, I’d feel my dream of
    becoming a writer resurfacing, a force gathering critical mass. I
    still had this idea that one day I would do something I thought
    of as my “real writing,” although the hubris of this aspiration
    also embarrassed me because I had no proof that I could write
    and no idea what form this “real writing” would take. Haiku?
    Fiction? All I knew was that I wasn’t doing it.
    On the few occasions I did try to write, I wrote short sto-
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    W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k
    ries that inevitably ground to a halt after five pages or so. Some
    segue or momentum of plot usual y tripped me up. After that,
    I’d squeak out a sentence or two but my heart wasn’t in it, and
    so I’d give up. I had a few notebooks full of false starts. The busy school years blurred past in a rush of students’ questions, papers, and class prep, but during the long, hot summers off work
    the feeling of falling behind would start up again. The years were
    going by, I told myself: Ticktock, as if writing had a closing bio-
    logical window.
    A woman in the HR department at the college told me about
    an annual summer writers’ retreat in the mountains above Cedar
    City, and I decided to go. Up a twisty road of pines and red rock,
    an old lodge held a number of classes all about the craft of writ-
    ing, real y nutsy and boltsy how-to classes. One class I took that
    week, taught by the poet Ken Brewer, changed everything for
    me as a writer.
    Ken was a sweet bear of man who was a product of the very
    best parts of the seventies—the groovy aspects that supported
    equality, vegetable gardens, and self-expression. As he segued
    into our writing assignment, Ken talked about how he always
    had trouble sticking to external forms. He gave the example of
    learning to waltz, which he’d found very difficult to learn. He
    could dance free form to rock and rol , he told us, because then
    he didn’t have to stick to someone else’s pattern of how his body
    should be moving. As I nodded yes, yes, yes, he parlayed this
    analogy into talking about how he’d final y discovered a form
    that was perfectly suited to his content. He told us that this form he called “the triptych” had helped him to find as a writer.
    Ken taught us that the triptych’s