Writing the Day

Back when I had the notion I might be a plein-air painter I studied with Betty Lou Schlemm, A.W.S. for a few years. Betty Lou, or BL as we often call her, is an outstanding plein-air painter and has a marvelous ability to articulate her thought process as she paints.

“Okay,” she will say as she mixes her colors, “now, I’m outside and the sun is shining and the clouds are high and wispy and I am going to paint the day.”

She uses that phrase a lot when she teaches - paint the day. Be there in the day and put it into your mind and down through your arm and onto the paper before you. Nobody does it better.

I don’t paint much these days - too many Muses - but I often think of BL’s dictum when I am writing and I try to “write the day” - be present in it and put it down on the page.

Today is what I think of as a Gloucester Day - mild and breezy with air moving in from the North Atlantic rich with the fragrance of salt water and fish and maybe whales breaching out on Stellwagen Bank. Clouds are big and high and scud across the sun sending shadows across the earth. Days like this often end in the brilliant rose colored sunsets that edge the clouds in wine and gold and show up in paintings like those of Maxfield Parrish who vacationed here as a boy and never stopped painting our clouds.

I am working on a collection of short stories these days and the one I am focused on now, The Haven, is set in a harsh bitter winter in the town of New Bedford - another town I love. The story is about a woman who married a wealthy, charming man from a prominent family but then, a few years into her marriage, becomes infatuated with his older cousin - a hard-living seaman ostracized by the rest of the family.

It is a wonderful story to write because I was once in love with a such a man who lived in New Bedford. I have delicious memories of waking up to the smell of the sea and the man I loved and walking with him through the early morning streets to a little coffee shop that was next to the Seaman’s Bethel where Herman Melville often sat to think while writing Moby Dick. (at right, New Bedford harbor from the window of the New Bedford Whaling Museum on a snowy winter day in 1994)

Moby Dick has been described as the perfect American novel. I have read it several times and still can be enchanted by the opening chapters where the narrator (“call me Ishmael”) describes the rugged seafaring districts of New Bedford in the 1840s. Inside the Bethel there are cenotaphs that line the walls including the one erected to the memory of a sea captain who was drowned by being tangled in the lines of a whale he had harpooned. It is said it is from that cenotaph that Melville imagined Ahab’s fate.

As I work on my story I have to leave the salt-rich sea-breezes of Gloucester today and enter into the icy, raw, stinging cold of New Bedford in the middle of a hard winter - but a winter in which the protagonist of my story is passionately in love. What a pleasure.

I don’t know how other writers work but for me having the luxury of slipping out of the place I am in and spending time deeply entrenched in another world - another place and time and environment - is a seductive undertaking. I love being in that place and having the task to write that place. If I do that well, if I get into that day and put it on the page in all its sensuousness and richness and detail, then I have done my job as a writer. At least in my opinion.

Writers write for different reasons but BL taught me how to be fully present in a place and a time and capture it. She does it with pigments, I try to do it with words. If people like my stories as much as they like her paintings I will do well in the literary world. But whether or not that happens I have this remarkable pleasure of slipping into a day and trying to capture its many nuances. That’s enough of a reward for me.

Thanks for reading.