Balcony Seat

When I first began to live in cities in the late 1960’s, the heady feeling of intellectual freedom I found there was very much associated with coffee shops. Coffee was delicious, especially dosed with lots of cream and sugar, and the accompanying toasted bagel or pastry was inexpensive, my love of sweet buttery wheat a tie to home. Most of all, I was purchasing a seat at the endless street carnival of the city while connecting it to the extravagant life I lived in my head and put down in the notebook in front of me.

Caffe Mediterraneum, Berkeley, CA

I usually had a favorite cafe, associated with the places and times I worked, though they often changed. If it disappeared it was like losing a friend. For writing, one of the best was on Sutter Street in San Francisco, on the second floor above an art supply store. The tables were not so close together that you couldn’t overhear others if you wanted to, but far enough apart that you could hear yourself think. Best of all, you could sit at a window and look down into Sutter Street, watching people. The light at a particular time of day, the shape of the room, the demeanor of the server, all made up the atmosphere which acquired an almost religious significance. The mystique had to do with the brioche they served, the people I had seen from the windows walking up the street, the friends I met there.

Not least, were the words I read and sometimes wrote in these hallowed spaces. Writing was an evocation of the senses. As in drawing, the more detail you noticed, the more evocative the piece became. I was addicted to writing, to putting on paper words connecting mind and world. Not so much as a letter written to the world, but to my growing self. It turned out I wasn’t alone!

By the time Natalie Goldberg made writing in restaurants almost a cliché, I was done. Not with journaling, of course, but with sitting in public places to do it. These days, while bookstores close, Moleskine, whose revived notebooks are world-famous, is opening its own stores! In their words, they represent, “around the world, a symbol of contemporary nomadism.” It turns out your notebook can tie your whole, roaming life together!

For Marty, the middle sister who has always loved books and whose horizons widen to California in about 1967, coffee shops are thrilling. She lives with a Jewish family, the members of which enlighten her about politics. She is homesick, but family life eases the difficulty of crossing yet another cultural divide.

Having found a life I love and no longer so much in need of intellectual refuge, I nevertheless still enjoy the balcony seat at a wonderful coffee shop on occasion. No laptop sits in front of me, separating me from the world. The cup of coffee, the buttery croissant, my pen rather connect me to it, my hands moving between them with delight.

Writing Rough

Longhand is defined as “ordinary handwriting, in which letters, words, etc., are set down in full, as opposed to shorthand or to typing.” I have always loved cursive and remember spending hours in high school classes practicing my penmanship, particularly my long name! (I was recently told that “k’s” are funny. My name has lots of them! People have asked me more than once if it was Finnish.)

Acquiring some speed in cursive, I took pounds of handwritten notes throughout college. I never learned shorthand, so most of them were readable, taken down in Shaeffer’s cartridge pens with blue ink. At the time, I was convinced that writing down as much of the teaching as I could was helping me to learn it. These notes have not survived, but I do have letters written home at that time, in that watery blue ink!

Recently I’ve been interested in the kinds of work for which I use longhand as opposed to typing. Keyboards have now become so ubiquitous in our lives that schools hardly bother to insist on handwriting skill. But pens and notebooks are cheaper to carry around than computers. You can use them in the sun and longhand has an intimate physical quality. Sometimes other physical aspects of the writing get onto the page, like the tracing of a leaf shadow, or a splash of your coffee. When I get close to a finished written product, of course I use a keyboard. But for rough notes, for journals, for thinking, I like handwriting.

Journaling, the addiction that has sustained me since I read “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a teenager and took up the practice, is usually done by hand. As opposed to weblogs, which are intended for publication and thus in readable print, journaling is private. Because I find I am not going to edit the cheap spiral bound books I carried everywhere with me, I now use the classic Moleskin notebooks. Like writers everywhere, I am grateful to the Italian company who revived them! Necessarily chronological and linear, there is no database searching in these journals. But I do reread them to find out what ideas I’ve had (and lost) at different times.

Though they weren’t new to me, I wasn’t immune to the flare-up of writing practices which Natalie Goldberg set off in 1986 with her book Writing Down the Bones. She advocated emptying the contents of your mind into notebooks, just to find out what you thought. Her central idea was to keep the hand moving; don’t control it or censor your thoughts. It might result in pedestrian, everyday thoughts, but you might also surprise yourself into deeper self-knowledge. Of course, “writing practice” as Goldberg described it, was done with handwriting.

Yesterday, as Don and I drove back from dismantling a film set in San Francisco and other errands, we wrote a short script he needed for the promo film he is shooting today. As he talked, I wrote a longhand version of the script in a tiny notebook. I carry versions of this notebook everywhere, for lists and notes. Organizing the work when we got home, Don said, “Okay, if you type it up while it’s still fresh, I’ll unload everything!”

What I found in working on The Pastor’s Kids was that, when I wasn’t sure what I was doing or what details were going into a chapter, I would sit somewhere writing rough, at speed in longhand, whatever thoughts and ideas I had. These pages circled around characters and ideas, going beyond and under what actually got into the chapter. Notes about time and place, details I wanted to capture, references which brought back whole incidents, things I didn’t want to forget. I shoved them all rudely onto paper. No ability to search here either, but the brain doesn’t need it. It is holographic, in the sense that each piece of the brain’s memory contains some information about the whole. A visual detail, a smell can bring back whole pieces of one’s past.

And what do we make of the fact that a handwritten document is a holograph, written entirely in the handwriting of the person under whose name it appears? Does each piece of handwriting contain a bit of the whole? Perhaps!