Once there was a man who wanted to write, but he didn’t know how to do it. 

You just figure out the story and sit down and write it, everyone said. It’s easy!

So the man sat down and tried and tried, but for some reason it didn’t seem to work.

What’s the story? he said. How do you know? How do you know what it is?



Then one day the man saw on the news that a famous writer was in town. He was giving a reading at the local bookstore.

I’ll go ask him! said the man.

At the reading that night, the man sat and listened politely while the famous writer read. And afterward, he raised his hand.

I would like to be a writer, he said. But for some reason, I just can’t do it. I’m having trouble with the story part. I don’t understand how you know what it is. How do you know what to write?

The famous writer sat there and looked at him.

Well, he said, it’s easy. You start at the beginning, and let it unfold. When you get to the end, walk away.

Okay, said the man, and went home to his desk. He sat there and stared at the page.

But what’s the beginning? he said in frustration. None of this makes any sense!

That night the man drove to the next town over, where the famous writer was doing another reading.

But how do you know what the beginning is? he yelled, when the writer had finally closed his book.

The writer sat there and looked at him.

Look, he said. You listen. You sit very still, and listen to your heart. When your heart speaks, you start taking dictation.

So the man went home and grabbed some paper. He sharpened his pencil and sat down at his desk. He closed his eyes and took a breath, and listened to the inside of himself.

He stayed like that for a long, long time, but nothing at all ever happened. He waited and waited for his heart to speak.

This is stupid, he finally said. I’m going walking.

So the man stood up and walked out the door. He walked down the path to the road. And then he just kept walking on. He never once looked back.

He walked and walked across the town, and then across the state. And then he just wandered aimlessly.

Sometimes he traveled freight.

He lived that way for many, many years. He went everywhere, met people, did things. He was always busy; he had no time to stop and think. It never even dawned on him to sleep.

But then one night the man was in a bar, and he saw the famous writer in the back. The writer was laughing and drinking with friends.

The man stayed there and watched them all night.

And when the writer left, the man followed him discreetly—from a distance, like a detective on TV. And when the writer turned into his fancy hotel, the man watched for a light to go on from the street.

Late that night, the man broke into the writer’s room, and stood over his bed in the dark. He looked at the writer lying there before him.

The vacation was Charles’s idea, insisted upon despite – or more accurately because of – the fact that I was still waiting for my diagnosis. He’d always been quietly of the opinion that my illness was all in my head. Not that he said so, but the thought slipped in between us. In bed when he ran his fngers down my back and told me that my skin was beautiful, my skin was so perfect. When he handed me a cup of tea, along with a small dish of ice cubes to cool the water, and asked not how I was, but how I felt. It sat in that small sea of wrinkles between his eyebrows, giving him what looked, to all the world but me, like an expression of genuine concern.

We are writing to you in the first-person plural. We may or may not be named Stacy, Laura, Genevieve. We are apes and we are soldiers. We may or may not be kidding. Our spokesperson is named Sally Sprout. She is happy to tell you why we won’t tell you our names: *They want to be seen as people. They want to emphasize that they are not anti-male, anti-family, anti-children ... They want to emphasize that they are sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers. *We want to be seen as people, so we dress up as gorillas. That way we are less particular. Why our costumes? *Dismiss the essence if people knew who individuals. Stop worrying about children. No personal gains, only intangibles.* We aren’t confessional. We aren’t secreting our lives through our pores or our poems. We aren’t making this personal. We just want to make ourselves known, we want to make ourselves un-ignorable. We want to make ourselves—not ourselves. We want to wear masks instead. We want to MAKE, period. *What’s the matter with you—you having your period—you’ve never had one.* We sign our notes, *with love and bananas.*



We want to take you to Big Dick City, because we’ve been living there for a while. We want to take you into the kitchen and let you cook us dinner. *We have been unable to escape the burden of responsibility of home and family—the kitchen represents the never ending albatross posited by both society and upbringing on the woman artist. *We want to show you our albatross.



We want to hang it around your neck.



Yes, you. Yes, yours.



Come watch our thousand tiny apes march along the painted freeway toward the fabled museum. We hit museums. We give them report cards. *Has anyone tried to unmask us? We have been harassed / escorted off MFA property by police. *



We may or may not include a woman named Nadine, who packs her two kids’ school lunch sandwiches at night to give herself ten more minutes to draw in the morning. One peanut butter and jelly; one peanut butter and honey. She has a rage in her so vast she could never look at it, because there would be no end to the looking. We may or may not include a woman named Grace, old as dirt; who wants her bones ground to powder when she dies and mixed into paint for other women to use.



We may or may not include a woman named Nancy, a woman named Gwendolyn, a woman named Elvira, a woman named cake batter, a woman named casserole, a woman named Late for School, nicknamed Late for short, a woman named Inadequate Mother, a woman named hymen, a woman named after whatever your uterus was called in whatever language God was speaking when he sentenced Eve to childbirth. We may or may not include a woman named God.



We want to build our installation from whatever’s left over from our homes: cloth and paper and cardboard; ironing boards and dryer lint and orphaned socks; whatever the albatross shits and surrenders. We want to build a jungle. We’d build a giant placenta from uncooked macaroni, fallopian tubes from plastic straws, ovarian cysts from gummy fruit snacks, just to be the women making woman-art, just to say fuck you to your demand that we don’t. *I paint w/ my cunt. *We paint graffiti. *War is menstruation envy. Bent down so long, looks like up to me. *Things are looking up for us. Come see.



Sincerely yours,



With love and costumes, love and cream cheese, love and morning cereal. With love and laundry detergent, varsity jackets, late night blow jobs. With love and tampons, love and yes-I’m-listening, love and to-do-lists, love like an albatross; love like a song we can’t help singing. With love and bananas—and none of our names, and all of our lives.



 



*Italicized sections are quotes from the folders and drafts in the archives.



This piece was originally published in Gulf Coast Magazine