Beginnings are a bitch
The inaugural issue of a twice-monthly, rambling newsletter featuring my story-related thoughts.
I’ve been obsessed with stories for a long time. Reading books was the best escape from my childhood. And then one summer in high school, my mother forced me to take a creative writing workshop, and those two weeks changed my life. I’d been planning a mathy/sciency life. Maybe I’d be a computer programmer, or a chemist, or, in my wildest dreams, work for NASA. Math was seductive to me. I was a child raised in chaos, but math class offered me the opportunity to turn chaos into order, and occasionally to find order in the chaos itself. Five class periods a week, for twelve years.
Yet, in creative writing I found another way to tame the chaos. I didn’t switch career trajectories immediately. I took every math and science course available to me at my excellent small town Virginia public school (shout out to Handley High School where I was able to rack up credits in AP Physics, Chemistry and Calculus along with three years of computer science).
But while spending a lot of time using a TI-82 calculator, I began calling myself “a writer” and reading David Foster Wallace and talking about his work all time (which I know is insufferable, but I will also never apologize for my love of the late great Wallace: Infinite Jest is a masterpiece, and I know because I read the whole book twice). But when it was time to go to college, I chose words because math wasn’t enough. Even physics wasn’t enough. I needed to understand the universe in a way that I (personally) couldn’t do with numbers.
If I was going to save myself from breaking apart, I needed words.
You can read about my personal story in more depth in The Washington Post, but the cliff notes version goes like this. I was four years old when my mother and I were shot by a stranger in broad daylight on a busy street in New Orleans, in front of the public library we patronized every Saturday. The man approached. He was dirty all over. Unkempt. Stumbling. Slurring his words.
He declared that he was going to kill us, then pulled out a gun and began shooting. My mother was shot but managed to turn around and throw her body on top of mine, shielding me from the worst, but we were both shot. I had a collapsed lung and surface wounds but was released from the hospital after a week. I have no permanent physical injuries. My mom, on the other hand, had been hit in the spine when she threw her body over me and almost bled out on the sidewalk. She was paralyzed from the neck down and not expected to live. But she did, because she just flat out refused to die. My mom lived as a quadriplegic for 20 years, before finally succumbing to her injuries.
Everything in my life since—it’s been shaped by that day. I had a fairly typical life—a fairly typical family, parents who adored me, a grandmother who doted on me, friends, and a preschool I liked. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, there was plenty of dysfunction under the surface. My parents were on the verge of divorce before the shooting changed their minds. But we were lucky to be more or less happy. Even “normal.” And then, one Saturday, were no longer lucky. And that has made all the difference.
And so I write.
I write because I have to. I come from a place you only leave after you've been forged in some kind of fire. It's a surprisingly useful place to come from. Suffering makes you tough. Trauma gives you character and empathy (if you’re lucky), and certainly provides lots of inspiration for fiction and poetry. But you have to leave the fire, to survive.
I write because I have hope.
I write for tomorrow, because it’s not just promised, it always comes.
I write to understand my mother’s intense love for me, and her imperfections, and her fury, and her on again/off again relationship with unkindness. I write to understand why Denise Doyle Vawter didn’t even think before she threw her body over mine. I’m a mom now, and so I understand her perspective more than I did at 10 or 25, but luckily I’ve never been in a situation remotely like that, as mom with my own kid. I write to understand how, several years before I was born, she broke off an engagement to the “right sort of guy” at twenty-three and then left her whole life behind to hitchhike around Europe, sleep outside sometimes (once on the steps of the Acropolis), and later work on a kibbutz. I write because I need to understand how to be a mother without a mother: I need to ask her so many questions and to have so many Christmas dinners, and fights.
I write to understand Skip Vawter, my father, who wasn’t present when we got shot, but tried to pick up all the pieces of his family. It was just the three of us. In the four short years he lived after the shooting, before dying of unrelated heart disease, my dad kept me safe, physically and mentally, and gave me four more years to be a child. He wasn’t perfect. But he was practical, calm in a crisis, and though he was a recovering alcoholic, he never relapsed after the shooting. Not once. Also, he had a dream about my mother before they met, and years before they met, while in a recon unit in the army, he used to sneak into East Berlin pretending to be German. I have two older half sisters, one of them half German and so there’s a few dozen more stories to tell.
I write to understand my English grandmother, orphaned during the first World War. She raised five children during the Depression and World War II, despite having a gambling, alcoholic husband who disappeared for years at a time. She was the first person I saw when I woke up after surgery to repair my lung, in 1984. She raised me too.
I write to understand my marriage, my husband’s love. I write to understand so many aspects motherhood that have nothing to do with my own parents. I write to understand my 10-year-old son’s whimsy.
I write to understand the people at parties in the suburbs, where I live, who invite us to parties but then will only talk about home improvement projects (I call these the Cabinet People), because of course they also contain multitudes.
I also write because it’s fun.
I write because I’m addicted to that feeling of getting lost in fiction, of getting completely into my head in order to get completely out of my head. There’s so much about my obsession with stories that is about light, not darkness.
Creative writing is the only thing I do that gives me more energy than I put into it. It’s kind of magic.
Being a writer is the only way I know how to love my husband like he should be loved.
Being a writer is the only way I know how to be the mother my little boy deserves.
It’s the only way I know how to live. To survive. To be a person. And so I keep writing.
Guns and trauma and grief, that shit steals so much from you—even your ability to be a person.
Stories are my way of stealing my life back. And when I write about my parents and transform versions of them into fictional characters (as I have in the novel I’m currently querying) I even get to steal my parents lives back.
So that’s why I write fiction and nonfiction, and sometimes poetry. It’s why I read. And write and edit stories about local books and the intersection of arts, culture, and social change in the D.C. area for DCTRENDING.com, where I’m the local authors editor.
And it’s why I’ve started this newsletter. To discuss my thoughts, some random, some hopefully well thought out, on books, movies, TV, my own writing challenges, stories people tell at parties, stories my kid comes up with, the reason my family spent a year watching almost all of modern Doctor Who, and why we’ve binged The Office three times during the pandemic, and why my husband got obsessed about a book about salt (there’s a surprising amount of drama around table salt). And why the stories my cousin and I tell each other, about our shared childhood, matter so much to me.
Stories make us human. They bring us together. Sometimes they push us apart, even violently. But they are always here. We have evidence of humans telling stories before recorded history. And then we have recorded history, and with it recorded literature. Gilgamesh. The Odyssey. Freaking Sophocles writing really complicated Greek tragedies over 2000 years ago.
I believe there’s nothing more fundamental to the human experience than storytelling. For better or for worse, it’s how we make sense of the world and move from tragedy to tragedy or joy to joy.
If you want to learn more about me, check out my website: www.norahvawter.com, the local authors section of DCTRENDING, and follow me on Twitter @norahvawter.
Coming in May:
Issue #2
On the sublime and the 18th century tripartite theory of aesthetics, and how an Age of Enlightenment philosophy is relevant to the stories we’re telling in 2023. I promise.
And Issue #3
On why the CW series The Vampire Diaries is actually brilliant storytelling and has inspired my own writing. I know the name of the series sounds silly, but I think you’ll find this interesting.
Until next time, I’m wishing you all beautiful days and juicy stories,
Norah
LOVE THIS, Norah <3 <3 <3 <3 .
"Cabinet people" <- uh huh.