We write to taste life twice.

This past week, Piper held one of it's largest events this year. As part of our Distinguished Visiting Writer's Series, Amy Tan visited the house on October 17th. We had been preparing for this since I was hired in May. Before I left for New York, on October 8th, I had to gather all of the different materials that we were going to need for the event. The day I returned back to work, October 16th, it was chaos. I had dozens upon dozens of emails, from the general email, from my work account, from my personal/work/school account. I had a handful of new Piper Friends, that needed to be added to the database and sent a care package. I had RSVP's and questions about the event. I had upset Piper Friends, who wanted to bring their husbands but didn't want to pay for a Piper Friend membership for them. I had new Your Novel Year Applicants, workshop registrees, and cancelations. 

I was instructed not to answer any of them. Unless it was absolutely urgent, I was to focus on nothing but Amy Tan. 

In her contract, she makes it clear that she brings her dog Bobo with her everywhere. In the car, on stage, on the airplane in first class. It also says that portobello mushrooms are not allowed to be served, or in sight, while she is visiting. I had picked up Joy Luck Club a few months ago, intrigued but with a bad taste in my mouth (I don't know why though...), and read the first couple of chapters before throwing it aside. With how much I have to read for school, it is very rare that I actually find time to read for pleasure -- although much of my reading for school is pleasurable. Amy Tan didn't make the cut.

I was intimidated to say the least. My co-worker Mollie was interviewing her, and as they finished up I introduced myself. Her hands were fragile, and she only briefly looked up at me. I then had to escort her to an MFA workshop she was hosting, a Q&A, and I was instructed to ask questions whenever there was an awkward moment of silence. As I walked with her, and our event coordinator Gwen, to our neighboring building, Old Main, neither of them made eye contact with me once and continued their conversation without inviting me.

Okay, well this is awkward.

And then finally, as we are on the last steps of the grandiose, late 1800's staircase, she makes eye contact. It's like the popular girls told me I can sit with them. She is speaking of her editor, calling her "miraculous" and referring to her own work as horrendous. She says that she needs her editor, that otherwise she feels naked.

I know exactly how she feels.

I feel so naked when I write. I feel like it's another part of me--one that few people know. Even my dad always comments, "you write so well. It is nothing how you talk." I talk too fast, and usually before I have the chance to think about what I am saying. Many have said that I have "no filter." I come across ditsy and bubbly and not quite sure what she's talking about. I hide things, I lie. I exaggerate and make up facts.

When I write, I know what I am talking about. I'll edit and re-edit, add in and then take out words, obsess over how each word rolls off your tongue, and rearrange my sentences no short of a million times. Everything I say, I mean with the uttermost of meaning. I can perfect the truth and make it worthy and reliable. I can submerse myself in the facts of a story or person or time or place until I have seen it from all angles, and am confident in my interpretation of the event. It is a me as me gets.

And that's why I get nervous. I think it is too me, that I am narcissistic, that I think I'm better than I really am. I think back to earlier pieces I wrote, how I thought they were so perfect at the time, and how childish they would grow to be. I think, Of course my dad gives me all of those compliments-- he doesn't know anything about the literary world. He will say: "Lauren, your talent is so special. You are going places." And it will be the nicest thing he's ever said, and I will be unsure of how much truth it holds. 

I've wanted to show the writer me for quite sometime now. I'm bursting at the seams, and she's intent on coming out. I'll leak a few poems on a food blog, I'll submit a story to a writing contest, letting bits of her drip out onto the me that everyone sees, tweaking the image that everyone knows so well. I'll post on facebook and ask for editors for a story, and I'll always get good replies. I'm known well, simply as Lauren Rice. I have too many friends than I know what to do with, and quite the list of enemies too. I am known as beautiful, as a drunk, as nice, as funny, sometimes as a slut, sometimes as a prude, as the girl who can write A papers for $20 a page, as a smoker, as a student, as an old friend. I am known for a million and one reasons, yet very few know me as a writer. And I tell myself that it will come with time-- that I'll get into my capstone classes with ease, and find a good graduate program. I tell myself that with all the studying that I do, and plan to continue doing, on writing, will have a benefit. I will be a good writer, I'll have to be. 

But it could all get fucked up so easily too. What if I don't get into my capstone? Just switch my major? Switch my dream? And I'm afraid that if I label myself as a writer, and then my plans don't follow through, that I'll be labeled as a failed writer. Simply, I'm afraid to expose this side of me in fear of rejection, just like most writers. And I want that editor, to blanket my words and soften the edges, to make it good and tell me it's beautiful and it's going to be published.

But in this era, social media is everything. All I would really have to do is give my stories some exposure and I would be sure to find lovers and haters. I have those who love me, and those who hate me. I assume it would go the same for my stories. But it means that I don't have that in-between person, and that I'm posting them naked to the real mean world. And I'm scared they won't be as good as I think they are.

And then I sat with Amy Tan through the Q&A workshop. I took notes and below are some of them:

• Who cares what people think--"I have to write what I need to write"
• The images in the story can be the most powerful pieces
• Images begin in childhood-- -nightmares, hallucinations
• You see things different as a child
• The world is mine, and everything in this world is a creation of my mind. Once I die, the entire world in my head dies too. That's why I have to write.
• An author is public, a writer is private
• "Pain is not a feeling, it's a place, a very lonely place"

She got to me. She tugged at the strings of my heart, and made me feel something inside. Everything she said confirmed my dreams are plausible. She spoke my thoughts, and made me feel that special thing that you can only feel when admiring other writers. It like how they say to "read like a writer." I had been doing that my entire life-- making notes of passages, scrambling to find a highlighter to highlight a piece of dialogue. I've been acting like a writer for nearly my entire life too. I had kept a journal until my late teens, which are all neatly tucked into my bookshelf. I have at least a hundred unnamed, random documents that I typed through ferocious tears or in the middle of the night while manic. I have notebooks upon notebooks with scrambled messages on most of the pages. I write on everything I can find. And I understood everything she said about writing, I kept nodding my head and trying to keep myself from asking (or commenting) a million things.

I guess you could say my fire was running on low fuel, and she just ignited the fire a bit more. And this was before, her hilarious, heartfelt, and interesting talk at The Tempe Center for the Arts. Which made me one of her biggest fans from this day forward.

Thank you Amy Tan. I'll definitely be picking up a copy of The Valley of Amazement this November.

Below is the quote I told her after the Q&A.