On Witnessing a Natural Phenomenon and Calling Myself a Writer

On Witnessing a Natural Phenomenon and Calling Myself a Writer

I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where during the summers my family swam in Mobile Bay’s latte-colored water. The bay and its watershed, now referred to by some as “North America’s Amazon,” was to me as a child as fraught with dangers as the actual Amazon. My toes sunk into the muck and silt of the bay’s bottom when I ventured ankle-deep into the water, and my lungs filled with the stench of fish and fumes from the distant paper mill. I feared drop-offs I couldn’t see. I feared falling into a delta sludge turned quicksand or being dragged into the bay by a scaly creature that lived in the deep. My younger cousin ran headlong into the water. She splashed and giggled, swam past the end of my uncle’s rickety wharf and floated face-up. I harbored fear enough for us both.

I wonder sometimes if I approached my early writing life with the same trepidation, waiting for the water to clear, the mud to turn sandy, for fairer conditions. But Mobile Bay rarely runs clear, and the mineral-rich mud seems sand-adverse. Occasionally, though, a rare occurrence bubbles to the surface, and the bay boils over with fish. They flop, leaping and bunching toward shore, into what might be called a stampede if they were anything other than fish. Mobilians term this a jubilee, a phenomenon related to oxygen disappearing from the bay except in the shallowest waters, which causes fish and shellfish suddenly to crowd and swarm toward shore.

Surface temperature, wind direction, and time of day play a role as well, although it’s anyone’s guess about a jubilee’s exact timing or where along the bay’s Eastern shoreline one will occur. Most jubilees last mere minutes, but that summer, as I stood timidly on shore, I witnessed this miracle. Many area residents, it is worth noting, live their entire lives without seeing a jubilee, but there I was, trying to avoid the water, when fish of every kind surged toward shore. Soon people were running with buckets and nets in hand toward flounder, mullet, and red snapper.

Writing-wise, my jubilee moment was when I began toeing the waters of writers conferences, and one accepted me into its fold. It happened to be a women’s writing retreat. Everywhere writers. Some published. Many speaking to and interacting with me. Another miracle, I thought. I collected the moments with these writers into compartments in my mind. I cherished them and inched my way toward calling myself a writer.

Not long after, I went to graduate school in New Mexico—not that a graduate degree, a.k.a., MFA, is necessary for a writing life. For me, the decision was about giving myself space and time to create. 

After I completed my degree, I worked full-time jobs as a technical editor for 12 years, jobs seemingly unrelated to the short stories and fiction I wrote at 5 a.m. on weekdays and for a few hours each weekend. When I could afford it, I took classes, participated in workshops, went to conferences, and submitted my work. The steady interaction with other writers and readers kept me accountable, and more importantly, helped me build my writing community. Sometimes I overslept or didn’t write.

Sometimes despair and self-doubt crept in, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that community and accountability made the difference. Sitting down to write was—and is—the hard part. It is the muddy bottom, the stink of fish, the murky water. Yet the work is discovery and on the best days is a jubilee. 

Publication came to me over time. I published my first full-length short story in 2014, four years after completing my graduate program. Four years after that, I won a short-story contest. Another four years passed before my first book of fiction, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories, was released. Those years represent hundreds of rejections, but over time, I came to see how willy-nilly rejections could be. Sometimes my piece wasn’t a fit, an issue was full, my submission didn’t appeal to those particular readers, etc. Whatever the reason, the rejections helped me see that accepting myself, breaching the soft bottom and the blue-brown water, has always been the true work ahead of me. 

That childhood summer, after witnessing a jubilee, I ventured into the bay without coaxing, and like my cousin, floated past the wharf. The bay had become magical, a place where fish congregated and people sprinted from houses hauling wash tubs on their backs. Writing took a similar path. Once I cleared away my excuses for not fully claiming my ground, I could fall backward into high tide and float. I could say for certain, I’m a writer. 

The bay where I swam hopefully will thrive long past my time in its waters. Nothing is for certain, given climate change and human folly, but for now, I worry less about the water’s depths or the spits of tar that occasionally blot the shoreline. And as for the locals who ran with their nets and buckets in hand, they taught me about community. The empty beach where I stood as a child suddenly had pulsed with people. As writers, we often create in solitary spaces, but our writing lives, our lives in general, are made fresh and new in community. 

Maybe the best thing I did during the two years before my book was published was to stop comparing my success to someone else’s idea of “writing success.” I wrote instead toward the woman I am and the one I want to be, toward the stories I need to tell. I let go of the fear that held me back and found my own path into the bay—not that I’m fearless or have it all figured out. It’s the work of a lifetime, or of several lifetimes, because the bay is large and looming.

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Ramona Reeves’ interlinked story collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and is set in Mobile, Alabama, where she grew up. She has been awarded an AROHO fellowship, a residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, a scholarship from Community of Writers, and the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize. She also has served as an associate fiction editor for Kallisto Gaia Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, Pembroke, Superstition Review, Texas Highways and others.

SOCIAL LINKS
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IT FALLS GENTLY ALL AROUND AND OTHER STORIES

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers