Barbara Sapienza, Why I Write

“The writer follows her hand,” Gabrielle Roth, creator of 5Rhythms Dance, tells us, just “as the singer surrenders to the song, the mother to the child.”

Writing for me is a daily practice, a gateway, which like a Zen prayer gives me more space. But it’s the mechanics of writing that intrigues me. I follow my hand. I always loved handwriting. It began in third grade, (1953) when Miss Connelly handed me a white lined paper and a special pen with a sharp point to dip into an inkwell, set in the small wooden desk.  I love the white page with lines, placing the letters side by side, watching the curve or the way a letter hangs below the line or stands up tall. It was there in that brick schoolhouse in Boston I began the handwriting meditation that fifty years later would become my first novel. Yes, I’ve handwritten five novels.

Writing quells my loneliness. I’m beginning to find that Loneliness is my muse.  Another name for her is Sweet Tears. In Spanish Lagrimas Dulce.

When I write, I commune with her on the page. She is the blood in my veins that crosses the white vastness, drawing me as a river pulls toward the ocean.  The writer Dinty Moore calls this The Invisible Magnetic River. Writing connects me with the current that pushes and pulls and connects me with the home place, the Great Mother, the ocean of my being.

Loneliness pushes my pen. I’m in good company. Hafiz, the Persian poet, says 

“Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few humans and even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need for God absolutely clear.”

When I feel Her, I pick up the pen and follow my hand. Writing is a way of connecting to myself and others. Perhaps this muse is my own intuition, guiding me to transform the loneliness into expression.

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing, spoke in a group round table at the San Miguel Writers Conference in February 2020. As she spoke about her protagonist Kya, the marsh girl, I thought of my own protagonists. She asked, “Why is the marsh girl surviving this way? What happened? How do we know how to behave if we don’t have a group? What happens if you’re lonely and you don’t have the natal group you’re supposed to have? The one you always know will be there for you.” 

I consider that my protagonists, Frances Pia (Anchor Out 2017) and Lavinia Lavinia (The Laundress 2020) search for their natal groups, looking for a safe home. I look to my muse, Loneliness, for the answer. My search is also for belonging, isn’t every one’s? 

Like many people from adolescence, if not before, I longed for connection. When I ask this question I’m transported to an early memory. 

It’s 1959. I’m thirteen. It’s a summer day at Kingston Lake, New Hampshire where I’m on vacation with a school chum. But I stand alone at the waters edge, while the other kids are swimming, jumping, laughing and playing. I walk slowly back and forth, feeling pretty with D.A, a duck’s ass haircut, a sexy black bathing suit with side strips of fleshy lace pointing down toward long beautiful thighs; toes gripping soft wet sand for life. With each step my heart falls and with it comes tears. 

 I want to swim, to join, to play, to laugh but my mother said,  “If you want to go, you have to promise not to go in the water more than knee deep. Angie’s friend drowned.”

I must disobey my instinct to keep my promise. I’m a loyal dog, excluded from the group.

 Fast forward: It’s the mid nineties.  I’m fifty now and mixing the pasts with the present and they are the same. I am at a conference in Sonoma, CA , again standing outside a circle of my psychology colleagues. We are participating in a role-play exercise where the past is my present. 

“Where is Barbara?” the facilitator asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Barbara!  Barbara!” friends call.

“I’m here,” I say.

“Where are you?”

“At the edge.” 

“Come in.”

“I can’t.”

“Ask one of us to help you,” Jim says.

Silence fills the room. Expectancy.

I ask Arthur, the one in the group whom I’ve known the longest. He will help, I must have thought.

 “Please help me? I’m stuck.” 

Silence. 

 “I can’t.” 

There is a hush. I fall deeper into my despairing isolation. No one moves in this sea of loneliness. We are processing, after all this is a psychotherapy process group.

“Tell her why, Arthur,” Jim says.

“Because if I help you, I’ll drown.”

Arthur knows how to save himself.

Arthur, like me, is an outsider, depressed and lonely, in the sea of humanity, however, he learned to acknowledge his loneliness to protect himself.

“Wait!” Three women friends hop onto their imaginary raft and row to shore, pull me aboard.

I am rescued.

The writing rescues me now. I follow the hand and muse, and there she is, in the form of my protagonists, sharing her world. The Sufi poets talk about the path as a gateway. I follow my hand on the path. I trust my muse will bring me courage to write what has been buried inside me, to feel less lonely and to open my heart to what is.

—

THE LAUNDRESS

Set among the steep streets and stunning vistas of San Francisco, The Laundress: A Novel (May 19, 2020; She Writes Press; paperback original; $16.95; 9781631526794) by Barbara Sapienza is a coming-of-age story for anyone who’s ever sought to understand where they came from in order to figure out who they’re meant to become.

Twenty-six year old Lavinia Lavinia is haunted by the secret of why she was whisked away from Italy at four years old by her Uncle Sal, and what happened to her parents. The Law of Omertá—silence—prevails among her blood relatives, and now that Sal’s gone back to Italy after the death of his wife Aunt Rose, she’s living on her own in the home where they raised her.

Abandoned by the only family she knows and burdened by her unknown heritage, Lavinia drifts aimlessly through the charmed city working as a personal laundress to a diverse cast of San Francisco residents—people with stories as complicated as her own.

Through the sacred and ancient ritual of washing clothes, and with the help of her best friend Kinky and her boyfriend Mario, Lavinia unveils the mystery of her life, rediscovering herself and finding a new family.

Sapienza’s follow-up novel looks closely at the adverse effects of secrets in a family, the intricacies of healing, and the incredible value of chosen relationships.

—
Barbara Sapienza, PhD, is a retired clinical psychologist and an alumna of San Francisco State University’s creative writing master’s program. She writes and paints, nourished by her spiritual practices of meditation, tai chi, and dance. Her family, friends, and grandchildren are her teachers. Her first novel, Anchor Out (She Writes Press, 2017) received an IPPY bronze medal for Best Regional Fiction, West Coast. Sapienza lives in Sausalito, CA, with her husband.

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