I remember buying my two rocking chairs, my red and yellow ones and hauling them from my cabin to Bedlam Farm and now back to this farm. Since moving here, I have not sat in either one of them, except to cuddle with a barn cat for a few minutes, there always seems to be a chicken or a barn cat in them. It seems there might be something wrong with that, are the chickens and cats supposed to drive the humans off of their own porch. Still, the porch has become a famous porch, people travel long distances to come and photograph it, it is a riot of life, and the gray hen is not worried about my sensibilities and priorities. When Flo got up to stretch, the gray hen hopped right up and herself comfortable and out of the rain.
When I came out to take a photo, she gave me a withering look, annoyed at my disturbing her.
In another time, writers and artists and poets and photographers were private people, they did their work in studies and offices. Celebrities, politicians, entertainers were public people, they worked in the open, inter-acted with the public, gave up the option of privacy and isolation, they lived behind big walls, surrounded by barriers guards. There was a clear boundary between the private and the public life, when a book was published, there was no expectation of anything more than reading it.
Our world has changed, and rapidly, there are no private people anymore, only public people. The Internet is a wall buster, walls and boundaries don’t matter, we are, in fact, all connected. All of our lives are lived in the open, the details of our lives available to retailers, governments, insurance companies, political groups and corporations, people post their whereabouts on Facebook, their photographs on Instagram, their sketches on Pinterest and then, of course, there is the government and the police, gathering data and photographs in the name of our safety.
The very idea of the private life seems to be vanishing, no longer a choice, no longer an option. For most of my writing years, I worked alone and in solitude, I wrote my book, edited it and published it, I left my private life once every few years to travel to bookstores, meet my readers, answer some questions, and then, and with blessed relief, I withdrew. A private life was an option for me, there was no Amazon to record my book purchases and sell the information to hardware stores, no social media, no e-mail queue. I never communicated with readers, the details and scope of my life was private and jealously guarded. People could type up letters and mail them to my publisher, a process that took months and was so laborious few people did it.
Imagine this: Readers had no idea where I lived who I lived with, whether I had a child, what I really looked like, what I did all day, even what my dogs looked like. I confess I liked that privacy, I liked the fact that my work had to speak for itself, uninfluenced by any knowledge of my private life or beliefs or history. There was a mystery to me, people were curious about me, what I was like, mostly because they never knew, there was no way for them to know.
This weekend, holding the first of two Open Houses At Bedlam Farm (the next is September 1), I was acutely aware of how public my life has become, how public I have chosen to make it and what that means for creativity. A public life requires a great deal of management. I get many more messages than I can grasp or answer, I have passwords and logins to remember, a happening in my life can be a photo, a story, a post, a video or a podcast. People know what I am like, what I look like, how I think, they know me better than my own family.
Hundreds of people, many touting cellphone cameras, came to see Maria and I and I was struggling to remember who they were, how I had met them, what I knew about them. They photographed me and every inch of the farm, every animal, such a thing would have seemed horrific to me a few short years ago. I talk to Apple more than to my siblings and I am working continuously to bring my creative life into this new and open space, where it must live and shine to survive. Last year I asked my former agent what I needed to do to be successful in the new world. Decades ago, my first agent spend hours sending me good books to read, talking to me about narrative and plot development and characters and language. My new agent told me what I needed most was to have 40,000 likes on Facebook.
I thought of my favorite writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won a Nobel Prize with no likes on Facebook but that is nostalgia, it is a trap. For years the most famous writer in the world, he lived a private life, I never saw a photo of his home, had any idea what he did all day, or knew what his wife looked like. I wanted to live in the world that exists, not the one that is gone.
My fellow writers have mostly been shocked and a little horrified at my decision to share my life on a blog. This has never been the writer’s life, and the transition has been much more difficult than it might seem, I began this process reluctantly, and then came to believe it was not only necessary, but the essence of creativity. What is more creative than change? The New York Times has never grasped the real meaning of interactivity, which is about defining a new relationship with the buyer of stories, the buyers of art. Thus they and their old world colleagues are struggling to make the transition. Maria was an intensely shy and private person when I met her, she didn’t even have a cell phone, let alone a computer. Now, I smile when I see her moving about the farm with her Iphone – and me – snapping photos of her work and the dogs to put up on her blog.
It is no longer good enough to offer a work to public – a book, a quilt or scarf – and tell them to take it or leave it, to follow the reviews. The arbiters of culture are gone, the people reading this are the new arbiters of culture, they are the reviews. It is you who decide who is successful and who isn’t, who gets to survive in the new world and who doesn’t. And you have made it clear you expect to know the writer, the artist, to share the experience of creativity rather than simply buy it.
My creative process has seen a continuous opening up to people who have so many choices now about what they read and see, people who used to have so few. I keep much of my life private – what happens inside the farmhouse is not photographed or discussed – what happens outside is shared. But more and more, I share the journey of my life, my struggle to live a meaningful life, my efforts to deal with fear and depression, these accounts are my new book, my story. I meet you all the time in the new digital community, the open groups, social media sites, image sharing sites.
In the past five years, I have changed. I am opening up, I enjoy meeting the people who read my work, follow my story. In our world, we have all given up on the idea of privacy, it has simply been lost in the digital revolution, and the fearful times in which we are constantly being told we live. We share our stories, I tell you mine, you tell me yours. There has never been anything quite like it, and it is exciting to be a part of it.
I am learning to be gracious about this, not just appear gracious. It has transformed me and my work. I remember lots of faces, many names. I know how get people to reveal enough of themselves so I can figure out who they are – people sometimes forget that there are thousands of them, one of me. I am learning to be patient with the people who sometimes ask too much, expect too much, stay too long. One woman Sunday came up to me, grasped my hand, and said, “I just wanted to say that you have changed my life, and thank you,” and she left, I have no idea who she is or what she meant. But I was very happy to meet her, to touch her, to see her face. The Open Houses are wonderful in that way, that is not possible on Facebook.
Maria and I are deeply grateful that so many people would come to see us, share our home, meet our animals, follow our work, buy our art. This is the life of the new writer, the new artist, it is not a question in my mind of whether it is good or bad, but what is the new reality for people who wish to live creative lives. The old story is the tormented writer, the struggling artist. The new story is unfolding, it is a community, a partnership. It seems to me that my story is your story, more and more, I think that is something I didn’t know before, I think it is the point.
I think of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn holed up on his nearby Vermont mountaintop for 15 years writing his books, or Eugene O’Neill in his ocean cottage on Cape Cod or Ernest Hemingway in his Key West retreat, the very idea of the writer and the book is melting into the past, into history and in many cases, irrelevance. Many people lament this, but for me, lament, like nostalgia, is a sinkhole, so easy to fall into, so hard to climb out of.
I realized Sunday that I am a public person now, my shy wife also, that is what we have become, that is our destiny, a part of the creative connection that is at the center of our great love for one another. I realized Sunday that there is gain and loss in everything, and so what? This is our life, the life we have chosen, the life we live, and it is a good life. I would not trade it for any other life.
