A Reading at Wave Hill

"I am a fish. I will be a fish." With that, I started to read.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

I was thinking about what I am listening to and that appears to be silence and “self.” Then, I remembered a piece I wrote and the reading of it at Wave Hill, a one-time Rockefeller estate with a mansion, and various outbuildings up on the Hudson. I was maybe forty. We held our tiny writing workshop on the 28 acre property in an old stone and mortar lodge with a huge empty hall set just below a rounded stone stage backed by a walk-in working stone fireplace. On either side, tall windows displayed the lawns or sky or hills down to the river.

The building for years had gone mostly unused, so a friend inquired, and we started our Sunday morning writing group, nine of us. I took the train up from Grand Central in the city. Sometimes I brought along a friend or acquaintance who might want to join in. One of us would present and/or read a piece, a poem, or whatever. Then, we’d workshop it. Out of that, came my Wave Hill story.

We’d decided to advertise to get more prospective writers in the group. All free. Public buses were available, but people took cars, too. The ad was supposed to introduce our workshop and welcome newcomers. They could bring whatever they liked. We often gave an assignment, then workshopped what people wrote on it. We wanted to boost our numbers and expand overall. Our ad went in a new magazine at the time, dedicated to NYC borough events, called Time Out. Since I was scheduled to have my writing workshopped, we decided the ad should indicate that I would be heading the event that Sunday. An introduction and a short fiction piece, both of which I was working on were supposed to be a footnote. “Ice and Lightning in Literature,” and “The Isle of Skye.” I didn’t know how they got the titles. I guessed later that it was the head of our group, the only one who could have suggested them to whoever did the Time Out listings.

I got up early, tired from rewrites, and excited, too, though I am always terrified of sharing my work. (Another story.) But it would be a small group, I thought, after cracking open a window, the bitter cold smacking me upside. My husband went down to our mailbox and found my weekly subscription to Time Out had arrived. The listing didn’t advertise what we most wanted to do, attract more workshop participants. My name in all caps and then the aforementioned titles appeared with the place and time. I was dumbfounded and felt betrayed. Feeling singled out is most people’s worst nightmare. Attention seeking was for me an even worse problem. Not asking for it had become a core instinct. Still, the weather was freezing, 6 degrees, sunny and clear, but still bone-chilling. I tried to relax. Tops, only a few of us in the group would show up, only days past the New Year and far too cold and early.

A friend and my husband and I rode the train up the Hudson, taking in the thick ice cover on the river. The shoreline and roads were empty. If even half the regulars showed, I said, let alone a newcomer, my turn would go fine. My husband knew me well. Maybe some newcomers would make it, he said, reassuring me that I’d be good, because I’d worked so hard on the editing. I doubted anybody could see that far in the distance, I said, and besides, first thing Monday, I would put a call in to Time Out to make right their mistake. We’d eventually get new people.

We got off the train and trekked the long hill up to the estate and then down the drive to the big lawn where the lodge stood, curtained from roof to ground in the longest, widest icicle sheets I’d ever seen. And I had grown up walking through storms to school, up the hills and dales of Toronto under cover of snow. A few recognizable cars were parked in view on the road to the lodge. One unknown car was on the lawn. So I was safe.

It was 8:15am. We joined the few other would-be writers inside and set up a place for us all to sit in a circle on the stage. They’d started a nice fire into which we set down a pot of water that came to a boil, which we used to mix our packets of coffee and cocoa into stored cups. As we chatted, I noticed the windows on either side of the fireplace showed, not the lawns or naked trees, but the wall of icicles that blocked the view. Ice and fire, I thought. How strange is that? And so, I was more relieved than I would ever say out loud that it was just us, our little group. That sick feeling I’d had for days was dissipating. That’s when it started.

They came through the side doors into the large hall in small groups, and each time more visitors arrived, the bright sunlight and cold spread across floor. More and more people came. Our group opened the big closets where the rest of the collapsible chairs were stacked. Enough for a real gathering. About 150 people arrived. We weren’t counting. Rows with aisles were set up. Then more people arrived. Insane. I got caught up in the physicality. Making people and places comfortable is clear and easy. My problem with self-promotion was on some psycho-mellow back burner until I realized I had not escaped the plan.

I went into shock. 10am. We were usually done by noon. People from all walks of life settled in. Some from the burbs around Wave Hill, others from the city, young and old, of different races, from different places, now all together in this large daunting hall. I remember walking around, asking if one of my fellow work-shoppers would mind filling in for me. We were all stunned at the turnout. No way. I kept thinking ‘what am I going to do?’ I felt sick and faint and felt slight tremors at my core. Our group leader tapped my shoulder. One of those every-cell-of-my-body-wants-me-to-run moments. “It’s time,” she said, seating herself in a chair to the side, below the stage, where all our chairs now were situated. The few stone steps to the stage appeared like Everest in front of a solar flare, which was the glow of the fire on the faces out front. A stand was placed for pages of writing or music. An unknown object? From outer space? To stir the fire? The coals? I couldn’t understand. My heart was pounding, my throat closed up. I can’t do this. It was more of an injunction than a thought. Something one feels, that requires no judgement. In the front row, my husband and my girlfriend were eyeing each other and then me. He’d grab our coats if I made a run for it.

He set his eyes on the lectern and gestured for me to place my pages there. I stepped up, took out my work, and put it out. The huge auditorium I had not pictured before was filled with human bodies, some patient, some not. I glanced at my pages. Just read, I thought, but no voice came out. I turned over a page and turned it back. Pray. Yes, a prayer, I thought. I glanced at the ceiling, reminded of the dark wood at the stone church in my neighborhood that Henry James often attended. I am not religious so much as an admirer of myths. I folded my hands. “Lord, if there is a lord, make me a channel. I cannot do this alone. Make me a channel, please. Otherwise, I’m going home.” I felt a bit of calm go through me, like when one slips one's feet into water. When the water is cool and uplifting. Immersion is a relief.  Water is my element, warm or cold. I am a fish. I will be a fish. With that, I started up.

Welcoming. Revising the menu. I’d read my introduction, devoted to this icy day. Then give an assignment, after which a half hour break would occur when anyone could put down in writing what they wanted to convey on the given topic. Some elderly ladies in the rear row started interrupting me. We can’t hear you, etc. I stopped and asked them to come sit up front where we had empty seats. The crowd waited calmly as the ladies gathered their heavy coats and things and moved. I started again.

“As an introduction to our workshop, I wrote this piece. It’s called ‘Ice and Lightning in Literature.’” My voice felt calm, in control even, and my fears fell away. Maybe half of me, but I was there. I read, looking into the audience, over their heads, sensing their interest, and even seeing smiles. People appeared curious and enjoyed the fun phrases I had put in the work. They clapped a lot when I was done. I got ahead of them fast. “So, I am going to just go to the workshop request,” I said hurriedly, suggesting we break into smaller groups. I turned to our workshop leader for instructions, and she deferred to the audience, which was not what I expected. The audience was dissuaded, if not aghast. “Read the fiction. We came to hear that, too.” As I set those pages on the stand, they sat stone still, not rustling. I read. As the pin drop goes, the hall was silent. My words took shape, then faded away, almost as if someone else were speaking them. The clapping again. I tried to move on, ignoring the fear and shame I felt growing beneath the glee. (Again that other story.)

I thanked them all for coming and said how I appreciated their listening to my work. Then I tried to start the workshop, giving the assignment. No. Again. They had questions about the fiction piece. I asked myself, who are these people?  Demanding?  Sure of getting what they want, despite having not paid a dime for the workshop. One audience member spoke out. “Your work reminded me of Annie Proulx,” she said. Others agreed, almost discussing it between themselves. Questions abounded. Why hadn’t I written more? They hadn’t seen my titles anywhere. I wasn’t published, I said. “It’s what we are trying to achieve in our workshop here if any of you care to join us on Sundays.” I didn’t add that I had never submitted my work to a publisher. Not then. I cared, but not enough, and it was too soon for me, I would have said, had I thought anyone still cared about my opinion. People were among themselves, discussing the piece. The descriptions. The two main characters. The Isle of Skye. No one had been mean in their comments, though one of the ladies in the first row who I had encouraged to move was quite angry with me. “When had I visited the Hebrides?” she’d asked. I answered honestly. I had never been there. No, not even close. A small stir ended when I said something like fiction is fiction, research is critical, but that using one’s imagination is the only thing that truly matters, besides traveling, which helps us grow and understand ourselves when placed outside our usual context. We write what we need to write, I said. Scars, in the case of this story about a character who survives a lightning strike, are of essence to us all. They hold a lot in their layers, I added. And that’s what I most wanted to tell a story about. The lady who was still perturbed, she stayed, though she’d tucked her coat across her lap, showing she was ready to walk out on me to prove a point.

I gave my assignment. “Write about some place and time when you knew by virtue of your standing there, that you were going to be different than when you stepped up.  Where you felt the earth change your course. That perhaps you had not known quite who you were until that moment in that place.” Something like that is what I said.  

Without hesitation, people took out notepaper, loose-leaf folders, and spiral notebooks. They appeared to stare off between writing lines. I stepped down and walked to the back of the hall to a small private bathroom with freezing tap water to splash on my face. It was so quiet when I returned, I thought it was strange for so many people. No one stretched or even seemed to want to leave. I found my husband and friend who looked happy for me. We whispered until I noticed the head of the workshop setting up two chairs a short distance from the first row, on the same level, not on stage. She came over to give me the news. It had gone great. We should start. And the head of Wave Hill was in the back row, she whispered, nodding in the direction of the young brunette in the back row who was busy writing like everyone else. Who knew?

We began. Each of them read aloud spontaneously from their pages. It was incredible. I remember so many of those stories. One Jamaican woman said that, getting off a plane in Kenya, feeling the wind hit her face, she knew she had been born in two places at once. An elderly Jewish women found herself, she said, for the first time ever while riding a crowded bus in Israel on vacation. A middle-aged man, while digging in the garden with a hoe, hit an older foundation of a house below his newly bought property, and that changed him for life. He had had to know more. A gray-haired heavy-set woman, wearing all denim and construction style boots, sat low in her seat. She had never felt so alive, she wrote, before she led a march with her fellow union workers from lower Manhattan to Union Square in 1962. The readings went on. Each story more beautiful than the next. Even the head of Wave Hill read about her recent wedding, how she had done it her way, and that had changed her into a new person. That and her new husband, too. We all laughed.

Almost everyone had written something, and all of these people read aloud. And the rest just stayed to stay. I can’t say how moving it all was, except that the head of Wave Hill soon afterward opened up the building to poetry, literature, and play readings by accomplished writers and actors, and it became eventually unattainable to our group that was shrinking for other reasons. Such is sharing. The crowd helped put the chairs away before we left the hall that day. It was 5pm. Dark out. And still 6 degrees.

The next day, my body was so sore I literally could not move. “Make me a channel” are words I am very careful to repeat. I thought “Ice and Lightning" held up. Worthy of publication in a book. My husband bugs me to send my work out to publishers, but not so much. Writing is about hearing and listening, even if at times it is only to find clarity and improve insight. Or to understand and access some other form of rhythm and sound that uses the voice to communicate. I enjoy bringing the forces down and into my hand, thumb and fingers. I am always reminded of the father of graphology, the French Priest, Jean-Hippolyte Michon (1806-1881.) “We write with our brains, not with our hands,” Michon, who was also an archaeologist, wrote. And not with our lips, I might add. It is why I studied cursive writing and signatures which paint pictures beyond what type and voice can carry, that is, when one knows what one is looking for, as in any excavation.

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Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man's Flower was published in the Bogie's Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.

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