Writers Have to Write

Crashing Waves                                                                                                                                                                           2008
Pacific Grove, California                                                                                                                             Catherine Al-Meten

What does a writer do when finished with a major writing project? Celebrate, take a nap, jump up and down for joy, have a cup of coffee, or open a bottle of champagne? Well, while all those might appeal, having just finished and published the e-version and the print-on-demand version of my new book, Shadows: A Collection of Poetry, I find myself needing to write some more.  Expressing ourselves is something that we all need to do. Artists, musicians, dancers, actors, playwrights, scientists, teachers, leaders, carpenters, whatever our trade or passion, we all need to express ourselves.  There are some writers who say they hate the act of writing, but love having written. Then there are those, like me, who just can't put the pen down or stay off the keyboard. 


As any writer knows, completing a major project and getting it ready for publication is a grueling and energy-consuming task. This particular piece is a collection of poetry that I have written over many years. For anyone who has read any of my writing (articles, scholarly work, essays, or lectures), you probably know me to be deeply passionate and rather on the uplifting and spiritual side.  And those assessments are true; partly true. Last year I was asked by a friend to read at the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium's monthly poetry reading this November.  At the time, I thought, "this would be a good time to pull my poetry together," and so I believed it would take me a couple of weeks to find the poetry, and then type it in some legible form.  I had not anticipated how instense the experience would be for me. 

First, I gathered poetry from old files, journals, and wherever I had stored them. One mistake I'd made was not memorizing any of the poetry I'd writtensince  seriously beginning to write poetry in the 1970s. Thanks to an old friend with whom I have reconnected, I was able to discover one of my first and favorite poems. We've yet to get together so I can get a copy of the poem, but at least I know it exists. It was written about a small group of friends who were part of the friendship group of some of my friends. These young men were from Lebanon, and the poem was about them. At the time, the Lebanese Civil War had been ravaging their country, and causing their once peaceful and lovely homeland much devastation. The poem was written from the distant perspective I had at that time, of the Middle East. It wasn't my experience, and I didn't know any of these people well, but the energy of their lives cast in shadows of a war, struck me.

The first, naive poem attempting to capture some piece of the culture and history that seemed to be living in front of me, was just the very small shaft of light that would open my eyes and mind to what was to come into my life.  War had been the shadow side of life from the time I was born. My parents met and married during World War II, and my Father fought in the Pacific Theater of War. an odd way to describe war, theater, but war seems to have set the stage for much of what life for many people on this planet have been living with for the past sixty plus years. All my life, I felt we lived in the shadows of war.  My childhood obssession with the horrors of the World War II and the facist horrors of Europe, had made a deep impression on my psyche.  I was convinced that war was obsolete, and had become a thing of the past. 

I recall sitting in my 6th grade classroom reading the Weekly Reader, and understanding that wars were still being fought in places like Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, and that advisors from my country were going to help solve the problems that had led to war there.  Later I would have a better understanding of the word and concept "advisor".  My  junior high and high school experience was a time dominated with what then became the Viet Nam War. Friends, classmates, and a whole segment of my generation went off to war, in those days, on demand of the military draft.  Yes, war seeped into every aspect of life, once again, and by the time I met my friends' Lebanese friends, I began to see that war wasn't going away by itself.

It was during that same time that I became more active in anti-war activities, primarily through my work as the Director of the Women's Center at my university.  Together with other student leaders, we organized one of the last student demonstrations to protest the war in Viet Nam. More than that, I became more and more aware of the need to take action to create peaceful ways of communicating.  

Through communicating about how cultural differences, history, language, art, music, dance, and literature all can be uniting forces for people, I saw writing, studying, and teaching as ways for those of us who want more peace and less war. The arts provided pathways and education provided a means  to begin to make a difference in the way we view the world, our individual and collective place within it. My goal became to strive to find ways for how we could get along and work with one another for peaceful ways to solve problems and resolve issues. The path I chose was one of seeking to find what unites us and what connects us to one another. To look for the beauty, diverse differences, and common desires that help us understand one another. To discover ways to allow one another to be, grow, create, and live harmoniously with one another and the Earth.

So life has passed by, and along the way, I found myself deeply drawn to studying the ancient mysteries and sacred texts of world literature and spiritual traditions.  Along that path, I was given the gift of a marriage to a wonderful man whose own life path changed mine.  We must all have some fantasy of finding the perfect person for us, but generally what we find is that the perfect person may appear quite different from our expectations. And if we find someone we truly love and connect with, we often have no idea what the path we walk together will be like. That is certainly true for my husband and me.  For many years, we have been separated by the wars that have been waged in the Middle East. The poetry that I wrote in the quiet, lonely nights when we were apart, in the times when rage or fear, or frustration seemed to be my closest companions, and when no words could really express what struggle and sadness lived within me, poetry was born.

So the task of compiling the poetry that had been written in spits and starts, here and there, became a compelling job.  As all writers know, editing and compiling a piece of work requires rereading and remembering what set your ideas into motion.  The painful and surprising process of rereading, editing, and writing more poetry for this book, was a wrenching and deeply difficult experience. Poets write about what is least speakable. Poetry is emotional, but not in an effusive way. Poetry shades emotions beneath suggestions, images, metaphors, shades of what really transpired.  Poetry touches on that which cannot be described. Poetry is raw and too open for most of us to enjoy except in small doses.  Bringing all this poetry to the page has been an act of wanting to look at what has been real, raw, and deep within me...the parts that rarely surfaced as I sublimated my energy into work, studying, raising children (my own and helping with my grandchild), until one day, I could do nothing else but look at the ravages of war and life, and determine that whatever has happened, we have both survived. 

What happens in the future, is no more clear to me than what I wondered about years ago as I stood in front of my family's house, looking over the rooftops wondering, "I wonder what's out there?"  Art, and the art of writing, is about communicating the answer to that question. And for me, the answer only ever is hinted at by the shadows.