The song “The Show Must Not Go On” by the band Harvey Danger, has this couplet:
You can bash your head against the wall, forever, the wall will never change
But if you start to like the bloody bruises, the wall cannot be blamed.
It cracks me up every time I hear it, but it also puzzles me. Is it about reveling in your own stubbornness? Or is it about persistence?
Recently Gotham teacher Teresa Wong suggested an answer, when she visited my class recently to talk about her new memoir All Our Ordinary Stories, because writing that book took her 20 years.
She wrote the first draft when she was in her mid-20s, after taking a trip to China and Hong Kong with her parents. She knew there was a story there, about that trip and her parents, but she couldn’t find the right way to tell it.
“It was just fundamentally flawed in a way that I couldn’t understand at that point and that I do kind of understand now 20 years later,” Teresa said
She put it away, came back, put it away, came back, trying out new approaches, none of which worked.
Meanwhile, Teresa did some other things:
- She became a mother.
- She became an artist and cartoonist.
- She experienced post-partum depression and write a book about it, which became her memoir Dear Scarlet.
- During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, she started her Substack, Closet Dispatch, where she draws and tells a story about one item of clothing in her closet.
- She became an Artist in Residence at the University of Calgary.
“I needed to add that extra layer of my having my own kids before I could understand my parents as well as I could in the book, to add the depth and perspective to everything,” Teresa said. “I needed to become a cartoonist, because I really needed the imagery and the interplay between image and text to really bring out my parents’ experiences in vivid detail.”
No doubt, trying and failing to write All Our Ordinary Stories helped Teresa write Dear Scarlet. And completing and publishing Dear Scarlet helped her solve the riddle of how to write All Our Ordinary Stories.
For some stories, when we say they need time what we’re really saying is they need you to keep living your life. You need to go to Hong Kong, have one more conversation with your mother, drive cross country, take and quit that job with the crazy boss, write other essays or poems or scripts or books. You need to come back again and again and hit that wall again. You need to fail.
And then, the miracle happens.
“What I ended up doing was just listing out all the stories that I wanted to tell, and then trying to group them into loose themes,” Teresa said. “Once I had that, it made it doable in a way that I hadn’t figured out for the many years I had been working on this.”
Persistence sometimes feels like bashing your head against a wall. But it’s not. It’s a vigil you hold for your story, so that when the right way to tell it finally shows up, you’re there, ready to usher it in.
Kelly Caldwell
Dean of Faculty