Swadhistana

I spent 2007-2009 writing a novel, my third, called Collision. It was set in the late '90's, and was about a young artist who finds a painting she thinks is a lost Jackson Pollock in her grandmother's attic. To unravel the mystery of how it got there and to uncover Pollock's connection to her family, the young woman must return home to Kentucky, ditch an amoral politician-in-training boyfriend, fall into the arms of a cute art-history grad student, and break into the Speed Art Museum. Her ultimate triumph is the Alberta Ferretti dress she wears to the first show of her paintings, at The Gagosian Gallery in New York.

In choosing to write about Pollock in the guise of what I hoped was a fizzy romance, I was trying to evolve from my position as a writer of straightforward historical fiction about artists. I wanted contemporary characters. I wanted to put a Justin-Theroux-type motorcycle-jacket-wearing New York boy in a moldering Southern Gothic graveyard with a disaffected Southern belle to see what would happen. I wanted to explore issues of place and family. I hoped to be a little less serious, but in a good way.

Publishing was not in good shape in 2009, when it was time to try to sell the novel. The agent who had signed me in 2003 and who had sold both of my published books quit the business and moved back to Australia. I was assigned a new agent, whom I didn't know well enough to be able to determine whether her taking months to read the manuscript and weeks to return calls was because she was unenthusiastic or just monumentally busy. Eventually, though, she sent Collision out to editors at publishing houses.

The publisher of my first two books passed, which I had been expecting and which I thought was for the best, considering how the publisher's marketing missteps had hobbled their sales. But then one by one all of the others passed, too.

My agent's assistant kept telling me they still had a few irons in the fire, until more than a year had passed and I stopped asking.

The book might have been an unsuccessful hybrid of two genres. It might have completely sucked. It might have needed a good editor, or another revision, or a complete rethinking. It might have been bad timing. It could have been all of the above. Whatever the reason, the result was a stillborn novel that ended as a computer file which by now could be too outdated to be opened. Writers don't talk much about the novel hidden in the drawer like a box of ashes.

*

In the Hindu tradition, of which yoga is a part, the body contains seven chakras, or centers of vital energy. Each chakra is associated with a location in the body, though they are a metaphysical overlay rather than a physical fact. The seven chakras are the root, the sacral, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the brow and the crown. The second chakra, Swadhistana, is located in the sacrum. Physically this chakra is the seat of reproduction. Mentally it is the seat of creativity.

Not, I think, a coincidence.

It might be possible to be a writer and a mother and not see the two as coming from the same place. In fact you could argue that the two are directly in conflict. Jasper was born sixteen days after The Painted Kiss was published. Jasper gestated for nine months, while The Painted Kiss took seven years, but once they were born their roles reversed. Like a baby giraffe that can stand minutes after birth, the book was forced to make its way more or less on its own, while Jasper sucked up every available molecule of attention. Still, they are twins of a kind: Jasper bright-eyed and robust, The Painted Kiss pallid and a little weedy from neglect.

I wrote The Wayward Muse while Jasper was a baby. Like siblings fighting for attention, there was an inherent conflict there: taking care of one required a certain amount of inattention to the other. Guess which one got short shrift? I wrote Collision when Jasper was still very small. My first, unfinished memoir, written in 2011-12 while I was pregnant, is Balthazar's dark twin.

For me the will to write and to have children is the same. I don't design buildings. I don't grow tomatoes and can them. Children and books: those are the things I make.

Women who've delivered stillborn babies call the next child they conceive a 'rainbow' baby. Which isn't as awful as all of the angel stuff, but I still find the terminology vaguely irritating, possibly because of the Biblical reference. In the Old Testament, God became angry at the wickedness of humanity and destroyed the world. Later he sent a rainbow to alert Noah and his kin that he would never do it again. The rainbow is supposed to be a sign of hope for the future, a future free from cataclysmic destruction. I'm sure all of the people who died during God's fit of pique, otherwise known as the Flood, really appreciated it.

But rainbows are beautiful. We get a lot of them in Portland, with all of the rain and sunbreaks. To me a rainbow represents two generally antithetical things happening at the same time. Rain and sun. Death and life. Despair and hope.

For me, unfortunately, the 'rainbow' baby is a book.

*

Someone I don't know well recently said that she had Googled me and had discerned from my publication dates that I must be taking time off to be a mom. It might save face to pretend that I devoted that time exclusively to the raising of my son, but it's just not true. I haven't taken any time off. I just don't have anything to point to. It sure looks like a gap in a resume: what did you do from 2007-Present?

I wrote, to no effect. Coincidence? A run of bad luck? Or something very stuck in that second chakra?

The following are emotional signs that your second chakra is blocked: feelings of guilt, embarrassment, shame, distrust, impatience, a desire to hide, nervousness, anger, a tendency to push for things, holding on, detaching from oneself and going out of one's body, feeling shut down, depression, and years of overly controlling one's emotions.

This sounds like someone I know, though to be fair it also sounds like a horoscope.

Stillbirth is not among the physical symptoms associated with the flow of energy getting stuck in the second chakra, although fertility issues are mentioned. But stillbirth is a thwarting of creativity on such a massive scale it makes all of those unresponsive editors look like rank amateurs.

I can't quit, of course, just because all of my creative efforts for the past six years have been stymied. But it's enough to make me consider Reiki.