To read some of Thea's writing online, try the links below:

Poetry:

Fertility in The Cortland Review, an online poetry journal with Real Audio, fall 2005.
Two poems, The Name of the Dream and What We Deserved, in The Spillway Review, July 2004.
More poems, reprinted from various journals, in the Noe Valley Voice.

Nonfiction:

"Trying,"an essay in the October 2005 issue of The Sun magazine (excerpt)
An article, "Writing as the Call of the Divine: Three Steps for Dropping Struggle and Creating with Ease," in the Bay Area based Psychic Reader newspaper.

On this Website:

• a poem entitled "Swim the River," which speaks to the creative process
• an essay, 'Something to Say,' addresses that perennial writer's question, "What makes my life worthy of writing about?"  
• and another poem, "In the House of the Dying," that won Honorable Mention in the 15th Annual New Millennium Writings Awards (one of 60 chosen out of 1,400 entries).

       Winter rain streaks the curved windows of my room. I sit, pen in hand, and listen to the comforting spatter of raindrops, the rattle of the gas heater. Then I turn my ear inward for where my writing wants to go. I have come to love the spare, monastic quality of these mornings, sitting at my desk with an empty mind and an attentive stillness. Writing is slowly becoming a sanctuary to me, an altar where I strive to hear myself and to accept what comes.

The more I unleash it, day after day, the more the flow of words veers away from invention and toward the truth of my own life. I find myself writing about past love relationships, their fervent beginnings and messy ends. And about the tangle of feelings binding me to my parents, stretched across the three thousand miles that separate us. My first reaction to this new development is one of fear. Houston, we have a problem.

       It's not the act of writing about my life but the idea of it that's got me worried. The urge itself strikes some part of me as suspect. If I continue to focus on my own experience, the fear insists, I will seem egotistical, self-absorbed, and uncreative. No one will want to read my work. It would be one thing, I tell myself, if I could write about bougainvillea drooping in the sultry heat of Mississippi, like William Faulkner, or about riding a ferry across the Meekong River at fifteen to meet my lover, like the great French writer Marguerite Duras.

       But I am from suburban Connecticut. I came of age in the Eighties, the decade of the shopping mall. What do I have to write about, I think nervously—the drone of the lawnmowers? The stilted silence in our brown-shingled house? The mothers with their tennis dresses and cracking pink lipstick? Worry wrings its hands and says, it's all boring, bland as a dinner napkin.

Perhaps it's the worried voice that's behind my secret mental list, the one that names the kinds of people who do have something to say. People who've suffered more than I have, or have lived in more exotic locales, or come from a more interesting culture or moment in history. Being from the deep South increases the score by a factor of ten, as does surviving a freakish accident, or speaking for a long-silenced community.

       If only I were a gypsy, I find myself thinking wistfully, or a child raised by hobo rail-riders or Communists or followers of an Indian guru. But I went to school and came home, did my homework, sat down to a dinner of pork chops and canned peas. Not exactly, the worried voice drones in my ear, the stuff from which great literature is made.

       A Sunday in February. I am lying on a carpet, gripping a marker and leaning over a swath of butcher paper. I'm attending a day-long writing workshop, and I've been instructed to draw a timeline of my life which I will then share with a partner. Your partner will tell you what jumps out at them, the teacher says, where the stories seem to be. Assuming there are any, a voice kvetches in my head. But I love markers and butcher paper and secretly relish exploring my own life, so I shush the voice and go at it.

       My partner is Bill, a gregarious man in his forties. He hones in on a tiny drawing I have made on the edge of the paper. It is myself as a sophomore in college, when I let a boy I hardly knew take clippers and hack off a big chunk of my hair. We were at a party, all of us drunk. The next morning, with a raging hangover, I skulked to the $10 haircut place where the hairdresser clucked in disapproval and gave me a trendy asymmetrical style to try and mask the damage. Still, for weeks, the evidence showed, pale patches of scalp like emblems of chaos. I want to know about that, Bill says. I cringe at the thought of delving into that time, when I had just been dumped by an older man, my first lover, and was staggering around lost, doing whatever I could think of to stay numb.

       When it's his turn, I point to the year 1970 on his timeline, where he has written "SDS—we occupied college administration building." He shrugs. "Yeah, I was involved in some anti-war protests," he says. "My best friend was a real militant, and it kind of broke us apart." He gets quiet. "It was a confusing time." How fascinating, I gush excitedly, to be able to write from personal experience about that crucial moment in history, when students turned the country upside down. "Yeah, I suppose it was pretty cool," he muses. "But to me it just seems kind of normal, you know... because I was there."

       That's the thing about our own lives—we were there. Connecticut seemed uninteresting to me because I didn't have anything to compare it to. But for my friend Ellen who grew up in California, parts of my life seemed downright exotic, like my years at a private high school in an old stone mansion by the water, where we wore plaid kilts and knee socks, read Beowulf, and kept our books in cubbyholes. Ellen, on the other hand, lived in Pacific Grove, a little hippie town on the Monterey Peninsula. She doesn't understand my fascination when she tells me that her friend's mom called herself a witch, or that she and her high school friends drove to Esalen, a New Age retreat center, at midnight and hung around naked. I never really thought about it, she says. It's just how it was.

Poet Jane Hirshfield writes, "Love everything that happens to you." At first it seems like strange advice. Haven't we all had experiences we didn't, and shouldn't, love? Then I see: she is telling us to embrace the lives we have been given, because in them is everything we need.

       As I relax into writing about my life, I gradually stop worrying that it's not interesting. Instead, I'm getting interested—in the questions still unanswered, in the blank spots of memory like empty squares on a map. I write about that first raw heartbreak, how the ground seemed to open beneath me, and how I used alcohol and attitude to construct a kind of armor. I write about John, our blistering fights, and the dark mystery of how I almost married him, how I shrank to fit into our shared life. And I wonder on paper about that photo of my grandmother—the one where she's eighteen and glamorous, leaning on the family's '22 Buick only she knew how to drive. How she squints into the camera, distant and inscrutable, as if she's got a secret.

       I begin to break through the surface to what was really happening in our brown-shingled house, beneath those echoing silences where my parents clattered around like noisy ghosts. There, I strike a long-buried vein, a lode rich with images and story, losses and longing. And the details I once thought boring—the bare black trees of winter, the rust-red couch, the sky darkening outside the window—begin to form one of the containers that will hold what I really have to say.

       I remind myself what I have always known, that good writing drops down into the raw emotional stuff of life, whether it happens in Connecticut, the Louisiana bayou country, or some world of a writer's imagination. What draws us, in the end, is not what is exotic, but what is deeply familiar—the heart's core at which we are each utterly the same.

Years later, I will go to see a movie, The Ice Storm, set in New Canaan, Connecticut, two towns over from where I grew up. It is the first time I've ever seen the locale of my history, my childhood, up on the big screen. The time and place I was convinced couldn't make art.

       The film is devastating and deeply poetic. For weeks afterward, I can't get the images out of my mind: an empty blue swimming pool filled with dried leaves, metal ice trays cracking open explosively, a lightless train stalled on the tracks, sheathed in ice. Images of sorrow, silence, and isolation, leading me right into the heart of the movie, the emotional deep freeze of the characters' lives.

       I walk out of the theater humbled, saddened—and inspired. Humbled because someone else saw poetry where I had argued for nothingness. Saddened by the truth of that particular place and its unique brand of muffled sorrow, which is my legacy. And inspired because I know what's true in my bones: art is everywhere, in each of our lives, no matter how ordinary we might believe ourselves to be.

       Love everything that happens to you. A Taiwanese filmmaker's embrace of where I come from reminds me. Frozen branches against windows, ice clinking in cocktail glasses, people circling one another in their own loneliness, struggling to connect—these are pieces in the mysterious puzzle that is my life, and they are mine to love.