On Islands

Greetings from Whidbey Island -- now, officially, the biggest island in the contiguous US. Does that make sense? Geography was never my strong subject. (Boomers – remember those ghastly plaster of paris topographical maps we had to make?)

[X-ers, never mind, Y-ers, never mind, and Millennials, don’t jeer at the old people].

Islands – I grew up on an island, and my husband grew up on an island as well. My mother's favorite song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I am a rock/I am on island.” Islands disappear and reappear in my life. Islands mark separation, a wonderful clear boundary between the others and me. I am safe, surrounded by water. But I am also alone (“no man is a—“). Which is not good.

Here at the Whidbey Island Writers Residency, though, you can be an island, a peninsula, or just about any body of land or water you want to be. You can be alone when you want to write alone or jump into very cold water with a bunch of other writers. Or photograph the scene. You can be a creek timidly winding through the wastes of some non-fiction writer's presentation, or you can be an ocean of information at the discussion about blogs.

Your choice. And the choice can change. This week, I’ve been a set of tiny atolls with a poem raised like a flag on each one. I have always loved poetry, and through my encounters with my former students Ching-In Chen, Nicelle Hughes, and Noel Mariano among others have been trying to expand that tiny poetry territory in my psyche. That generous waterfall of poetic license and erudition – Carolyne Wright – has allowed some water to trickle through the atolls at an increased rate.

But there’s other territory to incarnate: Ana Maria Spagna’s spacious sense of non-fiction as braided narrative – at once personal, political, and subtly poetic. What kind of land mass is that? Mountains, and desert, and snow, and ice. The entire state of California maybe, with all its variations.

I bring back to LA a sack full of geographical identities. But the island remains important to me as the place where I both build sand castles and send out smoke signals.

For writers, the island is where we must perforce write alone, but we travel from there too -- sending our words out like beacons, like boats, from our conscious-ringed singularities towards the other islands, vessels, hoping to encounter strange and undiscovered forms of bursting life.