Finish Work: The Twenty-Year Memoir

By Marc Nieson

Growing up, I delivered newspapers after school. Every day, for some ten years. And forty years later, I can still remember the front stoops and names of many of those customers. Some nights I’ll even dream about that paper route.

One spring afternoon, though, stands out above all the rest. I was biking down Jeanette Drive with my usual back rack piled high with Newsday when I came upon a man repairing a customer’s front brick steps. Unable to reach the mailbox, I set the paper down before the garage door, then paused to watch him work—his flicked troweling of cement, his gentle tamping of the bricks, his repositioning of string line . . . the thickness of his wrists, the worn knee pads wrapped round his dungarees. He worked with such precision and control, such utter grace. Not an ounce of fat on any of his movements. I could tell he knew exactly what he was doing, and how to do it. Maybe even the why.

I stood there for a good half hour, just watching him work. And I remember thinking if I could ever do something that well, anything really, I’d be a happy person.

*

This month, I’m publishing my memoir. Or, finally publishing, I should say, since it’s been twenty years in the making. Why so long, you ask? Questions of perfectionism, procrastination? Sure, in part. Admittedly I’m a writer who works and builds things slowly, who lives slowly. In great part, that’s what Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape concerns—a classic coming of age tale about young love and enduring landscapes, about life lessons that came slow-learned and hard-earned. A trail many memoirs traverse. Then again, some of us move slower than others. “Stumbling toward hindsight,” I call it in the book.

Still, 20 years?! How could that be? How does one sustain it?

I could try to claim extenuating circumstances. Other projects that took priority, like earning a wage, raising a child. But all writers contend with such conflicting responsibilities, if we’re lucky. After all, it’s what you build daily in life that truly matters. And, admittedly, I did not toil away at this manuscript day-in day-out for twenty solid years. There were many days when anything seemed easier than the heavy lifting, the utter tedium of showing up at the desk to write again. Many years when anything seemed preferable to facing the material of my life. Many drafts wherein I couldn’t even write the full name of a key character—using an initial was all I could muster.

Still, I stumbled on. Six years into the project I felt it was finished. Next followed the dance of hubris—my partnering with a NYC agent, the flood of publisher submissions, the trickle of rejection letters that were all kind and complimentary, but my memoir (set primarily on a remote Iowa hillside) was too quiet and removed for a wider readership. For a few months I believed that. Why should anyone care about my little schoolhouse story, my belly button lint? Deep inside, however, I knew the issue wasn’t the remoteness of the book’s location, but of its rendering. For a memoir, it wasn’t as forthcoming and vulnerable as it needed to be. It wasn’t done yet. Wasn’t plumb, or true.

And so I set aside the manuscript on a high shelf. For a good decade the box gathered dust. From time to time I’d scribble something on scraps of paper and slip them between its cardboard flaps. Meanwhile, I wrote other tales. Fictions, filmscripts, postcards. I got married and became a parent. I pushed strollers and park swings. Stacked Legos on the floor, words across a page.

And then a funny thing happened. Time moved on. Somehow I was older. Sometimes, all that’s needed is the practice of years. Time, not only for a writer, but for a person to grow into one’s words. To open a box.

The last drafts of Schoolhouse came in their due time. It’s still a quiet book, built brick by brick, I guess. Like Goethe once wrote, “Do not hurry; do not rest.” In retrospect, I suspect the book got done as quickly as it could. I’m fairly pleased with its level of craft, but more so with the solidness of its intents. I feel the story now offers a reader what I’d always hoped it could. Plus, I’m happy it’s found a home with a quiet independent Iowa press, located just down the road from where the schoolhouse once stood. If I could, I’d deliver one to each of your doorsteps.

*

I have no doubts that bricklayer doesn’t remember me, or that stairway he built on Jeanette Drive. It was just one of many he completed. In the end, it’s the work that matters, not the project. Each row of bricks or sentences, carefully placed. A structure to make true.

Writing, too, is a little like a stairway. Always another plateau to climb. Writing, an ongoing apprenticeship. We scribblers and stumblers, journeymen. And that’s OK. There’s always more work to be done.

___

Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His memoir, Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape is just released from Ice Cube Press. He’s won a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University, edits fiction for The Fourth River, and is at work on a new novel, Houdini’s Heirs.