Katya Sabaroff Taylor

I have needed something that would move me out of a frozen place of fear where I have been afraid to move forward or backward hence being stuck in place. I have needed something to create movement in my life and open up a new vein of creativity so that new life could flow in. I couldn’t imagine how to move out of this place. Enter my dear friend of decades, Katya Sabaroff Taylor, one of my writing teachers and mentors, who has written several books, and taught writing for several decades to people in every imaginable venue including in prisons. (Her book Prison Wisdom, the collected writings of men and women she worked with from 1991 – 2015, is simply phenomenal.) Click on her name to go to her website to read all about her work and books. Katya is so creative and writes with different people, stories, and she asked me to partner with her to do the same. She has asked me in the past and I have said no because I felt shy and kind of afraid. She asked me again recently and I said yes. Why not? I’m still shy, and kind of afraid, but all of a sudden this feels like just what I have been waiting for. Katya calls it “The 700 Word Story Club” and I have her permission to write about it here.

The way it works is that both of the participants choose a noun. They then share their noun with their partner ending up with 2 nouns. Those two nouns are the jumping off place into your story and both must use both nouns. This time Katya has chosen “Window” and I have chosen “Pomegranate.” So we have those 2 words, we have to write a 700 word story based on those 2 words, and we have to send each other our stories before Friday. As I have a standing meeting at 8 on Thursday night I will send my story to Katya before then. I am excited, and nervous, but I already have an idea about how I am going to begin. Katya said “Don’t worry, once you begin the story will write itself!” I’m not sure about that but the story is already unfolding in my mind. Katya does this with other people, in fact has done it since 2010, so she has written lots of stories. I have read a handful of them over the years and they are so good, I would love to read a book of Ka’s stories but though she has published several books this is not something she is ready to do yet. It would be a real treat to be able to read a collection of them. I hope she does decide to publish them one day.

And here’s the thing. I have, as I have written many times on this blog, written since I was 9, regularly. I filled notebooks with stories and poems. In my life as a writer however I have written, primarily, non-fiction. I wrote for magazines and newspapers from 20 well into my 40’s, have had a handful of small presses, all dedicated to writing about subjects coming out of my life from early on, writing about childbirth, homebirth, breastfeeding, family life, homeschooling, gardening, and more. I taught journal writing classes for nearly 4 decades and was zealous about keeping a diary. But in 2010 when I bought this house and was moving in I shocked everyone by having almost 400 volumes of my diaries destroyed.

The thing is I had planned to will them to my eldest daughter with the other 2 kids having the ability to access them through her. We imagine our children are going to really know us in this way. There was a family joke. I used to say, “I’m going to leave all of my diaries to Jenny (my eldest), my wedding rings to Rachel (my middle child), and my rolltop desk (A huge fancy rolltop my husband gave me on Christmas a year after we were married in 1975) to my son Aaron. The joke was that Jenny used to say to Rachel, a little more than tongue in cheek, “I’ll trade you the journals for the rings!” Ha ha ha. People wondered if I worried about my family reading my private diaries but they were all on shelves in my office. The family was really just OVER Mom’s journalling. The thing is I lived with a journal and pen in my hand. I wrote EVERYTHING, every time anyone moved or breathed, every single milestone my children made, their handprints, every gift they got for birthdays or Christmas, the whole story of our family, there was so much there that was wonderful, and those are the things I feel sad about not having anymore, BUT they were filled with decades of processing therapy and a lot of it was about having been sexually abused from 4-18. The journals were where I processed it all, including things about my marriage to their dear father that they just did not need to read. In the end I made the decision to have them destroyed.

The hundreds of volumes would have been an albatross around their necks. It was a terrifying, heartbreaking thing to do, and in the end, liberating. I felt like a slate was wiped clean. I used to, even in just moving around the house, always have a journal with me. I recorded everything. And there was the week I spent at my dying father’s bedside, he who had abused me. He suffered terribly at the end and I forgave him everything, not for him, but for me, I needed to let go to survive. I filled an entire journal in that one week. And it was not pretty, and it was not something I wanted my children to read or to know. The journals were destroyed, and I stopped teaching journal classes. I have never been able to keep a journal in the same way again. I have tried. I have bought countless blank books, some very beautiful, some expensive, some ordinary, but I start and I can’t continue on. To what end? I ask myself. I had always imagined that I was leaving a legacy for my family. When I realized it would be more burden than legacy and destroyed them I could never look at them in the same way again. I was already blogging, and I made the shift to these posts. They are ephemeral, they will last for a time, and that’s all that I need them to do. But, through the years, I also wrote novels.

Writing novels is an interesting thing, it is a completely different experience than writing non-fiction. It is freer, more exciting, because you can create the characters, create a whole universe, and tell a story that may, at times, come close to real life (or not at all) but it is a whole different way of writing. I loved it. I wrote several novels through the years and though I didn’t sell one I did have a few near misses and one unbelievable experience. I had written a novel called “The Threshold Of Pain.” This novel explored how the threshold of pain is so different for each of us. How, one might ask, does someone who survived the horrors of Nazi Germany come through it and live a productive life while someone who seemingly has everything ends up committing suicide? That was the premise and it fascinated me. I wrote a very odd story, pre-internet days. It was a love story between two very unusual people who, because of circumstances, had a love affair for years via phone, letters, even very elaborate occasions where he sent entire gourmet meals delivered to her with bouquets of flowers, fine wines, and more than you can imagine, and they ate together, over the phone (again, no internet, no Skype, nothing that we have today). On the cusp of them finally deciding they will risk everything and meet in person he is killed. In the end, through a breathtaking (I have been told) series of circumstances, she plans, and executes, her own suicide. It had a Romeo and Juliet feel to it. (The odd thing is that today, with the technology we have, this kind of relationship could happen. But then it wasn’t even on the horizon, or, I suppose it was, but I had no way of knowing that. It was pure imagination based on a very secret experience I will never reveal.)

The thing is that it was at a time when I had met and become friends with a mother and son who ran a very high-end boutique. She looked like Coco Chanel. Every year they had a huge fashion show that people traveled all over to attend and all of the proceeds went to AIDS research. We had become very close and they read the novel. They were (in their words) so “blown away by it” that they asked if they could have copy bound in leather to keep and I said yes. The novel was never published, but it changed lives, the lives of those two people and others who read it. And the sad thing is that because it was before the days of the internet I never had it on a hard drive, only the hard copy (paper) and I lost it during my house fire in 2014. That loss was more devastating than the loss of the 400 journals.

After that I stopped writing fiction. There were no more stories. In a desperate attempt to understand my complicated life I wrote only non-fiction. I tried, a couple of times, to do NaNoWriMo but quit early on. “The Threshold Of Pain” had been such a uniquely powerful experience in so many ways, and it was lost forever, I didn’t have the heart to go on. Even writing this 700 word story is scary for me, but it might just represent a shift that needs to happen for me in my life, and so, after I feed the dogs and make my own dinner, I am going to sit down here and write about a window and a pomegranate. I am excited and afraid, and I am going to do it.

Where might this lead? I don’t know. But I think opening the door to fiction, and writing stories again, may just save me. Writing stories save me through years of abuse when I was a very frightened little girl. Now, perhaps, fiction will save me again, as, in my 60’s, I am wondering how I will face the rest of my life. I am going to try anyway. 700 words might just save my life.