I’m on a plane headed down to New Orleans, to attend a roundtable discussion at the American Anthropological Association on science and advocacy. I should be doing some of the various short essay work I owe, but Pixie doesn’t feel like it. She feels like doing some work at this space, and I’ve learned not to argue with Pixie.
You’re probably wondering who Pixie is. She’s my muse. I don’t remember when I learned her name, nor do I even remember when she showed up in my imagination as an actual person. Well, not exactly a person. She looks like a bad-girl version of Tinkerbell, so more like a fairy. Pixie likes ballerina outfits, with little wispy tutus, just like Tinkerbell, but she also likes to wear killer boots and the occasional black leather biker jacket over her pink tutu. She also smokes, although never near me, so I’m OK with it.
For nearly all of 2010, Pixie’s been having an affair with the ghost of Galileo. The book I’m writing is inspired by Galileo’s ghost, so he’s been showing up, too. That’s how they met–through me. I don’t think their affair is sexual, although it is definitely erotic and intense. Galileo shows up as an old guy, and Pixie is about eighteen, so it’d have to be a February-December romance. He smokes with her, though. They sit near a cracked window waving the smoke out before I have to smell it. They also drink a lot of black coffee all day long, and then start in on the cocktails and competitive stories right at the stroke of 5.
The writing of the book works like this: Pixie and Galileo bitch at me to get going in the morning, and I resist, trying to have one more cup of tea and one more look at my favorite blogs before I have to go out to the cottage. Then I go out, and I look over what I’ve got so far while the two of them go at it, grabbing other copies of the manuscript, riffling through my research file boxes, loudly working on deciding what I should transcribe from them next. Sometimes they argue, but generally the two of them get into intense cooperative discussions while I sit around waiting for them to figure it out.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I sleep through some of their arguments. But it works. When I wake up, they usually have a whole bunch of sentences ready to go.
Sometimes people ask me how I write things so fast. The truth is that I don’t. Pixie writes fast. I just type fast. I’m serious. That’s what it feels like–like I’m just her scribe. I’ve heard artists describe this sensation–of just being a channeler–and more and more I feel like that.
Most recently I felt this sensation when I somehow managed to write two chapters of the book in four days. No kidding. It needed some editing, but basically I wrote 60 decent pages in four days. What the heck? (I tried not to get depressed by the math. If every chapter took 2 days, this book would have been done in 3 weeks. Pixie, why can’t you always work that hard?)
In September, when I was in Bloomington, I had a classic Pixie experience. I was down in Indiana for a reunion of alumni of folks who graduated from my Ph.D. department. While I was there, I got an email from the managing editor of the Hastings Center Report, Joyce Griffin, asking me to decide once and for all whether I’d write a commentary on the Seattle Working Group’s report on their deliberations over growth attenuation. If I wanted to do it, I had to do it fast.
I did want to do it, both to help out Joyce and to try to be helpful to the Working Group who had clearly struggled for us all with some really hard issues. Plus Joyce only needed 700 words. She only wanted 700 words. So I said yes, OK, I’ll do it.
I read the page proofs of the papers Joyce had for me to respond to. Then I took my laptop to the South Lounge of the Indiana Memorial Union–the place where I used to sometimes study in graduate school–and I let Pixie do her thing.
About 45 minutes later, Pixie had dictated to me an essay of 704 words. Just like that. I did a little light editing on it, cutting down three or four words, and sent it off to Joyce. Joyce expressed some astonishment at the speed, the word count, and the content. I felt, as usual, a little embarrassed taking any credit. Sure, Pixie had used a story from my life, but it really felt like I had just plagiarized from her.
What’s odd about this, of course, is that I write non-fiction, so I never really thought I’d have a muse. At least not unless I turned to writing fiction. But Pixie is very much a truth bitch. She sometimes lets me write down stuff I’m not precisely sure about as I write it, but she always insists that I look it up shortly thereafter, and that I fact-check everything.
My muse is firmly oriented to reality. She actually sneers and snorts at muses who work for fiction writers. Come on, she says to me, how hard is it to make things up? Hard for me, I remind her. I can’t seem to write fiction worth a damn. But maybe it wouldn’t be hard for her, if she felt like it. I don’t know. Sometimes I do catch her working on the LMS. It’s like she’s flexing her muscle, showing off to me. Lately she’s even had some really interesting plot and character ideas. But for right now, Pixie absolutely loves the challenge of taking what we know is true and making a good read out of it.
When I was a kid, my parents hoped (as parents always do) that I wouldn’t hang out with the bad kids–the ones who got in trouble. I wonder what my parents would think of Pixie. She’s very clearly one of the bad kids. She likes to make me say yes to everything that might be interesting for her to write about later. And so I say yes to too many roller coaster affairs.
Sometimes I feel like blaming her for my exhausting work life. When I leave home, Pixie always seems to hand me a mental pencil and steno pad, just in case something interesting happens. And then she always reminds me of my job: Make a good story. I say back to her, “Find a good story. That’s what you mean, Pixie. Find a good story.”
And she quotes my high school creative writing teacher, laughing in my face: “Write what you know, baby.”
She winks, and adds, “And know what I write.”