NOT WRITING

after Anne Boyer

by Geramee Hensley

“Why do you suppose an agave would want to have sex with a bat?”

— FRANCESCA CANTÚ

Before we get started, I want you to know, I wrote the thing about writing this thing, and then wrote the  thing about writing about writing about this thing, and I deleted it all, because at first I wanted to say something about the border, but then I didn’t know what to say about it other than imagining if it were a-thousand-mile-long gun and each time it cracked a bullet across the length of a nation the barrel whistled the question If I am not a weapon what is my purpose?

***

I drove a lot—just under a thousand miles in a couple weeks. I did a lot of thinking. I worried and panicked about how I would spend my time, and when I wasn’t panicking, I was doing things—good things I really enjoyed and wished I could do more of.

Through Field Studies, I had a two-week residency in Patagonia, AZ, where I worked alongside local high school students on conservation projects. Afterwards, I led them through writing workshops.

Building a retaining wall of stones to impede erosion and keep moisture in the soil for roots to soak up strength from made exact sense. Most of all, doing it made more sense than thinking about writing it, but the day after this project, Aria (the Field Study Fellow I worked alongside of for the residency’s duration) and I were to support high school interns on how to (re)think about this labor we were all doing together. I wonder what writing does. It doesn’t help move stones, but it might tell you what moving the stones did to you other than exhaust you. Might? No, it did. Writing revealed what moving stones did to you. And even more generously, writing revealed what writing about moving stones did to you, too. For the students, moving stones conjured a sense of pride in working with the land. Writing is its own sort of anti-erosion structure, and it can exhaust someone in the same way laying stones does, unearthing hunger.

***

If J. Alfred Prufrock has measured out his life in coffee spoons, I have measured mine in both hot dogs and burritos that could lasso the earth and cinch mountains until they burst like pimples. Aria and I stayed at a spot just a minute walk from El Pancho Villa—which served both quality dogs and burros. You could even get a dog in a burro. I enjoyed dogs both in and out of burros, but what I enjoyed most of all was the various breakfast burritos, all so delicious and affordable. Machaca and eggs smothered in their house salsa eaten in between bites of the oh-so-necessary grilled pepper.

Food had been a primary concern of mine since arriving in Patagonia. I had planned to use two off-days to work a couple food truck events, which added about 300 miles to my travel that week. When I was hired on the food truck, I told the owner I wanted to do it because I love feeding people. She looked at me with an assuring nod and said, “You’re a true Filipino,” which was nice to hear because most of the online discourse that would cook up like a thunderhead toward me was about all ways Filipinx-Americans are not Filipino. Even the term “Filipinx” is criticized by some Filipino citizens as a form of colonization.

As dangerous as it can be, the discourse bores me. I mostly wondered what it meant for me selling food out of a truck—the same exact food my Titos would sell as kids from street food carts in their hometown. They would sell to people going about their lives—who needed a quick bite on the way to a job or school. I would sell to Americans who wanted to try something new. But just as laying stones connected my students to a sense of pride in doing something with the land, did grilling skewered pork in a tiny truck with 100+ degree temperatures also restore my relationship…to something? A part of my family I’ve encountered only through stories now lived on through me. Did it not before? Did it restore my relationship to food—patch up the holes left by two eating disorders?  Maybe on the most fundamental level all it meant was that I was broke and that that part of my family lived on in me, too.

Thoughts of my mom accompany me in that truck. How could they not? So, if the work connected me to any of that—family, food—it most certainly connected me to death.

Food and death are all around me like a religion.

***

In our last workshop, we discussed with students how thinking about text as an object transforms it. They were instructed to cut out an object that symbolized their time working with Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN) then write something on the significance of that object into its shape. When they finished, they taped up their stories—the objects—to a window and in that way built a museum embodying their feelings related to the work they’ve done with the land:

I’m wrapping up my last year in the MFA in Creative Writing at UA, and I wonder if I had to embody my time here as an object, would it be a burrito? How is a burrito like death—sealed at both ends. To move here to Tucson, I quit a job—the only job I kept after my time as an undergraduate. After spending six years there, I finally realized a simple truth: if I didn’t leave, I’d stay until I die. Five months before the move, my mom died. The last time she had the strength to hug me was when I told her I got into grad school. At home, I was fully submerged in my grief, but when I arrived here, the bridge of my nose pushed up past its surface, and I felt possibility well up in me.  

I never planned for a post-grad school period. I always figured it would have stayed a distant “someday.” What have I been doing with my time here—my time writing has been the work of laying stones, even if it’s less anti-erosion structure and more graveyard. And as I finish this last year here, I keep asking the question: is it possible to bring what I’ve been working on out into the world? In other words, whatever life I thought I wanted by coming out here, is that life possible? Am I possible?

I know I feel possible on the ranch we visit, teeming with life. I never want to leave because at the ranch there are a series of clear tasks that must be done to keep the operation going. And after I leave here, not the ranch, but the program which has been a home, what are the tasks that I must do to keep my own operation going? Where will I be needed? The whole list is chockfull of hypotheticals I choke on.  Death is here at the ranch, too. It must be. The whole thing, beautifully, is a death operation. The cattle are not slaughtered there, but the whole infrastructure is built around their death. I carry the question “Am I possible?” like a smooth stone in my pocket. The time here did not come easily between failed love/friendships, hemorrhaged bank accounts, and living by myself and away from family for the first time in my life. And then there’s Death. What did my writing, which is mostly about death, do to me?

Did it (re)connect me to something? Am I proud of it? Why do you suppose an agave would want to have sex with a bat?

 If I am not a weapon, what is my purpose?