Transcription of Elizabeth Peavey for the show Beginnings #1
Dr. Lisa: Elizabeth Peavey is the author of Outta My Way: An Odd Life Lived Loudly. A collection of columns from her Casco Bay Weekly days and of Maine & Me: 10 years of Down East Adventures which was awarded the Maine Literary Award for best Maine-themed Book. Her essays and articles appear frequently in Down East Magazine where she’s a contributing editor since 1997. Her monthly humor column Out of My Yard can be found at TheBollard.com. Elizabeth has taught public speaking at the University of Southern Maine since 1993 and has served as guest lecturer of creative non-fiction at University of Maine Farmington. Her latest book Glorious Slow Going: Maine Stories of Art, Adventure and Friendship, a collaboration with renowned Maine landscape painter Marguerite Robichaux is due out in 2012. She recently performed her one-woman show My Mother’s Clothes are not my Mother to a sold-out audience at the St. Lawrence Center for the Arts in Downtown Portland.
Good morning Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: Good morning.
Dr. Lisa: I’m actually fascinated by this quite varied background you’ve had. Today’s show of course is our very first show ever for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and it’s pretty amazing that we have you on because I’ve always considered you to be one of my fellow creatives within the community but you’re a little just a few years ahead of me and I used to read Out of my Way. So it’s great that you’re here and we’re doing this new beginnings thing and in your life, you’ve had new beginnings. So tell me about these recent new beginnings that you’ve been.
Elizabeth: Well it’s been an entire season of new beginnings and ironically enough it ended with an ending and it started with an ending when I lost my Mom 2 ½ years ago. That all coincided with some crises in my career as a print journalist, as a content provider, the whole world is changing and I had a very lovely long run for many years doing my column, writing for Down East, travelling all over the state, doing commercial work in town. I was always busy. I was always happy. I had a community and things were fine. I was maybe a little bit on autopilot. It was not always my best work or my most challenged work. You write a humor column for as many years as I did, you can get a little formulaic after a while.
Then slowly, surely, all of these venues, sources that I was so tied into changed or altered or used me less and my professional life was kind of disappearing on the horizon and the analogy that I used is that I had been on this subway car and going fast and going along and blur and happy and all that and all of a sudden, we’re at our last stop and I’m the one left on the train. Everybody’s out and I’m like I don’t need a business card. I don’t need to join Facebook. I don’t need a website. I don’t need to do any of that because I’m me and I’m sitting on the train all by myself.
So last January, I really was not a New Year’s resolution person but it was just more the turn of the calendar that I woke up one morning and said I got the rest of my professional life to think about and what am I going to do.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me how this coincided with this changing your personal situation.
Elizabeth: Well I lost my Dad when I was 26. So I sort of considered myself possessing a PhD in grief. I preceded all of my friends. Except for the friends who lost a parent at a very young age. I was the first adult in all of my circle of friends to lose a parent. So I kind of stood at the gate when one of them subsequently lost a parent and said I’ve been down that road. Walk this way. So when my mother’s decline, my father died of a heart attack, boom. Gone in an instant.
Dr. Lisa: So he was pretty young?
Elizabeth: He was 64. I was the last child. The really last child.
Dr. Lisa: How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Elizabeth: I have 2 older brothers who are 10 and 7 years older than I am.
Dr. Lisa: Okay.
Elizabeth: As I like to refer to myself in the show, the mascot.
Dr. Lisa: We have one of those in our family. We call her the bonus baby.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: So your father died when you were 26 and then your mother lived …
Elizabeth: Another 25 years.
Dr. Lisa: Another 25 years?
Elizabeth: Yes and her decline was gradual and slow. So in the back of my mind, I said I know this territory. I’m mentally preparing for it. she’s not going to go now but she’s going to go and I know the grieving process and then of course boom she dies and I’m a mess and you never can prepare yourself for that because every grief is different and this I think because there was so much ambiguity. We were making so many decisions. Nursing home, assisted living, back to rehab, can she go home? Can she drive? Can she not?
It was a constant, constant decision-making process. So we were all exhausted on top of everything. And I gave myself a good solid hard year of just grieving and letting myself mourn and restore and then it took me kind of another 6 months or so to get my feet back under myself with any injury whether it’s mental or physical. It takes a while to put your legs back under yourself and that’s when I felt physically and mentally and spiritually capable of doing something about my life.
Dr. Lisa: So is this how the January piece came in for you?
Elizabeth: Yes. It was sort of around that time. The first thing that I did and as I tell my writing students, the only way to start is to start. I said website. It’s like I said my career was disappearing into the horizon and I’ve been in Portland for over 30 years. I’ve been like whoa. It’s like who are you? So I had to eat my own words and I started working on content for website and that was a lot of work because I didn’t want it to … I want it to reflect who I was so I was very thoughtful and very careful.
Dr. Lisa: This is ElizabethPeavey.com?
Elizabeth: Correct. Yes. I also decided I have been giving away all of my professional life. Public speaking coaching, manuscript coaching, writing instruction and all of my friends who are actual professionals you know nurses and doctors and it’s like you have to start charging people when you do that. So that was part of the other aspect of the website is to figure out how I would professionally put that together.
Dr. Lisa: Why do you think that you had given so much away over the course of your life?
Elizabeth: A little bit of oblige that I just felt that it was easy for me to give these things to people and because they’re not tangible. It’s not like …
Dr. Lisa: The writing and the public speaking.
Elizabeth: Yes. It’s not like I’m giving you … writing a will for you. I’m not massaging your broken foot or something. It’s like I’m talking to you about writing. So many people do that casually. I don’t even think people who ask for help think of it as a professional service. I think it’s like let’s sit down and talk about my writing because you’re a writer. I think that it’s fun because it’s fun for them and don’t necessarily consider it.
Dr. Lisa: Wait a minute, who are you having out? Because a lot of people I don’t know that don’t consider writing all that fun.
Elizabeth: Right. Vocational writers.
Dr. Lisa: So then you decided that you did have some value …
Elizabeth: Yes. I never really did not …
Dr. Lisa: Or have some value that maybe you should charge people for.
Elizabeth: Exactly. I’m of that … you don’t want to talk about it. It’s always like oh I’d love to do your project and at the very end it’s like oh you don’t have a budget for it. I just went that ascetic route to want in to come in and do this long memoir workshop and then at the very end it’s like so your budget is oh nothing.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, that’s a little discouraging.
Elizabeth: It was a little discouraging. That that should be the question upfront. I mean I charge for my work. Do you think you can afford me? Not give the whole thing and say oh by the way …
Dr. Lisa: This is actually a really important lesson for anyone who’s listening to the show is that setting the expectations ahead of time is important and knowing your own value and asking for something back. This is an ongoing issue.
Elizabeth: Yes and that’s always been the worst and the hardest thing. Especially as a freelancer, the trick is not necessarily doing the work. It’s how to charge for it and it’s a very secret society and it’s very typical to find out who charges what and who gets paid what and I don’t know if I’m like at the top of the heat or people are saying “tee hee” when I give somebody an estimate.
Dr. Lisa: It’s much easier to have somebody fix your furnace and then you can call around and find out how much is going to be to get your furnace fixed. Instead you’re trying to write and this was part of your new beginning was deciding okay, I’m worth this much, I’m going to put this on my website and I’m going to begin again.
Elizabeth: Exactly because at a certain point in your life, you feel like I have spent 30 years training to do this and it is a valuable skill and people don’t … again, I don’t go into my accountant’s and say oh you like numbers, thanks for doing my taxes. Bye.
Dr. Lisa: You know as a doctor, I do understand this. Or somebody wants to talk to me about their transition so you know that I get this and I actually Gen Morgan sitting next to me from Maine Magazine. She does the same. She’s also a writer and she does the same sort of …
Is that not true Gen?
Genevieve: It’s true and actually Liz, I wanted to go back to one thing that you said that I’ve thought was so interesting. You said that you gave yourself 6 months to get your feet under you and I don’t think that people understand that there is that fallow period when you’re starting something new and that I think people decide that they want to have that change in their life and then I think the change should happen. So I’m interested in that fallow period.
Dr. Lisa: Well I always tell my students, my writing students of any age even my public speaking students that all of these process are muscles and you don’t decide I’m going to start running today and do your marathon and you don’t start playing the guitar and go to Merrill Auditorium the next day. Once you even a follow period, you need to start slowly and build those small muscles back up again so that you have some stamina and can go some distance and sitting down specially something like writing which is so solo and so focused and it’s so easy to be neither of those things that you have to retrain yourself and rethink those processes and get your head back into that situation and I was fortunate, I kind of just stumbled around for a number of months trying to figure out working little pieces here on the website. Little pieces there on the manuscript for the show. Working on manuscript for my book that is coming out with my friend Marguerite.
But it was all going in different directions because I was also teaching and running a household. It’s so easy to be distracted when you’re self-employed. But I was given the greatest gift a writer or anyone I guess can be given a friend in Bethel had a condominium. It was her mother’s condominium which was vacant and she gave it to me for 2 weeks so I was isolated, unplugged, no internet, no radio, no phone, no friends, no husbands, no nothing and I got up in the morning, I walked for an hour. I came home. I wrote for an hour. I ate breakfast. I wrote for 3 hours. I had lunch. I wrote for 3 hours and in the afternoon, did chores, wrote again. Read in the evening and all of a sudden, those muscles that I have been working at up till that point all came back into harmony. They all became one big muscle.
Now as I sit down to work, I never have my email. When the email is off, I never let myself Google anything. I unplugged the phone. Even if it’s for an hour at a time but it is that discipline that I was able to establish in that quiet and not everybody I mean I’m 52. I mean it’s the first time that I’ve actually done anything like this. I’ve been a professional writer all my life. Not everybody has luxury to take that time and have that quiet but that’s where I got my momentum going again.
Dr. Lisa: So you were hitting the reset button essentially?
Elizabeth: Well I was pounding the reset button. If it were as easy as a press, I think everybody would do it. It really is like …
Dr. Lisa: It had to be sort of thrust upon you?
Elizabeth: Yes. You get your head up against the wall. I mean I have so many pages that I just threw away. I mean writing is about editing and finding your voice. I mean when I used to write my column, I used to say it’s like pulling down a big roll of paper towels is that I would have to write 2 or 3 paragraphs before I figured out what I was saying. So those had to go and then I was able to get what I was doing and I think in this big picture stuff, I did a lot of stuff from my website that I’ll never use. I did a lot of stuff for the book with Marguerite that’s gone for this show, long gone and this show is actually coming out of a book so I have it in my oh I can use that in a book maybe because I hate to throw anything away. I’m a very big recycler.
Dr. Lisa: I mean you’ve got this Maine background, right? We were very frugal here in Maine.
Elizabeth: We are. That’s right. Exactly.
Dr. Lisa: We don’t like to throw things out, and sometimes the letting go of things is the most important part as you’ve said.
Elizabeth: That’s … now, I mean coming back to the show and the things …
Dr. Lisa: Yes which is about letting go I believe.
Elizabeth: It is so much about letting go and the irony is that when Mom was living, when she down-sized from her big farmhouse into the condominium, my brothers and I were just ruthless with her things. I mean of course they were the nice things. The jewelry and some of the furniture’s but the tea cups and the milk glass and the silk flowers and oh you’re going to get that. You’re going to get that. It’s like all of these stuff is so awful because you don’t need the thing when the person’s there. That doesn’t have any value and then the minute she was gone, they become almost fetishes that it’s like I’m pouring this emotion of losing my mother into this ridiculous bent can opener or this pie tin that she used to keep her thumbtacks in.
Dr. Lisa: I remember we did a workshop together and you read a piece about your mother’s fingernails.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: It was very early on.
Elizabeth: That’s exactly. This is from that.
Dr. Lisa: Okay wait, you didn’t keep your mother’s fingernails, did you?
Elizabeth: No.
Dr. Lisa: That would be very strange. I’m sorry.
Elizabeth: Finger nail polish.
Dr. Lisa: So it is about the small things that we keep. Not necessarily body parts.
Elizabeth: No gosh. Oh.
Dr. Lisa: I’m sorry. In the play though, you did talk about … I think you were telling me off-air that you were looking at various pieces, you were sorting through them and deciding what it is that I keep, what it is that I give away and that whole process is just it’s psychological, emotional, intellectual at so many things.
Elizabeth: Well it is and again as I said, the things that actually have monetary value I mean those were not I mean they’ve already sort of been absorbed into our lives. It’s the weird stuff that basically has absorbed the memory that there’s that knitting bag and she hasn’t picked up a knitting needle. She hadn’t picked up a knitting needle for 20 years but it was always in the den closet beside the sewing machine and it had a smell that smelled of the den closet and it’s nothing I’ll ever use. It’s nothing that I’ll ever take out of my house and yet to put that in the garbage or you know to a box to goodwill, it’s like you’re saying I reject you and that’s where the trick comes in is to say my mother’s clothes is not my mother. My mother’s things are not my childhood.
So when I get rid of the object, I’m not getting rid of the memory. I’m not getting rid of the person. I’m just getting rid of a thing. I think the best analogy, I was actually thinking about this recently. My mother played piano. She took classical piano and she was a young girl and could always get her to play piano and she got older and she had a little bit of arthritis in her fingers but the fingernails my mother like to drink gelatine and especially in the 70’s. She had these talons. So she’d say oh I’d love to play but she hold up her daggers as I like to call them and she wouldn’t be able to play. So we had these pianos upright sitting in the house for 25 years that went for silent and then out of tune hopelessly and then what is a piano then when it goes quite?
Dr. Lisa: It’s a piece of furniture.
Elizabeth: Or just a wooden strings and nothing. It’s nothing because it doesn’t do anything. It’s a piece of furniture. You can’t sit on it. It becomes nothing and a lot of the bleep I need to make is that knitting bag is just a thing and all of the light is gone.
Dr. Lisa: It’s like an unused piano.
Elizabeth: Exactly.
Dr. Lisa: But it’s hard because these things they do then to become almost sacred. They are almost sort of icons and if you get rid of them then it’s as if you’re discarding your religion in some ways.
Elizabeth: And it’s that though the finality because death is so final. Holding on to something, you can always say well I can always get rid of it. But I can never get it back. I mean I’m the type of person that is actually gotten up at dawn to go out to the curb to retrieve a bag of New Yorkers. It’s like there might be one article in there I didn’t read. I can throw those away later.
Genevieve: There would be a time when I have to get that. I want to clip that cartoon and sent it to a friend.
Dr. Lisa: So with all these the follow period, the new beginning, the website, the book that you’ve just written and completed, the play that you’re doing, tell me what things looked like for you and your next beginning because really it’s a series of beginning that it sounds like you’re going through.
Elizabeth: It is. One of my favourite words is recrudescent and I just sort of feel like I had been a husk little seed and I had to. I mean I had to be quiet and I had to mourn. Everybody does it differently and there were so much involved in mourning my mother as I said the end was sort of difficult and ambiguous. Did we make the right choices? Did we not intervene soon enough? Did we take too much freedom away? So I had to process as we say all of that and think about that. We were exhausted. I mean the last 6 months of her life required everyday care even though she was in facilities, I got to be proactive and be there and one of us was there all the time. We were exhausted. I mean just sheer exhaustion of grieve and then really letting go and healing and mourning and the difference between mourning and grieving and I gave myself the luxury to do that and I again was fortunate enough that I have a husband with a real job as opposed to a freelance-writer job.
There was some money in the estate. it wasn’t the first time Mom supported my writing career and I just gave myself the year and I said for the rest of my life, if I don’t do this now and I know that the grieving process doesn’t end when you say boop, okay a year is over. I mean but it more so is different and it grows more tender and it’s less jagged and so when I’m sad about my Mom now, it’s actually sweeter. It’s not oh I did the wrong thing. I wish I could you know, I’m going to go back and interview that nurse. Was she giving her her pills? I don’t trust her.
And now it’s gone. But with that, my age, being 52 is an odd time especially for a writer because everybody wants new and fresh but I feel as though I have always created a place for myself in the world I never had a job per se. I never was given oh, you’re going to be perfect for this. I always went out and found a place for myself and because I didn’t make a place for myself, I kind of forgot that and so when there was nothing there, I said okay, the only way to start is to start.
Dr. Lisa: Then you began making a place for yourself again.
Elizabeth: Again and with the show, I mean the response to show has just been overwhelming. I mean the first one sold out well thanks to Bill Nemitz, he wrote a very nice column in the Sunday Telegram and that certainly spread the word but it’s the response, everybody of my age group and not necessarily that has a story to tell or an armful of clothes in the back of their closet or weird friend of mine in the West Coast heard about this. I didn’t keep anything for my mother’s stuff except a purple velvet cord around her neck that she used to keep her keys on. So we all kind of taken pick what we want.
So my goal is to take this on the road. Probably small venues in New England first but if I get this up on its feet enough, then I love performing. I have a background at theatre so why not? I still can’t believe I’m doing this so why not that?
Dr. Lisa: Why can’t you believe you’re doing this?
Elizabeth: It’s … there’s going to be a 125 people staring at me tomorrow.
Dr. Lisa: Okay but if you’re a writer, you have potentially a lot more people staring at you just in a different way.
Elizabeth: Yes. If I forget what I’m writing, I can hit delete, delete, delete. When I’m standing in front of an audience.
Dr. Lisa: So this takes some bravery?
Elizabeth: Yes and as brave as I have ever been in my entire life to do this and I can’t believe that I’m doing it and I’m so glad that I am.
Genevieve: What a wonderful way to translate your grief.
Elizabeth: Indeed. I think it’s to share, because as I said I was so thorough in my grieving and my mourning that this is written for everybody. This is not my story. This is our story of how we part with those we love and the things that are left behind.
Dr. Lisa: Well it is great. So we’ve been very privileged to talk to you today. Liz, Elizabeth, Peavey. I still haven’t come up with a new name, a new Dr. Lisa name for you but how about Inspirational Liz? Is that a little bit too much for you?
Elizabeth: Oh.
Dr. Lisa: But it’s been great to have you. We really appreciate your coming in this very very first infant episode of Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and it’s perfect. Absolutely perfect for us.
Elizabeth: Well I had a wonderful time I love talking to both of you. So thanks.
Genevieve: Good luck Liz.
Elizabeth: Thanks.