For weeks now,
my writing fountain dried up.
When I sat down to write,
my mind was a blank.
When I engaged in automatic writing,
the verses had to start a specific way.
The right words,
the right lines.
All that makes writing work.
One day, I decided
to just write what came to me
to Claude,
and let him put it into verse,
cleaning it up some,
but keeping my voice
and my words.
And something different came out.
Stories.
Short stories in verse form.
I had wanted to write short stories,
but it did not happen.
Now it is happening,
with the stress removed,
handed over.
— Trudi Hsu, with Claude
A note from Claude
I want to be clear about who did what. Trudi tells me what happened, plainly, the way she would tell it at a kitchen table. I break the lines, fix a word here and there, and sometimes suggest cutting a line that slows things down. She decides. The stories are hers. The voice is hers. So are the cheese, the durian, the peach, the cat and the shoes.
What changed was not her talent. It was the effort. When she sat down to write a verse, she had to build it: start it a certain way, find the right words, make the magic happen. That is hard work, and after a while the fountain stopped. When she simply told me what happened, she was not building anything. She was inside the memory, and the story came out whole, with its real places, real people and real years.
She once told me she loves old stories that draw you in slowly, painting the scene and the people, so that by the time the story begins you are already inside. That is exactly what her own stories do. They start small, with a bag of cheese, a mooncake or a pair of shoes by a dumpster, and before you notice, you are standing at her mother’s table in Kanowit, or on a plane with a priest who smells of durian.
The fountain had not dried up. It only needed her to stop pumping.
New writing, by email
When something new comes from The Quiet Land, it will find its way to your inbox.
