In late November I had a group of people over to my apartment in Santa Fe. We ail sat around the living room, and my friend Miriam read aloud a short story entitled "Aid." After several other people read, Cecil Dawkins (author of

　　Charleyhorse and The Quiet Enemy [Penguin Books, 1986]) walked directly over to Miriam and said, "You wrote too fast. You'rescared. Slow down. You shouldn't write a short story in less than two months."

　　Later Miriam said to me, "It was like a guru entered the room. It was one of the most truthful things anyone ever said to me."

　　Miriam gave birth to a baby girl in late January. In the middle of March, I was visiting and cooing over the baby.

　　Suddenly I asked—I guess testing the commitment of a new mother, something I know little about—"Have you writ-ten anything lately?"

　　"Well, I've taken Cecil's advice and I've rewritten the story

　　about my friend who had AIDS. I'm writing it slow, taking two months, like she suggested. Going slow is perfect for being a mother."

　　"Can I see it?" I asked.

　　Miriam held the baby and I sat at her desk reading her new story.

　　Here are the beginnings of both of Miriam's pieces. The first one, read at my house in November:

　　I sat in the hospital room waiting for Fred to die so I could go to the Lexington Hotel with Larry and fuck my brains out.

　　Fred lay in a coma, he was dying of AIDS, he smelled like a waterbed with a leak, his black skin had turned to ash, his feet and his hands were curled like claws, and he weighed less than he had at puberty. Unconscious, a pebble, a stone along the tide line, he had gathered us together. Two of his friends, both named Paul, stood over the oxy-gen tent sending him a warm pink healing light— as if it weren't too late for that. I couldn't actually see this light, but the two Pauls had informed me of its beneficial presence. Still, neither I nor Larry could bring ourselves to actually visualize anything. Larry was sitting and whittling away at the plantar's wart on his palm with a red Swiss army knife. Larry was six feet three, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and my ex-lover. He had slanty black eyes, and the back of his head was flat—a trait shared by the Mongols and American Indians, of which he was neither. I also knew that under his three-piece suit of summer-weight wool was a blue anchor tattoo and a BB pellet lodged by a lumbar vertebra. When

　　he thought they weren't listening, he whispered to me that the two psychic Pauls were faggots.

　　by Miriam Sagan, from Short Short Stories

　　(Pinchpenny, 1988)

　　The revision I read at her desk:

　　This is how Jeff died. Patrick sat in the hospital room for almost forty-eight hours straight, watching Jeff in a coma. A coma is neither a pleasant nor a particularly interesting thing to watch. But when Patrick got up to make a collect call from the hallway phone, Jeff died. Suzanne wasn't home anyway. Actually she was climbing the four elegant sets of stairs to her apartment in the west Seventies. Even Suzanne was not so rich that she felt she could afford an elevator in that neighborhood. Her key entered the lock just as the phone stopped ringing. When Patrick came back to Jeff's room, a nurse was drawing a sheet up over Jeff's face. When the nurse saw the look on Patrick's face, she pulled the sheet back down. Patrick stared at Jeff's face, which had gone pure ash under the copper brown.

　　"Jeff died," Patrick said into the phone. He had a roll of dimes now. Even Jeff's lawyer started to cry when he heard the news, expected as it was. First a remission from the pneumonia, then a sec-ond attack. When the virus finally lodged in Jeff's brain he could use only his right side. By this time he couldn't speak, but like a baby followed things with his eyes: the buttons on Patrick's pale green shirt, the arrangement of New York winter flow-

　　ers—purple mums, orange mums, and baby's breath. When the seizures began in earnest the doctors told Patrick they would induce a light coma withsedatives.

　　Jeff was a doctor. The nurses stood crying at the nurses' station because they believed a thirty-three-year-old doctor should not die. Jeff was born Thomas Jefferson Able, but he never told his friends at Harvard this. It made him sound too black, in a country way. A skinny man, he mixed the purple ebony of West Africa with the reddish brown of the Algonquin people.

　　"It's good, Miriam. It's really good." I paused. 'Thank you. I learned a lot from it."

　　She was pleased.

　　What I learned from it is that there is a quiet place in us below our hip personality that is connected to our breath, our words, and our death. Miriam's second piece connected to that place, because she slowed down. In her first piece, she was scared, so the piece was glib. We are often funny to cover up fear, but this quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well. I could take Miriam's revised second piece to Asia, to a small village there, maybe a place that knew nothing of AIDS, and they would understand her writing, because it came from the place where we are not American, not gay, not a woman, not a New Yorker.

　　But if we wipe out country, sex, religion—the things that form us—where does writing style come in? Style is all these things fully digested into our humanness, so the fact that

　　Miriam was brought up in New York doesn't overrun the basic emotion of sorrow.

　　Katagiri Roshi said in his book Returning to Silence (Shamb-hala, 1988) that it is not important whether a spiritual teacher has reached the peak or not; what is important is how he has digested the truth he has experienced and how much this truth is manifested in the teacher's life moment by moment.

　　This is true in writing, too. How much have I digested everything that I know and am, so when I write a sentence it comes out silent? What I mean by silent is that it communi-cates directly to your heart and mind, and there aren't any squeaky words that don't fit, words that are afraid. For in-stance, in a good vegetable soup the onion is not constantly sticking up its head for extra attention and yelling, "I'm the onion! I'm the onion!" Instead, it is contributing with the other vegetables to the good flavor of the soup. When I write about the death of my mother, that death shouldn't bolt upright like a rodeo horse and run out of the sentence. Instead, I should fully digest my mother's death and lay it silently on the page. A writer can do this with equanimity and clarity because the writer's bones, heart, and muscles have eaten it and she is willing to face her fear. So finally a writer must be willing to sit at the bottom of the pit, commit herself to stay there, and let all the wild animals approach, even call them up, then face them, write them down, and not run away.

　　Try this:

　　lake a subject, a situation, a story that is hard for you to talk about, and write about it. Write slowly, evenly, in a measured way. Don't skip over any part of it. Stay in there. It might take you several days, a week, a month to write out the whole thing. Continue to work on it every day until it is finished. Include the colors, the smells, the time of day.

　　Before you enter the writing each day, you might want to take a long drink of water or a walk around the block. Do something to let you sink into yourself, so you may write from that quiet place of equanimity and truth. You are safe, go ahead. Stay simple.