When Angel Eduardo asked me to be a part of this Writing Process Blog Tour experiment, I initially heard strains of “Working on the Chain Gang” in my head.  I hate chain emails as much, if not more, than him.  I never see any purpose to them.  But this is a bit different. Its purpose is many-fold. It is about inclusion and revelation and inspiration within the literary community.  While the work of a writer is a primarily solitary endeavor, it need not be.  Just as we read and share our thoughts about books we cannot put down, we need to share the words of other writers toiling alone in their literary pursuits.

I was privileged to meet Angel about six years ago through an ever-expanding writers community generated as the result of Edi Guinta’s Memoir Writing classes at NJCU. While I did not have the opportunity to take any of her classes with Angel in it, I did get the chance to meet him through one of Edi’s many MemoirFests.  In so doing, we, along with several other budding writers, created a “family of artists”  known as The Recollective. No longer is my craft as solitary. Through our group’s monthly gatherings, I have grown to know and love the tender hearted, poet and writer I now call cherished friend.  Angel’s discipline of writing daily is something to which I truly aspire, and his willingness to continue providing constructive criticism at the drop of a text has me forever in his debt.

WHAT AM I WORKING ON?

I have been working on a memoir entitled, “In the Wake of My Fathers” for what seems my entire life.  But it was not until the tragedy of 9/11 that I started to seriously take pen to paper to explore the relationships that formed as the result of my father and stepfather’s influences upon my life. As the only “love child” of my biological father and mother, I was raised in an endless series of apartments by my mother and stepfather, along with my half-brother, David. Simultaneously, my half-brother, Michael, and half-sister, Kerri, were raised by my father and stepmother, in a parallel world of middle-class rentals.  It is between these two universes that I traversed, trying to find my “true place” in both.

HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE?

While there have been other memoir works produced that explore the reconstituted families of divorce and re-marriage, mine explores it against the backdrop of 9/11 and the wake/funeral of my father, Michael, a man I idolized and hadn’t seen for five years prior to that tragic day at the World Trade Center.  It was this tragedy that led to my reconciliation with him a mere three months before his death on Valentine’s Day, 2002. It was his death that led me to the mental reconciliation of the death of my step-father, Bob, the man I referred to as “Dad,” a man whose image was tarnished for me by an ugly accusation just one week before his death on Good Friday of 1997. It is a work about reconciliation and the search for “emotional truths” in the wake of tragedy.

WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO?

I write it because I am compelled to. It is part exorcism, part resurrection. Through the art of language, I am looking to piece together the many missing parts of my family and life to fill in the emotional holes dug by all of us. In so doing, I also hope that others will relate to the feelings of disconnectedness often felt by children of “split” families and what it is to get to that place where the “hole” becomes “whole.”

HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?

As a child born of the tropics on the island of Key West, I cannot help but compare my writing process as that of the ever-changing temperament of the bounding main, waiting for the occasional shoreline revelation of a treasured gem. Sometimes, I can go for days, with a thought churning over and over in my head, waiting for those brilliant pieces of sea glass one finds on a morning stroll, to appear on the page when I am finally ready to sit down in front of my screen. At other times, I pull up a chair and start with a single word or idea, like a weathered piece of driftwood, striking away at the keys, carving out words painstakingly, striving for the end product I envision. Then, there are the days of purging, wading through the seaweed of language in search of those pearls that stay.

My process is dichotomous in its wild tranquility, often spurred by a song on the radio, a reminiscent scent that lingers in the air, a phrase that stays curled in my ear until I am forced to write it down hurriedly before it is lost to me in the waves of diminishing time. (Hence the need to always have a small notepad and pencil, or my cell phone, at the ready.) It is as amorphous as the endless blue-grey-green horizon line, changing with each day’s thoughts and memories. Often, when I am struggling to find a structure for a piece I am contemplating, I will take a long drive with no particular destination.  There is something about the rhythm of the ride, the feel of the air billowing through my hair, the isolation behind the wheel that reminds me of sailing and the many solutions I have found within the hull of a vessel, alone on a journey not charted, with no distractions other than that which lays beneath the surface of my consciousness.

WHO’S UP NEXT?

Michelle Rodriguez has presented and published her writing in a number of venues across the North East. She is a high school English teacher who is rewarded every day that she walks into the classroom. She has an obsessive love for Shakespeare and takes her sweet time teaching his works to her students. She lives happily with her husband and their dog,  Jake, with whom she loves to pieces but is still trying to reach an understanding. She is working on a longer work that encompasses more stories of classrooms, education, cultures, and ultimately, love. Her innate ability to make me melt with her written words (and often throw my own pen out in disgust) must certainly have been bestowed upon her from the Bard, himself.

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