What Makes Good Writing by David Dominguez
A keynote address read by the author on April 21, 2004,
at the California
State University, Fresno
Young Writers’ Conference
(slightly revised on May 1, 2004)
Last week, I reread one of my favorite essays: “Walking” by Henry David Thoreau. Ever
since, I have felt a sense of affirmation, for Thoreau is telling me that good writing is a way of life, which is exactly
what I need to hear in the wake of my own continuous struggle to write well.
Read “Walking,” and you will learn that in order to work the mind, one must work the
legs among the swamps and the “dank sedges” that haunted Edgar Allen Poe, and one must walk where Berry Lopez
sees the “pitched massifs,” for such walks will broaden the imagination. Thoreau begs the question, “Will
not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under such conditions?” and states, “from
such conditions grew Homer.” Thus, Thoreau identifies a link between writing
and the natural landscape. And, indeed, I feel on fire in the morning when I drive to work in my truck: the V8 purring; the
smooth open road before me; the scent of the vineyards, the nectarines, the plums, and the blackberry brambles filling my
cabin; my mind alive like a hornet’s nest.
Good writing comes about through a way of life. It comes about through long walks along the Kings River where one hopes to discover, under the jagged rocks, stories and poems nestled beside
earwigs, potato bugs, and clumps of earthworms.
This is not an easy walk. It is a hike, and the young writer must not hesitate to look at “walking”
as a metaphorical activity. Thus, walking is when he pushes himself out of the bed Friday morning to write, the sprinkler
in the garden the only sound he hears. Walking is when he locks himself in his study on Saturday to revise a poem despite
the sun passing over the calla lilies and through his window, the light warming his back. Walking is sitting on the couch
all day Sunday to read Zorba the Greek while the wind chimes sway in the breeze,
and the nearby swap meet shoppers enjoy tacos and horchata.
When I look back at my own life, I see a brief history interwoven with a series of events that made
me a writer. When I was a child, my mother read to me poems by Emily Dickinson, and my mind, at nap time, filled with
horses' heads pointed towards eternity. A few years later, my father put books in my hand and turned off the television.
I read stories such as “The Ransom of Red Chief” and “For Esmé with Love and Squalor.” Then, I fell
in love with other books, such as The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, The Dark Is Rising, and Call of the Wild. I read William Faulkner’s
Nobel prize acceptance speech and learned that nothing is worth writing about but the constructs of the human heart. I ran
cross-country at Hoover High School
and got tough quick. In retrospect, I’ve come to understand that what ever helped me pound out the 14th and
15th mile helps me pound out the pages that are turning against me. At California
State University, Fresno, I read William Carlos Williams’
“The Red Wheelbarrow”:
So much
depends
upon
a red
wheel
barrow
glazed
with rain
water
beside
the white
chickens.
And suddenly “No ideas but in things” echoed up and down the streets of my neighborhood. At the University of California, Irvine, I learned about duende, the force that the matador feels in his wrist when his sword
passes up and over the horns of the bull. At the University
of Arizona, I read Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Llanto por Ignacio
Sanchez Mejias,” a poem so good that I felt hopeless and refused to write for three months. But one day, I pushed myself
off of the sofa, I opened the blinds, sat at my desk, and wrote “Between Magnolia and Ash,” which became the first
poem in my first book, Work Done Right.
I took twenty years to write that poem because good writing comes about only after a person has
worked hard and made sacrifices on a daily basis. Good writing comes about when a person is willing to walk through, what
Dante calls, “A savage forest, dense and difficult.” Read Frank Gaspar’s “The Lemons,” and you
will indeed see that it is a wild land: boondocks “all pained with thorn” and poison oak.
Between Magnolia and Ash
(From Work Done Right)
I am Abraham, the great-grandson of Alberto,
a Mexican soldier who crouched
below a shrub of honey mesquite and buried his uniform.
That morning,
clean sheets slapped
shoots of sun in the breeze,
coals boiled
laundry water,
and Rosa leaned over an aloe to massage
her blistered
wrist, and in her gray eyes was a stillness
built on stones and leaves.
In the yellow
blooms, a tarantula hawk
sucked nectar above Alberto
watching the
insect body sheen deep
as a shotgun barrel in the sun,
and he stroked
water, stroked the wheat-colored sand,
and Alberto knew Pancho Villa approached.
When Pancho
Villa was only a boy,
he came in from the fields to eat
and found
his sister raped on a white tile floor
that grew dark as she squeezed
her knees
and became a point of dim light
in the lost bead of a green chandelier.
His first
bullet took the estate owner's thigh.
The second blew away his chest.
The man felt
nothing, and he leaned
his cheek on a window and saw
a spotted
wren look from the bones
of a cholla cactus and then died.
Alberto brushed
along the striated muscle
of a mare's hind legs, combed the black stockings,
and picked
manure from the hooves.
Perhaps, Alberto hoped, Villa would want the horses instead.
Alberto feared
dust and imagined
Villa's men on palominos whose hides
were spurred
raw below the ribs.
Pancho Villa rode in the blue evening light
that made
the hard crags of hills soft.
Villa's Dorados surrounded the stables,
dragged Alberto
under a cottonwood, and tied a noose.
A Dorado took off his boots
and soothed
his blisters in the trough
and watched Rosa fall on her knees and wrap
both arms
around Villa's shins.
Perhaps the Dorado, as his feet cooled,
when he didn't
feel grains of dust
in the pink discs of broken blisters,
perhaps it
was then when he saw the sudden break
of Rosa's hip and waist and how it hung in the air
so still he
began to want her,
and perhaps it was then when Villa said, "No."
Rosa and Alberto
crossed the Rio Grande
and walked between the magnolia and ash.
The starless
sky held Rosa and Alberto,
the ranch behind them was no longer their own.
They brought
their blood, a cart,
and one young mare that twitched its ears and began to sigh.
Thank you.
