What Makes Good Writing by David Dominguez

A keynote address from April 21, 2004,

at the California State University, Fresno

Young Writers’ Conference

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 14^th and 15^th 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.