I would never outline first because I don’t even read in a linear way. I jump around for a very long time. If I like the way language is used, if I feel the operation of what Frank Bidart calls a “compassionate imagination” then I go to page one and read through. But only then.

I write in emotional fragments because it’s how I perceive my world.  How I organize it, make sense of it.

The hardest thing, by far, for me is to sequence them. But once I have the hundreds of fragments and I start arranging and re-arranging them, I see all kinds of structure emerge from the juxtapositions. I already have the story.  And the structure, the plot, emerges. I discover it as I shuffle and re-shuffle the fragments. This works every time. And it is really fun!

I wanted to publish my first novel, The Memory Room  as a box of cards for this reason. So they could be read and shuffled in any order by the reader. This is what a painting does. No painter stands next to the you saying where your eye “should” move, first here then there. Painting isn’t linear.

Yet the linear ordering process, page 1, page 2, which felt so foreign and was so hard at first, ended up being deeply satisfying. I had a million starts that failed. But then I thought of music, which is always, in fact, linear. First note to last note. When I thought of music as a way to make my emotional fragments linear, I was home free.

First I organized my thousands of fragments into piles by emotional color. Red, (danger) blue (peace), green (hope), white(holiness), black (sorrow). Then I closed my eyes. What is the first note? I listened like a composer. I immediately knew it would be a single cello playing a solitary melody. I pulled an appropriate fragment from the pile. Then after that melancholy note, what?  On and on I went. In the end I had a butcher paper scroll running about 12 feet along one wall, and all of the fragments organized into chapters, reading from left to right, like a musical score.

But then I encountered the work of the Holocaust poet Paul Celan at the New York Summer Writer’s Program.  It was a talk by the late, brilliant John Felstiner, of Stanford, Celan’s principal biographer and translator into English. I was in tears when the talk was over and knew my main character had to have Celan in her fragmented world. My writing group groaned.  They knew every line of my manuscript and thought it was complete.  But it wasn’t.  What was a piece for solo cello soon became a concerto. Solo cello accompanied by a small group of instruments. I devoured Celan. I flew to Palo Alto to show Felstiner the first chapter in which I was integrating Celan. Surprisingly, he gave me his blessing.  It was a momentous event for me. And because Celan makes intimate use of the Psalms, the Psalms eventually entered The Memory Room as well. At that point I had a full orchestra.  I was finished.

Meanwhile, in this composing, a definite plot had emerged. A line from beginning to end.  And I loved the plot as much as the story. I loved how it started, progressed, climaxed, resolved. The thousands of fragments had become one cohesive thing. The fragments had become not just one text, but a vastness.  My fragments had become a universe.

It is for this order that we make all art. For this satisfaction. Every composer, fashion designer, architect, poet, industrial designer, choreographer aims at making some order from the chaos of experience. And this is why it is so deeply satisfying when, from either start point, plot or story, we bring them together. It is really joyful. And then we celebrate!  Because the work is finally ready to go out, without us, into the world. And it will embody not only actions and emotions, but will embody an ordering of a chaos that only we experienced. This is the greatest pleasure of all. What we needed to see in the world and didn’t see, ever is finally out there, outside of us, in the world, and we can see it.  This is a supreme, unmatchable joy.

“When I became aware that this book would be threading Paul Celan’s words all throughout its own texture, I wondered if an American novel’s contemporary language and concerns could sustain those of a tragic, brilliant Holocaust survivor.  But I needn’t have worried.  Mary Rakow has seamlessly, subtly composed her own memory fugue, distant from Celan yet profoundly connected.  It’s at once intense and crystalline on every page.”
–John Felstiner, author of Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew and Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan