Appleton author unites dual existences

Linda Tatelbaum used to live two separate lives. At home in Appleton, west of Belfast, she didn’t tell locals she was an English professor at Colby College. At Colby, she rarely mentioned that she was a homesteader, growing her own food and hauling water from a well.

Then came a breakthrough moment in a freshman class at Colby, a moment Tatelbaum describes in her new book, “Writer on the Rocks.” The class was reading Carolyn Chute’s “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” and they were disgusted that the book’s characters had killed rabbits for food.

“I sat there secretly shrouded in the robes of my double life. Just one day ago I had finished the fall butchering,” Tatelbaum writes.

“`Why is eating a rabbit so different from eating a hamburger?’ I ventured.

`Would you eat one?’ they asked. I nodded, still tentative.

`Have you eaten one?’ I nodded again.

`Where do you get them?’

I felt as if I had taken just a few careful steps out onto a frozen pond only to hear the ice cracking under me with the weight of unspoken words. There was only one way back to shore — speak my deed. I flushed. Stammered. Then gave witness to everything: pride, shame, fear, love.”

These days, Tatelbaum’s two lives have come together. She thinks of “Writer on the Rocks” as the marriage between them. The book is part memoir, part essay, with strong philosophical currents. The author will speak at the 14th annual Maine Women’s Studies Conference on Saturday, Nov. 13, at UMaine-Augusta, and at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21, at Borders in Bangor.

Tatelbaum has a doctorate in medieval studies, and while she hasn’t used that expertise professionally, it has influenced her thinking.

“In medieval days, people looked at things in levels. They thought the physical level was the lowest,” she says. “I’ve come to think that, for me, it’s the highest.”

For Tatelbaum, using physics to repair a well or build a stone wall is the ultimate satisfaction, and the tools that make such tasks possible can be applied to writing — and writer’s block — as well. She sees the writer’s doubt as a force, pushing down; an essay is a thrown ball that needs a reader to catch it. It’s “This Old House,” “3-2-1 Contact” and Robert Frost poetry rolled into one.

“First I read the large rocks bulging out along the base of the wall as the cause of the middle stones caving in,” writes Tatelbaum. “Gradually they slid off and landed on the ground stacked in reverse order, like a spilled sonnet.”

At a recent lunchtime discussion in a dimly lit Colby lounge, Tatelbaum talked about writing and moving rocks with a small, friendly group of colleagues. She described language as “a way to reach for what we desire.” Obsession, she tells us in the book, is “the human soul traversing earthly desire to to arrive at bedrock with a clang of recognition.”

At times, “Writer on the Rocks” is dauntingly dense — this is heavy stuff, as intellectually heavy as a stone wall is massive. There are a few trite moments, as when Tatelbaum declares herself “between a rock and a hard place.” Groan. The book is anchored, however, by tales of real people and places and struggles, and a few really fascinating facts of geology and history.

The original title was “Body English,” and the essays are grouped together like a college curriculum. There’s “Bod Eng 200: Vision,” then “Bod Eng 300: Ergonomics,” and finally “Bod Eng 400: Leverage.” It’s a little too cute, but structurally, it’s sound. Tatelbaum’s imagined course plan bears some likeness to the actual human ecology curriculum at Bar Harbor’s College of the Atlantic.

With cropped brown hair, twinkling eyes and a mint-green shirt, Tatelbaum looked like an academic leprechaun, a bottle of water before her on the table in the Colby lounge.

Even as a child, she thought a lot. Adults called her “the little philosopher,” and that’s how she thought of herself, then and now. At Cornell University, she intended to study philosophy, but an early class in logic shook that idea off. She’s writing now on the spiritual life of plants. Her counterculture commentaries on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” bravely make the case that money isn’t everything.

She describes herself as a poetic physicist, with no real knowledge of science. But she has always loved packing cars for trips, fitting bags into slots, an enthusiasm that foreshadowed her love of building stone walls. She believes women have an edge in stonework because they’re not as strong; instead, they have to sit back and think how to accomplish a goal.

Unflinchingly honest in her discussion of the writing process, Tatelbaum returns again and again in “Writer on the Rocks” to the block that stopped her cold in the summer of 1995, when she went to her office every day and produced exactly nothing. For the first time in her life, she says, she lacked ambition. It was awful … and kind of nice. She took walks; she cried. A good friend died and she came out on the other side.

“I feel it’s my mission to say how beautiful and how hard everything is,” she said. She favors difficult subjects: “I don’t want to write something someone can read, walk away from and put the laundry in the dryer.”

The new book is not really about writing, she professes, but setting goals. Start with the impossible, Tatelbaum advises, the equivalent of the unmovable boulder she refers to in several essays as “The Big One.”

“When you know what you can’t do, you can turn around to what you can do,” she said.