Nancy L. Wallace

Writer - I’ve been writing since I was a kid - as a teenager, I was attempting novels and short 
stories but when I grew up and got married, I threw all that stuff out. Then I wrote more short 
stories and magazine articles while I was married. When I moved to California, I wrote my friends 
letters—novellas, they might  have been called. I finally settled down and wrote seriously when
I entered college; I did this until senior year, when I met a professor who wouldn’t pass me
because I wasn’t doing the assignment. I worked him over good until I realized that he wasn’t 
asking me to write something scholarly and distant, he just wanted to know what I thought. Well you can 
imagine how deep I had to dig to find that again. No one asked me again for some time and I managed to get
a state job writing memos and stuff like that. When I discovered the computer, I became a renegade again 
for awhile, writing that fiction again and even some poetry. These stories are still some of the most 
exciting I’ve ever written. Then I went back to being serious for a living and forgot all about being
a writer.  A couple of years ago, a friend invited me to a "poetry reading". Hearing poetry
read out loud for the first time, I was so excited, I wanted to find "that poem" I had 
written 10 years ago and went home and looked for it. I was shocked as hell to find a whole sheaf of 
poems I had forgotten about - poems of lost love, found love, critters, people I didn’t understand, 
feelings, and scenes from a fantastic past. Well, that was all very well, but could I write now? For the
next year or so, I gave myself permission to read anything I wrote at open mikes, saying to myself,
"Nancy, you’re going to read this stuff out loud to people and they’re going to know who 
wrote it so if you want to go on reading this stuff, you can or you can do something better. But better 
or not, you’re just going to keep on reading your stuff, so it’s your choice, this or 
something better."  And little by little, I got better. I hope.

                                                 Or

                                    A Journal Bio for Nancy Wallace

We are creatures of connection - we make them everywhere we go. But most [connections] do not create 
a center, at most prop us up temporarily. Thus we collapse the instant they leave. Nature creates connection 
without robbing our center. This is why it is so right to center and connect thru nature. It does not leave us 
empty but instead creates emptiness. As I left the highway & entered the old road between Grass Valley 
& Colfax, I came upon the balloons. I drove past them & listened to that fish inside my stomach that leaps
with joy. I found the place to turn around & dangerously dangerously retrieve the pink & plum & raspberry
balloons, chock them into the back seat as cars careened around the curve in the rain on the narrow 
pavement & once in awhile almost hit me. I could not heed but was caught up in the joy of the balloons.

I went on and drove over a swollen river, a brown swollen river & could not refuse myself. Once again my car 
stopped & I reached for an umbrella. In front of me was the old bridge... Below, the river hurled over a 
gigantic granite slab and dropped whitely ... Doubt about who I am and what I was doing disappeared. I was 
myself rain bridge friend & nancy.

                                                                Ithaca Journal, March 11, 1996

Do you believe in Jesus? he said
after giving me directions to the Price Club. Not like you,
I mean I’m sure he existed, I said.

Afterward his words wafted
in the yellow grass
the shadowed parts of the curved road
waiting for the cool air to turn the hollows damp. I believed
not in Jesus but in him.

O I do love dry rivers!
It’s the extreme of it –

My father
took my mother’s car
into a field
on a curve like this.
You’ll have to get it fixed,
she told him in clipped tones I bet, and bring it back to Detroit. And
walked off I presume. Or hitched a ride.

I enter a redwood forest.
There are few stories of my mother & father
I must treasure them all
It is dark here
in the redwoods & cold.
I close the windows & turn on the heat. It is August.
There is no forest left
on those roads my parents travelled
& no need for curves
on that old seabed between Detroit & Toronto
Except to go around property lines.
"It was my car," she told me 45 years later.
I find the story hilarious
My mother talking to a man like that.
The ocean slurps into view.
I ease the car in a sharp curve to the right
glancing breathlessly back over my shoulder.

                It’s hard to engage anyone in a discussion of the danger
                of the drive to the coast on Highway 68 near day’s end the sun

                               "GOURMET LAMB DELIVERED NATIONWIDE"

                in your eyes behind the pale grass promising the ocean while you think of death.

                                                               8/9/00 On the road to elderflower