Ordinary People

On road trips, head trips, memory trips

Here’s a moment: 2007. My husband and I are driving from Michigan, where we live post-my MFA program, home to New York for a holiday (Thanksgiving, maybe). We’re on Route 80, which is how we drive from Ann Arbor to New York, and how I drove from New York to Oberlin during my undergrad years, a straight shot through the long stretch of Pennsylvania and Ohio. I get a call from my college mentor while on this drive, and he asks me if I’d be interested in returning to Oberlin to teach for the upcoming year, a visiting teaching position the creative writing department offers to alumni. I would love nothing more, but I’m driving to New York to share the news with my family that I’m pregnant, due the following July. The job starts in August. I tell him I’m honored to be asked and I have to think about it. I’m deeply flattered and secretly crushed, knowing I cannot take the job.

Another moment: Last week. I’m at Oberlin where I haven’t been for approximately 20 years, touring the school with my older child, a high school junior. The college and town feel deeply familiar; some things have changed—buildings added or renovated, new businesses, apparently no Quarter Beers at the ‘Sco for any alums reading this newsletter—but a lot is (eerily, comfortingly) the same¹. I send a friend a selfie from the bathroom before we go into the info session with the line: “Wow I really look like someone’s mom” because I do, because I am. I mean, I have just exited a minivan (a rental, the only way to travel 1000-plus miles in our family’s opinion). The weather sucks—we exited said minivan into hail, thanks for being on point Northeast Ohio!—but the info session is great, makes me want to go back and do it all over again with less risk aversion and more foresight, and the tour goes well. My kid likes the school, takes photos when she can (the tour guide, a member of the track team, is very sweet but walks too fast, which says a lot coming from a New Yorker). One of the photos my kid takes is this:

Though she had no idea, this is the literal spot where I gave my senior reading in 2000. I was introduced by the aforementioned mentor; I still remember him describing my character work as akin to the act of peeling an onion and discovering its layers, and the feeling of being seen and understood, the pride I had in my work then. I’m on a break from socials, but later that night, in whatever mediocre hotel off 80 we’re in, my husband shares my daughter’s post so I can see the caption: oberlin today! fun fact my mom went here. fun fact I love my mom. ok bye.

Recently, there was a great piece in the New York Times about the artist Ruth Asawa (that’s a gift link, if you don’t have a sub), about her home and the children who lived inside it and who tend to it now. As someone who can feel overwhelmed by the people-ness of having two children—by which I mean you aren’t raising two babies or kids, but two complicated human beings who you build lasting relationships with, who you are shaping to build their own when they leave your nest—I was floored to learn a few years back that Asawa raised five kids while producing such and extensive and impressive body of work.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, if you know my work, you know I’m not this type of mother, the type who’d welcome an ask for a sandwich mid-work, and that I won’t apologize for that or add caveats. But I admire this value in Asawa and others, and share wanting to make my work visible to my kids, to have them see me as ordinary and art as something that ordinary people do amidst our ordinary lives. I think, too, of the quote I open my course on building a sustainable writing practice with:

“If art is made by ordinary people, they you’d have to allow that the ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real human beings possess. This is a giant hint about art, because it suggests that our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to our getting work done, are a source of strength as well. Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.”

From ART & FEAR: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles & Ted Orland

I’m certain I thought in 2000 that being a writer would somehow make me an extraordinary person, that my ambition would enlarge my life—which it has—and keep me immune from, or make easier at least, ordinary choices, which it of course has not. On that drive in 2007, I became all too aware of the first trade off of many I’d make not only as a parent but as a writer, an identity which impinges on what most people consider ordinary lives: working schedules, being a provider of economic stability for a family, and so many other things I did not see coming because I had romanticized them² and because I wasn’t yet thirty, which is early in an ordinary life, however you’re building it. In 2025 I see how much of my work is entangled with this very question of the ways ordinary people exist in the ordinary world, a direction I was already headed in 2000, long before I would embrace my fiction as domestic, or consider having kids. I’m less interested in declaring a victor in these trade offs, in asking chicken or egg, than in noticing the coexistence of these moments across time.

ok bye

Danielle

1. In Mudd Library, a whiteboard (which used to be a bulletin board) with a question of the day: what’d you have for breakfast? The usual straightforward food answers, and because it’s college, an enthusiastic answer of PUSSY! which I could see the other family on tour with us praying the younger sibling did not spot, as she was already scandalized by the plethora of curses and absurdity, as college students intended.

2. …and to be fair, because publishing has shifted a lot from what I was raised to expect in the late 90s and early 2000s