The first time I wrote for the sole purpose of writing I was kind. When I woke the next morning to find the love poem “until” sitting on my nightstand in my handwriting I wasn’t sure I had actually written it. It felt like something had jumped out of me onto the paper and I didn’t know if it was a one time fluke or the beginning of a serious condition. I mean what does a writer do? -especially a writer who doesn’t make up stories, but pulls them right from her own experience. On career day at school, no writers visit. So I made myself up as I stumbled along.

I looked for a mentor, someone to tell me where people like me go and how they survive with this aching desire to serve reality raw like fresh cut steak. I looked in the books I ordered from the Weekly Reader. I looked in National Geographic and in the old New Yorker magazines. And every trip to the book store or library I looked in the poetry section. I would pick up random books with good titles and silently pray that I would find something refreshing that made me forget what time it was. And one day in Tower Records and Books I picked up Charles Bukowski.

Reading Bukowski is not likely to soothe many people’s souls – especially a 25 year old Christian woman. One biographer said “It may be difficult to describe Charles Bukowski as a nice man, as anyone who is familiar with his works will readily appreciate. His style of writing was sometimes brutally unforgiving, the kind that Kerouac would produce if he drank a bottle of whiskey a day and left off taking all the funny little pills he was so fond of.” I could rely on Bukowskis’ honesty and this mattered to me at a time when I was just starting to see that life is not fair.

I don’t think I ever consciously decided on a style of writing for myself. I certainly didn’t wake up one day and make a plan of action for the subjects I would address or just how far I’d go when writing how I felt. If I had done that perhaps I would be further along in the literary sense and surely I would not be found to be so offensive in the way I present myself in writing. I would have been more careful with other people’s feelings and more aware of the consequences of misinterpretation. More restraint and less… me.

I said some things in one of my last memos that offended some people and for that I am truly regretful. I offer my apologies to anyone who felt exposed or misrepresented by my words. When I send out a memo I don’t have malice or slander on my mind. I’m simply telling my story from my perspective and unfortunately the tone and intent of my words are often lost on the people closest to me while other readers far away reply with praise and encouragement for my honesty. I’ve accepted that I can’t please everyone, but I don’t want to hurt those I love either. To be myself and not be misunderstood is a goal more difficult to obtain than I ever imagined it would be.

Driving to work today Charles Bukowski was on my mind. Though I am a million miles away from being the artist he was, there is a similar something in his attitude that brings me comfort. At one time he was a nobody writer who succeeded only in composing masses of poems and commentary that entertained strangers and alarmed his friends. In an unpublished letter to Carl Weissner, dated "sometime nov. 1969," Bukowski explained "I have one of two choices--stay in the post office and go crazy...or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve." Soon thereafter he finished his first novel, Post Office.

As it turns out, before he died in 1994 Bukowski published over sixty books--poetry, short stories, novels and he has been translated into all the European languages, including Greek and Serbo-Croat. And in West Germany, where his audience has from the outset been the most enthusiastic, much more so than in the United States, his books have sold over four million copies. This reminds me of the time my former father in law told me I had a “German quality” about me.

I have joked before that I don’t even say half of what I am thinking. This is not really true. Someday when this life is through with me, my journals will be found and it will likely be surmised that I curb more than half of what I want to say. This, of course is of no reassurance to those of you who are a part of my daily life and never gave permission to be written about in a thing called the “milk memo”. There are certainly drawbacks to dating a writer in a similar vein that there are obstacles in dating a musician or a therapist or a minister. I will try to be more compassionate in the future. And I hold nothing against anyone who decides that “milk memo” is not for them.

I don’t know what made me so intent of being open about things. Bukowski, who grew up poor, disfigured and abused, had his theory about his own lack of restraint. He said “When they beat you long enough and hard enough you have the tendency to say what you really mean; in other words, they take all the pretenses out of you. If you can get out of it, whatever is still there is usually something genuine.”

How much I have been beaten, what right I have to speak out is a matter of opinion. I can only tell you that I admire Charles Bukowski, Dorothy Parker, Auden and Jesus Christ all for the same reason – artful, useful honesty. While I have never written for anyone’s approval, I have never consciously written to damage anyone either. And rest assured I TRY to be more like Jesus than any of the others I mentioned.

Even as I sit here now and look over the two Bukowski pieces I have decided to send with this memo, I know the hardest part about reading something personal is the knowledge that it is only personal when it holds some truth for the person reading it. I send my apology today because some of the criticism I received was true and it hurt. I also received intense praise last week for the same work. Thus the brilliant balance of it all that I am learning to appreciate.
Thank you for letting me be a part of your lives in this way.

Penny René

Now
I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word.
for decades now
I have infuriated the
ladies,
the critics,
the university
suck-toads.
they all will soon have
their time to
celebrate.
"terribly overrated..."
"gross..."
"an aberration..."
my hands sink into the
keyboard
of my
Macintosh,
it's the same old
con
that scraped me
off the streets and
park benches,
the same simple
line
I learned in those
cheap rooms,
I can't let
go,
sitting here
on this 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
the gods smile down,
the gods smile down,
the gods smile down.

Black Sparrow "New Year's Greeting" 1992
Charles Bukowski