Cliches concerning the blank page abound: your life is a blank page, this day is a blank page, etc., etc. And while there is intangible truth in these cliches, there is truth and inestimable worth in the tangible blank page. The new notebook opened to its first clean page, the just-gessoed canvas, eager for new color, the computer screen, its cursor blinking, yearning for release. In its discrete form, the Sanctuary of the Blank Page invites beginning.

As children, my friend, Val, and I spent hours with yards of newsprint. Inch by inch, hour by hour, and room by room, our pencils shaped homes that had germinated only in our dreams. We seldom knew–nor worried about–where our pencils would take us. Commenting on the poet’s craft, Robert Frost claimed, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” In our case, this translated into “No surprise for the creator, no surprise for the beholder.” As children, we understood the magnificent power of the blank page, upon which preferences, prospects and possibilities lay before us as the Promised Land. White was good. White was life-giving. White held infinite surprise.

When my father had to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to complete his doctoral work, my family moved to Lincoln, where I attended a new school. Unlike my Kearney school with a playground as gateway to Harmon Park, Bancroft Elementary had a gravel playground. With no playground equipment, it was literally a blank page. While the boys tossed or kicked balls in the west section of the playground, the girls lost themselves in creation. With the edges of our shoes, we painstakingly scraped the gravel into ridges, creating the outlines of rooms which–through collective effort–grew into houses. If we were lucky enough to find unique rocks, we added fish to the aquariums which graced our rooms. Sticks offered more scraping potential and ultimately became light poles or lamps or whatever. Recess after recess, we put shoes to gravel. When the boys inevitably ran through our homes, scattering neatly-edged gravel and ruining any semblance of rooms, we began again. This time would be better. This time we would add more. This time we would protect our work.

As a child, I understood the joy in the parameters of the blank page. In her book, Juliet Immortal, author Stacey Jay writes:

Seven, ten, fifteen, eighteen years old and still there is nothing finer than a blank sheet of paper, the white promise that the world can be what I make it. A magical place, an adventurous place, a possible place. Erasers take away the mistakes. Another coat of paint to cover them up. Black and red and purple and blue. Always Blue.

The white promise that the world can be what I make it. Exactly. I lived for this white promise, seldom passing up an opportunity to fill a blank page with something. In fifth and sixth grades when we finally were able to use cartridge pens during penmanship class, there was something even grander about this white promise: the loops and whorls, the slant and slight made from a cartridge pen. I could feel the tension of push and restraint as I learned to make the pen move across the page. And it was this tension that began to initiate me into a new realm in the Sanctuary of the Blank Page.

In restraint, I began to learn the power that such pause gives. And with pause came fear. Stephen King warns that you must not come lightly to the blank page. Writer Margaret Atwood writes that blank pages inspire me with terror. English novelist, Virginia Woolf, writes: My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry. Ah yes, like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry. Where yards of newsprint and pages of notebooks once made me giddy, my fingers itching to put pen to paper, now they began to terrify me, leaving me on the bottom step of the page, crying.

In my academic work as a high school and then college student, I came to the blank page with trepidation. A productive day of writing seldom yielded more than a single paragraph of prose. Which had been written, rewritten and then rewritten again, looking and smelling more and more like something decayed, its dry bones sprawled across the page, stripped of their original promise. The more I wrote, the more I had to psyche myself into the sheer act of beginning. For beginning grew to mean inevitable dissatisfaction and failure. Beginning meant coming to Jesus. And beginning meant hours of agonizing reflection and revision in hopes of harvesting something passable. In truth, the Sanctuary of the Blank Page frightened me in ways that nothing else had.

As a graduate student, I spent an entire semester studying the work of the confessional poets, focusing primarily on Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton. Immersed in their lives and their work, I lived through their personal and professional pain, their valiant efforts to save themselves from the depression that consumed their days and nights. Each poem was yet another raw confession of self-doubt, self-loathing, self-denial. Each poem was an assault on the senses. In the Sanctuary of the Blank Page, these women were writing for their very lives, baring their deepest pain line by line, stanza by stanza. Sylvia Plath writes:

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

Come what may. Ultimately, neither Plath’s nor Sexton’s facing a blank page day after day was enough to save them. Both took their own lives after years of suffering with debilitating depression. Still, had they not committed themselves to filling the blank pages of each day, I am convinced that they would not have lived as long or as well as they did. Or that the world would now have the wealth of their insights and imagery.  Consider Plath’s poem, “Mirror.”

Mirror