Happy Friday! I hope things are going well in your neck of the woods. It’s still hot here and I’m at the tail end of my double Covid saga (Covid and rebound Covid). It’s been a long couple of weeks …
I’ve been trying to spend some of my time this week getting back into a prose project on which I received some encouraging feedback from an agent several months ago. “What is this book?” I’m wondering. Is it a book of flash memoir pieces or a book of essays, as the agent suggested I make it? Or are there seeds to two books in the manuscript? I find myself wandering around idea mode, where I make copious notes and plans, wondering if I’ll ever find my way back to some actual writing.
Pausing to ask yourself if you really believe what you’re writing can be crucial.
As I’m thinking about how to move to the next phase, I’m pondering something my friend Jessica Mesman said in a short interview I did with her once. Jessica commented that in revision, she always asks herself, “Do I really mean that statement?” Pausing to ask yourself if you really believe what you’re writing can be crucial. Jessica and I also discuss how she often finds her way into life material via other texts, especially horror movies, which are her particular interest, and about which she has a book project that will, I hope, soon find a home! (You can watch the video of the mini-interview here. I apologize for my squinting at the screen the whole time. It was sunny, and I was paranoid that I wasn’t actually recording!)
Related to the practice of pausing to ask ourselves if we believe what we’ve written is the question of why we write in the first place. In poetry, an ars poetica is a poem that deals with this question— a poem that makes some reference back to why the poet writes poems. One of my favorites is Dana Levin’s “Ars Poetica (cocoons)”:
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat—
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out—
and a voice saying Don’t, don’t—
I once wrote an ars poetica that straddles prose poem and flash memoir, “Minecraft Ars Poetica,” which appeared in Ron Slate’s On the Seawall.
Minecraft Ars Poetica
“How do you enchant an anvil?” my son calls. He’s playing his computer game. “Grindstones can repair and disenchant?”
I need to remember to live an actual life so I have something to write about. I’m holding this stone from the witch store—Ionite—and studying the one coppery fleck. Other than that it’s dark blue, almost indigo, with white veins … Oh, wait, here are a few smaller coppery flecks.
At the grocery story today, I turned down an aisle and away from a couple in dairy with an unhealthy disheartened look. Pale and slumped. Who am I to say? The landlord of a recovering addict friend once told him he had the “look of the damned.” Do I have the look of the damned? As I turned down the aisle, I felt a presence latch itself to my back, like someone coming up too close behind me. When I looked around no one was there, of course.
I almost said “wolf” before. “Unhealthy disheartened wolf.”
My son comes in to tell me he didn’t mean to kill another sheep in his game. Yes, he dropped it from a great height, but he didn’t know it would die. He can tell it died by the floating block of wool left behind.
I live in a bubble of small movements, grateful students, antidepressants, child support. After a year it started to hurt even more. Then that began to ebb and I was left on this floating rock, studying the glinting bits, wondering what they even were.
“I have to stop killing sheep, right?” my son says. “Even if just on accident?” Finally I reply, “OK … yes. I guess so.”
Looking back on this piece today, I asked myself what it reveals for me about why I write. I think it speaks to the value of having a record of our movement through time— I can look back on this piece now and see where I was (and am no longer). It also speaks to connection and disconnection, to my sometimes overly insular character and the way that connection and observation of the outside world is what saves me. The seeds of that are in there, and I can see it now.
A couple other reasons I write are for solace— for myself and others— and to share the more complex, nuanced realities that I can’t otherwise share. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster wrote in his epigraph to Howards End. And the seed of all of it is in those words, the fearsome vulnerability, empathy, and search for connection and understanding at the heart of writing.
Why do you write? Looking back at your writing life, what does it offer you? I’ll leave the comments open!
As I'm searching for a topic to write about, I have been asking myself this. If I don't have some thing to talk about, why am I wanting to write so much? The process and returning to The Project are a delight to me. I keep reading craft books and am excited to draft a small piece, but again--on what topic? (Do you have something you look to when searching for a topic?)
I do love the feeling of building something for others with my hands. Whittling. I love how the writing process pulls me along into an exploration of partially-unknown lands. And I love to catch fireflies on the page so I can see them again, and perhaps in a new way. (But where are the fireflies, Bethany?)
"Did I really mean that?"-- GREAT question to ask! Thanks for that.