imagination || craft: Glimpses of the Inner World
How do we slow down and have writerly thoughts amidst It All?
What’s coming up: A generative workshop this Saturday 2/24; a self-guided lyric essay course; a 10-week master class in essay forms; a five week memoir class. Information on all Muse courses is here. Early bird prices end 2/29!
February has been a lot. In addition to going to the AWP conference, my son’s birthday is two days after Valentine’s Day, which means the middle of the month tends to be a sugar- and excitement-fueled blur. And in addition to that, we’ve had an excessive (and unexpected) number of days off from school this month. A labor dispute in our school district led to three unplanned days with no school, then this week saw a teacher workday Monday and a sick day for my kid on Tuesday. A lot.
So, how do we slow down and have writerly thoughts amidst It All? In some ways, this was the subject of my AWP panel, “Fragmented Inheritances: Lyric Essay and Intergenerational Trauma.” (Note: Over at Assay Journal, Heidi Czerwiec, author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, has curated a wonderful roundup of blog posts about nonfiction-related panels at AWP. You can read the summary of my panel here.)
In our panel, we discussed the value of leaving space within memoiristic accounts of difficult material. As I spoke about in my presentation, we don’t necessarily need one coherent narrative (or “redemptive arc”!) in order to speak of our experience. There is immense value to simply noticing and sharing one’s inner reality, and we can leave spaces within and around what we report, spaces that allow our readers to meet us where we are and that make moves toward recreating an inner reality we don’t normally share in everyday discourse. We can share the place where the inside meets the outside, to paraphrase Larry Levis. [*See below for more on this.]
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You don’t know someone else’s inner world, even the someones closest to you, and getting glimpses of it can be fascinating and illuminating. Take, for instance, the time last year when my son narrated for me some of the imaginative play he does with friends at recess. We’d gone to his school on a teacher workday, so I could vote. On our way out, we stopped in the playground, and Elias began telling me about the different areas where he and his friends congregated and what they currently meant. They would begin with a meeting at a certain big rock to discuss what they would play and who would take each role, and would then moved on to a large tree stump that represented a command center that could move them through time and space and …and …
There is so much listening to narration in parenting. I will acknowledge that it isn’t always magical. There’s only so much I can take in about Minecraft, for example. Sometimes, though, the glimpse is just what you needed, reminding you of the mystery that is another person’s mind and experience.
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In my teaching, I’m reminded constantly of the value of these reports back from our inner worlds. A self-guided version of my speculative nonfiction class “Writing Beyond the Known” has just wrapped up. In glancing at the student work in the course, I’m pleased and astounded once again to see what is possible when writers are given (and give themselves) permission to follow their thoughts, observations, and attention. Following someone’s flow of inner experience can be fascinating, and I love what writers are able to produce when given models for this and permission. I truly admire the writing students do in my classes, especially when they’re able to stay close to their experience and recreate it in language that provides some tenor of their inner monologues.
For my own part, I have found much solace in recording some version of my inner world and flow of experience. As I read somewhere recently (where?? maybe it will come to me), such autobiographical writing may not fix everything, but it helps frame experience in a valuable way. This was true for me in writing a series of flash memoir pieces in the year or two after I first became a single parent. Here are two of those pieces, “How the Sausage Is Made” and “Dispatch.”)
Essays and poems help me share the things I wouldn’t otherwise share. For me, there’s a certain buildup of pressure I’ve experienced when there’s some element of my thoughts or experience that could use sharing. The feeling is hard to describe, but it has to do with a subtle realization that some element of experience that’s coloring my days is largely unknown to those around me— and that putting words to this unshared part would help frame some small part of human experience for myself and receptive readers. There’s the necessary reporting, and there’s also the necessary leaving of space, the ways we, as writers, create openness (openings?) for readers to meet us were we are and also to reflect on their own experience.
*This is from my course “Writing the Lyric Essay,” a self-guided version of which opens soon:
In his essay "Some Notes on the Gazer Within," Larry Levis writes of the poet as threshold, the poet as making a journey into the wilderness, into the unconscious, to a place beyond the social. This setting out is what, ironically, allows the poet to reconnect with the self and with others, to come back again and report from that place:
So a poet, no matter what his or her subject may be, and no matter what the landscape, goes ‘beyond society.’ And so this is what happens at the moment of writing: the wave takes the shape of the fire. What is ‘out there’ moves inside. The poet becomes threshold. (83)
Literature in general offers a chance for communion that is not elsewhere available. Certainly the private, deeply personal discourse of old friends or lovers allows people to honor and present to each other the less mundane parts of consciousness. Indeed, literature reaches out across time and space to offer the reader an experience of shared private space with another.
[A self-guided group version of this class opens March 25th!]