[Repost] Misfits at the Hinge of the Year
With announcements about co-writing, generative workshops, and Lyric Essay!
Hi, all!
I’ve been traveling the past few days (and celebrating my birthday, which was Friday). And I’ve been thinking (still/again) about how we go about with our normal lives with all the bullshit going on. We live in a beautiful world filled with kind people and also a wretched world with unaccountably cruel people, and the starkness of those contrasts can often feel like too much to hold. Anyway, happy birthday to me. Here’s some Camus for our troubles: "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." (This is from the Instagram account NITCH, which I love. Lots of good photographs and quotations from fascinating people.)
I’m reposting my piece from 2022 about being a misfit at the hinge of the year. Solstices are hinges (portals?), and we just had the summer one. Do you feel a shift? A gathering of energy? Do you feel that outworn things are being shed to make room for the new? (One can hope.)
Anyway, don’t forget to be a misfit. Don’t forget to make good trouble. (Have you heard about the July 17th Day of Action?) Don’t forget that we ARE the the music makers and we ARE the dreamers of dreams, and we will continue to imagine (and enact) kindness, love, and grace.
Love,
Joanna
Announcements:
Co-writing sessions for paid subscribers will begin on Wed. July 16th. They will take place every Wednesday from 11:30am-1pm Eastern time over Zoom. No prompts, just checking in with each other before and after we write for an hour! (I’ll send out a link before the first one.)
Paid subscribers also get 20% off online generative writing workshops. The first of this five-month series will be on Sat. July 26th, 1-3 Eastern. Buy the bundle or buy one at a time. If you miss one that you’ve purchased, you can watch the recording.
There’s still space in the self-guided group course Writing the Lyric Essay, which opens on July 6th. Participants receive six weeks of readings, lessons, and writing exercises, plus interaction with peers for only $75.
Misfits at the Hinge of the Year
In the short story “The Company of Wolves,” a gothic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, British writer Angela Carter describes “the night of the solstice, the hinge of the year when things do not fit together as well as they should.” I’ve been thinking a great deal about the uptick to creativity that can happen in what for me feels like “the hinge”— October through around the solstice. Is it because in many parts of the world, the heat of the summer is followed by the crisp air of autumn and we can finally think? (By the way, when I recently told my nine year-old, that we needed to get out into the crisp autumn air, his response was, “You’re crisp.” Touché, I guess?) Or maybe the veil thinner is at this time? Are we creative, soulful types picking up on something magic and melancholy in the ether that puts us in touch a door ajar, through which we Intuit Things? I mean, yeah. All of it.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about how creativity occurs in the in-between spaces, the spaces of contradiction, ambiguity, of “neither one thing nor the other.” Keats called it “negative capability,” the quality that poets need, by which he meant “a being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (Here’s an interesting essay about the need for negative capability in current society. And I’ve written about how it shows up in parenting, as well.) For many of us, uncertainty has been especially difficult to tolerate these last several years. We’d like a bit more certainty, thank you very much. An ability to plan ahead, to know that our loved ones are safe, that democracy is alive.
But there’s a way in which uncertainty, mystery, and ambiguity are all we really have. It’s the human state. We have consciousness and we have mortality. We live in mystery. Literature and art are there to remind us of life’s contradictions and complexities, to help us remember that it isn’t easy for anyone and that everyone’s life moves between poles of joy and despair, life and death. They also remind us of the richness in uncertainty, in mystery.
I’ve also been thinking lately about my feelings of not fitting, not fitting in capitalism, in conventional society. Of being somehow outside as a single mother and an artist. The pressures on individuals in relation to these larger structures are real. How do we both critique those and offer up a vision of the value of “in-betweenness”?
It’s up to us to have the imagination necessary to create lives and a social fabric in which we can have enough security and certainty to fully experience our humanity. In that way certainty is important. Children need food and good opportunities to learn and grow; adults need opportunities to find their “right livelihood,” one in alignment with their spirit, or at least a stable, reliable one that will allow them to live as fully expressed human beings. But here’s another thing we need— a recognition of the in-betweens, of nuance and subtletly, of the beauty to be found within (because of?) our strangely brief human existences. The artists are the holy fools who move at the edges, reporting back on that which doesn’t fit into straightforward reporting and studies. The liminal is our home.
Here’s a prose poem I wrote that orginally appeared in Ron Slate’s great online journal On the Seawall:
Misfits
“What does ‘baron’ mean?” My son is reading a book in his carseat.
I try to remember what a baron is. “A type of nobility,” I say. “Like a prince but not quite a prince.”
There is a pause. “What does it mean when it’s like, ‘The earth was barren’?”
*
His friend at school has referred to the “b- word,” and he needs to know what that is. I don’t want to talk about it, I say. He keeps insisting until I break down. But first I remind him what sexism is, and explain how sometimes people attempt to put those with less power in their place, to suggest that they shouldn’t claim their power and speak their truth. Finally, I tell him the word.
*
He asks me what a “misfit” is.
“Someone who doesn’t fit in with the group and maybe doesn’t want to fit in,” I say.
“We’re misfits,” he replies.
“You and I are?”
“Yeah.”
And here’s a prompt:
Write for ten minutes on a time and place in which you “weren’t fitting.” Was there any richness or potential there? What did you learn?
Editing help from Elias J., age 12, who would have you know that they are the child mentioned in the poem above. :D