Who Gave You Permission?
On Jo Ann Beard's "The Fourth State of Matter"; Lydia Davis; Eudora Welty
This past Wednesday, I gave a webinar for Craft Talks on voice in which my main examples were by the poet C.D. Wright and essayist Jo Ann Beard. These are two of the writers who have given me different sorts of “permission” to develop and claim my own writing voice(s), and I’m so grateful for them and for those moments when you read something and just immediately, viscerally think, “Oh, you can do THAT?” and it’s like a door swings open in your creative spirit.
I asked my close writer friend (and fellow Melancholy Mom) Jessica Mesman who gave her permission, and completely unprompted, she cited “The Fourth State of Matter,” too. (Oh, and by the way, if you are able to access the full essay at the above link and choose to read it, just know that the essay is so sad, gutting— about divorce and the death of pets, gun violence and sudden loss— but it is also one of the most powerful, beautiful pieces of writing you will ever read.)
Two other writers who were like that for me when I first encountered them were Lydia Davis and Eudora Welty. Their voices and narrative methods are so distinctive and I just love them and their humanness, love that they exist(ed) in this world and crafted these stories to reflect some of what that can be like. (By the way, I enjoyed this interview with Davis.)
Below is an excerpt from One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty, in which she describes her mother coming out onto the sleeping porch in the summer and attempting to tell her about the birds and the bees when she was a girl. Instead, “one secret [about her infant brother having died] is … revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell.” This passage has stayed with me for years, dovetailing with my own writerly fascination with family secrets.
So, what are those texts and writers for you? Are there moments in reading that stay with you, that shaped your mind and maybe your writing? I’ll leave the comments open on this post, so I can learn what yours are!
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I love this, and I loved your Craft Talk, too. It was wonderful to sit with Wright and Beard for a moment and really look at their writing up close. And your thoughts on voice sparked so many things for me--thank you! I've also been thinking about these kind of books, what Maggie Smith called "permission-slip books," lately. There's the writers I read and realize, "Wait, you can do that?" (Like Jamaica Kincaid and Zadie Smith.)
And then there's the books I read and recognize the work I'm already doing in private and realize "Wait, I can do this and maybe someone, one day, might actually want to read it? And maybe if I work real hard and win the literary lotto, maybe someone, one day, might actually want to publish it?" That happened to me recently with Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark. I read it and thought, "You mean, I can write surrealist fairy tales and still call it nonfiction? I can write lit crit blended with ordinary stories and people might not look at me like I have three heads?" It felt like Mark gave me a talisman. Gonna carry it with me on my way.
Also, very random, but do you have any recommendations for online poetry workshops designed for writers who aren't poets but secretly dream of writing poetry?