Art and the ordinary

…although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously…When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being.”

from “A Sketch of the Past”, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s capability to articulate my inner thoughts astonishes me. “A great part of every day is not lived consciously.” How I would like to change that! But I have a feeling that it’s the “cotton wool” that makes those moments of glory or change or elation really visible. There is grace in the monotony of life, in that way.

But I also think we could stand to notice more things. I read some great advice in a poetry book about paying attention to just six things each day. If I did it regularly, it would be so valuable; I think it would aid my poetry, hone my observation skills, train my mind to find words for what I’m seeing… Plus there’s the joys of just seeing things more closely. Ordinary things have meaning and joy in them. Seeing them helps us savor them for the gifts that they are.

A related thought: I heard Leslie Jamison talking on the First Draft podcast today about “The ordinary life” and how “the material of any given life could be the material of art if you ask the right questions of it or engage the right processes of excavation and elimination” — if you look for it.

PS: I love that Virginia Woolf calls a day of being sick “non-being”. I hate colds, too — I’m going to write off the next one as a “non-being” day.

Sentences

One of my weaknesses — and obsessions — as a writer is the sentence. Sentences are a source of great pleasure and inspiration to me, but I’m aware that I have a lot of work to do to make my own writing as effective, beautiful, or deliberate as the writers I admire.

It happens that I just started Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. She has a whole chapter on sentences, and I thought I’d share a section about Virginia Woolf that I particularly enjoyed, starting with an excerpt from Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

And then Prose’s analysis of this sentence (which she calls “complex and virtuosic”):

     Once again it's worth mentioning that the composition of a sentence such as this one -- or any sentence, really -- is the end result of many minute decisions, and that a different sort of writer might have decided to make the same point in a dozen or so words that could have gotten the idea across as understandably but not nearly so enchantingly, nor so intelligently. Nor would such a sentence have been nearly so much fun to read. Another author could have said, simply: Considering how frequently people get sick, it's strange that writers don't write about illness more often.
     But that sentence would be a far less revealing and reliable introduction to the essay. Because it's not just the content -- the meaning -- of the sentence that prepares us for what is to come. What's in store for us is not a straightforward examination, a glorified statistical analysis of the inexplicable infrequency of illness as a literary subject, but rather an opportunity to watch Woolf's mind skipping from subject to subject in a simultaneously imaginative and logical way, crossing gossamer bridges that never seen like non sequiturs but rather like stepping stones from one clear stream of thought to another, from one engaging observation to the next.
     By the end of the twenty-five page essay, at which point Woolf will have gotten to her real subject, which is the bravery that it requires to continue living in the presence and the face of loss and death, she will have touched on several dozen topics that include reading, language, faith, solitude, science, Shakespeare, the animal kingdom, insanity, suicide, and a brief biography of the third Marchioness of Waterford. In just a few words, the essay skips from a discussion about how hard it is for us to envision heaven to a very different kind of difficulty, reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when we are feeling less than up to par. And so by the time you have come to the end of the essay, you will have realized that a sentence that may have seemed to involve a sort of showing-off was rather an admirably accurate promise about, or introduction to, the sparkling wit and the deep seriousness of everything that has followed.

Some writers are just geniuses — naturally talented, creative, visionary. But the beauty of writing is that I can take my own level of talent and practice and study and learn from others and get better. Other writers have much encouragement to offer about this:

Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, admits his own weakness at the sentence level — “I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer when it comes to using language. I distrust myself. Consequently, I try every which way with a sentence, then a paragraph, and finally a page, choosing words, selecting pace (I’m obsessed with that, even the pace of a sentence).”

Ray Bradbury offers ideas for how to study the writing of others — “My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student. Sometimes I’d get an old copy of Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, because I couldn’t do it, you see. I was so frustrated! And then I’d retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm.”

And Annie Dillard both acknowledges the struggle of writing and sets the bar high — “Writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

I can’t argue with that logic.

Authorial control

In one of my English classes in college, while discussing what John Milton might have meant in a certain passage of “Paradise Lost”, a question came up about the difference between what a writer intends and what the audience actually comes away with. How much control does an author actually have over a text? Is it their job to make their point as clear as possible, making it the writer’s fault if a reader misinterprets something? Or is it, due to the different backgrounds, educations, biases, experiences, and personalities of readers, completely out of the author’s hands?

At the time I remember feeling very strongly that the way the author intends something to be read is how it should be read; it is their responsibility to make things clear. I went so far as to wonder whether an author can be considered “good” based on how clearly they communicate their meanings. The reader’s responsibility, then, is to try to decipher a piece of writing for an author’s motivation. The problem with that, as we quickly discovered in the Milton class, is that even within a pretty homogenous handful of college students, there will be twelve different opinions on what that motivation is.

As I look back on it, I’m pretty sure my strong feelings were linked to my ego. I loathe being misunderstood. The thought of exposing my work, which was meant to say one specific thing, to a sea of faceless readers who might read it and come away with the opposite thing made me feel queasy. As soon as I let go of the work, I thought, I’ll be unable to defend it, unable to explain what I really meant. And the book or poem or whatever it was would just float out there indefinitely, proclaiming something I never wanted to say.

So I buckled down on my opinion that the author has a strong say in how their writing is understood. I determined to become such a good writer and be so clear that no one would ever second guess my intentions; there had to be a way to do that, right? Maybe I could write epilogues or introductions that spelled it out: THIS IS WHAT MY BOOK IS ABOUT.

There really isn’t a lot of support for this position amongst established writers. I feel like they’re basically saying, “If you have any experience at all, you know this isn’t true.”

Joseph Heller even credits his audience with knowing more about his work than he does:

INTERVIEWER: Does the reaction to your work often surprise you?

HELLER: Constantly. And I rely on it. I really don’t know what I’m doing until people read what I’ve written and give me their reactions….I really don’t think authors know too much about the effect of what they’re doing.

INTERVIEWER: Doesn’t that bother you…that the author (you) has such a tentative grip…?

HELLER: No. It’s one of the things that makes it interesting.

The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 51

So my position has changed since college. It’s just not realistic to think that you can always control the way people read what you write. As undesireable as it is, I will be misunderstood from time to time. But does that always have to be a bad thing? In the parts of my life that are not related to writing, isn’t being misunderstood helpful? Doesn’t it push me to communicate better, to work on relationships, to hone my language and attune my ears to the needs of others?

I even think there is a kind of beauty in letting go of control of your own work. There may be people who misinterpret your meaning or misread your intentions for it, but there also may be people who see things you didn’t see. Maybe someone can pick up on something you didn’t intentionally do that reveals something new about your work. Maybe there are connections in your story that unify it and make it cohesive that your subconscious put there, and it takes a certain reader to point it out. 

The closest I have personally been able to come to a definition of art is “something made that communicates.” Your art is being art when it starts a conversation between you and a reader. Your art is legitimate when someone misinterprets it. Your art succeeds when it makes someone feel something, negative or positive. Your art is real when someone responds to it, and I don’t think the response has to be the response you were going for to count.

Effective and beneficial

When I read Ted Kooser’s “The Poetry Home Repair Manual” a couple months ago, I was either bored by or opposed to a lot of the things he said. (Which felt weird, I should add. He was a Poet Laureate. I should have trusted that he knew what he was talking about.) But my goodness, this writing-a-poem-every-day thing is showing me more and more how right he was about nearly EVERYTHING.

For example: In his book, Kooser strongly advocates for understandable poetry. “A lot of this resistance to poetry is to be blamed on poets,” he says in a discussion about why there is not much money in poetry (lol). “Some go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not downright discouraging. That may be because difficult poems are what they think they’re expected to write to advance their careers. They know it’s the professional interpreters of poetry — book reviewers and literary critics — who most often establish a poet’s reputation, and that those interpreters are attracted to poems that offer opportunities to show off their skills at interpretation. A poet who writes poetry that doesn’t require explanation, who writes clear and accessible poems, is of little use to critics building their own careers as interpreters. But a clear and accessible poem can be of use to an everyday reader.”

I balked against this at first because nearly all the poetry I’ve read in my life to date has been confusing. I thought that was what I was supposed to aim towards: poetry so complex that you have to work really hard or be really smart to understand it. I figured that over time, I would reach that level.

But I was asking myself a few days ago “How do I get better?” and it sent me into a little spiral. I couldn’t figure out what to stive towards, aim for, or practice in order to get better. What even is “good” poetry, (never mind how to get there)? Surely what I’m writing at the moment is “bad” in the grand scheme of things; how will I tell when it’s “better”? What makes published poets’ work worth being published and how do I practice that in my own writing?

After a few conversations with Karlyn, Colby, and my mom (sorry, Onj, we haven’t had a chance to talk about this yet!), I am realizing that Ted Kooser was right.

The publishing industry is a business. It promotes good art, yes, but it is a business. It doesn’t determine the standard for “good” poetry, so I don’t need to try to make poetry that only reviewers, publishers, and critics will like!

Additionally, in our post-postmodern world there are an infinite number of ways you can find value in poems. Things like the expert use of the sonnet or the stirring narrative of a lyric poem are no longer the standard for good poetry. Now we have free verse, fragments, poems shaped like fish and halfmoons and shoes, inventive new forms, disruption of language, poems based on only sound, poems that dazzle with metaphor or image or consonance. Anything goes. Almost anything could be “good”!

And this is actually a comforting thing for me, because if there are infinite ways to write a poem, I can just practice the ones I like! Which frees me up to ask different questions of myself (What are my goals for my poems, and what do I enjoy?) and use different terminology (“beneficial” and “effective” instead of “good”, “bad”, or “better”).

And here’s what I want: I want my poems to be effective. I want them to tell stories. I want them to communicate emotions. I want them to help readers feel something. I want to recreate moments so other people can experience them. I want to illuminate hope. And you know what? I’m already doing a lot of these things. So some of my poems are effective and beneficial.

All of these realizations answered another question I’ve had about “valid” ways to write poetry. When I write a poem, does it have to be written according to the idea I started it with? Is it only successful if it accomplishes what I wanted it to do? Or can it wander its way into completion? Can it start from nothing and say nothing in particular? Am I allowed to be confused by my own poems or feel like they don’t mean anything?

As an example, I wrote this poem because I couldn’t think of anything to write and I literally just needed to get the words down:

If you were to
Sleep you'd miss the
Way the cloud banks
Fall.

Hills of mist and
Deep, dark streams are
Here now and they
Call.

Do you think you
Could be more in
Love with who you
Are?

Dark drops from the
Edge of all things;
Mourn the once bright
Star.

I felt like it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t understand any of it; it was total nonsense to me. A garbage poem, right? But it showed me something surprising, actually: that when I write from thin air, I can still produce something effective and beneficial. I was working from a prompt and was only allowed to use one syllable words. But my subconscious seems to have worked within that limitation to produce a poem about something sad and mysterious — something that totally fits with the form of the poem. That’s something I would have tried to do on purpose if I had thought of it beforehand, fitting the mood to the form of the poem. But my meandering way of writing this gave me the same result!

So no, I still don’t understand this poem and I have ideas about revising it. But there was something valuable in it even though I didn’t set out to accomplish something specific with it. What I’m concluding from all of this is that I just need to write more poetry. More and more and more. Writing will teach me how to improve my writing.

Obviously I knew all this, and I’ve always known that you have to make art for art’s sake, not for the approval of other people or for the hope of getting famous. It’s just that it sunk in this week in a new way, that I don’t need to be anxious about how my poems are “good” or “bad” right now. It’s really nice to feel free from expectations and just practice learning how to love my work — the process of it, the daily grind of it, the joy of it.

Ted Kooser had it right again: “Most of the fun you’ll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing. Eventual publication and recognition are reasons to feel good about yourself and your work, of course, but to keep going you’ll learn to find pleasure working at your desk, out of the way of the world.”

To share or not to share?

I’m thinking a lot about sharing my work with people and when it’s best to do that, for me. Most of the authors whose interviews I listen to on First Draft seem to lean towards holding onto drafts until they’ve done all they can to make them perfect. My gut feeling is that I also lean that way. I’m still trying to figure out if that’s really true, though. Part of the experiment I’m doing with Onj involves me sharing my daily poem with her via email and getting feedback, which felt wildly uncomfortable when she first suggested it; I’m trying to nail down why. (In the meantime we’ve settled on a compromise where she leaves me feedback and I read it after some time has passed.)

Ted Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual advocates for “leav[ing] your poem alone till it begins to look as if somebody else might have written it”. The benefits are twofold: 1) It helps you to see the poem objectively, like a reader would, and 2) the time away from it will show you its problems more clearly so you can fix them. He then goes on to talk about how to ask for good feedback — not on whether the poem is “good” or “bad” (“The last thing you need is a value judgement”) — but on whether your writing is “understandable and interesting”. He recommends having someone read your poem aloud to you, so you can hear the places that sound awkward or confusing.

I like the sound of this approach. It’s not that I don’t want feedback; I definitely need it! But when is the best time for me to get it? Is it when the poem is still fresh, when I feel the most vulnerable? Or is it after the poem has cooled and I’ve had a chance to revise it myself?

Proponents of the reverse approach might say that being vulnerable right away is good — it helps train you to be open in your poetry and not be attached to perfection. But knowing myself pretty well, I think that being so open so quickly could have the opposite effect; I might hesitate to write things that are truly personal because I’m worried about having to share them. Thinking about my audience as I write a poem tends to add undue pressure to write a great poem when the whole point of this writing-a-poem-every-day thing is to just write and not assume that any of my poems will be great.

The Writer’s Greenhouse puts it this way: “Leave yourself the freedom to write poems you might not want to share.” I think at this stage in my writing, I need that freedom. I barely give myself permission to put anything on the page; sharing it feels almost unthinkable.

So I’ll stick with my compromise for now, but I’m going to pay attention to how it feels to let others see my work before I’ve had a chance to revise it. I’ll remain as open as I can to the benefits of both approaches and see which one helps me more over time. If, after exposure and practice, I still feel that holding onto things is better, I might have to just trust my gut.

The two-week poetry challenge

Onj and I are doing a poetry challenge: Write a poem every single day for two weeks. (She thinks we can do a month. I am insisting that we start small. Lol.) I’m hoping to get a lot out of it:

• Get into a habit of writing something creative more consistently and often. I need to know that I can produce work even if it feels intimidating. I’m hoping that habit and regularity will slowly convince my brain that it likes the hard work of sitting down and thinking about writing.
• Learn to let go of the idea that every poem I write has to be a GREAT one. This article had the good point that trying to write a great poem every time will stiffen you up; in trying to make it “good”, you’ll only stick to what you know and not risk trying new things.
• Practice writing the thing I want to write — right now. (I think I have a habit of “saving” good ideas for another day when I’m feeling less inspired. I’m learning that this isn’t a good idea.)
• Try new things. If I like an idea I was working with, I could try putting it in a different form. If I only had the time for a haiku the previous day, I could lengthen it into something with more than three lines. If something worked well in free verse but I want to challenge myself, I could turn it into a sonnet. I could try writing a poem with exactly 11 syllables in every line or a poem that uses only one-syllable words.
• Rewrite drafts. I might not get to this goal in this particular time period, but I’m hoping that messing around with what I write — trying the same idea in different forms, stealing a line from yesterday’s poem to use today, etc. — will reassure me that rewriting is fun and can make my work better.

I’m three days in and don’t have a lot to report except that it’s hard to write poems. Lol. But I can already tell that this is a good process for me. And if I see benefits in two weeks, it really might be worth it to go for a month.

We’re also trying to track our mood each day as we sit down to write, because of an interesting idea in that same article by The Writers’ Greenhouse:

"Find out what kind of poem you write when you’re knackered, fluey, tipsy, light-headed, stressed, hormonal…
All the usual conditions when you'd dismiss the idea of trying to write a poem? Now's your chance to try them out. Sometimes the poem will just be about how tired you are or fluey you are; that's fine, and it falls into one of the categories above. Sometimes, you'll be stunned that despite your state, you can still step through the magic door into poetry land, and come back with something that pleases and surprises you."

Having felt apprehensive, lazy, unmotivated, or apathetic every day so far, it has already been rewarding to see the results of this tracking. I can write when I don’t feel like writing. And nothing has come out as bad as I thought it would.

I likely won’t share many poems here, at least not during this two week period, but I thought I would share the very small one I wrote yesterday in the spirit of vulnerability:

Chickadees

Chickadee feet
Sink in snow like
Fork tines into
Sponge cake.

The feeling these
Birds are bibbed fairies -- 
A hard one
To shake.

Moving slowly

Since the topic has been particularly encouraging to me lately, I thought I would talk about writing slowly and why it’s not a bad thing.

I’m a slow writer. When I was working on my first project, my goal was 250 words a day and it was a struggle to get there most of the time. And that was “just” drafting — I wasn’t reworking on the sentences much at all, just trying to get them out of me and onto the page. There were days that I spent up to two hours just sitting in my chair and looking at the ceiling, thinking, with not a word to show for it. I don’t have many other writers to compare myself to, but in my head they’re all writing much faster.

It bothers me how much validation I need for things like this, but hearing other authors say that they, too, are slow drafters makes me feel like I’m part of a community. We can’t ALL be doing it wrong. Ha.

David McCullough, the American historian, measured progress not in terms of pages written per day, but in how hard his brain worked: “There’s no question that the sheer effort of writing, of getting it down on paper, makes the brain perform as it rarely does otherwise. I don’t understand people who sit and think what they’re going to write and then just write it out. My head doesn’t work that way. I’ve got to mess around with it on paper. I’ve got to make sketches, think it out on paper. Sometimes I think I’m not a writer, I’m a rewriter. When a page isn’t working, I crumple it into a ball and throw it in the wastebasket. Always have. Our son Geoffrey, when he was a little boy, would come out where I work and look in my wastebasket to see how many “wrong pages” I had written that day. If the basket was full, it had been a good day. I’d worked things through.” This is a goal of mine — not to throw away pages, but to get better at making my brain perform. I struggle a lot with procrastination and distraction, I think in part because I know how arduous the process of writing is. Getting into the right brain space takes a lot of mental effort — and time — but it’s essential.

I recently read The Paris Review’s interview with Joseph Heller and was encouraged by his admission that he writes slowly. Like McCullough, he didn’t measure progress by time spent or the amount he wrote: “I ordinarily write three or four handwritten pages and then rework them for two hours. I can work for four hours, or forty-five minutes. It’s not a matter of time. I set a realistic objective: How can I inch along to the next paragraph? Inching is what it is. It’s not: How can I handle the next chapter? How can I get to the next stage in a way that I like?” Inching? I can inch. It reminds me of a quote about a character in pain from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: “No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.” The next chapter, the next stage, the submission process, the reviews — these are the things that are unendurable if I think about them right now. What I have to do is focus my attention on the next thing I can inch towards. The next sentence. The next phrase. The next word.

I also liked this quote from Heller: “I don’t get my best ideas while actually writing . . . which is the agony of putting down what I think are good ideas and finding the words for them and the paragraph forms for them . . . a laborious process. I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer when it comes to using language. I distrust myself. Consequently, I try every which way with a sentence, then a paragraph, and finally a page, choosing words, selecting pace (I’m obsessed with that, even the pace of a sentence).” I mean, this is the author of Catch-22. And he called writing “a laborious process”!

Beyond the day to day process of drafting, there is the amount of time it takes to finish something, revision and all. Annie Dillard thinks that “It takes years to write a book – between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant.” What a relief. Obviously there are people who are prolific, who write much faster. But you only hear about them so much because it’s rare. The majority of writers, chugging forward a few words at a time don’t make the news.

Dillard also, after a passage in The Writing Life explaining how even prolific writers don’t write more than a page a day, says that “…most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace.” I wrote in the margin: “As my mom would say, Bless you.” Berating is exactly what I do to myself, whether I realize it or not, when I have had an “unproductive” writing day or when I have put off writing to do something else. I’m trying to reframe; a productive day isn’t pages.

And in addition to all these pieces of wisdom, I am learning that moving slowly makes me dependent. This is the best possible position to be in for my writing. The gift came from God; he gives the ideas, the motivation, the ability to do the work, even the love of it. It is good to feel weak and slow when it reminds me that I am dependent on a good God who is with me and will help me. I’m the steward of the gift, not the creator of it.

I think it’s wonderful that things are designed this way. Without my laziness, procrastination, fear of failure, and very average talent, I would think everything was up to me and quickly despair when my gifts didn’t live up to the standard of success I wanted. But praise God for the hope that comes from having to rely on him; he’s stronger, more effective, and more creative, and he makes more beautiful things. He’s the original creator, making something out of nothing. May everything I write point to him, the Author of salvation, truth, and history.

Effort

A blog I follow by Simon Sarris recently posted an article about effort. He quoted Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood:

"There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn."

I find this an interesting concept. Is effort pleasurable? In a culture that prizes ease, efficiency, and effortlessness, a lot of people might answer “no.” Maybe it depends what the effort is for.

On good days at the climbing gym, I get a lot of pleasure out of not just getting to the top of a wall, but of the process of movement along it. I enjoy the feeling of my lats stretching as I engage them, my fingers extending as I reach for something, my calves tensing as my toes push off a tiny hold. But there are other days when making it to the top without falling is my only goal. Or when forward progress — more endurance, higher grades, finishing boulder problems — is my goal. And those days tend to be disappointing.

I wonder if I consider effort to be linked to success and failure, but in reality it’s separate. Simon Sarris asks himself, “What can I attempt that will be worthwhile, serious enough that it might end in failure?” It’s as if his failures signal to him that he was going after something worth it. The measure of the attempt was its difficulty and its value as a goal — not whether or not it achieved what it set out to do.

If enjoying effort is connected to trying to do something difficult and worthwhile, it makes a lot of sense that I enjoy writing. It’s fraught with difficulties (dead ends, abandoned novels, lack of motivation, the agony of tearing words out of you and onto a terrifying page, the submission process, publishing…), but the value of writing is somehow more than its difficulties. Dani Shapiro, in her book Still Writing, compared writing to building a skyscraper from the top down. Yes, its a nearly impossible task, but in the end you’ve built something with the delicacy of glass and the strength of steel — a skyscraper.

There are other reasons writing is valuable. Stories stick with readers, even if they don’t know what they liked or why, applying meaning to the story from their own lives and experiences; it is a form of connection. I’ve quoted it before, but Annie Dillard says that writing “is life at its most free.” It can address fears, articulate longing, create empathy, produce feelings. Richard Ford, when asked what the “exhilaration of writing” is, answered “Primarily, the chance to make something new, which might be good and beautiful, and which somebody else could use….To me, it’s the thought that you can make something out of words, which organizes experience in the way Faulkner is talking about when he says that ‘literature stops life for the purpose of examining it.’ To be able to do that for another person is a good use of your life.”

I think David McCullough understood the relationship between effort and pleasure very well: “I get a bit impatient with people who talk about all the trials and the pain and loneliness of being a writer. That’s not been my experience. I love the work. I would pay to do what I do. That’s not to say it’s easy, but I don’t think ease and pleasure are necessarily synonymous. I like it in part because it is hard. And because I don’t know how it’s going to come out.” Part of the pleasure is in the uncertainty, in the difficulty.

So I’ve been thinking about goals, and effort. And a couple of days before New Year’s, Colby asked if we could pray together and proceeded to thank God for everything he has done in the past year of our lives. It was an astonishing list; I had forgotten that half of these things happened in 2023! He mentioned how close he has felt to God this year, a personal relationship that has not faded or changed. He mentioned hard conversations that have only strengthened our marriage. He mentioned friends that have been saved as we watched in awe. He mentioned writing and how God has loved and supported and led me in the pursuit of it. The beauty of these things is incredible to me, all the more so because I wasn’t ultimately responsible for their success. And I’m just struck by how free a believer is, in Christ, to love hard things because we are not the the ones who accomplish the work. Loved by God no matter how many goals we achieve, we can pour effort into worthy things that are too difficult for us, knowing he will be faithful. The joy is in the effort – because it’s for him and by him that it is all accomplished.

“To him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.” Ephesians 3:20.

What I’m reading (December 2023)

I’m pretty much always reading something about writing — both to expose me to other writers’ wisdom and for sheer enjoyment. Right now I’m in the middle of A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver. It covers a lot of basics (rhyme, line, sound, etc.), but every time I think the audience might be someone a lot younger or less knowledgeable than me, she hits me with sections about the negative capability of the poet as originated by Keats, for example. Here’s a pithy statement from her that I liked: “Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents” (pg. 90).

This is kind of weird, but I’m currently reading an architecture textbook called Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (4th Edition) by Francis D. K. Chang. I’m curious about professions related to art that require a great deal of passion, specific knowledge, or willpower (like cooking, painting, or design jobs). I wanted a book that would help me understand the ideas behind architecture but also included definitions of terms; I want to understand why people become architects or what concepts excite them about the career. This book does most of the things I needed it to do, plus it has GORGEOUS pencil drawings to illustrate terminology and examples of concepts in real life spaces. Here’s a sentence that stuck out to me recently: “Whereas the act of stepping up to an elevated space might express the extroverted nature or significance of the space, the lowering of a space below its surroundings might allude to its introverted nature or to its sheltering and protective qualities” (pg. 121). I like the idea that a space can communicate a feeling, a nature, a meaning.

I’ve been in a sloggy part of Infinite Jest for some time, but recently got to a 19-page section ft. my favorite character, a square-headed gem of a human named Don Gately, that was so good it propelled me into the next 30. He and Hal are the heart of the whole monstrous book, I think. Goodreads says I’m only 63% of the way done, but I’m really enjoying my glacially slow pace. I’m underlining all kinds of things I didn’t see the first time I read this. Look at this fragment that’s an absolute gem: “the oceanic sound of 20 different tables’ conversation” (pg. 627). Isn’t it true that a dining hall full of people talking sounds like being underwater? The things DFW notices and articulates amaze me.

Lastly, I’m just getting around to reading the winter issue of The Paris Review. There’s a story by Madeline ffitch called “Stump of the World” that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I finished it. Told in a matter-of-fact tone, the frequent humor surprised me (“‘Jessica has invited me to move in,’ Emma’s mother said. ‘I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring it up with you.’ ‘And leave me alone?’ Emma said. ‘I’m not rushing into anything,’ her mother said. ‘She needs to know by next week.'”). There were so many interesting elements: the protagonist’s relationship with her teenage son (who steals sheet masks), produce expertise, a 30 year old woman who wants to be adopted by someone else’s grandparents, a slowly widening crack in the road. It also had really striking and beautiful paragraphs, full of tension and imagery in very simple syntax: “‘Dangling from one of the skeleton branches, a golden mask whirled against the wind. Emma’s heart turned to the kind of grapefruit they call Ruby Red. When Teddy climbed out of the sinkhole, a headlamp elasticked around his greasy teen hair, cotton candy grapes rolled through her. Teddy didn’t see her and while she watched, he handed Gallo a small rock caked in mud. Gallo polished it on his shirt…Only then did Gallo nod in Emma’s direction, so that Teddy looked her way. The opposite of a sinkhole is a volcano. It was not a fact you could put on any kind of test, but Emma felt it to be true. She was as angry as she had ever been.” I love how Emma’s knowledge (she’s the one who works in produce) informs the metaphors that describe how she feels in this section.

Stay tuned for more “what I’m reading” posts, as I just got a really exciting stack of books for Christmas 🙂

A weekend retreat at the cabin

Last weekend, to celebrate Karlyn’s birthday, she and I drove to Sinnemahoning, PA to visit her family’s cabin. It’s a special place for her, and it felt really special that I was included. Karlyn hasn’t been able to visit in three years; it’s been six for me.

It was the most perfect two days. We had no cell service. She brought a stack of journals; I brought a half-finished blog post, some books, and my writing notebook. It was 32 degrees when we first got to the cabin but it warmed up to 50-something by the second day — cozy enough to snuggle up in blankets indoors, inviting enough to enjoy being outside when we felt like stretching our legs.

We took so many pictures. It looks like winter in Pennsylvania right now — on the twisty mountain roads we we even saw patches of snow — but there was green in surprising places. Looking at these pictures now fills me with the deep, clear calm I felt while I was there.

We saw dozens of elk (very close up!!). We hiked the Lowlands Trail in Sinnemahoning State Park and saw the blue water glitter between banks of wheat-colored grass. We walked to all the places I remember — the stone wall that has snakes in it in the summer, the bridge over the swimming hole, the railroad tracks, the big rock. We stood by the river for a long time. Karlyn took pictures through the grasses; I stood on the pebbly shore and breathed in the breeze from the water — wet, full of purity and freshness and something familiar that I hadn’t smelled in a long time. It was a moment of joy.

Later, next to the blue iron bridge, we watched a kingfisher dart back and forth over the water as we built cairns out of rocks and raced little leaf boats. I sat on the concrete jetty and meditated for a couple of minutes, just breathing in and listening. It didn’t feel like winter anymore — it was too mild. Maybe more like the beginning of spring, when the bite has gone out of the wind.

This post is mostly about the pictures, but I wanted to share a really cool thing that happened while we were indoors: I started a new story. I could attribute it to having no cell service, to being in a creative frame of mind, even to being around Karlyn and her encouragement (and to an extent, all those things are true!), but I know that it ultimately came from God. It was a gift, one of those parcels with wings that “beat slowly as a hawk’s” that Annie Dillard talks about. I found an idea in my writing notebook from June of last year and told Karlyn about it, and she enthusiastically told me I should try it. I sat in front of a blank Word document for a while. And then God gave me a first sentence. And then another. And then three more. A speaker emerged, a character who was driving the whole thing so decisively that I let go of the steering wheel entirely, just like all the writers on the First Draft podcast say can happen, and I sat back and watched him come alive on the page. I wrote and wrote and it poured out of me as naturally as water.

The story may last or it may not, but I’m not worried. I’m just thankful. For friendship, rest, and joy. For trees and rivers, moss and pebbles. For God continually being with me and for me in my writing. All of it is from him.