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Craft: Writing through the grim
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a bit battered by bad news. There’s Covid-19, of course, and the hum of anxiety around that: what we should do to prepare and avoid, what we might expect to happen, what we can and can’t control in all of this. There’s the now constant reality of climate change. Add a dash of work worry. Coat with some sadness over recent deaths in my circle of family and friends. And it all adds up to feeling as if it requires just a bit more effort to get through to the end of the day, the end of the week—and the start of the next one.
It can be tough to sustain a creative impulse when life starts to feel like a grind. It can even feel frivolous (and privileged) to mention creativity against the backdrop of the literal life and death issues confronting us. But I remain convinced that sustaining that creativity is an essential ingredient in providing us with a purpose behind our drive to survive. What’s the point if we allow life’s stresses and strains to squeeze out joy, subvert beauty, crush creativity? And the truths we find through developing our own creativity and experiencing and appreciating the creativity of others are, I would argue, essential in equipping us to face and perhaps solve some of our most pressing problems.
But how do we sustain our desire to create when the worries of the world weigh us down?
On an episode of the W/MFA podcast from last summer, author Casey Cep talks about knowing what you need as a writer. Cep’s fantastic book Furious Hours is about Harper Lee’s unsuccessful attempt to write a true crime book in the 1960s. Lee was an alcoholic, something that surely affected her ability to complete her book, but Cep points out that alcohol wasn’t Lee’s only issue. While working on To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee had supportive agents and editors who both encouraged her and engaged with her about the work. By the time Lee was attempting to write her true crime book, these key early figures had passed away. She was isolated, without a community of writers or editors to share her work with, to push her to move forward. Cep contrasts Lee with Truman Capote. Capote too was a notorious alcoholic but he somehow knew how to gather the resources around him that he needed to enable and compel him to work—including, even, his childhood friend Harper Lee, who he called upon to accompany him when he was researching In Cold Blood. Lee was more than just his traveling companion: she was instrumental in helping him navigate the southern communities at the core of the story, even carrying out interviews and organizing research materials for him. And while Lee herself had the support of her family—sisters who guarded her privacy fiercely—she didn’t have many people in her life who understood her as a writer, who knew the challenges of engaging in difficult creative work. (Capote, it seems, didn’t return the favour—or she didn’t ask him to.)
Cep herself shares an office with her wife, New Yorker staff writer and former New York magazine book critic Kathryn Schulz. “It’s so important to find people who, even if they’re not reading your work, who you can talk to about it,” says Cep in the podcast.
“That’s not just because you’re struggling with it, it’s because you’re delighting in it. [Kathryn is] my first call when reporting goes well. We share an office and we often just pipe up from something we’re reading with elegant facts or interesting ideas or beautiful sentences. It’s just such a delight. …I just think that it’s part of the way that writing can be a joy.”
Other writers cope with their anxieties by channeling them onto the page. In Weather, author Jenny Offill does just that. It’s a work of fiction, but the structure will feel familiar to anyone who reads modern memoir: snippets of scenes, interior monologue and reflection interspersed with chunks of facts and background that illuminate the insights. The sections may seem random but are in fact artfully arranged to amplify and enlarge, lead and enlighten. The story is told through the eyes of narrator Lizzie, a Brooklyn librarian and young mother with an over-educated, under-employed husband and a brother struggling with addiction. Lizzie becomes the lens through which Offill explores her fears about climate change, and while the ending isn’t entirely hopeful, neither is it entirely despairing. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Offill shares that her research left her with unanticipated hope:
“Of all the things I read, what stayed with me was this piece by this political scientist Erica Chenoweth at Harvard. She studies all these movements and she said that the surprise to her was that it takes 3.5 percent of the population to be involved in a movement for there to be really significant change. That’s what it took for civil rights. That’s what it’s been for the LGBTQ [movement]. And I thought, well, that’s a number I can actually handle.”
Along with writing the book, Offill has become involved in the climate change movement (specifically with Extinction Rebellion) and launched a website, obligatorynoteofhope.com, with resources about climate change action. (For another example of a book written in response to anxiety, see the note about Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11 below under “Other good stuff.”)
Ultimately, if we are to continue creating, we all have to find our way to something that fuels us: connection and encouragement from a community of writers, the will to write the book we need to read, enough creative sustenance to keep us going. Years ago, I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and one of the many useful lessons Cameron offered was the idea of “filling the well.” Writes Cameron:
“As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them—to restock the trout pond, so to speak. I call this process filling the well.
Filling the well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs. Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details… Art may seem to involve broad strokes, grand schemes, great plans. But it is the attention to detail that stays with us; the singular image is what haunts us and becomes art. …
In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.
A mystery draws us in, leads us on, lures us. (A duty may numb us out, turn us off, tune us out.) In filling the well, follow your sense of the mysterious, not your sense of what you should know more about. A mystery can be very simple: if I drive this road, not my usual route, what will I see? Changing a known route throws us into the now. We become refocused on the visible, visual world. Sight leads to insight.” (pp. 21-22 of my 1992 edition)
This image of filling the well has stayed with me. I think about it when I open myself up to experiencing the work of other creators, allowing myself to enjoy work even when I don’t fully understand it. But it’s not just about experiencing someone else’s artistic creations, it’s about allowing time and space to experience the day’s sensory details, the hundreds of moments that offer the gift of connecting with the world and the people around us: the ripple of light across a hardwood floor, the chorus of hope-filled birdsong on an unseasonably warm March day, the grace of young mom’s hand as she gently brushes her baby’s cheek. I remember the days after I quit a toxic job more than a decade ago, and how as I walked out my front door that August, I noticed the sweet scent of tiny white blooms on the hedge next to my driveway. In the four years I had lived there, as I raced from home to office and home again at night, I had never noticed those flowers. I didn’t even know that the hedge bloomed, because as I scuttled to work and back, my mind was always somewhere else—hours ahead of myself, worrying about solving the next problem. It’s so easy to miss moments of beauty or connection or curiosity, to dismiss them as somehow too sweet or too inconsequential to matter, and register instead only the instances of commuter rage, online idiocy and political mistrust; so easy to let irritation and frustration and worry quash our desire to create and connect.
How do you fill your well? As much as I love a good to-do list, that’s probably the wrong approach for this endeavour. I will share what works for me, but as they say, your mileage may vary: do what works for you. Some of mine? Being outside close to living things—trees help. Bodies of water, and especially the scent of salt water. Vistas: standing someplace where I can look into the distance. Staring out the windows of vehicles in motion, though not when I’m the driver and I have to pay too much attention. Train rides are excellent! Sitting alone in crowded places and listening in on the lives of others. Sitting alone in empty places and listening in on the not-so-quiet quiet. Art galleries. Fabric stores. Public gardens. Random playlists. Walks with my dog Buddy, who goes where his nose leads him.
Moments. Noticed. Nourishing. Replenishing drop by drop the fuel I need to get through today’s challenges to tomorrow’s possibilities.
Exercises
Get practical: What one thing could you do to decrease the hum of anxiety in your life? I’ve recently added the simplest physical exercise of all to my routine: 30 minutes of vigorous walking a few times a week. (Buddy stays home for these ones—he’s a dawdler great at getting me to stop and notice, not so great at getting my heart rate up.) Maybe it’s an extra half-hour of sleep each night, or a single change in your meal habits. Don’t make this a transformational improve-yourself-in-one-swoop plan: just one small thing that contributes to boosting your vitality.
Keep a “noticed” book: Whether you note them in your phone or in an actual notebook, “notice” one thing each day and write it down: an image, a sensory detail, a connection you make between incident A and object B. Take a minute or two to polish the words you use to describe it—stretch your writerly muscles.
What I’m reading: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
This spectacular memoir is, I must also admit, anxiety-producing/exploring/deconstructing/navigating. Machado writes about surviving an emotionally toxic relationship. The book is technically brilliant: Machado frames scenes in short chapters as tropes, and so explores what happens through the lenses of the gothic romance, noir, world building, musical, I Love Lucy, Choose Your Own Adventure and more. The writing is propulsive, the emotions on the page harrowing and horrifying and so terribly relatable. I found myself reading it in gulps, and then needing to look away, catch my breath, slow my heart rate. The book is a masterclass in tension control and pacing, and a demonstration of the power of mixing first- and second-person perspectives. It is Machado’s story, but she pulls you in under her skin so artfully that when she addresses herself/you as “you,” you hear her from inside her/your own head.
Other good stuff
Read A story of art in a post-pandemic world I bought Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11 three or four years ago, but then couldn’t make myself read it because post-apocalyptic fiction seemed too much to absorb in the immediate post-Trump era. The book sat in my bedside pile of guilt until one evening I reached for it and tumbled into its pages. St. John Mandel’s narrative follows a group of traveling Shakespearean actors who wander the edges of the Great Lakes in a post-flu-pandemic world. A thumbnail sketch of the book sounds, yes, grim—but there is something so human and hopeful in its pages: the clusters of survivors who gather around the fire to watch the actors perform; the character who creates a tiny airport museum of cell phones, iPads, computers, game players that will never work again, but exist now only as mementoes of lost connection; the two characters who each carry a copy of a rare comic book, and derive such different messages from its pages. I inhaled the book in three sittings, and look forward to St. John Mandel’s new book, The Glass Hotel, just out this spring.
Watch Nice people making pretty things My sister, mom and I spent the evenings of the last week absorbed in Neflix’s Next in Fashion. It’s a fashion competition for nice people: the designers were all genuinely lovely, supportive of each other’s work and kind to each other (mostly) as they competed. I wanted them all to win, though I was delighted with the outcome as well (no spoilers!). A television show to recover from the news with.
Listen Lessons in writing—and history In case you’d like some plague mixed with your craft lessons this week, give the W/MFA podcast episode with David Randall, author of Black Death at the Golden Gate a listen. Randall focuses on crafting narratives from history and in particular the hunt for historical characters compelling enough to hang the narrative around. At the end of it, you can comfort yourself with the reminder that at least Covid-19 isn’t the Bubonic Plague.
Book industry stuff
Book fair felled by flu fears: London Book Fair cancelled
Standing with Ronan and Dylan: Hachette Book Group employees walk out in protest over acquisition of Woody Allen’s memoir.
Wanna buy a book biz? S&S is up for sale
New head at Anansi: Sarah MacLachlan is set to retire
Extinction Rebellion Canada gets prize money: RBC Taylor Prize finalist Ziya Tong donates winnings to environment group, citing RBC’s poor record on fossil fuel investment
A best-selling nonfiction author opts to self-publish: His last book was traditionally published, sold 150,000 copies—most online—and so this time out, he’s publishing himself. (h/t to Jane Friedman’s Hot Sheet newsletter)
Tweets & stuff
News we can all use
Mom’s keeping watch
He may not make the cut as a service dog, but he’s still a good doggo
Obligatory picture of Buddy
Buddy says sometimes a nap is the best coping mechanism
The stuff at the bottom
I’m a writer, editor and teacher. This is my personal e-newsletter on the craft of writing nonfiction, sprinkled with occasional feminism and social justice. You can find out more about me on my website at kimpittaway.com. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter. I’m the executive director of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction limited residency program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you’re interested in writing a nonfiction book, you should check our program out!