To inhabit someone else’s body in prose is to be a kind of foreigner—an outsider with an insider’s access. And isn’t that why we read? ~Lidia Yuknavitch
From the Archive | Lit Salon Answers the Question, What is Embodied Writing, Anyway + Our Next Seasonal Intensive, "Strange Containers," on Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities Starts August 7, Join Us!
Dear Jeannine,
What is embodied writing anyway? I mean, I get it on a certain level—or, at least, I think I do. But when I try to form a clear thought about it, I find I can’t. Is it a process of writing stories about embodied memories? That’s as close as I can get, I think, to understanding the concept. Any clarity would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Curious but Confused
Dear Curious But Confused,
One day when I was three years old, I tripped while running on the sidewalk.
Before I fell, I flew, flew in my brown saddle shoes with their slick leather soles and loose laces, my white acrylic knee-highs slouched around my ankles. Sloping above me, the ancient glacial rock of Lake Superior’s North Shore, dandelion and lupine sprouting from its crevices. Below me, another heaving, cracked-up sidewalk like all the others then and now in the West End of Duluth.
When I ran, I soared.
When I crashed, I crashed.
There was loose gravel on the sidewalk, and a round pebble lodged itself under the split skin of my knee. No one washed the cut. The blood dried, my knee scabbed over, the split skin fused itself back together, but the pebble remained, a pea-sized bump. For many years, I could wiggle the hidden pebble from side to side with my finger. The sensation of rock on bone was pleasantly painful, a sharp surprise.
One day the pebble dissolved. I don’t know exactly when, because it left a hard lump of scar tissue in its place, which itself softened only slowly, over time, so that the moment of its gone-ness was unknowable, even to me.
The moment of gone-ness may be unknowable, but our bodies contain the sensory information for every story ever lived, every story ever told, every story ever waiting to be told.
How do we access these stories through embodied writing?
Psychologist Rosemarie Anderson describes embodied writing this way:
Embodied writing seeks to reveal the lived experience of the body by portraying in words the finely textured experience of the body and evoking sympathetic resonance in readers. Introduced into the research endeavor in an effort to describe human experience—and especially transpersonal experiences—more closely to how they are truly lived, embodied writing is itself an act of embodiment, entwining in words our senses with the senses of the world.
Lidia Yuknavitch writes:
…You must lie down on a bed in an apartment in a foreign city—foreign to you—foreign enough so that you become the foreigner. To inhabit someone else’s body in prose is to be a kind of foreigner—an outsider with an insider’s access. And isn’t that why we read? To inhabit other perspectives or forms, to empathize, all the while understanding the limits of our physical being?
Some of this wisdom bears isolating and repeating:
Entwining in words our senses with the sense of the world
You must lie down in a bed in an apartment in a foreign city—foreign to you—foreign enough that you become the foreigner.
Both of these bits of wisdom hold precise keys to the secret that brings embodied writing to life. Because in my experience, the way we best access and write embodied stories is counterintuitive.
Often, people think the way to articulate embodied stories is to look inward. Which seems, on the surface, to make sense. After all, if the story lives inside of us, if it lives in our body, in our cells, and deep within our body of memory, then one might assume it could be best found through an archeological examination of our innermost thoughts and feelings.
However, I have found this not to be so.
I have found that the surest, most direct, and most fruitful route to expressing our most embodied stories in a way that brings them alive for readers, brings readers all the way into the world of the story and as close as possible to the source and taproot of our most vividly lived experience (and, coursing right beneath that, the clear, cold, clean groundwater of universality) is in fact, to look outward.
Shunryu Suzuki tells us that the inner world and the outer world are the same:
When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world.
When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world.
The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless.
We say "inner world" or "outer world" but actually,
There is just one whole world.
All of the wisdom schools, ancient and modern, teach some version of the lesson that what we perceive in the outer world is to some degree, at least, a reflection of our inner world.
What the outer world has to offer, however, that our inner world can never offer, is a safe, sturdy bridge for our readers. The outer world is, in fact, the one thing we share in full with our readers. It’s the world they live in, a physical world with sharp things, soft things, cold things, hot things, dark things, loud things, fast things, tender things, violent things.
Therefore, our job when embodying our stories is portray the bodily experience of the outer world, the world of things known and recognized by your readers. Our job is to lie down in the outer world as if it is a bed in an apartment in a foreign city.
We want to lie down in the outer world in an awake and aware enough way that we might entwine in word our senses with the sense of the world.
This, ultimately, is my understanding of embodied writing. An understanding grounded in a question asked by my mentor, Paul Matthews: How close up to the world can you get with your words?
This is the question which, for me, unlocks all the magic, unearths the rock on bone.
Love,
Jeannine
PS Here are some more recent(ish) posts centered on embodied writing.
Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities
Four Weeks of Highly Specific Flash Writing Starting August 7! Join us!
Writing in the Dark’s next seasonal intensive for paid members, Strange Containers, starts August 7, and will include 4 weeks of inspiring and actionable Wednesday posts with short craft essays, powerful readings, structured and inventive writing exercises, and full participation in the comments (as with all our intensives), plus write-ins and a Live Salon open mic reading founding members.
This one is going to be fun. I hope to write with you! And if you are already a paid subscriber, you’re all set. Your subscription is all you need to participate, see below:
What’s Included in “Strange Containers”
Paid members:
Full access to all Strange Container posts, sent via email on Wednesdays, and rich with readings, writing exercises, direct instruction and inspiration for trying your hand at some unusual new short work.
Access to our incredible comments—our comments section is what makes this place so damn beautiful because of the amazingness of the Writing in the Dark community. Each week, participants share questions, insights, and snippets of work in progress—and your guides, Jeannine and Billie, actively participate, as well.
Founding members also receive more interactive stuff like:
Voice Memos and Video Notes.
Live Write-Ins and Live Salons on Zoom w/open mic readings to celebrate the intensive when we’re done (these are so fun).
All participants will come away with:
A storehouse of valuable new ways to think about approaching short work, and why we might want to, plus specific tools to apply long after the the intensive is over.
A collection of new work in progress that you can continue to develop on your own.
An archive of flash and hermit crab readings and writing exercises that you can repeat as desired.
A deeper understanding of the ways these forms can work to enliven your writing practice.
Join now to start experimenting right away and to participate in our thriving Thursday Threads and explore the full archive of past intensives.
What People Say About Writing in the Dark Intensives
I can’t believe what I’m getting out of this intensive. It’s changing my writing in the most unexpected ways, and I am beyond grateful. You are the most generous teacher.
You are magic. Pure magic.
I have learned much from you in the last year, through your weekly posts and seasonal intensives. The depth and quality of your content is unmatched on Substack (IMHO). That, plus the network of subscribers you have garnered is why I look forward to Wednesdays! (And Mondays for Lit Salon and Thursdays for the new Threads!) I have been involved in workshops that cost more but provide less. Thanks for all you are producing and the community you have created in an effort to bring the out our best writing selves.
As always, there's more to these exercises than I first anticipate.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this challenge and truly appreciate all the ways you’re helping each of us become more thoughtful and evocative writers.
It's actually been super helpful to work through the exercises in quick succession, like a little writing course... But so much more inspiring and thoughtful and generous and fun than any I've taken before. THANK YOU Jeannine, you are brilliant.
These assignments are like magic.
Your post gave me a giant AHA moment. You’ve unlocked my understanding of tension and storytelling in memoir.
This post was wonderful. Love the first quote especially. I had a couple of deeper realizations with this exercise.
Reading all the comments on my writing today, so full of enthusiasm and encouragement, really made my day! One of the things I will treasure most about this challenge is learning to trust myself and others with my writing.
What to Expect From Strange Containers:
Unusual craft essays on flash, hermit crabs, and the space between that explore inventive approaches to short work, along with structured writing exercises to get you started on some of your own!
Inventive writing exercises that invite you to try some really unexpected new approaches on the page.
Encouragement to participate each week—which is a very lively experience—or work at your own pace, or start the challenge later or repeat it, or whatever works best for you, because all of the posts will be tagged and permanently archived in order.
At the end, you’ll have up to 4 original, interesting, and intriguing new pieces of flash or hermits (or something in between!) that you can revise and consider. If we’re lucky, these new works will really surprise you.
An immersion in the concept of “zero-waste” writing, where everything interesting can become something more than itself now or later.
Encouragement to record your experiences as part of the process—and you can expect to find me and Billie Oh in the comments, too, participating in the conversation.
Links to resources for further reading.
Exercises that are clear, doable, and scaffolded over the 4 weeks in a way that allows you, if you like, to “arranges the bits” toward an interesting suggestion of wholeness later.
Highly usable craft tools you can apply forever.
Specific, potent literary approaches to deepen and illuminate your relationship with language.
New discoveries about yourself and your life.
Less familiar readings as well as some crowd favorites.
Exercises that are specific and directive and clear, but also a bit feral and unpredictable. You can expect (as always in WITD) exercises that honor the truth of living in bodies that breathe and move and laugh and cry, while also living in a world that breathes and moves and laughs and cries, while also having unruly minds that are constantly escaping to the past and the future even when what we most need is to attend to this exact moment in order to live lives that are, as Mary Oliver said, “particular and real.”
To be imperfect, and for that to be perfectly okay.
To come out of this intensive with new ideas about what writing can be, and how it can feel.
To come out of this intensive with new ideas of who you are, who you are becoming, and what is possible for you as a writer.
I know now from the experience of the Lyric Essay Challenge and Story Challenge and The Visceral Self that these things evolve and change along the way, but these are the main points as far as we can see, and I’m happy to answer questions if you have them! Just throw your thoughts into the comments or respond via email to this post.
I cannot wait to write with you!
Strange containers sounds fun!
I really like the story of the pebble dissolving, very cool and says a lot.
The Foreign CIty thing: I've said this to folks for a long time - that you can inhabit your home city with a Traveler's Mind. Seek out new experiences, new people and neighborhoods, new food. Talk to strangers. There's no reason to be bored, pedestrain, habituated. Narrow. It's a kind of Zen mind - Beginner's mind deal. Like Thoreau said, " I have traveled extnsively in Concord."
Thank you for last nights workshop and then this this morning! Between the visceral self intensive, last nights workshop and the upcoming strange container intensive(the contents of which are completely new to me) I feel like my writer within is being shot out of a cannon, with my eyes squinting, skin on my face flapping, my heart pounding. It’s a thrill to be leaning so much!