I wonder whether with a slight adjustment ... [desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? ~Rebecca Solnit
I wonder whether with a slight adjustment ... [desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? ~Rebecca Solnit
Story Challenge | Week 5 | Desire ... Jane Hirshfield tells us that while life is short, desire, desire is long. Let's harness the full force & complexity of that desire for our stories and our lives
Wait, desire again?
We’ve spoken about desire already in Week Two of this Story Challenge, as well as in a recent Lit Salon post, It’s All About the Wanting, and in a recent archival post, 10 Questions and (So-Called) Answers About the Writing Life.
But, as Jane Hirshfield wisely tells us in her stunning poem, “Heat”:
… life is short/but desire, desire is long
Perhaps one of our creative mantras in the new year will be this:
I desire to write, and I desire to listen to my body, to listen to my heart, to listen to the voice of my experience—all that has happened, is happening, and has yet to happen—and to speak my deepest longings. My longings need not be grounded in reality. I can and will use the language of the body, the language of my body, to capture the essence of my wanting and to depict the sound and sensation of yearning itself, and what it means to yearn.
I promise, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of desire, its truth and its power in our stories, yes, but also in ourselves, as the fuel and furnace of our creative lives.
Billie and I dig a little deeper into the topic of creative desire in this week’s Voice Memo, which you can find here (if you would like to upgrade your subscription for full access to WITD’s most interactive content such as Voice Memos, Video Notes, and Live Salons, you can do that right here any time—just choose Substack’s founding member category; our next Live Salon Zoom Q & A for Story Challenge is coming up soon on Friday, January 19 at 12:30 Central!).
In this Voice Memo, Billie and I share thoughts on two other juicy topics:
The craft issue of “image density”
This is a craft issue I’ve commented on a few times in the last couple of weeks in response to your glorious snippets of work (I cannot tell you how thrilled we are at the brave, playful, evocative, and wildly entertaining array of excerpts you’ve all shared; it’s spectacular and the reason the comments sections during these Challenges offer a master class of their own, truly). So I wanted to address it with more specificity: what does it mean to give an image “space to ring out?” What does it mean for images to compete with one another? What does it mean to allow the reader enough time to “cogitate” on an image, or, at least, have the image impress itself fully into the mind’s eye, and emerge whole, before adding more images or even additional descriptors (adjectives, adverbs, or even imagistic nouns and verbs)? What we really want when we’re crafting an image is for that image to sear itself as something precise, unmistakeable, and unforgettable in the mind. What we don’t want is to be the version of ourselves that David Sedaris describes in his essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky—when speaking about toppled statues of confederate generals—saying that what most of us when we see a bronze statue isn’t, in fact, anything very particular, but, rather, simply “statue.” This is not only likely true—at least, much of the time—it also exemplifies the kind of numbness that stands between us and the kind of avid attention and insatiable curiosity that will bring not just our writing to life, but … our lives to life. What we want, for ourselves and our readers, is to see the statue itself, who and what it represents, the shape of its musculature and its penetrating features. We want to see a realer than real version of the thing, a version of it we can never unsee. Giving the statue more words of description will never make it come to life—but giving it the most precise words will. Words precise enough to bring forth an image like Larry Levis’s “… thin haze of stars, persisting.” This is worth striving for. Take a listen to the Voice Memo for more specifics.
The perennially and urgently important topic of “feedback”
Billie and I discuss at some length how we can be most useful to each other and ourselves with regard to reading and engaging with one another’s works in progress, especially when the work is very much an exercise, an experiment, unfinished, and really, in many ways, not yet quite even born yet.
“Feedback,” or, more accurately, artistic process and how we best serve one another as co-creatives, is a topic near and dear to my heart. I founded my Writing in the Dark live, synchronous workshop with a fervent commitment to a rigorous space that aspired to the highest level of craft while also being inspiring, supportive, and safe for writers at all levels. I believe we have achieved that, with writers publishing dozens of essays and stories born in the workshop in journals from Brevity to Fourth Genre to Literary Mama to Calyx to Hippocampus and many, many, many more. But we do not critique each other’s work and we do not give “feedback” in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, we focus on deep listening and voracious curiosity about these works in progress (the workshop is generative, so everything discussed is unfinished) and share what is working and what we are curious about. This close attention and curiosity leads, if we are lucky, to possible opportunities in the work. You can read more about that process here, in my post The Very Bad Writing Workshop (& What To Do Instead).
I hope in fact you will read that post, because it is so foundational to how I teach and what I believe about the high expectation, high support process of teaching, and how it creates safe, vital creative communities. In these safe, vital communities, we can engage in a highly rigorous exploration of the craft of writing, we can push ourselves out of our comfort zones and genuinely grow and develop as artists (and do that much faster and more efficiently than we can do all by ourselves), we can be courageous enough to share our work and generous enough to curiously and attentively receive the work of others, and we can, through this cumulative energetic exchange, deepen and strengthen our own artistic intuitions and our creative confidence for recognizing the wild, unpredictable intersection where the story that wants to be told meets the story we want to tell meets the most powerful writing craft with which to tell it.
That intersection is magic. But it’s not something that our stories can be “feedbacked” into (coining a term there). It’s a place into which we must feel our way forward through the dark, edge up to the portal of possibility without a map. That’s what it means, really, to be “writing in the dark” together: that we are listening, crawling, tracing our fingertips across the surface of our words and each other’s words, feeling the thrum, celebrating the unmistakable moments of brilliance, and listening, listening, listening. And from that curious and attentive place, wondering, sometimes out loud, about the rest. When I say to you about your work, “I wonder what would happen if you …” or “If this were my work, I think I might have to try …” I am not being falsely cautious or using the language of the question as a guise for advice or direction. I have come to know, over my 30 years of teaching, that my hunches are only that: hunches. What you are making might far surpass anything that I can ever imagine—and, in the comments during the Story Challenge, none of us really know what we are making! It’s a grand experiment, and one I have the most profound respect for, because it’s called … creativity. We are generating new work in new way using the power of our imagination toward the greater good, which is itself a form of worship. I believe the best, most startling and impactful art comes from approaching that process with deep belief and tender reverence.
We hope, if you listen to the Voice Memo, you will find it useful—and we hope you’ll share any questions and observations of your own in the comments on this post!
Back to the topic of desire—both the kind that propels a story forward, and the kind that propels us forward. We could speak all day and night about desire, because most of us have gone to—go to—such great lengths to protect ourselves from the fullness of its sensation (and are so good at deceiving ourselves about the nature of our truest desires). This distancing and deceit impedes our art, without question. In art, the closer we get to ourselves, the better. In art, the more we feel, the better. In art, the truth of our desires is our guiding star.
Rebecca Solnit has written beautifully on why blue is the color of distance and desire, saying:
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?
And isn’t that the truest thing about desire? How it’s often complex and contradictory, and so rarely unidimensional? How often do we want just one thing and only that thing, with no other competing desire? We’ve talked, in fact, about how Dorothy Parker (supposedly) said, I hate writing, I love having written.” What is that if not a competing desire? One most of us can relate to on a cellular level.
Speaking of cellular level, I believe if we are to swim in the phosphorescent waters of desire, we must make some space for our bodies. You know I am a yoga teacher—or, at least, I trained as one to deepen my practice, though I don’t actually teach yoga classes. Billie is a yoga teacher, too (and they do actually teach yoga classes, and meditation, as well). So, we have an interest in the wisdom of our bodies, those old hounds, those old horses. Yes, I am thinking of May Swenson’s marvelous poem, “Question,” in which she asks:
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
What will I do, indeed? Oh, our bodies, with all the hunger and revolt, the noise and mess, the illnesses and frailty, and also the breath going in and out, the electricity, the fire. Our bodies are so thoroughly, relentlessly, gloriously real. Our bodies, our horses, our hounds, how can we ever write as we are truly meant to write without allowing ourselves sinking deep into the desires we hold in our hearts, our hands, the folds of flesh that pad our bones and our bellies, that give our shadows shape and heft and energy? Our bodies are the source of our stories. Yes, we shape stories with our minds. But stories live first in our bodies. And our bodies are full of desire.
That’s what we’ll focus on this week. I have a three-part exercise for you which will be most fruitful if you first review the I Remember exercise from Week Six of the Lyric Essay Challenge, “The Uncommon Light of Memory,” because that exercise very much sets the mood for this one.
I can hardly wait to see what you share in the comments! You will have several options to choose from, and it will be great fun to see what kind of balance we get. Also, please always feel invited and encouraged to share your experiences with the exercises as well—the positive and the frustrating (I am a big believer in the benefits of creative frustration, so, never be afraid to share frustration; it’s all a part of the process!).
Here we go—I can’t wait to read your work.