Carved By Water

Essay in 12 Steps | SEVEN | All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering ... the route back to our original place ~Toni Morrison

The gist of this post is “curiosity —> attention —> discovery —> meaning.” And the reason (at least, one of the reasons) this gentle, iterative process is so creatively propulsive is that it works in relation to the lived and remembered experience as much as to the so-called unknown (because it’s all unknown, or should be, to the creative writer; as Stephen Jay Gould said, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question”).

To note, this week’s simple but potent multistep prompt/exercise can be used with any work in progress for which you’ve reached a sticking point—or, it can be used as a bridge between drafts of any work, with the idea being to push forward only that which is essential. It’s a deeply useful prompt.

However, before we dive into this week’s work, a quick announcement!

We still have at least three sliding-fee slots available for Denise Robbins’s gorgeous climate-writing class.

And although the class explores climate writing through the lens of fiction, the techniques Denise teaches are urgent and relevant across all genres. Here’s what Denise wrote in her recent essay on climate writing:"How to write climate fiction without being a doomer":

Things are getting weird. Climate change is unpredictable. There are limits to what we’ll ever be able to understand. “Slipstream” or “new weird” fiction can serve to highlight this unknowingness, delighting in the relentless weirdness of the world.

What is “slipstream”? Typically, this is fiction that borrows elements from sci-fi and fantasy while sitting firmly in a common-day setting. But the real definition is more about a vibe than any particular element. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel wrote in their introduction to a slipstream anthology that this type of fiction “raises fundamental epistemological and ontological questions about reality that most other kinds of fiction are ill-prepared to address.’” Slipstream makes the “familiar strange or the strange unfamiliar.”

Please reach out if you are interested in claiming a spot in this beautiful offering (paying only the tuition you can afford)!

Back to “curiosity —> attention —> discovery —> meaning”: When we pay very close attention to the world (a skill which requires practice), the world reveals itself to us in ways not otherwise immediately apparent. When we’re paying attention, the bird, or missed freeway exit, the broken saucer—all take on various depths of meaning beyond the obvious. I’ve found this process of attention-revelation-meaning to be immeasurably valuable to my writing practice. Attention guides my writing toward the metaphors that are already there, toward the unexpected, and toward the “5-degrees to the left” version of the truth.

Interestingly, this attentional power is just as important when applied to memory as when applied to the present moment. That’s a big part of what we explored last week, in Step Six of the Essay Challenge, when we paused to direct our attention to the “uncommon light of memory,” collecting concrete images and fragments into an “I Remember” piece. If you missed Step Six, you can find it here (and the “I Remember” prompt is one that tends to yield interesting, fruitful results all by itself and/or as part of a larger process of building almost any kind of literary work, not just as part of the Essay Challenge).

As I mentioned last week, this particular prompt, which I call simply, “I Remember,” is one of the most successful creative writing prompts I use with students across myriad settings from prisons to retreats. It’s a prompt you can pull out and repeat whenever and wherever you need it as a way of marrying memory and attention, as a way toward a character study (including of your past selves), and as means of coming to love language again for its own sake.

Those of you actively engaged in the Essay Challenge know we turned to memory last week for respite as much as anything. We sought to provide ourselves a deliberate antidote to the taxing and sometimes too-pressured work of structuring our essays, identifying their strands and, beyond that, their core aboutness. We needed to let the work simmer and to ourselves go a bit loose in the limbs and easier in the breath.

Perhaps this interest of mine in the cross section of memory and attention and the necessity of remaining loose-limbed in the writing process explains in part my fascination with this recent New York Times profile of Lauren Groff, which initially outlines the physicality of Groff’s drafting process and the ways in which her work habits are highly intentional, exploratory, slow, and full of non-attachment:

…[N]ovel writing is an endurance sport, and Groff said it takes her about five years to complete one. She’s able to keep up her publishing pace by working on several projects, even several novels, simultaneously, holding entire, vibrant worlds distinct in her mind….

[D]ifferent projects live in different corners of her office, a former nursery with blue walls on the second floor of her house in Gainesville, Fla. And when she shifts from one piece of writing to another, she doesn’t shuffle papers on her desk, but moves her body to another part of the room. On a recent Zoom-tour of her work space, she had one project going at either end of her long wooden desk and another on the daybed.

“I’m trying to Jedi-mind trick myself into not putting so much pressure on any particular project by having them be really loose for the first really long span of time,” she said. “I’m writing toward — who knows? Letting it be exploration and joy, centered around either questions or a central thesis or an image.”

Letting projects be loose for the first “really long span of time” and writing toward “who knows” and letting it be an “exploration and a joy?” Yes. 

Yes, yes, yes.

As you know, “staying loose” while actively writing toward “who knows” is what we’ve been seeking to do for these past six weeks. In staying loose, we’ve been able to develop a practice of seeing and sensing shimmers and shards all around us, now and in our memory banks. We’ve allowed the aliveness of our projects to rise to the surface rather than sink under the expectations and worries and insecurities we place on ourselves.

So, yes, looseness.

But, also, a respect for intuition and the power of attention and memory. The NYT Groff interview continues:

When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.

“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she said.

“Nothing matters except for these lightning bolts that I’ve discovered,” she continued, “the images that are happening, the sounds that are happening, that feel alive. Those are the only things that really matter from draft to draft.”

I admit, I have never written the entire first draft of a book in longhand. Nor have I ever locked anything in a bankers box. That said, those of you who’ve studied with me in person know that I highly value drafting by hand and ask that students rely on notebooks and pens, not laptops or tablets, for drafting during my workshops and retreats. Of course it’s always possible to modify as needed for anyone who suffers from arthritis or other physical limitations that make drafting by hand challenging or impossible (and I’ll say a little more on that in the structured exercise at the end of this post). But I focus on writing by hand when possible based on the substantial body of research showing that writing by hand engages different regions of the brain and fosters deeper learning than typing. That research isn’t hard to find online and you’ve probably seen it yourself in the form of various headlines. In the interest of time I’ll share just one snippet from a 2020 study at Johns Hopkins:

New research from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggests that handwriting practice refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that appears to help adults learn generalized literacy-related skills "surprisingly faster and significantly better" than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos.

In creative writing, specifically, I have found that handwriting—and writing from memory—allow writers to drop into their System II thinking much more easily than typing.  My own Billie (Z’s mom and author of Dumpster Yoga) recalls their experience of hand drafting during a 2018 in-person writing retreat I hosted at Naniboujou on the North Shore of Lake Superior:

After writing all weekend, following along with the various prompts, I had little starts at all sorts of things. A few short poems, an assortment of paragraphs here and there in my notebook. I had an “I Remember” page that I liked, and some concrete specific descriptions of the Great Hall and the massive stone fireplace we sat next to as we wrote. Toward the end of the retreat, Jeannine had us break for 2 hours during which we were to revisit our material and shape it into something we could read in five minutes or less for the celebratory group reading.  The idea was to “stitch together” something from what we had been creating all weekend.

But I simply couldn’t seem to do it. In part, I was overwhelmed and struggling to focus because I had recently moved back from China and was reeling with unexpectedly intense reverse culture shock. I wanted to write, but found myself wandering aimlessly instead, then sitting alone in a little nook staring at the frozen ground for most of the allotted writing time. With only about 30 minutes left, I finally turned to a blank page and, without revisiting any of my previous notebook pages (filled with the scraps of all those writing exercises from which I was supposed to be “stitching”), I began writing from memory. Bits and pieces of everything I had been working on came flowing onto my page. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote that day—and that notebook is long gone, or long buried in a pile of other notebooks someplace somewhere—but I do remember that the writing was alive. The words that survived the forgetting and re-remembering process were electric and urgent. Most importantly, I was excited by them. I wanted to keep writing. And when the timer went off and we gathered into the circle to share our work, I was eager to read my draft.

The piece I wrote at Naniboujou never became anything more complete in itself, it did evolve into more than the sum of its parts over time. For one thing, I stole some of the language and transplanted it into later essays and poems. But more than any specific verbiage I lifted, the thing that resonated the longest from that draft was its rhythm, the drumbeat of its lines, and white space between disjointed fragments, all of which carried into “Beneath The Break,” a lyric essay that was eventually published and nominated for a Pushcart in 2022.

I recall one of the lines Billie did keep—“channels of stone carved by water long gone”—which they “transplanted” into a cascading paragraph about their first wedding anniversary (which hadn’t even happened at the time they wrote that line). This play between stone and water became one of the recurring themes of their essay and echoed in one of the final lines—“I didn’t know what love was. I still don’t. But I know water, however soft, is capable of cutting stone.” Their words were like water, finding its way home. Toni Morrison says “water has a perfect memory”:

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”

I, too, believe that things can be invisibly pulled toward an idea of where, what, and how they are meant to be. I’ve referred to this concept countless times daily for the past couple of weeks as Billie works on moving into their new house with Z. Things want to be someplace on purpose, things want to be where they belong. And the more we work to find that right place, the more a space (or an essay) can become imbued with purpose and take on an energy that ripples out to announce, “Hey! Here I am! This is me. This is what I was meant to be.”

A quick example of this: Last week, Billie called me somewhat distraught—everything was going wrong, including that all of their new-house related deliveries were being dropped right on the sidewalk by the tuck-under garage door and beneath the mail slot, instead of up the front steps and closer to the door. And it’s true that Billie’s steps are kind of tucked behind a retaining wall, making their front door hard to see from the street. “All my packages are going to get stolen,” Billie sighed. We speculated that the couple who sold the house to Billie, who were in the 90s, maybe didn’t do much online shopping, and delivery people were confused about where to place the boxes. But later, after several more days of unpacking and organizing and helping things find their places, Billie called again—“Hey! They’re bringing to the door today! And I didn’t even remember to add a delivery note.”

Here's what I said to Billie, and what I believe is true: there was an energy shift in the space inside and outside of their new house. They reached a tipping point, a point where things got closer to what, where, and how they wanted to be, and that energy pulled everything else into alignment.

This week, with our words and our memories, we are going to search for that tipping point in our essays. The whole five-step prompt requires a minimum of 30 minutes, so after you preview the five steps, make sure you wait to begin until you can select a time and space that will allow you to immerse a little.