From the Archives | Dear Curious: Is That Fucked Up?

Lit Salon on the question of why we write + what it means to write things that "reach far enough into the universe to make things messier and more difficult"

Happenings & Other Stuff

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📖 WE MADE AN INDEX! Well,

Billie Oh

did—they made a Writing in the Dark Index so you can find stuff you’re looking for! You see, one of the best benefits of a paid WITD subscription is access to the entire archive, including all of our seasonal intensives & challenges. So we made a directory! We’ll keep filling out the categories with more links, but check it out for now and feel free to give feedback and suggestions!

✍🏼 Our next seasonal intensive starts in April and is devoted to embodied writing. Our bodies store memory, experience, and the raw material of story, so we’ll use use powerful but gentle techniques to articulate our cellular knowledge, muscle memory, and fascia of connection from which we weave all stories. Join us!

originally published October 2023

Once in a while, someone asks you a question you’ve heard a million times before, but for whatever reason, you hear it anew. You hear it as if for the first time. That happened to me this fall when I joined my friend Heidi Czerwiec in helping another friend,

Sonya Huber

, launch her beautiful new book of essays, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook. We gathered at Moon Palace Books, my favorite Minneapolis indie radical progressive anti-racist bookstore—the ground-zero of support during the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder—and we each read from our recent work before taking questions from the crowd.

The question that hit me hardest was the simplest one, the shortest one, the one I’ve heard countless times. For whatever reason, I heard it anew that night and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Lit Salon

Dear Curious: Is That Fucked Up?

Dear Jeannine,

Why do you write?

Signed,

Curious

Dear Curious,

I know a trick, I said.

This was several years ago, and I was teaching a workshop in my living room to a handful of beginning writers. It was early March, and the light was harsh in the way spring light is always harsh in my northern city of Minneapolis. Every streak in picture window glass screeched at us. Still, the living room had a cozy feel, what with the beeswax candles and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The writers were animated as we discussed Joy Williams’s proclamation that:

… the moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be abandoned … effects repeated become false, mannered. The writer’s style is his doppelgänger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.

This assertion of Williams’s had compelled me tumble out unthinkingly that I could produce such a “certain effect.” The writers leaned forward in their upholstered chairs, set their bright ceramic mugs of coffee and tea on the wool rug, on the painted side tables. Tell us, they said. But no sooner than I made the claim, I found myself embarrassed and unsure. Was my “effect” really false, or mannered? Was it actually just a trick to be abandoned, or was it possibly something truer, more open-beaked and striving? I no longer wanted to confide.

You have to, the writers said. Now that you brought it up.

Okay, I said.