How We Write Ourselves Alive

If you are taking notes, you are insisting that what is happening matters enough to be recorded. You are insisting that it is real. You are insisting that you are real.

Me, writing with my workshop students, 2010

This morning I made my coffee—well, I poured the coffee from the pot that Jon had already brewed, then prepared it the same way I do every morning, the oat creamer, the small ceremony of it, the way the white swirls into the black—and I stood at the kitchen window watching the California light stream in, such a confident light here in California, the kind of light that knows its own security. So unlike February light in Minnesota.

That’s partly what I was thinking, as I swirled the creamer into my coffee. Mostly, though, I was still pondering a conversation earlier this week, a conversation with someone in the middle of a hard project, who asked me a question I keep turning over: Why do we do this? Why do we keep coming back to the page when the page costs so much?

So that’s what I’m writing about this morning.

Two quick announcements first, though:

Open Mic Salon Replay & Cento Poem

Our open-mic salon yesterday was gorgeous! Watch the replay here!

And check out the cento/collaborative poem I created from the readings too. Let me know what you think.

What a lovely hour! Next one is March 10 (and you can always keep an eye on our events calendar here).

Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP

We have three last spots available for the April session of Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP, which runs six consecutive Tuesdays, April 14 - May 19, 6-8 PM Central. Details about the workshop can be found here and/or you can enroll here.

If you’ve never participated, please read the workshop description first and also make sure the dates work for you for this non-refundable workshop (all sessions are recorded). WITD is a uniquely engaging format and you’ve likely never experienced a workshop quite like it.

Now, back to that question of the page—and why we keep coming back despite the cost.

I didn’t have a quick answer. I rarely do for the questions that matter. But I’ve been sitting with it all week, and what I want to try to say is this: we come back to the page because the page is where we become legible—to ourselves, first, and then, if we’re lucky and we work hard enough and we’re honest enough, to someone else. And becoming legible is not a small thing. For some of us, for a long time, it was the only form of existence we could fully trust.

I tell a certain story about how I became a writer, and, like most such stories, mine is both true and incomplete.

The true part: I learned early that language was the one room where I had complete authority. No one could enter without my permission. No one could rearrange the furniture while I slept. I could make the walls any color. I could make the windows face anywhere. That a child would find this kind of sovereignty in sentences—rather than in, say, a body, or a house, or a family—is not a mystery if you know anything about what it means to be a child without a stable body, house, or family. You find the room that holds. And then you live in it.

The incomplete part: calling this writing makes it sound more intentional than it was. What I was actually doing was surviving. When I was ten years old in Casper, Wyoming, the year my stepfather finally left for good and my mother’s first long breakdown began, I built an elaborate house out of cereal boxes for my collection of super balls. I gave them a father who was a kind dentist and a mother who made pastries with filling. At night I tucked them into their little beds and held them in my palms and smelled their rubbery heads. I also started roaming the alley behind our house with a notebook, pretending I was Harriet the Spy. I wrote a play for my fifth-grade class. My friend Norah and I built a poetry machine out of an appliance box, and I hid inside composing poems for five, ten, or twenty-five cents depending on length, and the Casper Star ran a story about it on the front page: The heart of the machine is not a large, integrated circuit, but Miss Ouellette, who hides inside the box.

I was hiding inside the box. I am still hiding inside the box. This is called writing.

Here’s what I mean when I say writing saves us: not that it rescues us from pain, but that it converts pain into something more. Into something with a shape. Something that can be turned in the light, that has edges and angles and—this is the part that keeps astonishing me—uses. Pain as raw material is nearly unbearable. Pain as essay is still painful, but now it is also structured, and structure is the beginning of meaning, and meaning is the beginning of the self being able to locate itself in the world rather than simply be at the world’s mercy.

None of this is metaphor. This is neuroscience. When we find language for what has happened to us—when we move it out of the body and into the word, and, therefore, the world—we are doing something literally biological. We are moving experience out of the limbic system, where it registers as pure sensation, pure threat, and into the prefrontal cortex, where it can be organized, considered, held at a distance large enough for contemplation. James Pennebaker spent decades proving this in his lab at UT Austin, watching people get healthier—healthier physically, not just emotionally—from writing about trauma. All of this, from writing.

But I want to push past Pennebaker, past the wellness applications, into something harder to name.

Because what writing actually offers—what it has offered me, and what I watch it offer the writers I teach—is not just the conversion of pain into information. It is the discovery of the self as narrator. Which sounds like a small thing and is in fact an enormous thing. Because to be a narrator is to occupy the position of the one who sees. Who notices. Who refuses to let experience pass without testimony. To be the narrator is also, importantly, to be the one who speaks.The child who was not allowed to speak becomes, on the page, the only one in the room who gets to say what happened. Not the last word—the world is more complicated than that—but a word. A shaped, witnessed word.

That is not nothing. That is, in some configurations, everything.

A paradox exists at the center of all serious writing: you must go toward the thing that frightens you, and you must go toward it in cold blood. Not numbly— numbness is the absence of feeling. What you want is something more like surgical attentiveness. The ability to feel fully while also watching yourself feel. To be, simultaneously, inside the experience and five degrees outside it.

This is actually how good writers move through the world even when they aren’t writing. They have developed what I’d call a double consciousness of experience—fully present, and also always faintly, quietly taking notes. Not as a defense mechanism, though it can look like one. As a practice of care. Because if you are taking notes, you are insisting that what is happening matters enough to be recorded. You are insisting that it is real. You are insisting that you are real.

For some of us, this insistence was the first act of resistance we were ever capable of.

I think about this when I read the work of the writers here at Writing in the Dark. You bring me snippets about your mothers and your losses, your marriages and their fractures, the particular and unrepeatable texture of your particular and unrepeatable lives—and what I feel, reading them, is not just the content of what you’ve written. I feel the act of the writing itself. The insistence. The refusal to go unwitnessed.

It moves me every single time.

I also want to tell you something about doorways, because I think about them often, as you probably already know.

When I was ten, living in that gray house near downtown Casper, I became fascinated with doorways made by tree branches arching overhead. The way you could step under them and feel, however briefly, like you had passed into another world. I didn’t have language for what I was practicing then—the vocabulary of liminality, of threshold, of the psychic necessity of passage—but I was practicing it anyway, the way children do things they need to do without the theoretical apparatus to explain why.

What I was practicing was the essential act of the writer, which is the belief that a threshold exists, that something different is on the other side of it, and that you are someone who can cross it. Not escape—and this is important. Doorways don’t take you out of your life. They take you into a different relationship with it. You are still in Wyoming. You are still you. But you have stepped through something, and the stepping-through has changed the angle of your looking.

This is what writing does. The page is the doorway. The essay is the threshold. You step through, and you are still in your same life, still carrying your same losses—but now you are looking at them from a place that is slightly outside their jurisdiction. The jurisdiction is real. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t. But there is also, always, this: the part of you that narrates is the part of you that survives.

Here’s what I’ve learned, after years of writing and teaching writing: the people who are afraid to write their hardest truths are not afraid of the truth. They are afraid of becoming the person who has told it. They sense, correctly, that there is no going back. Once you have written the real thing—once you have named it with precision and let it stand in the light and shaped it into something another person might recognize —you have crossed a line. The person you were before, the one who kept it folded and small and private, is gone.

This sounds like a loss—and I suppose to an extent, it is.

But it is also a birth.

The writers I love most—the ones who have changed me—are the ones who understand this and go toward it anyway. Who understand that writing is not self-expression in the small sense of that phrase—not merely getting things out —but, instead, a more profound act of self-creation. The self that writes is not the same self that lived the experience. It is the self that looked at the experience and decided it was worth something. Worth shaping. Worth offering to another person. Worth saying: Here. I made this from what happened. Maybe you recognize it. Maybe it is also yours.

When I wrote what later became the first chapter of The Part That Burns (the essay published in a shorter form and called “Four Dogs, Maybe Five”), I organized that piece in numbered sections, each one named for a dog. I didn’t know, when I started, why I was doing it that way other than it was a constraint I gave myself, a rule I told myself to follow. I needed to write something quickly for a workshop deadline, and the dogs are what I came up with. So I followed the logic and trusted it, the way you trust a sentence when it begins to move in an unexpected direction and you go with it rather than pulling it back. Later, I understood what had been only raw instinct: the dogs were the through-line. The constant that everything else during that time was measured against. The creatures who stayed when the humans left, or the creatures who left when the humans stayed but should not have. They were the book’s unconscious, and my own. In other words, the structure of the dogs was doing work I couldn’t have done consciously.

This is what I mean when I say we do not know what we are writing until we have written it. The essay knows things the essayist doesn’t. The story is smarter than the storyteller. You think you are writing about dogs and you are actually writing about survival. About what holds. About who holds. About the difference between a mutt and a dog with a real name, and how, in the end, Pete —the little stray, the little cur—was the one who stayed.

The form is not incidental, or merely a container. The form is the meaning. And when you find the form, when it clicks into place you feel that unmistakable rightness—a rightness that transcends craft because it is actually pure discovery. A rightness that is the feeling of having crossed a threshold you didn’t know was there.

I want to say one more thing about saving ourselves.

We don’t do it once. It just doesn’t work that way. We can’t expect to do it once and then, voila, we’re saved. We do it in the present continuous: we are saving ourselves, always, over and over, with every sentence we commit to, with every revision that sharpens a thing until it becomes true rather than merely accurate, with every workshop where we sit across from another writer’s hard-won pages and say, I see what you are trying to do here, and I think you can go further, I think you can go deeper, I think you can bear more than you think you can.

Writing is not the solution to suffering. I want to be clear about that. And it is not therapy, though it can of course be therapeutic. Writing is not justice, either, though it can witness injustice. And it is not redemption, though something that functions like redemption can, occasionally, happen inside it.

What writing is: attention. I know I’ve said that before. I will undoubtedly say it again. Writing is the radical, loving, unflinching act of paying attention to the world and to your own life. Of saying: this happened. This mattered. I was here, and I was changed by what I found here, and I am going to try to tell you about it in a way that is true enough to be useful—to you and to me, to all of us who are trying to find, in the wreckage or the wonder or the ordinary February mornings of our lives, something worth saving.

The light is still coming in at its unflinching angle.

The page is still there.

You already know how to walk through.

Love,

Jeannine