Is Sorrow the True Wild?
Week One | For the Joy & the Sorrow | Writing toward delight while exploring joy as "terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up"
“Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?”’
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Hello! We’re ready to begin this strange and beautiful adventure together, our 12-week writing intensive, For the Joy & the Sorrow: Writing the World, inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. Why strange? Well, because strange means “unusual, or extraordinary in appearance, effect, manner, etc; peculiar, not known, seen, or experienced before; unfamiliar.”
For me, that is much the point of writing, always: to embark on a journey of discovery with no known routes, no plotted destinations. To flex our ability to do two seemingly contradictory things: 1) see the world more closely, more keenly, more concretely and 2) move beyond false certainty we have about the world and its workings.
If you are a paid member, you are all set for this intensive. Posts come to your inbox every Wednesday (at various times—i.e. I caught a bug on the plane home from Mexico Saturday, which has steadily worsened, and this morning I am quite ill, so I just completed a Covid test, which is thankfully negative; I hope it stays that way, as I tend to take Covid hard). If you are not a paid member, you can upgrade here and/or read more about how this intensive works here and then join us!
Again, it’s easy; you need only to be a member and watch for the Wednesday emails, no sign up required. If you want to do the Write-Ins and Live Salons on Zoom, enjoy Video and Voice notes, and other interactive offerings, you might want to be a founder. It’s only $15 more than an annual membership and we have lots of fun events planned for 2025. Note that Substack will charge you the full annual amount if you upgrade from an annual subscription, but will also extend your membership to a year from now, and refund any difference on your previous annual membership. But all paid members can do the full intensive, so no worries if you aren’t interested in the interactive/live offerings. So many writers are introverts, we know!
And now, with all that administrivia out of the way, may I just say how much I love this sentiment from Ross Gay? So much. Is sorrow the true wild? What if we joined our sorrows?
I feel as if Gay is speaking directly to me. I feel like he can see straight inside my heart. Last year, in a WITD Lit Salon post called “Dear Curious, Is that Fucked Up,” I confessed my proclivity to write things that make people cry. I said:
Here’s the thing about darkness: it can be blinding, but it can also be freeing….I want to devastate people. Is that fucked up? Reaching “far enough into the universe to make things messier and more difficult” is all that I want to do with my writing, drawing material directly from universal free fall, the crack of bone on rock, the unwashed cut.
But wait, isn’t this intensive based on delight? Well, yes, delight is the point. But delight is never true when taken out of context. We cannot crop the photo of the flower to remove the chainlink fence beside it and call that truthful. As the Avid Bookshop in Georgia said about Gay:
Ross Gay is an ambassador of pure joy—not the sugar-coated, roll-your-eyes kind of happiness, but the subversive, wink-and-nod kind of delectation. Whether he is comparing clusters of harvested sweet potatoes to snuggled bunnies or finding beauty at his aunt’s funeral, Gay’s eye for the oft-overlooked wonders of life is unrivaled …
So, yes, we’ll be courting delight! I promise. And we’ll do it by honing our attention to better see and feel what is real in the world, which will in turn help us to appreciate the truth, which includes but is not limited to delight. This is the approach Gay took, the approach that made his work matter. To do this, we’ll adopt the very simple rules that Ross Gay himself followed:
I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.
Every Wednesday for the next twelve weeks, when these posts come out, I’ll invite you to write to an exercise I’ll create based on whichever of Gay’s essayettes (as he calls them) we’re looking at that week. On all the other days of the week during this time period, you’re invited to simply find a delight, any delight, whether in the present moment or the past (you’ll see that Gay focuses both ways in the book), and jot it down. No pressure to make it “good.” That’s not the point! The point is to train our attention, because what we pay attention to grows. Always.
Gay followed his rules for a whole year (and then more recently for another year for The Book of (More) Delights), while our intensive is only twelve weeks long, but of course you can keep going if you like. I might. Let’s see what happens.
But also, let’s not make this difficult for ourselves, and let’s not ever beat ourselves up if we don’t write down a delight on certain days, or if we only write down one word, or half a word, or a doodle. Let’s meet ourselves exactly where we are at, with love and kindness and genuine acceptance. Anything else is creatively self-injurious. As
said last week, “When we hate ourselves, we suck all of the air and light out of the room of our being. And nothing can grow without air and light”So, please, let’s not do that. Even Ross Gay himself admitted in the preface that he skipped some days! He also acknowledged that thinking and writing about delight on an (almost) daily basis did in fact cultivate much more delight in his life.
He said:
It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project, delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me!
So let us be delighted by whatever we create here together, knowing that it will be enough, and it will be more than we would have created had we not set out on this adventure.
We’ll start this week with a truly delightful essayette in which Gay discovers a surprising tenderness in himself and others through the act of doing something a little strange, about which he feels a little self-conscious. I’ll link to the essay under the paywall in case you don’t yet have the book (remember, you’ll want Gay’s book on hand for this intensive, but I am a former elementary and middle-school teacher and I know that very rarely is “the whole class” fully prepared on the first day!).
Friends, I’m so ooking forward to developing our “delight muscles” together. It feels like what we truly needed right now, and I am grateful to be doing this together with all of you.
So, get out your notebooks and pens, click on your delight radar, and prepare for take off.