Loose Ends

I have a few, how about you?

“To be an artist is to believe in life.” – Henry Moore

The day after my dad died last August, I spoke over Zoom to Asha Dore for her podcast, Totally Biased Reviews. Right away when I logged on, I told Asha about my dad having just died, because I wasn’t sure if maybe it showed, you know? Like, did I look different after my dad died? Did I sound different? Was I still myself? Asha asked if I was sure I wanted to talk, and I told her yes, I was sure. I told her I needed something to help me feel more like myself for an hour—I needed a way to remember myself. Asha gave me a way to do that when I needed it. And although I was tender (I still am), the conversation, in spite of that, or because of it, or both, was wonderful.

Asha wanted to talk about (among other things) using the craft to tell difficult stories. The full episode can be accessed by clicking the photo, but if you’re just up for a snippet, I’ve got that for you:

Craft can actually be the vehicle, the bridge, the doorway, not just through and into hard stories on the page, but out of those stories in our lives. I’ve said before: it’s not that we get to erase the past—whatever we’ve lived through is always a part of us. But when we use craft to transform those stories into something more than the lived experience, it’s incredibly empowering. I know that it changed my life.

WITD”s tagline is Writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours, and that is really how I feel. It’s so transformative writing those stories—to me it’s not just telling the stories, it’s like making something out of those stories that’s more than and different from what it was to live them, maybe especially childhood stories, because we were so powerless in childhood.

But when we come to the page through craft, we suddenly have all these tools, all these tools to shape a story, to make it into something beautiful, that is my goal, always, to make something that has beauty in it, even when the lived experience was devoid of beauty, was really hard, painful, terrifying, destructive.

To be able to make something that has beauty in it, it’s kind of like a miracle, really. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that.

You could say that this kind of miracle is one of my obsessions.

Speaking of obsession, I recently discovered Octavia Butler’s essay, “Positive Obsession,” which is brilliant. If you ever need some inspiration to keep you going creatively despite self-doubt or impostor syndrome or steep odds or exhaustion or whatever, read some Octavia Butler essays, and also her notebooks. Here’s a brief excerpt from “Positive Obsession”:

Olivia Butler gives me not just permission, but encouragement, to lean into my writerly obsessions, which I plan to do more in 2025.

But first, next week is Christmas, the first night of Hanukkah, the deadline for grades for my Writing for Public Health class at the U of M, and, of course, it’s the very last week of 2024. We’re hosting three large family gatherings in that stretch of time, and, in addition to all the other cooking, I’ll be making my caramel rolls—the traditional ones—and, for the first time, a gluten-free version (wish me luck; I will share the results honestly). I’m also considering a tres leches cake, or a raspberry curd cream cake. Or both. Again, watch for updates.

The following week, on Sunday, December 29,

Billie Oh

and I leave—with Z—for a week in Mexico, at Isla Mujeres, where we have been twice before (first when Billie was two, and swam in the ocean for the first time, and second when they were ten, and Jon and I brought all six of our kids on our honeymoon in Tulum, with a side trip to Isla—and yes, you read that right, we brought all six of our kids on our honeymoon).

Needless to say, it’s going to be an extremely hectic two weeks from now until Billie and I return on January 4, and the Writing in the Dark posting schedule will be erratic and sparse. We will be here on and off, but not with the usual schedule or content until the second week of January. Probably pics of my various baking adventures and collage poems from the beach and stuff like that.

We hope you can use this time to finish up some loose ends of your own, or, at least, to obsess a little over doing so, which brings us one step close to actually doing so, if we believe Octavia Butler, and I do.

Meanwhile, if you need some inspiration and permission and motivation as you do whatever you do to welcome the new year, such as let go of what you no longer need and fill in the contours of your hopes and dreams—I offer you this week in lieu of a writing exercise, a contemplative Voice Note on the art of finishing things, why it’s so hard, and how we can face down the challenge.

Billie & I made this Voice Note last year toward the end of the Essay Challenge, when we were overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of the work you had all produced, and aware that many of you were likely starting to panic (or at least, scratch your heads) about how you were going to start pulling it together into something cohesive that you could call “essayish.”

The topic of finishing is worth revisiting from time to time, because the obstacles between us and the completion of our creative projects are many and fierce, not the least of which are the ones inside of ourselves. And those interior obstacles often involve fear of the grief we will feel if and when we do finish the work.

Grief?

Yes, grief. “A period of darkness often follows the completion of any creative project,” writes artist Jessamyn Lovell.” She goes on:

I think it’s fair to describe this feeling as grief. Finishing something you’ve worked on intensely for any period of time is validating. You birth this creative endeavor like a piece of you that felt incomplete.

If you’ve been following me a while, you know I also greatly admire Ann Patchett’s writing on this topic, which I won’t repeat at length here, because you can find more here if you like. I’ll only repeat that Ann Patchett also describes this feeling of grief around her books:

I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

So, while many of us might lack the time to finish significant projects in the next couple of weeks, we can allow our thought to meander into the territory of our hopes and dreams for the year ahead, and we can imagine ourselves reaching up to touch those dreams, reaching up to grasp hold of them and hold on as the dreams lift us off the ground toward another ledge on whatever cliff we’re climbing. At which point the dream loses its updraft and deposits us on the ground to start over again. But we’re not really starting over, because this plateau is new. We haven’t been here before, and could never have arrived here, without finishing something, however imperfectly.

Finishing is how we become writers, yes—but it’s also how we become just a little bit more of who we actually are. It’s how we become our Self with a capital S.

I like how Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this process of becoming through creative work:

What I'm always telling people … is—I can't promise you that it's gonna work. I can't promise you that it’ll be good, I can't promise you that anybody will like it, I can't promise you that it will get published. I can't promise you that, if it gets published, it will be well reviewed, I can't promise you that if it's well reviewed, people will purchase it, I can't promise you that if they purchase it, you'll have the capacity to do another one. I can't promise you any of that.

But what I absolutely can promise you is that you will be a different person at the end of that project than you were at the beginning. One hundred percent. That is the reason to do it. Because aren't you a little curious about who you'll be at the end of something? That's why I do it. And sometimes that’s the only thing that makes me do it.

Yes, I am curious about the version of myself that I will become as I tie up creative loose ends. I know it will be a realer version of myself than the one I know now. Because I know that real isn’t how we’re made; it’s a thing that happens to us, and it happens when we continually rediscover ourselves. That’s something I do best through my creative writing.

So, I’m grateful for the projects I finished in 2024, and I hope to finish more in 2025. I hope the Voice Note helps you to imagine finishing some of your projects, too. I’m going to start the visioning process for my top projects now, as these short dark days finally lead us toward something like light, just on the other side of that long horizon.

Much Love + Gratitude,

Jeannine

PS Writing for joy is one way to live more joyfully, and that’s what we’re going to do in our first WITD intensive of 2025, starting January 8:

”For the Joy & the Sorrow: A 12-Week Intensive for Writing the World."

This multi-genre, all-level intensive, inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, will draw our attention—and our most alive writing—towards the “extraordinary in the ordinary” by helping us to see and illuminate (and write!) the innate duality in all things.

Using the power of close, clear-eyed attention, we’ll learn how to vividly capture the beautiful and the broken with the eyes of a photographer and the heart of a poet.

A wonderful way to start a hard new year. Intensives are for paid subscribers. If you need to upgrade, you can do that any time.

PPS If you liked this post, you might enjoy some of these posts that dive deeply into these topics and contain writing exercises to further explore them (you can find many more in the WITD Curriculum Index):

• How to Be A Writer (It’s not what you think)

• The Things Themselves, Alive With Metaphor

• A True Metaphor is a Swift & Violent Twisting of Language

• On Desire (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)

• Depicting Desire (What exactly does it mean to want?)

• On Dialogue (The heart of dialogue is simple. The profoundness is to listen. — Lolly Daskal)

• Revision (9 Questions and 26 Craft Keys for revising our writing to be stronger, clearer & more alive)

• Teeth in the Art of Revision