Our Animals, Ourselves: A Strange Writing Exercise
"By paying attention to and learning more about the animals that might snag our attention, we can better understand what makes us human." ~Gina Chung
Ugh, I have COVID. So do Billie and Z. It’s been a week, to say the least.
And I’m distressed about it for all the reasons COVID is distressing, including, specifically for me today, the fact that it means I’ve had to cancel tonight’s advanced class at Stillwater Prison, The Feeling of What Happens: Writing That Stirs Emotion.
Luckily, my dear dog Frannie (above) sleeps by my side all day—she’s a professional snuggler. Also luckily, I will not have to cancel Writing in the Dark’s upcoming first Live Salon on Zoom (you can read a little more about it here), offered Sunday, 12 – 1 PM Central, as a celebration of “permission” in our work, and a congratulatory gathering for those who participated in the Essay Challenge, or are participating now or planning to later, or who have an eye on the upcoming Story Challenge and want to get a better sense of what Writing in the Dark is all about. Indeed, this first live salon is free and open to all subscribers (a Zoom link will be sent out an hour in advance on Sunday), so please join us! We’ll have some informal flash readings followed by a craft Q & A and I’m really looking forward to your words and your wonderings.
Meanwhile, this Writing Lab post is my very best work under the COVID fog, and it contains some craft + personal musings along with a structured writing exercise that I hope will surprise you. I feel like a kid who drew a stick figure and a house with chimney smoke and says, “I hope you like it!” I do, I hope you like it.
First, though, before we get to the exercise, a bit of context around where it came from.
It started with feeling glum about missing my class at Stillwater tonight—and not only because it’s a wonderful class (it’s comprised in large part by students I taught at Stillwater last spring, so we were able to hit the ground running and dive deep into the work with relative ease and grace). But, also because, put plainly, I’m letting the guys down. Yes, I’ll make up the class, of course, but that doesn’t ameliorate the disappointment and frustration I know they will feel when they learn they won’t be getting their passes, won’t be leaving their cell blocks tonight to gather in Lit 3 for 2.5 hours of intense, lively, challenging, and inspiring conversation about their works-in-progress as well this week’s assigned reading.
Tonight, we would have looked at Jane Kenyon’s “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” which I expect they would have liked (and/or will like eventually), because of how they reacted to her poem “Evening Sun” (they loved it and had the most insightful things to say about it several weeks ago). No, it’s not a class devoted to Jane Kenyon, ha—we’re reading Toni Morrison, Ira Sukrungruang, Ken Liu (every man in the room cried at Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie”), Sun Yung Shin, Sharon Olds, Cheslea Biondolillo, and others.
But this Kenyon poem, “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” is especially well suited to our theme—writing that stirs emotion—because not only does it seem impossible to read it and feel nothing in response, it also manages to do its work with tremendous subtlety and nuance.
Also, surprise.
And that concept—surprise—is what sparked something in me this week for our structured writing exercise. Surprise, and the possibility of playfulness, during a time when the world is anything but.
This week, my friend and fellow memoirist, the celebrated poet
, wrote in her Substack,:I’ve been thinking about the lines of Bertolt Brecht: “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”
And I’ve been thinking about something Hannah Aizenman wrote about these lines in The New Yorker:
“People often seem to share this verse—published in 1939, while Brecht, a vehement anti-Nazi, was exiled from his native Germany—as a token of hope, a testament to the human spirit’s eternal resilience. But it also articulates the stultifying effects of crisis on the imagination. During dark times, all anyone can talk about is the dark times, and it’s hard to say anything original or useful; the talk becomes treacly, or else cynical, the echoing clichés lulling listeners to sleep. Brecht assumed a responsibility to keep readers attuned to the sound of his era’s brutality and banality. He was less interested in song as a source of relief than in its power to awaken an audience—and provoke a reckoning.”
What can a poem do? A poem is a not a tourniquet when you’re bleeding. It’s not water when you’re thirsty or food when you’re hungry. A poem can’t protect you from an airstrike, or from abduction, or from hate. It’s hard to write when our words feel like they’re not enough—they can’t do the real, tangible work of saving lives, or making people safer.
But can they remind us of our humanity? I think they can, and I think we desperately need a reminder.
This—our need for a collective reminder of our humanity—is the reasoning behind this week’s structured writing exercise. And the book in my stack that’s offering me the most surprise and joy at the moment is a slim volume by Virginia Woolf called Flush: A Biography (it’s the biography of a cocker spaniel, who happens to be the pet dog of Elizabeth Barret Browning!).
What a silly, unexpected idea this is, coming from Virginia Woolf!
Here’s what one Goodreads reviewer said about Flush:
This is my favorite Virginia Woolf book so far and as I read this story about Elizabeth's Flush, it is easy to see why dogs are so part of our lives and contribute to our happiness as we do theirs.
And here’s a tidbit from She Reads Novels:
Flush is a wonderfully creative combination of fiction and nonfiction. For factual information, Woolf draws on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's two poems about her dog and also the letters of Elizabeth and Robert, some of which she quotes from in the text.
To note, Flush is not solely whimsy. Woolf confronts some of humanity’s most complex emotional experiences in this unusual volume. And as Gina Chung writes in Literary Hub, “Learning about other animals makes us better writers.” I know this is true, because, full disclosure, I taught a class a couple of years ago at Shakopee Prison, and the theme was, at the women’s request, writing animals. The work that came out of that class was stunning. So, as with all of our exercises, you should allow for the possibility that you’ll find something unexpected, interesting, vivid, original, and maybe even moving. When we’re lucky enough to discover truth at a slant, it can take our breath away.
Fair warning: I’m introducing a touch (just a touch, but go big if you like!) of fabulism here—but that doesn’t mean you must write “brightly.” Go where your heart leads you.
But be open to a crumb of humor or joy if it offers itself. I hope it might, for we are all searching for crumbs right now.