Pleasures of the Flesh
We can't study and write pleasure without talking about touch. So, let's talk about touch
"...we are making something all together, in our bodies and the spaces between us and the moments in which we touch.” ― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body
Just one second before we jump in—we’re about to talk about touch, I promise. But first, let me tell you about our upcoming summer writing intensive:
The Power of Place
I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to explore after pleasure, and then last night I had the pleasure of being at Next Chapter Books, in conversation with Tamara Dean, to help launch her new book, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless:
In the midst of the environmental crises of the early twenty-first century, Tamara Dean sought a way to live lightly on the planet. Her quest drew her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There, she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change—an experience at once soul-stirring and practical that she recounts in Shelter and Storm.
In conversing with Tamara and listening to her read from her essays about her time in the driftless region—which, incidentally, is where Billie and I went for our brief but very intense writing retreat last summer—I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about the profound impact of place in our lives and, if we are making the most of it, in our stories.
As novelist Clint McCown says:
Place is a secret force and omnipresent means through which the writer may wield a controlling hand.
When we give place our full attention—in life, and on the page—we will discover meaning and depth not otherwise visible. During our 12-week Story Challenge last year, we devoted a week to place, and it was incredible. At that time, I said, “our stories must enter into a contract with place in which place is neither atmosphere or decoration, but an essential player in the unfolding drama.”
Despite the crucial role of place in our lives and in our writing, it’s easy to give place short shrift and, in so doing, miss powerful opportunities to discover important insights about ourselves, others, and the world. We also, of course, miss opportunities to make our writing more real, true, and alive.
And when thinking of place, remember that place is an elastic, expansive concept. Place can be:
A city or town (Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout)
A neighborhood (Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor)
A school (Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro)
A hospital (Gray’s Anatomy)
A house or apartment (Remains of the Day by Kasuo Ishiguro; Rear Window/Alfred Hitchcock)
A room (Room by Emma Donoghue!)
A farm (A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley)
A street (The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros)
Write Place With Us
None of these works would or could be what they are without a true devotion to place in the writing. So, for our next intensive for paid members, The Power of Place, starting June 11, we’ll take six weeks to explore the intricacies of place in our own writing, and how it can change and deepen all aspects of our work.
Join us for this deep dive into the power of place as we look at extraordinary examples of place-writing across genres. If you aren’t a paid member, you can upgrade anytime for unlimited access to not just the place intensive, but also the curriculum and exercises for all of our past intensives. You’ll also have access to our Voice & Video Notes, Write-Ins, Live Salons, and more.
Sarah Fay of Writers at Work says Writing in the Dark is “Like Getting An MFA for practically nothing,” and Laura McKowen of Love Story says it’s “as if Mary Oliver and Rilke had a brainchild.” So, please join us! We look forward to writing with you!
And now, back to our regularly scheduled date with pleasure! Specifically, the pleasure of touch, the first language we learn and the last we lose.
As Diane Ackerman writes in A Natural History of the Senses:
Touch is the oldest and most urgent sense. It is our first language, and our richest means of emotional expression.
In an increasingly digitized and disembodied world, the human touch remains a primal force of connection and healing, a quiet articulation of care that words often fail to express.
Artists and poets have long understood that touch transcends the purely physical; it is an emotional and even spiritual act. Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, encourages intimacy not through possession but through presence:
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Here, touch is not merely contact but a mutual recognition, a moment in which one being says to another: I see you, I feel you, you are real.
Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls touch “the sense of sense itself,” the point at which interior and exterior meet. A mother’s hand on a fevered brow, a friend’s arm around a shoulder, lovers lying in stillness … these gestures affirm our aliveness. Even Michelangelo, in his Creation of Adam, captures the near-electric charge of touch, depicting God's and Adam's fingers nearly grazing, the space between them vibrating with life’s possibility.
To be touched is to be acknowledged, to be welcomed and woven into the fabric of human life. Whether in the touch of hands washing dishes side by side, or resting on a knee in quiet solidarity. In these tactile moments, the abstract becomes real: love becomes muscle, presence becomes warmth.
In a time and place where screens mediate most of our communication, we risk underestimating the primal importance of the physical. As neurologist Oliver Sacks noted, “To feel is to live.”
Touch restores that feeling, grounding us in the here and now, in the weight and wonder of being human together.
The short poem we’ll look at this week conveys the power of touch in what was for me a surprising way.
The poem, new to me, was a very pleasurable surprise, and I hope you find it so as well.
I also hope we can explore the possibility, in our own writing this week, of aiming toward those two destinations ourselves: touch and surprise. It’s a fun and potentially hefty challenge, so feel free to give it more than one try.
I’m very excited to see where this trail takes us!