POV, Wingless Bodies, and Uninvited Guests
POV, Wingless Bodies, and Uninvited Guests
Essay in 12 Steps | EIGHT | This is the message. We are at the top of the river. Who are you? Please put us back in the water. We are floating to the sea.
Friends, we’re at week eight in our lyric Essay in 12 Steps Challenge. That means it’s almost time to return to the hard work of wrestling form and aboutness with our lyric essays, because by week ten we need to start revising.
But first, this week I bring you two gorgeous published lyric essays (in the Paris Review and Kenyon Review) to help you with form and structure decisions, and two potent, very doable exercises that can be applied not just to your current lyric essay, but to any work-in-progress that needs … something to push it forward.
One of these two exercises—I think of it as “The Uninvited Guest”—resulted in the second stanza of my prose poem “Wingless Bodies” and was instrumental in drafting The Part That Burns with clarity and truth. I recommend it as an essential aspect of the radical revision techniques I teach in workshops. You can listen to me reading “Wingless Bodies” with music composed and played by my dear friend Susan (and read it in full) here—Susan and I performed this piece at AWP 15 in Minneapolis, and it was a blast.
And here I give you the specific stanza in which I allowed the uninvited guest onto the page. When I first set out to write this stanza, it was going to be a sweet reverie about taking my beloved young children to the headwaters of the Mississippi, a treasured memory made all the richer over the years thanks to subsequent visits, including with my fourth-grade students when I was a Waldorf teacher. But when I sat down to write the scene, my high-school boyfriend waltzed insistently onto the page. Because, though I’d sort of banished it from my own memory bank, my first trip to the Mississippi headwaters was, in fact, with him. And I had never, until this vignette, written about him. Nor had I wanted to. But, the vignette would have been a lie without him.
Thus, the power of the Uninvited Guests.
II. Source
The Mississippi gurgles up from a clumsy knob and kettle landscape. Knobs are hills filled with coarse gravel and boulders dropped like loose change by the glacier’s edge. Kettles are scars filled in by melt water to make lakes and ponds and bogs.
At the headwaters, I was seventeen when Darius fucked me in a damp tent. I watched from above, recalling my stepfather’s coarse hands. I bled, but it didn’t hurt. It hurt, but it wasn’t Darius’s fault. It was his fault, but he was scarred. And I was scarred. And melt water runs downhill. We could have had the baby, but we didn’t. Darius stole stuff and sold it. Cars, drugs, guns, and something else, like that small thing inside him that was naked and open-beaked. Darius went to prison.
The headwaters are best crossed holding a child’s hand. Sometimes this threshold is no more than a rivulet you can skip over. The dust on your feet stays dry. Other times the only way is to crawl in and lie down. Let the water rush over your supine body. Let the river run into your open mouth. Maybe you pull yourself out.
I got married. I had babies. I brought them, wild and uncombed, to the source, where they scratched notes in careful cursive: This is the message. We are at the top of the river. Who are you? Please put us back in the water. We are floating to the sea. Carefully, they burnt the edges of these scrolls, match after match. Then they launched them in glass bottles toward the Gulf, where the fresh water spills into the brine.
I’m so grateful for the uninvited guest in this vignette, for it would have been a thing that shirked its core aboutness, a thing that wrote around the truth, without him.
Now, before we wrestle our essays into their “somewhat final” form, we’re going to pause and recognize that effective, powerful writing is not a homogeneous category. We differ as writers. Our experiences and taste differ. Our voices differ (even from one project to the next in our own repertoire). My best work will sound wholly different from yours, because we are different writers. We are not seeking to emulate any one style! We’re trying to find the precise style that this essay, the one we’re working on right now, yearns for, reaches for, wants to bloom into.
Therefore, we’ll turn our attention, as mentioned, to two incredible lyric essays we have not yet examined, written in two vastly different styles. As per the promise of this intensive, which was that we would look at beautiful work together, marvel at what it accomplishes, and become wildly, insatiably curious about why it works the way it does (and, importantly, this does not require us to all have the very same opinions about the work—we are allowed and encouraged to have different reactions, different taste, different ideas, because that’s what makes this place beautiful and rich and engaging and useful).
Our work in the week ahead will be to read and compare these highly distinct lyric essays, both powerful, gorgeous, and drenched in meaning, yet written in styles as different as spring and fall, a creek and a canyon, a road trip and a slow walk in the forest. Of the two essays:
One is much more narrative
The other far more fragmented and nonlinear (though still relatively chronological)
One is a fairly straightforward braid, with two relatively clear strands (both subjective, though one is far less personal than the other, thereby creating something of that friction and metaphorical opportunity we get when we juxtapose more objective prose with subjective prose)
The other is more of a collage, more fragmented, no clear “strands” but rather a collection of shimmers and shards developed into vignettes and painstakingly arranged to create a mosaic of deep meaning
Your work is to consider these two essays and come to some clarity around them. Which is more like your emerging essay—or is your essay something else altogether?
I’d love for us to discuss these essays in the comments this week, and share thoughts on what elements of craft and style contribute to the effectiveness of each one individually, despite their clear differences.
In this week’s Steps, you’ll find links to the essays and some general guidance on learning from them, and two potent exercises to apply to your essay in progress to either help pull it together or shake it up, depending on what it most needs right now.
And with that, I wish you happy reading and inspired writing with this week’s exercises and your own ongoing essay efforts (and please share your progress)!