Pulling Threads, Making Clay

Essay in 12 Steps | FIVE | The job of the ... writer is to say, Here I am world, and here is the world, and out of this oxymoronic writing, we are here to make each other. ~Nicole Walker

I really appreciate the nuances around fear and how it can actually be helpful. I wasn't sure why I decided to do the Essay Challenge. It was a whim, when the first post came out, and I had no topic in mind at all. Now I realize it's giving me an on ramp back to writing after a long fallow period. Just enough structure to provide stability. A very different approach than I've done before. ~ Peg Conway, writer

This comment from Peg made my day and exemplifies the grand and glorious challenge we are tackling with our Essay in 12 Steps work. Those of you engaging are brave, devoted, curious, and honest. You are attentive, clear, and willing. You are writers.

This week’s structured prompt will lead you across a major milestone with your essay, a milestone that takes you from prewriting to essay writing (even while still acknowledging that you will inevitably continue writing words, sentences, paragraphs, and scenes that do not make the final cut into your essay—writing is inefficient and unruly).

Before we jump in with Step Five (we’re almost halfway!), I want to let you know a couple of things:

1. Yesterday we contacted (or tried to!) everyone on the waitlist for the Writing in the Dark synchronous workshop. The Thursday section sold out right away, as we anticipated, but we opened a Monday section (October 30 - December 4). This is the first time since deep pandemic that I’ve run two concurrent sections of WITD, and I’m so excited for the massive creative energy we’ll stir up this fall. As of this morning the Monday section has several open spots. If you would like to check it out or sign up, you can do that here (and I would love to write with you).

2. The comments section on these Essay in Twelve Step posts is on fire!

Friends, I’m in awe of the comment sections on these posts—regardless of the posts themselves! The comments offer a masters-level class on literary writing. In fact, each of these Essay posts has been averaging nearly 100 comments or more, including my responses to questions, challenges, frustrations, and breakthroughs in the writing. I highly encourage you to take a look, even if you are not working the essay prompts in real time. The conversation taking place in the comments is more than just inspiring. It’s real. In fact I’m most grateful to those who’ve been willing to take a risk and say “this is confusing” or “I don’t know what I’m doing” or “can you talk through this sticking point” or even “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” or even “I’m feeling totally lost.” Each honest, revelatory, and even despondent question has provided an opportunity for richer, more complex discussion of this thing we love—this intersection of words, truth, meaning, and beauty that is the essay. What a tender honor to have these conversations out loud, together, among other people who, as Toni Morrison says, “do language” and want, as Wendell Berry says, to make “language capable of telling the truth again.”

This is also relevant to an exciting note I received yesterday morning from a new paid subscriber—exciting not for praising what this newsletter offers, but for describing what the subscriber hopes to find here in a way that aligns perfectly with my vision and my goals:

I'm looking for prompts for a small writing group that lean more literary/thoughtful and less... Dear Diary. Also interested in reading your takes on writing and language.

This note speaks not only to this Substack in general, but also to today’s post, our Essay in 12 Steps Part Five, and the prompts we’ll work through today (and have been working through all month). I’ll say a bit more in a moment about the notion of prompts that “lean more literary/thoughtful and less… dear diary”—but first, a few thoughts on community.

Writing—or any creative endeavor, but perhaps especially writing—can be intensely lonely. Indeed, I wonder if the deep loneliness if writing is in part why we tend to, in first drafts, at least, fill pages with words that are too interior, too stifled, too claustrophobic to have the effects we would wish, the effects that allow someone else to feel something, to experience something, to enter into a universe of our making as if it were real and alive, because it is real and alive.

To write instead in a way that brings us closer to discovering who we are meant to become is an act of courage and vulnerability, regardless of our genre, or even our medium. This is the way of art, as eloquently expressed by Anne Truit in Turn: The Journal of an Artist:

I am always, and will always be, vulnerable to my own work, because by making visible what is most intimate to me I endow it with the objectivity that forces me to see it with utter, distinct clarity. A strange fate. I make a home for myself in my work, yet when I enter that home I know how flimsy a shelter I have wrought for my spirit. My vulnerability to my own life is irrefutable. Nor do I wish it to be otherwise, as vulnerability is a guardian of integrity.

And yes, we have writing strategies, devices, and approaches that can help us to create work that invites, startles, embraces, warms. We call this craft, and craft is powerful.

But we also have (at least) two other concrete and well-proven tools for overcoming the smallness of the writing life and the way that smallness can leak quietly onto the page:

First, we can go out into the world and look closely at it (yes, that’s a craft tool, too, but it’s also just a life tool).

Second, we can seek, build, and participate in a writing community, as the new subscriber wrote to me yesterday. Becoming actively involved in an artistic, creative writing community can help us to not only write more and write better, but also grow as artists and humans. To that point, I am wholly thrilled with the quality of the writing community that is growing here in the comments (and the subscriber chat, which you can find here). What a thing, that we can do this virtually, learn one another and each other’s work in a true enough way to see our writing from new angles and in different lights. To see ourselves to ourselves from new angles and in different lights.

Watching this community take shape brings me joy—and it is wholly due to the courage and generosity of those of you who have been willing to share snippets of your work, yes, and also to ask questions, including and especially those hard questions, questions that reveal the vulnerability of the artistic process and the deep discomfort of “dwelling in uncertainty” as I have been encouraging us all to do.

I bow to you all.

As for prompts that lean “more literary/thoughtful and less... Dear Diary,” well, you’ve come to the right place. Which is good news and hard news. Hard because prompts that lean more literary/thoughtful and less interior are more difficult. They require you to engage with language on a less stable, more dynamic level than prompts that ask you to “think about a time when,” or similar. The prompts we work on here are constrained, complex, and challenging (while also being alive, fun, exhilarating, and, for many, life-changing).

For those of you who feel unsure as you work these prompts, BRAVO! That’s the whole point. It’s supposed to feel new, strange, and uncharted. We’re not supposed to know if we are “doing it right” because there is no “right.” Yes, there is something specific I’m asking you to do (it’s not a free write, because you could just do that on your own). But as you ask clarifying questions, I am grateful to be able to answer them as best I can toward the direction in which I am pointing you. I also know you might find a different route, because there is no wrong way to do this other than to be rigid and uncurious. As long as we are open, curious, and willing to explore, we are doing it “right.” For our purposes, the notion of “right” is malleable and expansive enough to accommodate tweaks and left turns. Anything else would risk being “paint-by-number,” which is decidedly not what we have set out to do.

What we have set out to do is immerse ourselves in words, play with them, turn them in our hands like stones—some sun-warmed, some jagged, some moss covered, some muddy, some too heavy to hold—and make something new from them. As part of that, we’ve committed to immersing ourselves in the words of others, too—others who’ve written lyric essays that are powerful, strange, beautiful, wild. Getting under the skin of those essays until we find ourselves all the way inside them.

As we start building out the real essay this week, I encourage you to take a look at four exemplary lyric essays—two that most closely resemble a braid, by Lidia Yuknavitch (Woven) and Eula Biss (Time and Distance Overcome, a heartbreaking and intense essay that addresses the history of lynching), and two that most closely resemble collage-style work, by Sejal Shah (Curriculum) and Emilia Phillips (Lodge: A Lyric Essay)—that each, in their own way, offer us a path forward, while also, when taken together as a collective, showing us the unequivocal truth of multiplicity: we have many paths forward. Next week, we’ll look at even more options.

But for now, specifically, you’ll see that Biss’s braided essay uses two objective strands with only a very brief, breathtaking, devastating, sublime subjective flash at the end, while Yuknavitch’s braid uses two subjective strands, one of which is in the distant past (and does weave in objective/researched material), and one that is closer to the present. The two collage-style essays also demonstrate multiplicity, with Shah’s being clearly segmented and organized under an almost hermit-crab-like title and subheadings, and Phillips’s showing definite experimentation with formatting and visual effects (among other elements).

The point is, above all else, to give you permission. Permission to love words and revere their power in general, first and foremost. But also, specifically, to be elastic and playful with your words. To be free and experimental and unattached, meaning you are willing to make little mountains of words that you might not use, and you can celebrate the mountain-building for its own sake, before the eventual shaping and carving begins, as it always must.

And yes, I know we’re mixing up weaving and sculpting language here. As we do when we are feeling our way in the dark.

Let’s make an essay.