“Ravens taught me to pay attention. The desert taught me to see. Art and artists taught me to see more…and better…and to appreciate, savor, and protect.” ~Linda Durham
The lost art of close reading & how it changes us as writers & humans + a structured writing exercise built on close reading combined with the power of three & an extended state of mystery & unknowing
Hi, friends,
Let’s talk about close reading, and the wildly life-enriching gifts we can receive (as writers and as humans) from this taxing, arduous, and sometimes frustrating process.
When I think about close reading, I can’t help but recall my grad school advisor, the novelist Martha Southgate, who forced me to do it. I didn’t like it, because it was unfamiliar to me. And while I thought then that my lack of familiarity with close reading stemmed from my being a college dropout who’d barely graduated from (alternative) high school, Martha said that pretty much all of her advisees struggled with this skill, which is why she was insisting we practice it.
Turns out, close reading was by far the most valuable skill I learned while earning my MFA (other than the applied, structural discipline to finish a book).
Since graduating from my MFA program in 2017, I’ve not only done a lot of close reading but have also incorporated close reading as the cornerstone of my synchronous Writing in the Dark workshop and as an essential element of this newsletter, as well.
Why?
Because close reading, at its core, is simply another way of paying close, devoted attention to what’s in front of us, and paying that attention truthfully to the thing itself (in this case, a text) instead of our thoughts and ideas and interpretations and associations about the thing.
The ability to do this—to pay real attention to something for a sustained period of time—is life changing. Yes, it makes our writing better. Immeasurably better. But it also changes the way we exist in the world. It allows us to avoid the fate Mary Oliver describes in her stunning poem “When Death Comes,” where she writes:
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real …I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
But what the heck is close reading, exactly?
Here’s how the writing center at the University of Wisconsin defines close reading:
Close reading is deep analysis of how a literary text works…
Fiction writers and poets build texts out of many central components, including subject, form, and specific word choices. Literary analysis involves examining these components, which allows us to find in small parts of the text clues to help us understand the whole. For example, if an author writes a novel in the form of a personal journal about a character’s daily life, but that journal reads like a series of lab reports, what do we learn about that character? What is the effect of picking a word like “tome” instead of “book”? In effect, you are putting the author’s choices under a microscope.
The process of close reading should produce a lot of questions. It is when you begin to answer these questions that you are ready to participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper that makes the most of your close reading work.
So, when we close read, we’re not talking about what the writer might have been thinking, or how we once experienced something similar, or how the opening reminds us of a passage in something else. Instead, we’re requiring ourselves (often with great effort) to see what is actually in a particular piece of writing, right now, the language, the words, the images, the rhythms, the repetitions, the grammar, the turns of phrase, the structure, the length, all of it. Here, and now.
In this way, close reading teaches us the skills we need to see what is actually happening on the page of a literary text, and how it is doing the work it does, how it is creating the effects it creates, including the emotions it evokes in us.
But, as we practice close reading a text, we’re also learning how to close read the world.
How to close read our lives.
How to close read ourselves.
Even our dreams.
In our synchronous Writing in the Dark workshop this past Monday night, we worked really hard to get closer and closer to what was happening in the published piece we read (Jane Kenyon’s marvelous “Three Songs at the End of Summer”) as well as in the student work we heard in the flash workshops. In these discussions, we strove to better understand the concept of "aboutness" and how it differs from theme and other broader, more distant ways of thinking about our work.
We also talked a bit about the amount of time covered in our work (narrative time frame) + the SIZE of the story we are trying to tell (i.e., its gravity, emotional weight, height of the stakes) and how this "story size" interacts with the size of the container (word count) in which we are writing.
Often, we want to tell a story that is simply too big for the container we're trying to squeeze it into. Of course, we CAN tell a GIANT story in a *tiny* container. Poets often do. But it's ... not easy. It requires a level of skill and poetic facility that is difficult to attain. The Writing in the Dark workshop and this Substack certainly help us to acquire the ways of seeing that are prerequisite to telling huge stories in small containers (because attention and devotion to precision in observation and in language are key, yet another arena in which a consistent practice of close reading serves our artistic development).
But even though it’s possible to tell a giant story in a tiny container, we should not feel compelled to try to do so every time we sit down to write. Instead, it’s also valuable (very valuable!) for us to simply allow ourselves to tell small stories and make them feel bigger through devoted attention to detail of the kind that opens an ordinary moment up to becoming far more than the sum of its parts. Jane Kenyon does this with the relatively ordinary feelings of loss and social loneliness many of us feel/felt in returning to school at the end of summer. She took something small and made it feel emotionally large—or, rather, she revealed its innate emotional largeness!—through the how of the telling, not the what.
Remember this always: when you sit down to write, what you end up making need not be a stand-alone thing. When you remember this, you will approach the page differently, and more artistically. You can write something that might become a piece of something else later. After all, every whole piece of work is made up of parts, and the stronger each part is, the stronger the whole. So, whether you make an "essay" or a "poem" or a part of something larger—a scene, section, or fragment that knows not what it is yet—that thing can still shimmer with aliveness because of the attention you have given it.
We also spoke in workshop on Monday night about the benefit of allowing yourself to not know what you are writing about before you begin the writing. It's tempting to try to reverse engineer "aboutness" by saying, "I'm going to write about this and this in order to show this other, bigger thing." Or similar. But we can also step away from that and say, "I am going to look closely at this, and this, and this, see where it leads me." I have found that the latter approach consistently leads to better art.
Consider what Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss said about her writing process and how she wrote the poems that matter most to her, in an interview in Literary Hub recently (Diane's process is about not knowing, very deliberately not knowing, and, additionally, embracing constraints to help stay in the zone of not knowing long enough to let something interesting happen):
"Poems are smarter than I am. Like dreams, they come out of the dark and lead me to uncanny arrivals. The syllable counting, and the fourteen lines and the volta, or turn of thought, that we see in traditional sonnets, distracted my analytical brain enough for the deeper, more mysterious content to ooze up from the cytoplasmic goo."
Ultimately, close reading is a disciplined process, not unlike shimmer/sharding. It is a rigorous method and not nearly as "free" as just discussing our thoughts and feelings about the work—our impressions and associations. But, over time, this method reveals to us the hidden architecture and movements, the elements of language and structure, that again and again produce powerful work—while also revealing to us, hopefully, the opportunities in our works-in-progress that can help us achieve such effects in our work.
And in our lives.
That is what Toni Morrison meant when she said:
...[W]e do language, that might be the measure of our lives.
Thanks for doing language with me.
As for this week’s Wednesday Writing Lab writing exercise, it’s inspired by Jane Kenyon’s gorgeous poem, “Three Songs at the End of Summer.”
Fittingly, we’re going to explore a triptych like Kenyon’s, but we’ll take an entirely different approach to the triptych this week than we did for the diptych last week. And, no, we’re not going to do a four-part exercise next week! Ha. That would be funny, but, no. Instead, this week’s triptych exercise concludes (at least temporarily) our formal immersion in using distinct parts and perspective to illuminate something larger—though, isn’t that what we’re always doing, anyway, informally?
Oh, and we’re going to try to keep it simple (or, at least, that is what I am inviting you to do). The idea is, stay small, stay easy, stay simple, and most of all, stay in mystery to see if allowing yourself to remain lost might lead you to one of Diane Seuss’s “uncanny arrivals.”
Now, let’s write.
(And Thursday WITD students, you know the drill now—you should hold off on reading this until after our Week Two class tomorrow!).