Sing Three Short Songs
Essay in 12 Steps | TEN | Remember that the essay is just an artifact; it's the process of writing the essay that is alive, that is a living thing, that does its work on us for the rest of our lives
Quickly, quickly, before we dive in, some news from Elephant Rock.
I have just four last openings in the Monday section of Writing in the Dark, the virtual writing workshop. You can register here—I would love to write with you!
We also have a beautiful one-day workshop on voice on October 14 with Jill Swenson, and a two-part workshop on finding the metaphors of our lives with Arya Samuelson starting November 11.
Elephant Rock teachers are not just talented and well-published writers; they’re also devoted teaching artists, and we would love to welcome you to one of our classroom communities, now or in the future.
And now … we turn our attention to our tenth week of this epic lyric essay challenge. And it is epic, indeed. I’ve noticed that some of you have been working at your own pace, catching up as you’re able, and posting your work and your process observations in previous weeks, and I love it! I just love it. And I will be hanging out in the comments and catching up with you and your recent postings in the next few days (I just returned from our wilderness cabin tonight—here’s a pic of this morning’s sunrise).
Meanwhile, a brief recap of all we’ve accomplished since August, when we began this process of steeping and simmering in our essays. First, we committed to a practice of attention, through which we gathered the “shimmers and shards” of life as concrete, specific, exterior sensory observations, observations of real things outside of ourselves, with no comparison, no metaphor, and no narrative or narrator: just the thing itself, the things themselves.
It was not easy, but it was so, so fruitful. I hope you have continued this practice of attention, this practice of collecting shimmers and shards.
In fact, I am teaching the attentional process and the harvesting and gathering of shimmers/shards now to my incarcerated students at Stillwater Correctional Facility. In class last week, I told them—and am sharing with you now—that this practice, this daily attentiveness to the exterior world (both the one we live in and the world of memory and the lived life) is the bedrock of our writing practice. This is how a writer exists and comes to bear in the world: through the careful, curious attention paid to the thing itself, the exterior thing, followed by the precise, articulate expression of that thing in plain, simple words.
We have discovered, together, how shimmers and shards of things, fragments of real things outside of ourselves, can unveil worlds upon worlds, while also revealing ourselves to ourselves.
We have also explored the power of questions and answers, and the strange, inadvertent magic that can occur when we shift those Q & As five degrees to the left of the intended pairings.
And we’ve plumbed memory and taken time to appreciate the way a sense of story and aboutness can emerge very simply from one clear, remembered image lined up with another and another and another, with no effort or force toward explicit meaning.
Eventually, we focused our attention toward the possibility of weaving the objective with the subjective in a braided (however loosely) narrative and/or the arrangement of fragments in a mosaic or collage as a pathway to nonlinear (or less linear) narrative.
Then we stepped back from the work to let it rise like dough as we wrote what we know by heart, by hand.
All along the way and again very specifically in week eight, we looked closely at some lovely, powerful, and strangely beautiful lyric essays for inspiration and for illustration of particular elements of structure and craft, and experimented with POV and an uninvited guest to shake things up.
Finally, last week, you pushed yourself to assemble something, however messy and incomplete, that might resemble a draft of a lyric essay. You assessed what you had on the page and gave yourself an approximate word limit, so that you would know how much cutting (or, less likely, drafting) might still lie ahead. And you pushed yourself a little harder toward a sense of aboutness in the work that you’re building, while scouting for the possibility of a central metaphor and/or dramatic question.
And continually, you’ve shared your questions, triumphs, breakthroughs, frustrations, and snippets of the work in the comments, showing up to encourage and inspire each other (and me).
Well done, essayists! Well done.
This week, I bring you an invitation to (in addition to whatever work you continue doing on the essay itself) to immerse yourself in two resources and one activity that may help you in these final weeks ahead.
This week’s resources include:
1. An extremely brief but profoundly useful craft essay exploring the fine line between a prose poem and a flash essay, and the relevance of fragments and fragmentation to meaning-making. This craft essay could not be more timely for our tenth week of the lyric essay challenge. I believe this craft essay will offer you a way to make genuine peace with your essay-in-progress even if you think it’s just a big mess. It will give you a way to take your essay’s face between your palms and say, “Yes, I can love you again.”
2. An astonishing Jane Kenyon poem that offers, in its own outrageously gorgeous way, a method with which you can explore your own work, a way with which you can get a little further inside the chambers of your own work and hear its chant, its echoes, then worship there for a moment.
As always, I can’t wait to hear your voices in the comments. We’ve come so far together, and worked so hard. Remember that the essay is just an artifact. The process is the living thing that does its work on us for the rest of our lives, and impresses itself upon everything we write next. This paradox is the deepest mystery of making art, and I’m honored to be part of your process.