The Game Was To Guess The Words

Lit Salon Unveils WITD's Latest Feature, With A Beautiful Essay by Jocelyn Lovelle, Including Jocelyn's Author's Note & Thoughts on the Editorial Process

Welcome to Writing in the Dark’s brand-new Lit Salon feature, where we share reader submissions written in direct response to specific WITD exercises, plus author notes and specific observations on the editorial process.

I am so excited!

If you haven’t yet heard about this new opportunity to submit your work to WITD for publication, that’s because I just announced it yesterday. You can read all about it here:

Call for Submissions! Writing in the Dark Now Pays for Essays, Stories, and Poem-ish Things!

Accepted pieces receive publication, $50, and much love.

As for this week’s essay, it is, in fact, the reason this new feature exists at all.

Here’s what happened: Jocelyn Lovelle, a WITDer who writes the newsletter Hello Beautifuls—and who has been participating in The Visceral Self intensive for embodied writing—emailed me a short piece on Saturday afternoon in response to a general call for guest essays I’d put out on Notes. In her email, Jocelyn included a couple sentences about how she wrote her piece, how it emerged from a particular Visceral Self exercise.

As I read Jocelyn’s story, I saw right away what was working so well in it: her precise, visceral description of her nights in bed with her grandmother, and her honest and absolutely gorgeous description of her grandmother’s aging feet, made we want to read more and more and more. The deeply embodied details of girlhood friendship made me say, “oh!” out loud. And Jocelyn’s sex scene quietly earned this essay’s ending. In addition, the piece deftly uses white space and exercises a remarkable restraint, allowing us as readers to understand its meanings without having them force fed to us. In other words, as this essay gently unfolds through time, it gradually reveals its core aboutness and makes us feel something along the way. I knew by the third paragraph that I wanted to share Jocelyn’s work with Writing in the Dark’s community.

I wanted to share Jocelyn’s piece not because it was perfect—virtually no essays are—but because it was alive. And because I could feel it—its embodied quality and the way it reached toward its aboutness. Also, Jocelyn did a technically difficult thing with this piece, covering a giant swath of time in a very small container, while still allowing us to feel the story. Jocelyn pulled this off with a grace that makes it look almost easy, and I suspect she did so without even realizing it (feel free to ask her in the comments!). I imagine she was able to achieve this technical feat without noticing she had done so through focusing meticulously on vividly recalling and depicting “the things themselves” one at a time, without excessive explanation.

I replied to Jocelyn right away and told her I loved her essay and wanted to publish it in WITD. I also asked if she was willing to participate in a (very fast) editorial process with me, using some of the same basic methods I use in 1-to-1 mentorships (currently closed for new mentees, but when I do open again, I will announce that here in Writing in the Dark). That process includes suggestions/margin comments and tracked changes with explanations any suggested change that’s more than very small. I also asked Jocelyn if she was willing to write a note to accompany her piece, describing the process she used to write it in response to the exercise, and any surprises along the way.

Jocelyn said yes to both requests.

Finally, after our super-fast editorial process which turned out to be very tender and illuminating, I asked Jocelyn if she felt comfortable describing her experience of having her work edited, because the editing process itself often deepens not only the work, but the sense of artistic camaraderie between the parties engaged in it—but it can be hard for writers, too. So I wanted her thoughts on it.

Suddenly, this was feeling like a real literary salon!

And so we shall certainly keep doing this, publishing work written in response to WITD exercises along with detailed reflections on the processes through which the writing unfolded, including challenges and surprises, from the writer’s own point of view.

It is a true honor to share Jocelyn’s essay with you along with her incredibly generous and illuminating Author’s Note and her brief observations of the editorial process. I am grateful—thank you, Jocelyn.

What a gift, all of it.

The Exercise Under the Essay

Jocelyn wrote this piece in direct response to a five-step writing exercise (with a meditation and restorative yoga pose) given at the end of The Visceral Self | Week Five: The Heart. Jocelyn says it was also inspired by/supported by my WITD craft essay, “I Want You to Write About Sex.”

The Game Was To Guess The Words

By Jocelyn Lovelle

When my mother was a young woman she slept in a mahogany four-poster bed her father made, with a husband who broke her heart. When she left—even though she wanted to stay—my mother took a very little bit of money, her clothes, and the bed. 

While my parents were still married, I slept in the dark mahogany four-poster bed, and when my grandmother would visit, she slept in it with me. "Come on in Babydoll," she would say, "let's get back to back." First, we lined up our shoulder blades and spines, and then our hips, and finally our feet, so that the bones in my 10-year-old-body met the bones in her 70-year-old-body in all the same places. 

The skin of my grandmother’s feet was thick and cool and smooth, with rough edges at her heels and hard full-moon calluses below her big toes. In the summer she wore sandals and I could see her feet, swollen and ugly, covered with purple and blue veins. But in bed, where only the feel of them existed, my grandmother’s feet felt like home. 

We would lie like that, my grandmother taking deep breaths, exhaling a small prayer: "It feels so good to get flat." Her heart beat through her thin skin, through her ribs, through my nightgown, speaking in the dark directly to my heart, telling me the story of a life of work and joy, disappointment and wonder, loving and breaking, of a heart winding down at night into the softness of sleep.

Often, in that same four-poster bed, my best friend would spend the night with me. Her name was Amber, and she and I would write on each other's backs, messages of silliness or love, with the tips of our fingers. The game was to guess the words, but, really, the game was to feel the light pressure tattooing a song into our skin, our spine, our ribs. My heart would beat faster when it was my turn to be drawn upon. I loved the feel of her fingertips, tickling and warm, writing a message that would speak to me in my sleep. 

I do not remember where the four-poster mahogany bed went after my parents divorced. It just disappeared. What I do remember is how my mother bought herself a white wrought iron frame with bright brass globes on the posts, and how I slept on a plain frame with no headboard. But my bedroom walls were beautifully papered. 

When I got married, my mother gave me the mahogany four-poster bed and told me to never give it away. So my new husband and I carried that bed, piece by piece, up the two flights of stairs in the townhouse in La Jolla. But the bed is not where we got pregnant.

That happened on the floor of a friend's house, a moment of unexpected quiet, just the two of us left behind. Him needing reassurance, release, me needing to please. Our agreement solidified in sexual currency. The diaphragm hastily wriggled into place, my thin red dress with the tiny white flowers—my favorite—pushed up over my hips, the carpet making its mark on one low knob of my spine. The intensity of his need pushing me farther away, my thoughts on the small fire burning my skin, my voice making encouraging sounds, my body feeling something stir, but not enough. Waiting, thinking of clouds, thinking about wanting to be where I was, but not knowing how. Thinking of my grandmother's cool feet, waiting for the burning to stop. 

When we sold the La Jolla townhouse to pay for a year driving through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, my once-husband and I moved ourselves and the bed, temporarily, to his parent's house in Carmel to prepare for our trip. The parents, his and mine, thought we were out of our minds, that we would die at the hands of guerillas. Our friends, some of them, thought we were daring. Others of them thought we were crazy. We thought it was the only way to stay sane.

We slept in the four-poster bed in Carmel as weeks turned into months. It was easy to stay, with a view of the hills and the ocean, easy to eat cracked crab with melted butter and drink good Chardonnay on the deck watching the sunset over the Pacific. A storybook life without the storybook ending.

The year-long drive turned into a year living in Costa Rica, then two, then five, then eight. It was easy to stay in Costa Rica, too. There was no cracked crab, but there was ahi pulled out of the ocean, dirt roads, warm water, businesses to run, friendships, catamarans, endless parties, and tropical sunsets. After 10 years, we finally returned to California and moved the bed from Carmel to Menlo Park. We installed it in the upstairs nook-turned-bedroom in the quirky 1940s house we rented from a landlord who knew not the laws of tenant privacy—a landlord who would ride his bike into our driveway and up to our back door every evening to make sure we were not poaching the ripening artichokes he made clear were not part of the rental agreement.

It was as we left that house that I finally left the four-poster bed, glaze cracked from age and storage and heat and moisture, pruny, like skin submerged too long under water. I'd slept in that bed—my feet running with nowhere to go, stopped short by the thick dead end of the footboard, the headboard looming over me, my skull pressed up against it time and again—for too long. 

I didn’t set out to betray my mother's request by giving the bed away. What I remember is how it got loaded, with so many other pieces of furniture, into a friend's truck as we moved out of the quirky house where we'd held impromptu dinner parties on the flat roof watching the sunset. One truckload was going to our new place. The other truckload to Goodwill. What I remember is thinking I never wanted to sleep in that bed again. What I remember is telling the friend it was part of the load going to the new house.

But did I? 

I only know the bed didn’t make it to the new house, which would be the last place my once-husband and I would live together. The place where, on a Saturday morning in late May, just before my birthday, I would wake up in a bed loaned to us, and my once-husband would ask me, "What do you want to do today?" And the messages sent so long ago from my grandmother's heart, from my friend's fingertips, would finally be freed from the confines of wood and sadness and history, to make their way up my spine and back to my heart and I would look at him, reading the paper next to me, and say, "I don't want to be married anymore."

And in that moment, I would understand that the betrayal would have been holding on, just because someone else had asked me not to let go.

The author with her grandmother

Jocelyn’s Author Note

When Jeannine asked to consider the connection between our heartbeat and our life force, I was puzzled at first, because my connection to my body has been broken for many decades. I had to really work at this. I read the poem we were given in relation to the exercise, "Making a Fist," by Naomi Shihab Nye, again and again and let it pull at me, let it pour through me. This line especially resonated: my stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

And as I tried to connect to my own stomach feeling like a split melon against my skin, as I remembered lying down in the backseat of a car as a child, as I listened to my heart and what it knew or didn't know of being alive, of having a finite amount of beats in it, I remembered lying down in the bed with my grandmother and how comforting it was, how much I loved it, and how, on some level, my young heart knew her heart was old. They spoke to each other. And then I knew that was the connection Jeannine was talking about. 

The two paragraphs in my essay, of my grandmother and my best friend, were what came out of that exercise and they are mostly intact from how I wrote them the first time. I got feedback in the comments that these scenes brought back forgotten memories for others and then I knew there was something more that I wanted to work with here. 

I sat with those paragraphs and re-read them and asked my heart what the larger story was, and eventually, the opening line came almost fully formed to me. From there, a few more paragraphs about the bed came and as I set the piece aside and came back to it over and over in the next several days, more pieces started to reveal themselves.

I wrote about getting pregnant and having sex, then deleted it. But because I'm in Jeannine's class and feel so supported by her and the WITD community, I kept working on it, I fought internally for it to stay in. It felt very uncomfortable to me and it also felt vital to the story, tender and vulnerable, raw and a bit hard, and that's what makes it work I think. I think it also works because it lies outside of the direct story of the bed, and yet gives context and depth.

I did not know what this piece was about in the beginning and I didn't know for a long time that it was leading to the ending. The process helped me connect with something powerful underneath the surface and bring it to light.

Jocelyn’s Thoughts On The Editorial Process

I felt deeply supported and loved in this editorial process. And I felt like Jeannine was careful and attentive to serving the piece, the writing, the reader, the flow, the rhythm, the entirety of the piece as a whole. It felt like someone holding a precious piece of art in their hands, turning it over and over, admiring and polishing, admiring and polishing. Not until it was perfect at all, but until it was more itself. 

Having a piece edited can bring up many emotions, but this process felt 100% in my hands, with Jeannine gently guiding me and the piece towards a safe harbor. She pointed out something I was doing throughout the piece that I did not notice—where the narrator was telling the reader what was going to happen before it actually happened. Her point in helping me see this and in removing those small bits, was that she wanted the story to unfold on its own and for the reader "to experience for ourselves the narrator's gradual dawning of awareness." This feedback was invaluable and I can now watch for it in future essays. 

To have someone with so much love and skill and experience edit a piece and bring her full attention to it, was a beautiful gift and I am grateful and humbled by her generosity.

And some suggestions Jeannine made, I decided not to go with. They didn't feel quite right and yet I appreciated why she gave me the suggestion. It's all fodder for seeing my writing through someone else's lens.

More About Jocelyn

Jocelyn Lovelle writes about the beauty and devastation of being human at the intersection of trauma recovery and compassion. 

She started college as a business major and ended up with a degree in English and creative writing. Through two businesses and two marriages, through a 10-year blog detailing her life as an expat in Costa Rica that was lost in its entirety (really she's fine about this now, mostly), she has written to stay sane, to process the world and her own trauma. At the age of 50 it hit her that it was finally time to share her personal experiences and her writing again, but on a deeper level. It was about this time she discovered Substack. She's been writing once a week for her publication, Hello Beautifuls, since March of 2023. 

She hopes that by sharing her experiences in surviving childhood emotional and sexual trauma that she will not only heal her own heart, but help others feel seen and find connection and comfort. 

Want to Submit to WITD?

Read full submission guidelines here. Then, if you have something to polish up and send, please do. I would love to read your work.

Jocelyn Lovelle