The Singing of Unstable Places

A four-step writing exercise for exploring how an "unstable ‘almost but not quite’ situation transcends fascination, and leads to beauty and deep significance"

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It's about surrendering to this feeling of utter fragility, and singing through the volatility of it all. The earth is unstable, and I'm part of the earth. I can feel it coursing through my own body. I feel the energy of everything, flickering. Let's just sing together. ~ Adrianne Lenker

When I was in second grade, I lived in Douglas, Wyoming, with my mother, stepfather, and two sisters. At the time, we attended a Lutheran church, because my mother had been excommunicated from Catholicism for divorcing my father. This was the early 1970s. We eventually stopped attending church altogether, but for that year in Douglas, we were Lutheran, and over Christmas, my Sunday School class held a gift drive for orphans abroad. I don’t remember where abroad, just abroad. I do remember deliberating long and hard about what I should bring to that gift drive.

On the one hand, I wanted to give something wonderful, something an orphan would really love. In other words, something I really loved. On the other hand, my family was chronically broke and we didn’t have much ourselves, so it was hard to let go of something I genuinely cared about— like, say, the little box of costume jewelry I had dearly wished for, bravely asked for, and, to my utter surprise, received as my absolute best Christmas gift that year. I had no idea the jewelry was essentially worthless. To me, it was glorious. So, to give the shiny drugstore ring and bracelet, or to keep them? This was the question, and I struggled long and hard before accepting that I had no choice. After all, this was church. God was watching.

When I arrived at Sunday School on the morning of the gift drive, carefully wrapped and taped jewelry box in hand, curling ribbon spilling from its corners, I watched in horror as another little girl from my class skipped up to the orphan tree with an unwrapped box of Colgate. Indeed, several boxes of toothpaste sat under the tree, alongside packages of diapers! I was appalled. What poor orphan would want toothpaste or diapers for Christmas? But when I expressed my righteous indignation to my mother, she said those were the items orphans needed most. The lights on our tree flickered. I pictured my precious, useless jewelry jostling on the back of a truck, headed for parts unknown.

That gift drive was one of my first conscious encounters with the intricate relationships between wishes, ideals, intentions, and reality in this complicated world. Since that initial disillusionment, I have maintained my ideals while falling short of them repeatedly. Still, my aspirational fire burns on, as does my curiosity about the chasms between idealism’s bright air—so thin, so high—and the hard ground we walk on, with its thick grime and mottled scars. Most of all, I am fascinated by what can grow and fester in those chasms, especially power imbalance and abuse.

This particular fascination catalyzed the best short story I’ve written (so far—hopefully there will be even better ones to come!), “Family, Family.” Ultimately, “Family, Family” places children in a make-believe world of their own creation, a world wherein they test the limits of their own principles and power. Leo, the little boy at the center of “Family, Family,” defies the familiar tropes of masculinity and, therefore, male entitlement. He is bird-boned and slight, eschews ruckus and roughhousing, is averse to touch and texture, reads voraciously, and prefers the company of his pregnant teacher to that of his peers. Perhaps most dangerously of all, Leo flagrantly disregards gender norms by carrying an unborn “yarn baby” of his own under his signature argyle sweater.

Not coincidentally, “Family, Family” also takes place in a Waldorf school, where ideals are high indeed, and based almost wholly on the vision of the schools’ founder, Rudolf Steiner, who genuinely wished to transform society for the better by establishing a new social order that would recognize and nurture the spiritual nature and development of human beings. Some of Steiner’s ideas are beautiful. But some are deeply disturbing. Either way, the ideals prove difficult to implement. During my ten years as a Waldorf elementary- and middle-school teacher, I witnessed the mayhems, small and large, that erupted when human error and imperfection, including my own, clashed with the expectations of a hyper-idealistic closed community. Inevitably this experience heightened my curiosity about how our ideals can inadvertently propel us headlong into trouble.

In fact, that’s exactly the kind of trouble that interests me most in writing. I appreciate how Malcolm E. Brown and Steve Hubbard describe it in their article “Instabilities in Nature & Art” in Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas:

Turning to the arts, we suggest that the concept of instability is relevant here too. Total regularity and symmetry – analogous to stability – attracts us, but quickly becomes tedious. Complete chaos is also unappealing. However, there are states between the two which fascinate us, and in works of art created by the hand of a genius, this unstable ‘almost but not quite’ situation transcends fascination, and leads to beauty and deep significance. Consequently, artists who hope to ingeniously encapsulate the human condition instinctively grope in the unstable ground between complete regularity and complete chaos.

Let’s play around with this on the page this week—this unstable ground, this “almost but not quite” terrain, and see where it leads us.

Writing Exercise: Headlong Into Trouble

One of the most powerful aspects of writing prose is world building. Often, we hear about world building in regard to science fiction or fantasy, where the “rules” of the world differ greatly from those of our world.

But, in reality, good world-building is crucial to any story-writing, whether it’s fiction or creative nonfiction or even essay (perhaps to a slightly lesser extent with essays, depending on the kind of essay it is, but I digress). In Family, Family, I explore world building not only in terms of the setting of the story—the school and its various oddities and quirks—but also through the lens of the game the children event: they’re making up the rules and changing them day by day. So, the world they’re living in is dissolving and reforming itself quickly and constantly—it’s unstable. And unstable places are, in stories, rife with possibility.

For this week’s writing exercise, I’m inviting you to experiment with the following four steps (you can tell a true story or a fictional one, both will work!), as follows:

1.     Think of a highly specific world (a workplace, a family, a travel group, a running club, a neighborhood, etc.) and develop that world in some detail. Again, this world can be real or fictional—what matters is that you give enough detail to