The Thing That Would Postpone Our Deaths
The Power of Place | Week Five | A study in foreshadowing through doubled place-detail: revelation and concealment
How many of you cry at concerts?
I’ll get to our Power of Place work in a moment, but first let me tell you why I’m asking about concerts. I’m writing to you this morning from Bayfield, Wisconsin, on the south shore of Lake Superior. From here, you can take a ferry to Madeline Island, where I’ve taught writing retreats in the past. This is a stunningly beautiful little midwestern town that looks and feels like a very sleepy version of Sausalito, with its harbor full of brilliant white masts like a watery forest of bare birches.
Jon and I are are here because last night, Jon and I attended what was our sixth Iron & Wine concert. As usual, I wept (and wept). The concert was at the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua, which means it was in a giant tent in a field in the middle of nowhere. We’re guessing the tent held about 300 people, so pretty intimate for Iron & Wine. We’ve seen him perform in sold-out venues that likely hold more like 1,000 people. So it was an unusually magical setting to listen to this brilliant, transporting music in such a setting on a cool July evening.
A good handful of the songs we heard were new, which Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine) told us we had to sit through in order to hear the stuff we wanted. Everyone laughed, but it made me consider how, in earlier years of loving Iron & Wine, I actually was pretty disappointed when he played a lot of new music at a concert. I felt like it wasn’t what I came for. Now, however, when he plays new music (as well as when he completely reinvents his old music), I feel ecstatic, I feel welcomed into a kind of sacred circle, where creativity and art, where a kind of birth, is happening right before my eyes. Afterward, I told Jon how I felt, how I noticed this change in myself over the years with Iron & Wine, and how I realized that I am, for the first time in my life, a true fan.
A true fan.
I don’t know exactly what this means in terms of writing, the craft of writing and the intersection of art, creation, and life, but I know it’s connected. I’ll be thinking about it a lot.
Meanwhile, I just know that it felt amazing, being here at age 57 having this musical experience that most people have in their teens. Not me, and I am not entirely sure why, except that my life was just so chaotic in middle and high school, so chaotic and scary during that on ramp into foster care, that I was too shut down to really hear any music. Too shut down to really care. Caring about anything then was dangerous. I needed a thick, impenetrable shell around myself in order to get from morning to night. Until much further along into my adulthood, music rarely made it through that shell in such a way that it became a part of me. But even then, with three little children and limited funds, concerts simply weren’t a thing for me—concerts just weren’t on the table until the last couple of decades, and, even then, sporadically.
So what I felt last night was an epiphany—an observation of a kind of healing. In that epiphany I could see I had experienced—I became aware of experiencing—something I had only really seen from the outside before. Something that was for other people, but not me. Suddenly there I was, inside of it, with everyone else. It’s really something to recognize how healing just keeps unfurling in so many new ways, unexpected ways, peripheral ways, and sometimes truly beautiful ways, through all the days of our lives.
Also: another reminder that we’ve been working on our vision for the 2025-’26 school year in terms of an adjacent, tuition-based, live and synchronous offering for writers committed to taking their practice and their work to the next level (in other words, what comes now, with our inaugural 9-month SCHOOL program having let out for summer?!). We will have more on that soon. In the shorter term, I will very very soon be announcing the re-opening of the original live-on-Zoom WITD workshop soon. If you are already on the SCHOOL waitlist, you’ll get first notice on that workshop, which is capped at 20 writers and will fill quickly. If you are not on the waitlist, you can join by emailing Writing@writinginthedark.org with “waitlist” in the subject line.
Now, for place.
I want to talk this week about place as a means of foreshadowing. Place as a means of pointing us toward where a story is going to take us, place as a kind of forceful undertow that can pull us along in the direction of the narrative.
I feel like we haven’t talked a lot about foreshadowing, but what powerful tool it is to write beginnings (of essays, stories, scenes) in such a way as to truly foreshadow what is to come. I think we did, back in the Art of the Scene intensive, speak a bit about the way we can think about scenes as having mini narrative arcs.
The main (or at least one of the main) takeaway from our work with scenes was that for a scene to be a scene, we need to have:
a specific person/people
in a specific place
at a specific time
for a specific length of time
and something needs to happen (even if it is internal)
and something needs to change
You’ll notice that in this set of elements, time comes up twice—that something (however quiet) must happen, and that it must happen at a specific time for a specific length of time, or, more accurately, during a specific length of time, whether a few minutes, an hour, a day, etc. We won’t right now go further into this crucial distinction that makes a scene a scene, but if you want to go deeper, you can check out the full 12-week intensive here, which offers a rich exploration of how to craft effective, moving scenes, which are the absolute most crucial building block of powerful, real, alive writing regardless of genre.
What I do want to revisit today is the specific key to scene writing that I learned from Donald Maass’s lectures and craft books.1 Maass offers a strategy for making scenes vivid, real, engaging, and irresistible, a way to make a scenes fully alive and real, surprising and, above all, unforgettable (since we want, ultimately, for readers to think about and remember our writing), and it is to make sure, when reviewing our scenes, that they do not consistently