Later This Girl Will Drive With Windows Down And Sing. But First She Will Tremble on The Cliff Above Her Terrible Divorce.

Also! Please Share Your Audio/Video Thoughts About Writing in The Dark To Win a Signed Copy of THE PART THAT BURNS! First Three Who Respond Win!

Hi, Friends! Quick announcement & request: We’re making a video, and we would love to include your voices! What we need are short clips (audio or video) where you share what this place, Writing in the Dark, means to you.

If you know how to record yourself and send the short file via email, this could be pretty easy! We need your recordings by Friday, March 22, and, if you are among the first three to respond, you’ll receive a free signed copy of my book, The Part That Burns.

All you have to do is:

• Email a short (let’s say less than 2 mn is ideal) audio or video clip to admin@elephantrockwriting.org, subject line TESTIMONIAL, sharing what WITD means to you. This does NOT need to be fancy or professional and you do NOT need to worry about exact timing or coughs or dogs barking or whatever; we can edit as needed! We just want to hear your thoughts in your own voice.

• We need these by Friday, March 22, so you really can’t overthink it. You don’t have to do worry about lighting or anything, because we’re only using the audio for this project (if your video is great, maybe we’ll use it later, though!). Mainly we just want you to know it’s fine to use whichever recording format is easiest for you, thus we’re accepting both audio and video files. You really can’t do it wrong. We will love whatever you send us.

• What should you say? Well, we just want to know what Writing in the Dark means to you. You can speak to any of the following sample prompt questions:

  • How has WITD shaped/changed your writing life?

  • What does this community mean to you?

  • Why did you join, and why do you stay?

Thank you in advance if you’re able to do this—we’re so grateful! If you’re one of the first three to respond, we will be in touch for your address and inscription details. The book will be personalized to you or whomever you want it signed to, and maybe I’ll even doodle a little something in there for you!

And to any and all who respond, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthank you we are so grateful.

Finally, to make this post more than just a call for for testimonials, I’m also including an essay I wrote almost exactly 22 years to the day.

This one was published in The Rake magazine several weeks before my protracted and terrifying divorce became final. It was a threatening, unstable, and incredibly alive time.

Since the writing is 22 years old, it’s hard for me to resist the urge to roll up my sleeves and revise it.

But I won’t.

Because this was one of the first times I took a real risk in writing—one of the first times I dared to let myself be seen. And the risk was real. I had recently been under an order for protection, was still in the final phases of an awful custody battle, and all this was unfolding very publicly in the small school where I was a new teacher (and a parent). There were still people calling loudly and angrily for my termination, and, to be honest, I myself was shaky about staying in that school. I had to brace myself to walk through the doors there. But I didn’t have a college degree (long story as to why the school, at least at that time, was willing to hire people without degrees or teaching experience—story for another day), and I had three young children to support. This was my first-ever full-time out-of-the home job (in other words, I had scant professional experience other than freelance writing and editing, and I’d applied for some editing jobs, but gotten no offers). So, I felt two parts trapped and one part determined to prove myself, vindicate myself, not just for myself, but also for my kids. Sometimes the smaller portion of will wins out by necessity.

In the end, I stayed another eight years in that small school, becoming the first woman ever to graduate her class there (in a Waldorf school, teachers stay with their classes for eight straight years, from first grade to eighth). It was hard, and I came over the years to have serious doubts about the foundation of the education, including many of the beliefs of its eccentric founder, as well as its application of a so-called consensus-based governance model (again, story for another day).

However, I also learned many, many things during that art-soaked but challenging time that would, ultimately, contribute to the creative writing teacher I would eventually become. To this day, I draw on those lessons in every environment in which I now teach, from beaches to prisons. By the time my class graduated, I had become a servant leader in the school. I was awarded a fully paid year of sabbatical, then taught another year, and, finally, left on my own terms to develop my writing career more fully, get my MFA (yes, w/o ever completing a bachelor’s), and, finally, teach writing at the university level.

So, even though this short essay is not how I would write it now, from a craft perspective—I’m simply not the same person or writer I was 22 years ago—it’s a piece I dared to write during a time when it took all I had just to walk down a hallway. So, I’ll let it stand “as is,” for the fragile moment in time it represents, (with the exception of one brief mothering image I’ve excised because it’s simply too tender for me to recount in this moment).

Thank you all for everything. I’m beyond grateful.

Love,

Jeannine

Thinking in Captions

Jeannine Ouellette

originally published March 22, 2002 in The Rake Magazine

Since entering into a hellish and utterly surreal divorce almost two years ago (for starters, think accusations of adultery and public humiliation, job threats, slashed tires, rumor-mongering, a bitter and protracted custody dispute, an order for protection when things got really scary, $40,000 in legal fees on a teaching salary of $30,000, and a small, intimate fishbowl community where I teach and where my three children attend school and where I have brazenly carried on to this day in a love relationship that wasn’t adultery but wasn’t politic, either, with a teacher who used to be my son’s teacher and who also used to be married to my daughter’s teacher and who has three children of his own in this fishbowl school whose murky waters he has since left and in which I still swim) I’ve taken up the habit of thinking in captions.

My mind floats slightly above the scene in which I see myself, just the way people describe near-death experiences (or delusory mental illness, I suppose). My mind coolly surveys the situation, casting off pithy one-liners. For instance, there I lie on the couch, mail unopened, phone unanswered, mind untamed, alternately sobbing wretchedly and staring vacantly into space. Caption: “Had Good Life, Wrecked It.”

Or I watch myself jump at the sound of the front door, my face lights up as I run to greet my love, he sets down his bag and puts his arms around me for as long as I want. Caption: “I Can’t Believe I Found Him” or “Love is Worth It.” What about the kids, though? There my mind becomes relentless with its incessant captioning. Scenes: Youngest daughter sobbing and kicking when picked up by her dad, or me holding my son who is weeping because he misses the old days when his parents were married. Identical captions: “Selfish Mother Destroys Children’s Lives.”

In another scene, I’m going into stress palpitations on the night before an important observation and review at my job as a second-grade Waldorf teacher. My oldest daughter, 11, is helping me select a story to include in this important lesson plan, and she’s sitting on the couch beside me, reading something from a favorite anthology. Our bare feet are softly touching. Her hair glows around her face, backlit by the table lamp beside her. She is lovely. Caption: “Happy, Healthy Daughter No Matter What You Think You Self-Righteous Assholes.”

Funny how the captions, emerging unbidden (and sometimes unwanted) from my subconscious are a barometer of my emotional landscape, revealing the intermittent hostility, the terror, the hysteria, and the inexplicable joy despite it all. Joy? Yes, oddly, more than you could imagine. For as much as I have suffered and wailed and stared, I have also never laughed so hard or so often as in these past twenty months. I have discovered that what James Baldwin says is true: “One discovers the light in darkness. That is what darkness is for. And what the light illuminates is danger, and what it demands is faith . . . ”

So the darkness has shown me the light, the pain makes possible the pleasure. Where once I was numb I am now skinned alive, and while raw flesh is vulnerable to excruciating pain, it is also apparently ticklish and amazingly sensitive to the slightest comforts. I am tinglingly alive and dangerously exposed. I’m naked tied to a post in a parking lot. It’s miserable when its hailing and I’ve got some frostbite scars, but there are these moments when the sun is clear and mild and the breeze is tender and carries the scent of new grass. There are these moments that I remember my humanity, and it is sublime.

Scene: Me in January, gloriously warm winter sun shining down as I walk to the corner coffee shop. It’s been a beautiful morning in the classroom among children I love, and it is a stunning afternoon outside. I walk alone down Nicollet Avenue; two young men in their sagging jeans and windbreakers pass by and whisper, “Pretty lady.” I smile at them, distracted for a moment from the paralysis of my upcoming divorce trial. A beam of light shoots down from heaven and nearly blinds me. Caption: “Later this Girl Will Drive With Windows Down and Sing.”

This terse captioning is unlike me and yet it is comforting. I have come to understand that my captions are my means of deconstructing judgment and giving up on defense. Life is much too complicated to explain anyway, so why try? I’ve come to prefer seeing each detail as a perfect reflection of the ever-emerging whole.

Take this scene: Me with my beloved getting hugged and hugged and hugged until I think I will die of happiness, and surrounding us are his three children and my three children, my little daughter adoring his middle daughter, his older daughter bringing her boyfriend over to hang out, my son looking up to his son, both embroiled in love and jealousy and the newfound thrill and agony of potential brotherhood, all of them giving something to the vision, all of them demanding, accepting, rejecting, baking creampuffs in September, sharing Christmas in December, throwing tantrums in January, chasing away shadows in February. Caption: “Maybe Selfish Tramp Mother Has Not Ruined Their Lives After All” or “Find and Circle the Two Crazy People.” Scene: Me, paying and mailing bills, holding down my jobs, meeting my deadlines, borrowing money, not from a bank, but from angels posing as human beings stepping in to help me when I desperately need it. Caption: “Lucky and Knows It” or “She Brings Home the Bacon But Doesn’t Eat it Because She is a Vegetarian and That’s Why She Keeps Losing Weight.”

Or, maybe it’s time to graduate from captions and simply write a pull-quote for the whole montage: “Look, She’s a Mother, a Teacher, a Writer, Making a Life, Picking Through Rubble, Finding Agates and Putting them into Her Children’s Pockets, Carrying On, Becoming Real, Dreaming Everything, Expecting Nothing, Letting Go, Being Water, Believing Love, Relinquishing Everything, Practicing Faith. The End. The Beginning.”

Discover the Most Powerful Tools for Embodied Writing

Writing in the Dark’s next seasonal intensive, The Visceral Self, starts April 3, and will include 12 weeks of inspiring and actionable Wednesday posts with craft essays, beautiful readings, potent writing exercises, and full participation in the comments (as with all our intensives), plus paired yin yoga poses and meditations to deepen and embodied writing experience—plus bonus material (recorded meditations, candlelight Live Salons on Zoom, and more) for founding members.

This one will be so special. More (and more embodied writing examples) are in the six linked posts below. I look forward to writing with you!

1. The Visceral Self Starts Soon

2. Howling Under A Smooth Surface

3. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final ... Nearby is the country they call life.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

4. I Was A Child in A Child’s Body

5. Some Might Have Called the Roses Garish

6. This is My Body, Filling My Body

7. Sleeping Birds Are Vulnerable