🧵 Thursday Thread: What's Your Ordinary Delight? It can be almost anything.
"Something implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays
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Writing in the Dark turns two this month—it’s kind of our birthday all month long—and we have something fun up our sleeve to celebrate. Yes, the December live events count (see above!) but Billie has been working hard on something more, and we can’t wait to show and tell you next week! We’re excited and we’re so grateful for all of you, truly. I wish I could make you all a cake.
And this morning I woke up thinking especially about all the people I’ve heard from lately (and the ones I haven’t heard from, and never will) who are out there quietly working through posts, doing exercises on their own, not ready now (or ever) to jump into the comments, but doing language in that way that changes you from the inside out. If that’s you, I just want you to know that I see you and appreciate you and your presence here matters.
teaches us that it’s more than okay to be quiet. I spent my first 40 years writing in the dark mostly alone, and every single one of those words mattered just as much as whatever I’m writing now.I just wanted to say that out loud. There’s a place at this table for everyone, and there’s no wrong way to write our way into becoming.
Thank you, each and every one.
And now, here’s what I’m thinking for today’s thread. Let’s warm up a bit forWriting in the Dark’s first seasonal intensive of 2025—”For the Joy & the Sorrow: A 12-Week Intensive for Writing the World,” which starts January 8.
What we’re going to do, with inspiration from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, is draw our attention (and our writing) towards the ordinary in the extraordinary. In other words, we’ll actively look for delight, and find some inventive ways to write about it without being treacly.
But also, it’s okay to be treacly, if we want.
Especially today, right now, in this thread, it’s okay to be treacly. Also, I’m kind of enjoying that word, treacly. It’s not one I’ve used until this year. I leaned more toward saccharine. But treacly is kind of pleasant, and all-natural, right?
Anyway. We can be sentimental and emotional, we can be whatever we want. We have permission (courtesy of my mentor Paul Matthews, from his craft book, Sing Me The Creation).
So today, let’s share something, anything, that brought us some small dose of delight recently.
I’ll go first. Just today, I was driving to the dentist, listening to public radio, and Angela Davis was interviewing Resmaa Menakem and T. Mychael Rambo, authors of the children’s book, The Stories From My Grandmother’s Hands, an illustrated book that features grandmothers and is focused on healing from racialized trauma.
You can listen to the interview here—it was fascinating—but the part I want to share now, as my ordinary delight, was where they played the audio of the baby giggling. It was … well, it was delightful. It really was. But what really got me was what it made me remember.
It was a thing that happened last month when Jon and I were up at the Pumphouse on Lake Superior celebrating my father’s life, and imagining into the future we hope for our family to create together. On the last morning, as we were taking our time packing up, Jon and Z had some kind of chasing game going on that involved Jon, with a white towel over his head, pretending to be a ghost. This game was taking them all over the house, upstairs and down, but eventually they were mostly running in and out of the (giant) bathroom where I was trying to brush my teeth or something. And in and out they kept running, Z squealing and giggling, Jon ooohing in his ghost voice and pretending to bump into walls, Z trying to get away from him, etc. You can picture this. And bear in mind that Jon is 6’3” and he’s crashing around, and Z is small, but incredibly fast and strong, and he’s zooming around, and both of them are running circles around me, and I’m right over the edge of irritated and was just about to say something to Jon about what maybe stopping whatever the hell he was doing, when it hit me.
The giggling.
The whole body joy of it, the utter delight. Z didn’t sound like a four-year-old. We have five grandchildren, and Z is the youngest (Esme, the oldest, just turned 7 yesterday!). So we’ve been nonstop surrounded by babies and children for the past seven years. And Z really didn’t sound like a four-year-old laughing.
He sounded like a baby.
He sounded the way a ten-month-old sounds when you’re playing some kind of game with them, some kind of game like making a silly noise or doing a ridiculous, nonsensical thing with your face over and over again. You know what I’m talking about, how you can get a baby laughing so hard they can hardly breathe just by doing this simple, silly thing.
That’s how Z was giggling.
That edge of irritation in me just dissolved. I realized that the reason Jon wasn’t stopping, even though he was probably at least as tired of the ghost game as I was, was because of that giggling, that magical, time-travel joy coming from a part of Z that really needed it. It made me cry, it was so powerful to witness. So the ghost game continued until it ended on its own, which games always do.
Later, I mentioned it to Jon. I wanted to know for sure if he had heard what I did. I said, “Hey, you know that ghost game you were playing with Z earlier?” And he looked at me and said, “Did you hear the way he was laughing?” And I blinked back tears again.
Simple, ordinary delight.
So, what about you?
Love,
Jeannine
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