We have an inner window through which we see the world... it's our job to wipe it clean and see things as they really are. ~Sebastian Koch
Windows as agents of narrative significance, symbolism & even theme + writing exercises to explore window framing + Janet Burroway on her method of "working in the dark" as a writer
I have always loved windows. In The Part That Burns, I briefly describe my favorite childhood window:
I love our house in Douglas. It is white and green with a cozy front porch that juts into our little square yard of brown grass with one spicy pine tree. Inside, wooden stairs lead up to my bedroom, which has a slanted ceiling and peeling wallpaper that smells of fire and old books. Next to my bed is a square-paned window, glued shut with paint. Pine boughs scratch against the glass when the wind blows. In Wyoming, the wind always blows.
That window was—for the girl I once was—far more than an opening in a wall. It was an opening to another world I chose to believe in, a world for which I was in constant search of “signs.”
Even the definition of the word window suggests a multiplicity of meanings. We think of windows not just in relation to openings in structures, or in regard to how the eyes offer a so-called window to the soul, but also in terms of time—as in, windows of opportunity, and how these can open and close with or without our involvement.
Like in the final stanza of Dorianne Laux’s poem, “Dust”:
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
My favorite windows are probably the ones that glow at night. I love this effect. I always have, and it’s part of the pleasure of the long walks my husband and I often take at night.
Sometimes we head down the Franklin hill toward the Mississippi River and walk those paved trail there, so that on one side, it’s all trees, bluff, water, and on the other side, wide lawns and stately mansions.
More often, though, we trace meandering circles all around the various looping streets and avenues that make up our immediate neighborhood, which is a curvilinear maze carved into the forested hillside of Prospect Park, a much-loved and desired university enclave less than a mile from campus. It’s an area with a long history of active, progressive politics and a specific history of hippie counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s. That history is evident in the visual aesthetic here.
The houses in Prospect Park aren’t, for the most part, especially large or grand, and most are older—ours, for instance, was built in 1901. Some yards are small, others are large, and many are steeply sloped and/or supported by substantial retaining walls thanks to the hilly terrain here. Prospect Park’s general vibe regarding lawn and garden upkeep is what you might call relaxed and rambling. We have lots of messy native pollinator gardens on the boulevards. For anyone to report anyone to the city around here, you’d have to let your shrubs completely obstruct the sidewalk or go for weeks without shoveling your walk in winter—and even then, you’d more likely see an anonymous complaint in the neighborhood list-serv than anything else.
Other than the hilly and forested nature of of our streets, the most unique characteristic of Prospect Park is probably the concentration of artists and academics who live here, and—related to that, I think—the many architect-designed homes, more than any other Minneapolis neighborhood. This latter bit makes walking and windowing even more interesting, of course. We like stopping to look at the lines and angles of various homes, and the way the windows frame both interiors and exterior views with precise intention. Sometimes at night we get a glimpse of an especially lovely lamp or chandelier precisely showcased in a window. In daylight, we might notice suddenly how a house’s windows allow us, momentarily from the street, to straight through the house from front to back.
A few houses—some of the modern ones built in the ’60s—are almost entirely glass-fronted, and, interestingly, most of those are also close to the street. I always wonder what that feels like,
We know—we can easily feel—how windows are more complicated than their physicality.
As a lonely teenager in crisis, navigating my mother’s mental breakdowns that led to my eventual placement in foster care, I felt myself almost pulled inside of the windows I saw on my long meandering escapist walks Prospect Park’s sister neighborhood on the St. Paul side—called St. Anthony Park. With their charming panes and shutters, their amber light cascading along the bridal’s wreath and dogwood shrubs beneath them, the sounds of piano or radio or children’s voices calling loudly enough to be heard through them, and even, sometimes, the shadowy shapes of anonymous members of these anonymous families passing close enough on the other side of the glass to be seen momentarily—those windows represented openings to a different kind of future.
Even now, forty years later, I can recall vividly those long fall evenings walking alone under the turning canopies of elm, oak, and maple, taking in glimpses of other lives so drastically different from mine, and imagining myself inside of those light-filled stories instead of the dark one I was trapped in. Of course, I knew, even then, that those windows revealed only a sliver of the lives within. After all, I already understood a great deal about the things we hide. Still, those windows and what I saw through them—even just that amber light—framed visions of much needed possibility.
Windows can offer this same framing quality in our writing. As John Lawson argues, in his 2024 paper, “The Other Side of the Window”:
Windows in contemporary fiction symbolize desires for possession, freedom, and self-understanding, shaping narrative structure by framing visions that reflect characters' relationships, gender dynamics, and literary exploration of boundaries and constraints.
Likewise, Djuna Barnes, in “And All The Windows, Great And Small,” asserts:
Windows in contemporary fiction … serve as powerful symbols and narrative agents, structuring themes, settings, and character interactions, enhancing the depth and complexity of the narrative.
These analyses refer to fiction, but we know too that CNF and memoir must, in order to pull us into their currents of meaning in a way that matters, rely on the art of fiction, with all its attention to concrete specific detail and its respect for the building blocks of story, including the organic and inherent metaphors given to us by the world as it is versus the ones we are tempted to create in the isolated and disconnected chambers of our minds.
What do I mean by metaphors given to us by the word as it is? That’s something we discussed fairly extensively in Week One of the Essay Challenge, “The Things Themselves, Alive With Metaphor.” What I’m pointing to is this: how when we observe the world closely enough, when we observe its concrete, specific, physical details closely enough (whether these are details of the world in front of us, or a remembered or imagined world), those details eventually suggest and reveal deeper meaning. They begin to offer potential significance, symbolism, and even, in some cases, powerful themes.
I very much like what Janet Burroway says about finding meaning and even uncovering theme through direct, slow observation of precise detail. Here she describes—interestingly, for readers of Writing in the Dark—her own process of “working in the dark” as a writer. Specifically, her specific example of her second novel describes the process she follows to discover her books’ themes in a way that avoids work feels “flat and agenda-driven.”
Burroway is the author of plays, poems, children’s books, a memoir, and eight novels, most recently Bridge of Sand. Her book Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America. And in a 2019 interview with