When They Fight & When They Sing
A structured writing exercise for opening into mystery + the art of juxtaposing one thing and another thing in order to see (or sense) what emerges in the space between
I search for doorways—thresholds between one thing and another, boundaries between worlds, futures, fortunes. I have always watched for such portals.
When I was still a child, doorways were appropriately and powerfully elusive—and yet, when they did appear, they were easy to spot: branches that curved and touched overhead, for example, or the slender passage between two buildings, or swaths of earth separated by fences, streams, or ditches.
Now, I recognize a whole world of doorways that are more abstract yet equally meaningful, such as the decision to answer an email or text or ignore it, the idea implemented or left to wither on the vine of the mind, the morning kiss that hovers in the air between my husband and me, its not-yet-articulated shape an invitation to be heeded or passed by.
Like that potential kiss, hovering invisibly, thresholds offer a fertile space and container for our writing. And I can’t help but be extra sensitive to thresholds at this time of the year. With the veil between our world and the spirit world so thin, it seems like I can feel it all, everything everywhere all at once. I always think of Dorianne Laux’s brilliant and gorgeous poem, “Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl” in which a young ghost says:
I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.
As some of you know, Billie and I wrote about Halloween and the experience of thresholds for last Sunday’s Live Salon in a piece called “The Bruising and the Mending” (and although it was not intentional at the time, even that title, “The Bruising and the Mending,” suggests a threshold).
Then, on Monday I taught, in the live synchronous WITD workshop, this incredible piece by Sun Yung Shin, “The Medicine Veil: Arrivals & Departures: A Diptych,” published in Agni. Diptychs are so interesting in visual art—these paired images can be depictions of two different things, or different depictions of the same thing. In writing, a diptych is a literary work consisting of two contrasting parts, such as a narrative telling the same story from two opposing points of view. And here is how Nicole Breit explained the literary art of the diptych as short-form memoir in Brevity.
In Sun Yung Shin’s beautiful piece, she explores (through conversation with mother) her arrival as a Korean adopted daughter, juxtaposed with her father’s death.
Sun Yung Shin writes:
Now that you’re on the Other Side, I wish I could ask you the questions that I failed to ask before. I wish I could write them on a piece of paper, fold it up, and leave it in a hole in the wall that you would check for messages once a week.
A hole in the wall, where he would check for messages once a week—such a lovely way to visualize the veil between life and death, between those who are here now and those who have come before or not arrived yet.
Laux’s poem and Sun Yung Shin’s seem to invite us to consider dividing lines in our own lives, the thresholds between pre-birth, this life, and the mysterious beyond. It doesn’t matter what we believe or not about an afterlife—there is no question that something changes when life leaves the body (or enters it).
But what?
It can be extremely fruitful to lend voice to that force, whatever it may be.
Perhaps you might experiment with writing yourself a letter from a person no longer here. Or from yourself in future time, when you are no longer here in the form you now occupy. Or perhaps an unknown force might speak to you (or to someone else, perhaps a character in one of your stories) from across the threshold, as is the case in Laux's poem. In this exercise, try to let the spirit (or whatever you wish to call it) speak in its own voice, as Laux allows the girl to do in this poem. Or as the poet Sharon Olds does in her poems written from the perspective of her deceased father speaking to his daughter (see this marvelous profile of Olds in the New York Times).
Writing in this way need not be morbid, though I know for some, it may feel that way. However, it can also be, as it is in Laux’s poem and Sun Yung Shin’s essay and in Olds’s poetry) also beautiful, surprising, and life filled.
As Jeanette Winterson said in an interview in the New Yorker recently, about the connection between ghosts and writing:
I think you have to be open, to be receptive, in order to write. It’s this business we were talking about earlier, how you get yourself into the right state of mind to allow new patterns to form, to allow new ideas to emerge, and to not start putting a formula on your work or trying to steer it in a particular direction—all the things that humans do. I’m always saying this to my students: stop trying to stamp it with an identity too soon. Let it be and let yourself be.
People are frightened of not producing in this obsessed world of continuous work. And they think that it’s better to produce something mediocre than to produce nothing. It takes time to learn whether you’re just bottoming out or whether you need this time for things to emerge in a different way. It’s hard in our world not to throttle your ideas to death.
It’s a large part of why I prefer to live in the country. There’s no one around me here and at night it’s completely dark. I am alone. I don’t particularly like bright lights. In the evening, it’s very meditative. You can read, you can think, you can let your mind settle into a better space.
Later in the same interview, Winterson said, “If you’re doing creative work, you already know that it’s the spirit, the thing that must move through and continue to refresh itself as humanity does.”
This week’s structure prompt will help you take this work to the next level by exploring the threshold between one thing and another in a step-by-step way. You will tap into the mystery of juxtaposing a thing next to a thing in order to sense what emerges in the space between. I developed this prompt in response to Sun Yung Shin’s Arrivals & Departures, and assigned it to my current synchronous Writing in the Dark workshop students.
SPOILER ALERT & CAUTION SIGN to the students in the Thursday section of the synchronous Writing in the Dark workshop—this is a potent structured exercise and I strongly recommend you wait until after our class tomorrow night before reading further (please trust me?!?!). Most of you know from past experience that the close reading (this week, of Arrivals & Departures) and the in-class writing will be richer, better, and more steeped in mystery and the unknown if you don’t already know the structured exercise. I promise, based on what happened Monday night, that it will be better if you wait! Okay, you’ve been gently but emphatically warned.
Everyone else, feel free to dive in and see where this exploration of thresholds takes you—and be ready to open some doorways.