In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 168.
Once I realized that what I was looking for was not simply a single, incandescent voice within a larger tradition, but a sprawling, trans-temporal collective, an endless ensemble—to borrow a phrase from the literary critic La Marr Jurelle Bruce—a window in my mind flew open. The work has a different purpose and texture now. I can hear the music everywhere.
Over at Penguin Classics, I edit an anthology series with my friend Jesse McCarthy. It’s called Minor Notes. Our shared project is to seek out largely unsung Black poets and recover their work for a contemporary audience through the publication of yearly collections featuring their poems. Minor Notes: Volume 1 was published in April and features seven poets who wrote during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, David Wadsworth Cannon, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray. At the core of our practice, our process, is the idea that by deepening our understanding of these brilliant, individual writers and their roles within the robust social scenes they inhabited, we can ultimately help create a fuller image of their shared context. The poems are at the center of our concern, of course. But they are not all that exist within the chosen frame. We set out to sketch a world.
For a while, I thought of this project as work meant to exist primarily within the realm of my life as a literary critic. My poems have always been informed by the study of Black literature, culture, and history: My first book, The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), opens with a poem dedicated to Henry Box Brown, a nineteenth-century abolitionist and autobiographer who escaped enslavement by mailing himself in a wooden crate to his supporters in Philadelphia. But I have more recently deepened my sense that an intentionally archival practice in the writing of poems is key. That is: a practice of not only returning to the sites and sounds of my own life, but to those of the literary forebears who helped make my practice possible without my knowing—the writers rarely mentioned in our working memories of the past, whose influence I picked up primarily through poets they taught directly or inspired from afar.
Put another way, I’ve gone in search of bandmates across space and time. I’m learning new ways to converse with the dead and the living, especially the innovators whose names were never offered to me—those whose contributions were never broached in my training or mentioned in polite conversation. I’m listening out for the minor notes in my daily routine. And not only the poets: the entomologists, historians, high school teachers, jazz composers, architects, and philosophers of science. The gardeners and librarians. The explorers. Across genre and form, era and discipline, I’m in search of the echoes of questions I already hold dear, as well ones I’ve rarely considered.
Where are the minor notes in your own life? Who are the writers, past and present, in need of further study, attention, and care? How do we elevate their voices in our work? Welsh author and critic Raymond Williams defined tradition as “the selection and re-selection of ancestors.” Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote that her “best allegiances are to the dead.” As we return to the page in our daily practice, let’s think on the affirmations of these ancestors, and their allegiances to the writers who cleared the way for them to flourish, experiment, and live. We write poems to remember. So let’s renew our habits of remembrance with an eye toward those excluded from the record. As we are building our own, living archives, let’s make as much room as we can. May our attention, our celebration, also be an act of recovery.
Joshua Bennett is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which was a winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. This summer, he will join the faculty of MIT as a professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities. He lives in Massachusetts.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 167.
What’s a shovel good for?
I’ve been asking a version of this question in classrooms across the country during the past few months, always as an opener, and the range of replies has been illuminating. In a high school outside Boca Raton, Florida, we get to the core of the matter rather quickly: A shovel, one student says, can be used to dig for stuff. “What kind of stuff?” I counter, and a constellation of objects fills the room. Treasure, another student says. Graves, offers another. A third hand rises from the back left corner of the class: You can dig a hole and plant a tree.
Back home in Boston, the array of options further expands. My students tell me that a shovel is a toy (think here of the kind that comes with a plastic pail and the promise of a day building sandcastles), a way to manage backyard leaves in autumn, and a weapon of self-defense. This last suggestion gives me pause, in no small part because it’s a perfect pivot to what we’re reading that day: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” It’s a poem I’ve been reciting for thirty years, but rarely with much emphasis on the larger context Brooks provides just beneath the title: “The Pool Players. Seven at The Golden Shovel.” Here, the shovel is not only an instrument; it’s a site of gathering. It’s a place where seven friends assemble—I hear my mother in the back of my mind saying “biblically, seven is the number of completion”—to play a game of angles.
I’ve been thinking more and more about this question of archaeology and archetype, exhuming the past and clearing space for the future, since listening (this time on a trip to New York City, again to talk with classrooms full of young poets) to a recent episode of Kamran Javadizadeh’s podcast, Close Readings. During the episode, Javadizadeh is in conversation with my colleague, Chris Spaide, about Gwendolyn Brooks’s timeless poem—perhaps the most anthologized poem in American history, Chris reminds us at one point in the exchange. They also discuss an especially luminous, contemporary extension of it, Terrance Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel.”
To begin, you should know that “The Golden Shovel” is a golden shovel. The form is named for the banner under which it first appeared. With a golden shovel, you bury an older poem in the ground of your own, and it branches out from there. The last word of each line spells out the poem that is its condition of possibility; the lines of that antecedent work guide yours to its conclusion.
This spring I’ve been building a shed full of golden shovels. While searching for poems that best fit the exercise, I’ve revisited a coterie of poets who have helped shape my voice over the years: A. R. Ammons, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, W. S. Merwin, Thylias Moss, Pedro Pietri, Stanley Plumly. In returning to their lines, I find new treasure every day. I discover new passageways in my voice, and travel in directions I could not have anticipated. I would recommend the practice to anyone, in any genre: Find a sequence of lines you love, and let it serve as the foundation for an entirely new composition.
At the level of content, both Brooks’s and Hayes’s poems emphasize mortality, the brutal speed of life itself. The golden shovel,though, cuts in multiple directions; both towards the grave and against it. It calls on us not only to reckon with the vulnerability of life on Earth, but to build what we can while we’re here. To cultivate, collaborate, and look after one another.
Joshua Bennett is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which was a winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. This summer, he will join the faculty of MIT as a professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities. He lives in Massachusetts.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 166.
Earlier this year, the poet and essayist Ross Gay visited my poetry class at MIT. Our theme for the semester is “social poetics,” inspired by the Mark Nowak book of the same name. My students and I have been doing our best to figure out how to more thoughtfully theorize togetherness, as well as how an ancient impulse towards assembly shows up in the essential workings of what we call poetry, movement, and song. Ross talked to my students about joy, which he fittingly described, in response to a question, as “how it feels to practice the fact of our entanglement.”Hefurther elaborated this point later in the day while sharing an essay about his favorite pop-music covers during a public reading from his new book, Inciting Joy (Algonquin, 2022). The practice of one artist covering the song of another, he offered, is evidence of extensive study and deep admiration. It is a way of saying, I love this song, this sound, this feeling so much, I want there to be more of it in the world. I will reproduce its magnificence on my own time. In my own voice. This approach to thinking about covers, the act and art of covering, carries the echo of Elaine Scarry’s argument in her book On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 1999): that beauty “brings copies of itself into being.” Even an act like staring, Scarry theorizes, is an attempt to replicate the initial moment of astonishment that a beautiful object evokes in us.
Ross’s lecture got me thinking about all the covers in my life that I love. Stevie Wonder’s double-cover of The Carpenters’ classic “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye,” which he performed on the David Frost Show in 1972. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” which is a cover of an Otis Redding song, though Franklin’s is the much more famous rendition. And then, of course, there’s Anderson .Paak’s cover of “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service, which is featured on his 2013 EP, Cover Art (which can still be found, it bears mentioning, on Bandcamp). It is an album composed entirely of rock and folk covers, sung with a soulfulness that takes the music into another atmosphere. With a good cover, imitation is not only flattery. It is a kind of education. It is a practice of combing through all the voices in the world in search of a combination that feels true.
In the life of a poet, covering is one of the ways to enter a tradition, and it can take on a multitude of forms. Think here of Robert Lowell’s 1960 collection, Imitations, with its array of poems echoing everyone from Homer to Baudelaire, Rilke to Rimbaud. Or John Murillo’s poem “Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop,” which further extends the range of Bishop’s canonical meditation on loss, “One Art.” For both writers, the precursory work they are in conversation with is a launchpad, an invitation to innovate rather than an unapproachable standard to be admired from afar. Influence is an occasion for dialogue. It’s part of how we discover our strengths and obsessions, our vulnerabilities, our sense of ourselves as part of a field—a never-ending ensemble, rather than a lone voice shouting into the great expanse. And sure, on some days, it might still feel that way. But the practice of reading and listening as widely as possible, of paying attention to the small, breathtaking details of your everyday life, allows you to approach the work of those who have come before us with something new, and vibrant, to say.
On my best days, I’m doing a solid cover of my father, who worked the night shift at the post office for forty years, and still had the energy when he got home to make sure that our hair was brushed and that we were armored in cocoa butter before we went off to school in the morning. When I dance, I know I’m pulling from both Bobby Brown and my big sister, LaToya, who used to bring me with her to step practice and house parties, where I learned the moves that I would carry with me all the way to college. When I teach, I know I’m reflecting the light of my grandmother, who could recite poetry and folklore from memory. She hosted a Christmas Day talent show at her apartment in the South Bronx for decades. All the kids present had to perform covers: of Bible verses, Michael Jackson choreography, favorite songs—it was up to us. The sharing was the point. The joy was the point. And if you forgot the words or the steps, someone was there to help you out. They would cover for you.
Most of us who turn to the page to bear witness, to dream, are working on covers in one way or another. To make that practice intentional—to actively seek out the voices of ancestors, literary, familial, and otherwise, in our compositional approaches—not only honors the past, but it builds a more expansive future for the writers who will follow us, as well as the ones we are working alongside in the here and now. Covering is a way of life. It is an aesthetic commitment to repetition with a difference, the dazzling flourish, our willingness to follow what we cherish as far as it can take us. We cover to preserve, adorn, and immortalize in a world where time eventually takes everything. We cover to take care. We cover to remind the world that we were here, once, and in love with what we could hold for only a moment.
Joshua Bennett is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which was a winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. This summer, he will join the faculty of MIT as a professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities. He lives in Massachusetts.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 165.
In February 1899, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialist poem “The White Man’s Burden” was published in The Times, a British newspaper. Appearing at the beginning of the Philippine–American war, which would last more than three years, the now infamous lyric encourages the United States and its white citizens to take up the “burden” of empire, to civilize the “half devil[s]” and “half child[ren]” of the Philippines. In my book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues (Mad Creek Books, 2023), I embarked on a translation of Kipling’s poem into Tagalog, one of the most widely spoken languages in the Philippines. My intention, however, was not to offer a straightforward Tagalog version of Kipling’s lines but what I call an irreverent translation.
Instead of a translation that attempts to “lovingly…incorporate the original’s mode of signification,” as Walter Benjamin writes in his essay “The Task of the Translator,” an irreverent translation does not operate with love for the original, but vengeance, a desire to usurp the authority of the text and indict its language. Akin to erasure poetry, the irreverent translation seizes upon the language of the original to critique it and bring out what Travis MacDonald, in his essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics,” calls the “hidden poems of [the] host text.” If the original poem is host, then the irreverent translation of it is a parasite interfering in the host’s textual operations by “break[ing] the semantic field,” as French philosopher Michel Serres writes in The Parasite (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
I began by thinking about how the act of translating Kipling’s poem into Tagalog, the language of its Other, resists the original’s telos of fully assimilating non-Western natives into Western civilization. The English language was a tool of colonization, according to history professor Vincente L. Rafael. When the U.S. colonial government made English the primary language of Filipino school instruction during its rule from 1899 to 1946, it “meant to speed up the pacification process, drawing Filipinos closer to American interests and thereby putting an end to their resistance,” Rafael writes in his scholarly article “Wars of Translation: American English, Colonial Schooling, and Tagalog Slang.” What frustrated American officials was the persistence of vernacular languages, such as Tagalog, in the school setting and how it inflected the ways in which English was deployed by the colonial subject. What was seen as a “foreign language handicap,” an inability to suppress the mother tongue and fully adopt English, Rafael claims, was actually a subversion of linguistic colonization and evidence of the resilience of the vernacular: Filipinos selectively integrated English into their vocabulary rather than allow their language to be totally subsumed by it.
I wanted to gesture to this history of disobedience as a form of subversive resilience by transforming a poem apotheotic of imperial ideology into one that becomes foreign to its intended white audience. Translating “The White Man’s Burden” into Tagalog allows for a Filipino persona to emerge: This is how I found myself in the poem and what expanded the translation into a personal exploration of my relationship to language and identity. Simultaneously inhabiting and interrogating this persona, I asked, “Who am I to take translation on?”
While a conventional literary translation attempts to faithfully transmit the host text’s form and content, the irreverent translation forwards the subjectivity of the translator. It translates its process as much as it translates its host text. In my irreverent translation of “The White Man’s Burden,” for example, I offer metacommentary about my struggle to accurately translate the line “‘Why brought ye us from bondage?’” Here, Kipling offers an imagined question from a colonized subject, disparaging them as an ignorant savage who prefers the “bondage” of their native culture to the so-called freedom of Western rule:
“Bakit dinukot niyo kami sa kadena?”
The syntax isn’t right. I’m repeating myself again. What is the value of tautology?
“Bakit niyo dinukot kami sa kadena” “Wag niyong dukutin kami sa kadena” “Sa kadenang niyong dinukot”
I would rather go to tested systems.
…
“Bakit niyo kami dinukot sa kadena”
Return to the original: “Why brought ye us from bondage?”
…
“Why did you snatch us from our chains?”
Not only do I reveal my process in these lines, but I grapple with the brokenness of my Tagalog and my desire to trouble my relationship with English. In DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), poet Don Mee Choi writes, “I returned to South Korea. I returned in the guise of a translator, which is to say, I returned as a foreigner.” Translating Kipling into Tagalog meant confronting both English and Tagalog as a foreigner. English is my primary language, the language I think in, speak in, and write in—not only because I lived in California until the age of five, but because English was the language mainly spoken in the social and familial contexts I belonged to. Even when I lived in the Philippines, Tagalog was a peripheral language to me. To estrange myself from English meant retroactively remembering moments in which its naturalization was consolidated into me and by me. This estrangement was most palpable in the moments I would translate Tagalog into English, as I did in the section on Kipling’s phrase “Cold-edged with dear bought wisdom:”
Matalim pero matamis na karangunan Literally translates to “Penetrating yet sweet that is call,” in other words “Penetrating yet sweet call,” in other words “Matulis ngunit tamis na tawag,” in other words “Sharp but sweet calls” from
After offering a Tagalog version of Kipling’s phrase, I gave a literal but crude translation of it back into English: The result is the syntactically awkward and grammatically incorrect “Penetrating yet sweet that is call.” Penetrating wasn’t right. I found myself looking for a better word in English, moving through a chain of signifiers until I arrived at one. A sense of pleasure accompanied the discomfort of searching for a word in English to translate the Tagalog, only to come up with the same word Kipling had used in the first place. It felt like I was learning English rather writing in my primary language. I settled on words I wouldn’t have employed otherwise and allowed myself to play with syntax.
I also experienced discomfort when writing in Tagalog or translating English into Tagalog, a feeling that was more familiar to me. Throughout my childhood, I was criticized and ridiculed by family, teachers, and peers for not being able to master the language. Whenever I spoke Tagalog, I felt shame for not being able to speak the language I was expected to call my own. Because of my lack of fluency in Tagalog, along with my fear of misrepresenting it, I tried to follow the syntactical and grammatical rules I had learned during Tagalog classes in my primary education in the Philippines. Part of my process of irreverent translation was translating my discomfort and making it central to the formation of Mistaken for an Empire.
This is how my translation of “The White Man’s Burden” goes beyond an uncritical transmission of vocabulary and grammar: by allowing moments of linguistic uncertainty to appear on the page, exploring the English and Tagalog words within the context of my own Filipino-American subjectivity, and bringing personal and public history, memory, and cultural symbols into conversation with Kipling’s lines. This rhizomatic process of allowing the translation to branch out beyond the confines of making one language correspond with another was an act of irreverence, allowing the parasite to overcome the host.
Christine Imperial is a PhD student in cultural studies at the University of California in Davis, where she was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Her first book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, won the 2021 Gournay Prize from Mad Creek Books, an imprint of Ohio State University Press, where it was published in April. Her work has appeared in American Book Review, Inverted Syntax, Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 164.
In her essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco writes that ethnographic displays of non-Western peoples have historically depicted their cultures inaccurately, serving as performances in which the Other fulfills the role of the savage as directed by the fantasies and desires of the colonizer. A prominent photographer during the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, Dean Worcester, for example, wanted to “convince his [American] audience that the Philippines was incapable of self-government,” and that its non-Christianized tribes required the presence of the U.S. to lead them toward “civilization.” Worcester, as Mark Rice notes in his book Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines (University of Michigan Press, 2014), was a trained zoologist whose photographs of native Filipinos were influenced by a desire to taxonomize peoples as a zoologist would taxonomize animals. Rice notes that, in pursuit of instantiating his argument for colonizing the Philippines, Worcester convinced and, at times, forced Filipinos into his photographs, where they performed the role of the fantastical exotic Other.
These photographs became integral to the project of writing my first book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, a book-length hybrid essay that explores American imperialism, the colonization of the Philippines, and its afterlives as manifested in my subjectivity as a dual citizen of the United States and the Philippines. Encountering Worcester’s photographs, I was captivated by what I call “the blur,” parts of the image that are out of focus or blurred. The blur, as Fred Moten theorized in Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being (Duke University Press, 2017), is a site of inscrutability, agitation, and excess. In a similar vein, philosopher Keith Allen identifies the blur as the “overrepresentation of experience.” In Worcester’s photos, attempts to document the native subject and her environment are dislodged by the persistence of what exceeds the photographer’s intention and, by extension, the imperial project of capture and erasure. Instead of a traditional ekphrastic endeavor of lyrical description propelled toward the epiphanic moment, I sought to write within and through the ruptures in clarity. I sought to write into the potential for resistance that resides within the images.
I began with one image emblematic of Worcester’s visual motifs meant to reinscribe the Western and “savage native” subjects into their respective categories. In the photograph, Worcester stands fully clothed beside a short Negrito man, with the jungle in the background. (The term Negrito refers to several Indigenous peoples of the Philippines; the photograph does not indicate which tribe the man belongs to.) In Mistaken for an Empire, I wrote about this image to both indict Worcester’s colonial mission as paradigmatic of the “white man’s burden” while also calling attention to the way in which the Negrito man resists passivity through his blasé expression and intentionally slouched body—potentially registering an unwillingness to be seen that exposes the artifice of the photograph’s construction. Yet there is something else within the photograph, lurking both between and behind Worcester and the Negrito man: blurred branches, reminiscent of the urgently frenetic strokes of one of Fernando Zobel’s abstract paintings. In contemplating this blur, I am reminded that Worcester was not a trained photographer but an amateur. This blur is a sign of his lack of training; it should not be overlooked, but rather seen as indicative of the limited vision of the imperial gaze, stemming from a false belief that the Western eye is the same as the “objective” eye of the camera. In addition, the blur appears as a fissure between Worcester and the Negrito man. It is a fissure that can be read as a refusal to reify the constructed boundaries between white and non-white individuals. The accidental blur disturbs the careful composition of the photograph, threatening its stability and betraying the reality it seeks to present.
In another photograph, Worcester stands in a group of Indigenous tribesmen, all carrying traditional shields and axes, in front of a wooden hut where two women watch Worcester and the rest pose. That Worcester stands comfortably with the native Filipinos even as they bear arms demonstrates his confidence in his subjects’ obedience. However, a man with a shield and sword, at the edge of the scene, seems to have been caught mid-motion. His instability is not a result of the limits of early photographic technology or the delay of the photographer’s hand. It comes from the movement of his body, which is both concealed and indexed by the blurring of his shield and axe. While we cannot know why exactly the man moves, it opens possibilities for speculative narratives of resistance and refusal, narratives which expand the life of the archived person beyond the confined spaces of colonial representation and subjugation.
Writing the blur of the colonial archive and imagining narratives beyond the frame, I keep scholar Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” in mind. In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman writes that through critical fabulation’s process of speculative storytelling and historical research, the captive subject becomes an “agent that performs action.” However, this practice must “enact the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration,” Hartman writes. With critical fabulation in mind, I can consider the blur as a reminder to reject any determinative impulse directing my research and writing, to refuse “to fill in the gaps and provide closure.” The blur’s agitative force not only disrupts the restraints of the still image but agitates me into entering and dwelling in uncomfortable states of unknowing.
In rewriting and writing against Worcester’s photographic archive, I must contend with the danger of reinscribing its violence. Critical speculation about the blur requires an interrogation of the politics and ethics of my own gaze. Am I refusing, as Moten writes, the “full richness of [the blur’s] resistance to valuation”? How do I write about the blur without resorting to a gimmicky approach to its representation in language? How do I write with what Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity”—the right to resist being a completely legible subject whose difference can always be explained and assimilated? Moreover, how do I position my own gaze? Who am I in relation to these photographs? In writing through the visual blurs of twentieth-century colonial photography of the Philippines, what would it mean to extend the concept of the blur beyond the photograph? How can “blurring” become a framework by which I write through my own multitudinous and fragmented identities? I have no immediate answers to these questions, but I feel that my writing cannot be divorced from this persistent critical inquiry. In writing with the blur, I must continue to dwell in its tremors and move where it takes me.
Christine Imperial is a PhD student in cultural studies at the University of California in Davis, where she was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Her first book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, won the 2021 Gournay Prize from Mad Creek Books, an imprint of Ohio State University Press, where it was published in April. Her work has appeared in American Book Review, Inverted Syntax, Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 163.
When I hit a wall in my writing—poetry, prose, or hybrid work—I realize that the approach I’m taking needs to be disrupted. Instead of pushing against the wall, I must break it down, dismantle the structure, and rearrange it. I become reenergized by the process of rearrangement via disarrangements of the intended or expected sequence of words, images, and sounds. An image: taking a razor to a strip of celluloid film, a fragment falling onto a table filled with scraps of potential scenes—an accidental epiphany from a renewed perception of the mass of discards. I do not physically cut up the page I’m working on, but rather return to discarded drafts or archived notes to renew my vision of it. Because I once saw these old documents as superfluous, I am able to deform them by digitally cutting them up, splicing their images, language, and insight in order to direct the new piece to an uncertain destination. Yet this uncertainty, this surrender to what John Keats calls “negative capability,” is how I move with the text rather than force it into my original intention. In other words, in the process of rearrangement, the initial intention of the writing—its promise of clarity—recedes as the impulse of association takes hold. When I say I become energized by the process of rearrangement, I am saying that I realize the need to abandon intention and surrender to accidents of slippage and contagion: the failure of certainty.
I recall essayist John D’Agata’s claim that if “we take to heart the traditional idea of the essay as an attempt to figure something out—an attempt, but not a guarantee—then the essay is also inevitably an apprenticeship with failure.” When taught how to write a formal essay in school, we’re taught the formula of introduction, body, and conclusion. We’re taught that the success of the essay depends on its organization and clarity. We’re taught to provide evidence to substantiate our claims. We’re taught that our process of “figuring out” needs to be evaluated in the form of a grade. We’re taught how to write against failure, against the possibility of not being understood. We’re taught to replicate procedure. But the essay should be an experiment—without a guarantee of success, like the hypothesis before an experiment. In the essay-as-experiment, however, the scientific process is stalled and undergoes hypothesis and experimentation dialectically. The essayist, as Theodor Adorno writes in “The Essay as Form,” is “discontent with the procedure [of the scientific method].”
In the Introduction to Creative Nonfiction class I took as a sophomore creative writing major, I remember the feeling of excitement when encountering fragmented essays in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, the nonlinear narratives of Joan Didion’s The White Album, and the elegant randomness of Sei Shonagan’s The Pillow Book. It was in this class that I learned that the word essay originated from the Middle French essai, meaning an attempt. Rather than analyzing how authors reached their arguments and the validity of their claims, we studied the essay as an experiment in thinking, which invited contradiction and imagination. It was in this class that I first learned how to let memory stand as a scene rather than try to explain what it meant or how I felt about it.
For my final project in that class, I wrote an essay called “Allegiance,” which I see now as the genesis of my first book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues. In “Allegiance,”I juxtaposed memories of my life in the U.S. with my life in the Philippines alongside memories of my mother and grandmother. It was a study in ambivalence, a working through of complicated parallels between my dual citizenship and the expectations of choosing one maternal figure over the other in the face of familial conflict. After submitting “Allegiance,” I let it sit in my computer’s documents folder and moved on. Later, in my MFA program at the California Institute of the Arts, I rediscovered the essaywhile stuck on a draft for what is now Mistaken for an Empire. After cringing at certain stylistic choices and moments in which I made cliched connections between personal and national concerns, I began to highlight, cut, erase, and copy the text of “Allegiance” into my then-current draft. What was once a finished essay was now a receptacle of scraps that could be recycled into something less like an essay and more like a montage.
I was deeply inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of the montage while writing Mistaken for an Empire. In “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” Eisenstein defines the montage “as an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots—shots even opposite to one another.” Thinking of my book as a montage refused a hierarchization of materials and any desire to suture contradiction with explicative narration. In allowing this collage-like method to dominate the writing process, a hybrid form emerged wherein memories, documents, photographs, advertisements, and poetry all comingled, like a montage of images that spoke to the ambivalent tension of living a hybrid identity.
Hybridity itself can be understood as a type of failure, a failure to remain pure and authentic, a failure to define oneself legibly and singularly. Writers of hybrid identities—such as first- or second-generation immigrants, who balance the expectations of multiple cultures—often feel inauthentic, unable to meet any one culture’s standards. In her essay “Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form,” Jen Soriano puts it this way: “This clash of internal multiplicity and external expectations of a single truth yielded one definitive result: my silence.”
Maybe, then, the writer of the hybrid essay is not simply an apprentice of failure, but kin. Hybrid forms fail to fit into the box of genre and follow generic conventions. To fit into these forms is a silencing of difference, a silencing of what fails to be understood by the dominant culture. Positioning hybridity as failure does not mean it is lacking in rigor or technique, but that it resists being categorized. In “The Queer Art of Failure,” Jack Halberstam writes, “The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us…to be underachievers…to lose our way…to avoid mastery.” When I say the writer of the hybrid essay is failure’s kin, I mean that the writer is able to surrender to the uncertain paths of experimentation in order to find new ways to articulate herself. Writing my book as montage, I risked the failure of being understood by everyone for the prospect of remembering the histories and people erased by the continued legacy of imperialism, while also calling attention to moments of inscrutability, resistance, and excess. When one writes with failure as kin, one writes without the expectation of understanding, ceding to the persistence of the opaque. By relinquishing the goal of being understood, one gains the freedom to dismember, fracture, and play.
I return to the beginning of my essay: “The renewed perception of the mass of discards” cannot simply be an epiphanic moment of aesthetic possibility, it must be a reckoning with fraught associations; it must be a failure of forgetting. That is what I am doing when I find myself stuck during the writing process—resurrecting what would have otherwise been forgotten.
Christine Imperial is a PhD student in cultural studies at the University of California in Davis, where she was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Her first book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, won the 2021 Gournay Prize from Mad Creek Books, an imprint of Ohio State University Press, where it was published in April. Her work has appeared in American Book Review, Inverted Syntax, Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 162.
“Distractions can be useful,” writes Carl Phillips in his most recent book of essays, My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations From a Life in Writing, “for pulling us away from self-consciousness about making, and for increasing instead the chances for the seeming accident that, even now, after so many years, each new poem feels like.” Truer words were never written. What would my notebooks, whose scattershot contents have seeded virtually all of my work, even be, if not for the panoply of distractions I’ve let pull me away from respective tasks at hand—and, yes, from self-consciousness about making—over the course of my life as a writer?
Distractions increase the chances for accident, as Phillips says—and accident, I would add, increases the chances for encounters with what I like to think of as “accidental poetry.” Elizabeth Bishop’s extraordinary poem “The Man-Moth,” for instance, would never have come to be, had she not happened upon a particular newspaper typo and, most importantly, had she not recognized the accidental poetry lying latent in the mistake. “I’ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be ‘mammoth,’” Bishop shared in the essay “On ‘The Man-Moth’” (1962). “But the misprint seemed meant for me. An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for a moment.”
So, back to my notebooks’ all-over-the-place and all-generative contents: snippets of poorly dubbed movie dialogue, bizarrely phrased menu items, billboards with missing letters, nail polish color names (the more off-brand, the better); these are the found bits of accidental poetry that have, if not outright inspired, at least played critical roles in untold poems of mine over the years, and untold poems of mine yet to be written.
Ninety-nine-cent stores can often be—I’ve found by chance (how else?)—particularly fertile sources of accidental poetry. Many of the companies responsible for the merchandise arrayed on a discount minimart’s fever-dream shelves are located outside the United States and must not go in for things like professional translators (if they did, how could they sell you that permanent hair dye for only $1?). I would never disparage a person’s efforts to communicate in English—a hegemonic language I have no interest in policing—but I do think it’s worth paying attention to international corporations’ marketing jargon, suspect in any language. And the dry lingo of product descriptions and assembly instructions, transmitted and transformed by the various tongues of global capitalism, can be astonishingly (if unwittingly) poetic.
I will always remember, for example, the school-supplies section of a dollar store in Brooklyn, New York, where, some two-odd decades ago, I came across a translucent sea-lettuce-colored plastic folder with nothing on it but the words, “Do you know the children’s times?” I have yet to decipher the meaning of this somehow ancient-sounding question—much less to find its answer—which is to say: I have yet to write this found-poetry fragment’s long-lost poem. But I will. And then, of course, there was the ninety-nine-cent store in Queens whose toy section presented me with a roughly orbuculum-sized package, which read:
Beautiful Peacock (It will give you Infinite Pleasure!)
This extraordinary and confounding Peacock—who, in its corporeal form, was housed in a box I never bothered to buy (for ninety-nine cents or more), or even to peek inside, during all the years I lived next door to Sunrise 99 Cents or More—for some reason gets outsize attention now as a stalker of my subconscious. It makes several cameo appearances over the course of my long-sequence “Arpeggio Progression in Missing Key,” for instance, the last poem in my book peep (Waywiser, 2022). Here’s one of its particularly Peacock-centric sequences (#7):
on the way to where we’re going
we talk about missing
things on dry land on dry land someone had a heavenly peacock they never took out
of the box the box said its function was changing direction immediately when hitting obstacles & flashing
the peacock will give you infinite pleasure its neck can stagger it is feather consecutive who knows
if any of that’s true though it was all according to the box
I recently read Kathy Fagan’s fascinating second book, MOVING & ST RAGE, in the eponymous poem of which Moving and St. Rage “become mythic characters from a failed romance,” as Fagan herself puts it. The ur-source of the book’s profound lyric insights is, of course, a moving-and-storage-company sign with an errant “o” that she’d once rambled past.
“One is offered such oracular statements all the time, but often misses them,” Bishop continues in her brief essay on “The Man-Moth.” You have to be open to the world—to its newspaper misprints, its signs with fallen-off letters, its discount-store products with their curious phrasings—in order to receive its prophecies and poetries. Stop paying the world attention and it’ll slyly palm its offerings, like the Man-Moth himself at the close of Bishop’s eponymous poem:
Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Danielle Blau’s debut full-length poetry collection, peep, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2021 Anthony Hecht Prize and was published in both the United States and the United Kingdom by Waywiser Press in 2022. Her nonfiction book, Rhyme or Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Problem of Being Here Now, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 161.
I’m often overcome by a weird sort of wonder at the thought that the one and only thing on Earth (or anywhere else, for that matter) which can rightfully be called “free,” is, perhaps, a poem. The sort of freedom I’m flashing on at such wonder-struck junctures is Spinoza’s—so a weird sort of freedom. “I say that a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature,” the Dutch philosopher wrote in a letter dated October 1674 to a person named G.H. Schaller. “You see I do not place freedom in free decision, but in free necessity.”
A poem, it seems clear to me when I’m in this particular frame of mind, is an enactment in miniature of Spinoza’s “free necessity,” following its own internal laws of logic, the nature of which is determined utterly and decisively by the nature of the poem, and of the poem alone. And though the poem is beholden to nothing and no one beyond its own nature, if you listen, it will tell you—its writer—where it needs to go, in its own time, in its own language.
Needless to say, you’ll have to pay careful attention, since every individual poem has its own set of laws, its own sui generis but relentless—unwavering, unassailable—inherent order. And none of what the poem is, and must be—absolutely none of it—can be assumed or inferred. The poem—like the world, for Spinoza—is causa sui: the cause of itself. It is entirely unconstrained by external forces.
The norms of narrative don’t hold—unless they do, because the poem says so, or more accurately, because the poem’s very essence necessitates them—nor do the norms of language or grammar or logic itself, certainly not logic itself. If a sentence has started, you would be wrong, as either its writer or reader, to think you can predict how it will end. You would be wrong to trust that a sentence, once started, in a poem, will end.
This is no free-for-all, though. Far from it. To say everything is permitted in poetry couldn’t be further from the truth. Make no mistake: There are mistakes. In fact, at every given moment, as you write, every choice is a mistake—except the one. And which one that is is not your choice but the poem’s. And also: It is not a choice, not even for the poem; it is a necessity.
Once a poem has conjured itself—and don’t be fooled, it has conjured itself; you, the writer, were merely incidental—there is only one place it can end, and only one path it can take to get there. Every move here is radically determined and determining. Every component is connected, and every connection is necessary.
Such is my experience, at least, when I am in the throes of poem-writing—and believe me, it is a process every bit as grandiose and without-a-doubt deluded as it sounds. What else could drive a reasonable person, a putatively reasonable person, to lose herself for hours in grave and blissful deliberation over a line break—as if it mattered, as if it objectively mattered—if not self-delusion?
But, still, I can’t help but think, I can’t help but trust, implicitly, as I write, that it is, all of it, profoundly necessary. That at the truest and most fundamental level, there is no sentence, no line, and no line break, but only one thing: the poem’s single unified explanatory system, in which each seemingly inessential detail—each sentence, each line, each line break (yes, it may well seem inessential to you, that line break, but then, as it turns out, you’re totally wrong)—is in fact a necessary implication of the entire necessarily existing implicative order of the poem itself. That every step justifies the next. That every cause has one effect. That every fact has an explanation. That the particular world of the poem, as I have laid it out, as it has confided itself to me—if I have listened intensely enough, and have assumed nothing, and have made no mistakes—is the particular poem’s only possible world.
That this is how the poem will save me.
Because when you begin to sense what it might be like to think the poem’s own thoughts—when the accidents and vicissitudes and opacities of your own personal history, of your own personality, seem, not to disappear, no, because even as you’re thinking the poem’s thoughts, the poem, of course you realize, is thinking your own; so, no, not to disappear, but to dissolve, to melt back into the poem’s diamond-hard latticework, to reconfigure in the poem’s own image, and to reemerge intelligible, meaningful, and necessary; when you can come close to this, when you and the poem seem (very nearly) to be thinking with one mind—it is something (very nearly) like freedom.
Gone, at last, is the terrible burden of choice, of weighing what appear to be equally serviceable options, of forcing yourself to make what you deep-down doubt amounts to much more than an arbitrary decision (and does the fact that it’s arbitrary even matter? You doubt it.)—and here, at last, is what you need to do instead: listen.
Pay close—excruciatingly close, exquisitely close—attention. Do not miss, or misinterpret, the secret that the poem you’re writing is trying—in its own time, in its own language, in its own voice—to share with you. No, do not, under any circumstance, miss (or misinterpret) the poem’s secret, which is no less than its own nature, its own idiosyncratic and essential ordering principle, with which it has thought—is constantly thinking—its own self into existence.
And so long as you do listen in the rapt, quasi-possessed manner required, then you and the poem, thinking almost as one, will know exactly what needs to be done, exactly when it needs to be done. And you will know too (and perhaps here lies the most liberating notion of all)—it will be clear beyond a reasonable doubt; there will be no more question; it will be self-evident—yes, you will know that it needs to be done.
Remember, it is the poem—not the poet—that is absolutely free. The poet’s freedom is derivative only: She is free insofar as she can get nearer and nearer to thinking the poem’s own thoughts. In other words, the poet herself is never, can never be, completely free. And so, since only the poem itself can know the whole infinite sweep of its implications, the necessary magic of poetry’s free necessity goes further still, because even as, step by step, word by word, this individual poem discloses itself—even as it pounds out the one and only possible rhythm determined by its nature, even as you assimilate its essential pulse, even as this pulse becomes your own—it will still, somehow, surprise you.
As the inner workings of the poem subsume the inner workings of your mind, the poem will nevertheless continue, with each and every necessary line, to take your breath away, to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, right up until—and well beyond—the end.
Danielle Blau’s debut full-length poetry collection, peep, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2021 Anthony Hecht Prize and was published in both the United States and the United Kingdom by Waywiser Press in 2022. Her nonfiction book, Rhyme or Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Problem of Being Here Now, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 160.
In one of his famous letters, John Keats wrote, “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.” In another letter, he coined the term negative capability: “when [a hu]man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats’s idea was that a poet should be a kind of negative force—that only by emptying herself of herself could she make enough room to be fully inhabited by whatever it is she’s contemplating.
Whenever I’m feeling uninspired, I think: Somewhere, somebody is doing something right now. You may say this sounds less like a hype mantra and more like the mother of all mediocre movie taglines; you would not be wrong. Nevertheless, this thought is, for me, a surefire poem-generator—lifting me up, up, and away from the well-worn facticity of myself, out into the contemporaneous “Mysteries” of unknown others and their unknown lives.
So think of the following as a negative capability tune-up, an exercise in temporary self-displacement—an empathic immersion program, if you will.
Begin by simply imagining some unknown Somebody, who, Somewhere on earth, is, even now, as we speak, in the middle of doing Something. The trick is to make the Somebody, Somewhere, and Something as specific, realistic, and concrete as possible. The resulting vignette can—and in fact probably should—be quiet, intimate. Whatever is currently taking place in this imagined person’s world likely won’t find its way into any newspapers. What you’re being asked to conjure here is an ordinary moment in an ordinary life in the ordinary process of unfolding on some ordinary stretch of the planet.
Each stanza should have as its subject a new imagined Somebody. The poem can be as long as you want—but aim for a minimum of four different Somebodies, or four stanzas. In the space of one stanza, can your readers come to feel that they know each Somebody—or better yet, that they know what it’s like to be that Somebody—just through the well-chosen details you’ve put on offer?
Keats’s psychic porousness was not reserved for members of his own species, however: “If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel,” he wrote. So in a variation on this exercise, you might make some or all of your Somebodies nonhuman. But “[n]either was Keats bothered,” Mary Oliver points out in A Poetry Handbook, “by the categories of animate and inanimate: his friend Richard Woodhouse records that Keats claimed he could ‘conceive of a billiard Ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness & very volubility & the rapidity of its motion.’” In true Keatsian fashion, then, your stanzas’ respective subjects might include, in addition to imagined humans, imagined nonhuman creatures and/or inanimate objects.
Whoever or whatever you choose to include, your stanza-long vignettes should be stocked with evocative details, concretely physical yet—at the same time, and to the same degree—emotionally intimate.
I love to take an object made all but invisible by its mundanity—an egg-shaped container of pantyhose, a lawn chair turned on its side—and break it open to expose the full dimensions of the human vulnerability it carries. Characters inhabit most of my poems, characters with idiosyncratic voices and points of view, characters as liable to be overlooked as their own pathos-rich furniture and knickknacks. One of my aims is to let these characters’ hidden stories come through; it’s astonishing how much narrative can be stored in someone’s set of novelty coffee mugs or arrangement of washcloths.
Many of my poems from peep (Waywiser Press, 2022) were—despite their marked dissimilarity in form and content—born of some version of the thought, Somewhere, somebody is doing something right now. The perspective of this one—“Formal Proof That the Universe Is Neither Cruel nor Kind, and That This Is the Greatest Conceivable Horror,” an early draft of a poem in my book—is dispersed among tenants of a single apartment house during a single moment in time. The reader is given access to each tenant only by way of the odd physical detail; the tenants don’t have much more access to one another or to themselves. The “conclusion” of the poem’s “proof” delivers readers to a place of brutal remove, an “out there” with no mind to pay to the muffled phrases lost in the moment they’re uttered.
The “out there” with no capacity to pay us any attention is, for me, inextricably linked to the urgency of these exercises in negative capability, because whatever can be said about the universe-at-large, we have minds and imaginations to lavish on each other, and it’s in all of our best interests, I think, to try and really use them. As Percy Bysshe Shelley writes in “A Defense of Poetry,” a “[hu]man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; [they] must put…[them]self in the place of another and many others.” Or in the words of contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum, from her article “Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination”:
The imagining [that the poet] demands promotes a respect for the voices and the rights of others, reminding us that the other has both agency and complexity, is neither a mere object nor a passive recipient of benefits and satisfactions. At the same time, it promotes a vivid awareness of need and disadvantage, and in that sense gives substance to the abstract desire for justice.
Danielle Blau’s debut full-length poetry collection, peep, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2021 Anthony Hecht Prize and was published in both the United States and the United Kingdom by Waywiser Press in 2022. Her nonfiction book, Rhyme or Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Problem of Being Here Now, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 159.
The editors we interviewed for our book, The Invisible Art of Literary Editing,publishedbyBloomsbury Academic earlier this month, discussed the collaborative nature of their jobs: They help writers produce stronger, clearer work through an editorial conversation with those writers. Before a piece of writing lands in an editor’s inbox, however, the writer is in conversation with herself. We found ourselves imagining that inner dialogue and how we might answer the questions on her mind as she nears the final stages of a writing project.
How do you know when you’re done? If you have to ask, part of you knows you’re not done.
But what if the project is done? I’m worried about over-revising. You’re probably worried about the wrong thing. For every writer who sticks with a project too long, there are ninety-nine writers who submit a piece before it’s ready. Any editor will tell you that half-baked submissions are more common than over-revised manuscripts.
But I want to be done. Can I be done now? Interrogate your motives. Do you believe this project is finished, or are you just in a hurry to publish? (A confession from the people writing these answers: We wish our own answers were always, Yes, we’re done and No, we’re not in a hurry to publish; but that’s never the case. The best we can hope for is, Yes, we believe we’re done and Yes, we are in a hurry to publish. We’re not proud of this mindset, but let’s acknowledge the ever-increasing pressure in the writing world to publish frequently and widely. Read the contributors’ notes in a magazine and tell us it doesn’t feel like an arms race. We hate this pressure, every writer we know hates this pressure, and yet we all keep playing this numbers game, because we don’t trust anyone else to stop.)
So, about my original question… If you have to ask, put the project aside for a while. “For as long as you can manage,” says Zadie Smith in “That Crafty Feeling,” her 2008 lecture to writing students at Columbia University, included in her book Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin Press, 2009). “A year or more is ideal—but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: You need to become its reader instead of its writer.” Once you make that transition—when you become your project’s reader—the answer to your question will probably be as obvious as the words on the page.
It will probably be obvious? Not definitely, though. You could also give your project to some trusted outside readers and ask them if it’s ready for submission. But don’t trust them too much. They don’t know, either. Not really.
The internet says I’m done when my revisions start making the piece worse instead of better. That answer makes sense. Why can’t you be that straightforward? Hm.
What? That advice you got from the internet presumes that a writer is a good judge of her own work. Which is a funny thing to presume about the person who has the least critical distance from the manuscript. In our experience, writers are often the worst judges of their own material. The parts of our own work that tickle us most often turn out to be self-indulgent.
Like using a Q&A format for an essay? Stop distracting us from responding to your shitty internet advice, which also presumes that improvement happens in a linear way. The advice makes us picture a line graph: First the line goes up as changes make a manuscript better, then the line goes down as changes make it worse, forming a pyramid.
It would be cool if revision worked that way, but it doesn’t. Improvement is erratic, like the flight pattern of a butterfly. With each draft, you’ll make some good changes and some bad changes. But even if you make a bunch of bad changes and the overall project gets worse, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should stop revising, or revert to a previous draft. In fact, it might not mean anything. Your subsequent draft is as likely to be a breakthrough as it is to be a breakdown. You just don’t know.
Can I get a second opinion? Sure. When Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing (Knopf, 2016) and Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf, 2020), spoke at Butler University, she said something surprising about publishing her first book: She didn’t anticipate how sad she would be to be done with the project. “It felt kind of like I was missing a limb,” she said.
So try this thought experiment: Imagine submitting your project to a publisher. What emotions rise to the surface? Your reaction may reveal something important.
Revise until sad? That’s your answer? Look at it this way: To write creatively, you have to get comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, doubt. Pitch a tent in the land of not-knowing. This is true not only while writing an essay, poem, or story, but during its submission and release to readers. This is true especially of books.
Whether you’ve let the project rest for three months or three years, whether the thought of sending it into the world fills you with sadness or relief or excitement, you won’t know if you’re done revising. Not definitively. And if you want to persist in the world of creative writing, you’ll have to make peace with that mystery.
In his craft book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Random House, 2021), George Saunders writes, “We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant.”
The more you know your work and your process, the more intuitive you will become as a writer and reviser. Which leads us to our final answer, the one we fall back on with every project, even this essay: You will feel the piece is done when you’ve made it as strong as you can, and you’re ready for an editor’s eye to spot what you can’t. Then you’ll be done revising. For now, anyway.
Bryan Furuness is the author of a couple of novels, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson (Black Lawrence Press, 2012) and Do Not Go On (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and the coauthor with Sarah Layden of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Furuness lives in Indianapolis, teaches at Butler University, and believes that breakfast burritos are the perfect food.
Sarah Layden is the author of the story collection Imagine Your Life Like This (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), the flash fiction chapbook The Story I Tell Myself About Myself (Sonder Press, 2018), and the novel Trip Through Your Wires (Engine Books, 2015). She is the coauthor with Bryan Furuness of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) and teaches creative writing at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 158.
Do we find our stories or do our stories find us?
For me, it’s a little of both. I’ve always thought my true calling was to be a junk collector. I love patinas of rust. I love ragged, torn clothing. I love finding abandoned items on the street. I save old plastic jewelry, torn-apart wrapping paper, and random shiny objects in a big box called my “collage box.”
Similarly, I keep a computer document I call “stray phrases,” which is its own type of junk shop, a collection of odd sentences I’ve come across or thought of—stiff, voluptuous, rapturous, restrained, or just plain kooky, all of them special for reasons I can’t articulate. I just like them.
W. H. Auden once described writing a poem as connecting the best lines from his notebook, which mirrors the way I tend to write, especially when it comes to flash fiction. At some point after having kids—living in a state of perpetual transition on buses and subways, standing around on playgrounds—I started carrying a notebook in my back pocket. It was a type of net to capture stray thoughts, overheard conversations, or lines from whatever book I was reading.
My random jottings became part of my creative process. I type them up and either place them in my “stray phrases” document or in any number of other documents where I have writing projects in various stages of dress and undress.
Flash fiction allows the rags and detritus of the everyday to become gems and jewels. To be a junk collector is by definition a practice of looking at the world differently: finding purpose in other people’s castoffs, beauty in other people’s trash. Flash fiction holds similar transformative powers because brevity changes the contours of a conventional story.
“Part of the fun of writing them is the sense of slipping between the seams,” Stuart Dybek said of flash stories. “Within the constraint of their small boundaries the writer discovers great freedom. In fact, the very limitations of scale also demand unconventional strategies.”
Among these strategies is the repurposing of everyday, or found, forms of writing: A flash story can be a list, a letter, a text exchange, a Twitter argument. I’ve written stories in the form of customer reviews of Dansko clogs and a guest’s entry in a bed-and-breakfast log.
Leesa Cross-Smith wrote “Girlheart Cake with Glitter Frosting” in the form of a recipe that comprises a feast of “ingredients” that make up girlhood: “Too much black eyeliner. Roses. Champagne from a can, champagne in a bottle. ‘Music to Watch Boys To’ by Lana Del Rey.” The story goes on to list more singers, authors, celebrities, songs, movies, and objects—creating a montage of the joys and conflicts of girlish youth.
Michael Czyzniejewski uses an outline for his story “The Braxton-Carter-Van-Damme-Myers-Braxton-Carter Divorce: An Outline.” Kathy Fish uses a dictionary entry in her commentary on human nature, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild.”
Kim Magowan wrote a brilliant 100-word story, “Madlib,” in the form of a page from a Mad Libs game book. Sam Martone used Internet jargon for “404—Page Not Found,” a winding story that mingles the cold tech speak of error remediation with the fictional digressions of the page’s anonymous author. Lucy Zhang used the how-to form in her sultry hybrid piece, “How to Make Me Orgasm.”
Found forms can incorporate visual elements as well. In “The Death of Your Son: A Flow Chart,” for example, Isle McElroy tells the story of a family through the chart’s branching paths of life events. In “LifeColor Indoor Latex Paints®—Whites and Reds,” Kristen Ploetz inventively divides lived experience into whites and reds, starting with the first light of birth (a color named “Hospital Light—AR101”).
Found forms and found text gain layers of meaning when they are repurposed for a story. Annie Dillard described turning a found text into a poem this way: “The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles.”
Flash can animate ordinary places of discourse, alert us to the stories within otherwise pedestrian prose. It allows one to walk through the world as a junk collector might, looking at the different narrative objects that surround us, wondering if they might be vessels for a story.
Flashpoint: Junk Collecting With Words Collecting junk naturally leads to playfulness because of the way randomness and the accidental is part of the process. Be a verbal junk collector: Search for text you might create a story with or text that might stand alone as a story. Look at your junk mail, the letter you receive with a new credit card offer. Look through the e-mails in your spam folder. Go to the library and read through old newspapers or diaries.
See how you can give the “junk” you find a different life through the simple frame of a story, a new context. The junkyard of everyday language is a playground of story possibilities.
Adapted from The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story, published last month by the University of New Mexico Press.
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and cofounder of 100 Word Story. He is the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017), and Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories (Press 53, 2015). He is also an editor of Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story (Outpost19, 2019). Faulkner’s stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Southwest Review, and Tin House, among other publications, and have been anthologized in collections such as New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton, 2018) and The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017). His essays on creativity have been published on Literary Hub and in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Writer, and Writer’s Digest. Find Grant online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen to his podcast, Write-minded, and subscribe to his newsletter, Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 157.
A sentence has wishes as they decide. —Gertrude Stein
A person recently asked me, “What unit of writing are you most focused on in ‘the art of brevity’: word choice, the sentence, the paragraph, or something larger, like a scene or chapter?”
My answer didn’t take much thought: It’s the sentence.
I love the sentence because, as Gertrude Stein posits, sentences are each their own unique being. A sentence can have sweep and circumference, a swing and a lilt. A sentence can be a fillip or a thud, a tickle or a trickle, a brush or a scratch. A sentence can prick or punch or flow or stop. A sentence can be carried by a cadence or a gust of emotion. It can march in a parade or slink into the background. The words of a sentence can pop and flop, slither and dither, hurtle and chortle.
Sentences are like people. Some sentences revel in their opulence—they live for the show, fulsome and rococo—while others bristle at any unneeded adornment. And then some sentences seem to know nothing more than their function, as if they’re a garbage disposal or a toaster.
The writer Christopher Allen opens his flash-writing workshops with the question, “Which sentence in a flash-length narrative is the most important?” Some students say the first sentence. Some students say the last sentence. Then he tells them it’s a trick question. “It’s every sentence, because flash-length narratives don’t allow for spinning wheels and throwaway sentences,” he says.
That’s true. The parts that go into making a short are more noticeable because brevity accentuates them. The shorter the story, the more work a sentence has to do. A sentence must be able to cast shadows through the most careful word choice, create mood with the rhythm and juxtaposition of its words, paint brushstrokes of nuance, and capture the microscopic even as it weaves its way into a string quartet of other sentences.
Sometimes a single sentence can be a story unto itself. The prime example of the practitioner of a “sentence story” is Lydia Davis. Here, for example, is Davis’s “A Double Negative”:
At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”
Is such a sliver of a thought a story?
To some it might resemble a single somewhat awkward line drawn on a canvas. There is no setting. No characters with names or ages or any other kind of detail. And yet there’s conflict: over the choice of whether to have a child and the difference between wanting to have a child versus not wanting “not to have had a child.” That conflict reveals a state of mind, implies actions, and yet still holds questions.
Davis’s sentence communicates a sense of finality, and yet it’s unstable enough that you have to wonder whether she’s truly committed to any outcome. It’s a muddled sentence: using the double negative to maximum existential and dramatic effect yet so strangely phrased that it requires rereading to truly get its meaning. And then you’re stuck in the double negative, which by definition can never be quite a positive, so you’re left in an odd suspension. The character’s resolution seems unclear and requires rethinking.
The language of the sentence is the character of the story, for the narrative is a thought. Davis’s stories can seem epigrammatic, yet they’re more than that. They don’t rely on any grandiosity of language or elaborate sentence structure. Rather, she constructs the lineaments of her story through subtle phrasal maneuvers, tuning them for different sonic impacts, stitching in the tiniest of narrative threads.
Interestingly, Davis’s short “sentence stories” were spawned by her translation of Proust’s long, winding sentences. “I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann’s Way,” she told The Guardian in 2010. “There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn’t make me recoil exactly—I loved working on it—but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke.”
While Davis’s sentence stories tend to be short and pithy, a sentence story can be winding and rambunctious and breathy as well. Ted McLoof ’s “Space, Whether, and Why” is told in a single sentence of 1,394 words. The narrative is not only an achievement of word count but of storytelling. There is nothing extraneous or engorged about McLoof ’s story. Every word and comma feels necessary. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a single sentence until after reading it, when I traced back looking for a period—and there wasn’t one.
McLoof said the story is about lack of space, a momentum that takes over a couple’s relationship with such force that they never get to examine their relationship properly. “Each event piggybacks on the last one, and they never get the benefit of perspective, and that dooms them. I wanted the reader to have that same feeling of breathlessness, of an inability to pause even for the length of a period to reflect, because that’s a distance my characters weren’t allowed,” McLoof wrote.
Other flash stories that are long, winding sentences include Hananah Zaheer’s “Lovebirds,” in which she uses 703 words to capture the simultaneity of life; Kirstin Chen’s “Meine Liebe;” Jennifer Todhunter’s “The Levitation;” and Gwen E. Kirby’s “Friday Night.”
Sentences, no matter whether they’re long or short, are units of composition. How they are used in a story affects how they are experienced in an architectural way, with the space in the “room” of narrative allowing for different types of drama.
Flashpoint Exercise: A Story in a Single Sentence
“The most revealing story I’ve written is also the shortest,” Amy Hempel wrote in an essay on Oprah.com, referring to her sentence story “Memoir”: “Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?” Now it’s your turn. Write a story in a single sentence. It can be six words or sixty or six hundred. It can be long and winding—breathless—or short and truncated and blunt. A sentence can be viewed much as a longer story or as a book is viewed. It is a container. It can be a container that is pure and simple, or it can be a container cluttered with strivings and meanderings, adorned with the rubble of meaning. If you want to experiment and see how your story might change at different lengths, write it at all three lengths—six, sixty, and six hundred—and observe how the modulations affect the character of the sentence and the narrative itself. A perfect six-word story might be ruined by an extra fifty-four words, or vice versa.
Adapted from The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story, published last month by the University of New Mexico Press.
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and cofounder of 100 Word Story. He is the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017), and Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories (Press 53, 2015). He is also an editor of Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story (Outpost19, 2019). Faulkner’s stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Southwest Review, and Tin House, among other publications, and have been anthologized in collections such as New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton, 2018) and The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017). His essays on creativity have been published on Literary Hub and in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Writer, and Writer’s Digest. Find Grant online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen to his podcast, Write-minded, and subscribe to his newsletter, Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 156.
The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. —John McPhee
Wringing language dry, I force excess from early drafts. This might mean leaving something bare, just the skeleton of elements. Or it might mean the sound of dripping, the sense of something lightening, trailing off, expressing, weeping. —Carol Guess
I think writing itself is, from the start, distillation. When I write, I’m trying to distill how I need to say a thing down to the fewest and most necessary words. —Carl Phillips
How much of a story can be left out?
Writer Deb Olin Unferth says that flash fiction—defined as a narrative of less than 1,000 words—forces the writer to ask not about what to add, but about what to subtract. “The short makes us consider such questions as: What is the essential element of ‘story’? How much can the author leave out and still create a moving, complete narrative? If I remove all back story, all exposition, all proper nouns, all dialogue—or if I write a story that consists only of dialogue—in what way is it still a story?”
In my writing workshops, I often heard (and gave) the critique, “I need to know more about _____.” More characterization, more background, more detail. But I rarely heard feedback on what to cut. Subtraction can be more difficult than addition, which anyone who has tried to declutter a house or clean out a closet Marie Kondo-style knows. Editing a story can feel as counterintuitive as pruning a tree. It can seem harmful to cut a branch, to remove what a tree has grown and alter the natural shape it wants to take. But pruning is necessary for both the health and aesthetic appeal of a tree: Proper trimming encourages strong growth, increases flower and fruit production, and removes damaged limbs—all of which make a tree more beautiful.
The same goes for pruning the “bush” of a story. An intimate act, the process of pruning brings a vinedresser closer to the tree. You have to notice the flow of a tree’s shape, its contours, its arches, the way it reaches up to the sky. You have to feel its wood, decide what is healthy or unhealthy. A good pruner inhabits the tree, sensing its spirit, following its energy. A writer does something similar. In looking for what to prune, you become more attuned to a story’s contours. You feel the story in ways you didn’t before.
Subtraction is perhaps the most challenging thing for a writer to do. But the ability to remove things so that their removal creates a better narrative “divides those who can write from those who can really write,” said David Mamet. “Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation” (italics mine). You’re not just cutting words and sentences; you’re pruning the story, deciding things like how sentimental you want the language to be or what pitch the main character’s emotions should reside in. What concrete details or information can you omit, hinting rather than explicating? What if you cut a sentence? Or a paragraph? Or an entire scene? Or the last two paragraphs?
There might be no better way to learn how to shape a story than to write in the confined space of flash fiction. I didn’t truly know how to work with omission until my early attempts at writing 100-word stories. My first drafts came in at 150 words or so, and I didn’t initially see any places to trim. As I kept trying to reduce those stories to exactly 100 words, though, I learned that a good 100-word piece strikes a precise balance between what’s left out and what’s included. The rigidness of the 100-word-story form put pressure on me to “mind the gaps,” as I like to put it—the gaps between words, sentences, paragraphs, and around a story itself. I practiced the art of omission, and in those spaces I discovered that wisps and whispers are as integral to good storytelling as hard information about a character’s surroundings or personal history.
A miniature story is a drama taken from its larger context, pruned to suggest a bigger world. Flash attunes the writer to the subterranean, the implied, the unsaid, the unseen. The world in flash fiction is always a little bit haunted by what’s left out. As Lu Chi said, “Things move into shadows and they vanish; things return in the shape of an echo.”
Exercise: Building a Story through Omission
Our initial impulse as writers is to want to give context. To tell where we are, how we got here, what we’re feeling. Writing context is easy; the hard part is not to tell things. And to tell things by not telling them. This is a skill that takes a lot of practice. How can you provide just enough clarity and just enough ambiguity? Ambiguity is an essential aspect of the human experience, after all, and omission is the key craft technique to nurture it.
Here are three exercises that rely on different types of omission:
1. Write a story that consists of only a list. For successful examples of this form, read “Girlheart Cake with Glitter Frosting” by Leesa Cross-Smith, “Orange” by Neil Gaiman, or “To Do” by Jennifer Egan.
2. Write a story only through dialogue, using Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as an example.
3. Take a story you’ve written of any length and give yourself the challenge to shorten it by 25 percent. Just for fun, see what you can trim, how you can fill the empty spaces with suggestion. Then ask yourself: Did your story gain through subtraction? If so, what did it gain?
Adapted from The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story, published this month by the University of New Mexico Press.
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and cofounder of 100 Word Story. He is the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017), and Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories (Press 53, 2015). He is also an editor of Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story (Outpost19, 2019). Faulkner’s stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Southwest Review, and Tin House, among other publications, and have been anthologized in collections such as New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton, 2018) and The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017). His essays on creativity have been published on Literary Hub and in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Writer, and Writer’s Digest. Find Grant online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen to his podcast, Write-minded, and subscribe to his newsletter,Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 155.
Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? —Roland Barthes
The gape in a garment—an undone button, the slit of a skirt—is erotic because of the way it reveals tantalizing glimpses of flesh. Brevity likewise lures the reader forward with hints and possibilities. As much as a writer might want to tell the whole story, fleeting appearances can be more exciting. The words and images of a short-short narrative, also known as flash fiction, are akin to the brush of a hand from a lover. Flash is the art of the sidelong glance.
Desire forms itself around the ambiguous, those feints and teases that keep us captivated by the mere suggestion of fulfillment. The author calculates just how much and when to reveal. A question is posed, but not answered. Pleasure doesn’t come from the satisfaction of desire so much as it comes from its pursuit. Writers’ materials are traditionally the wiles we conjure with words—but in flash fiction, in particular, that also includes what we choose to omit, or subtly suggest. As Casanova said, “Love is three quarters curiosity.” Storytellers must think with the mischievous mind of a flirt.
Flirting is a silent language, a way of signaling interest and attraction in the space that exists between lover and beloved, writer and reader. The best flirts know how to strike the right balance between sending a signal and then withdrawing, knowing how each gesture changes the storyline. A veil exists between writer and reader, so you have to think about how to lift the veil. If you give too much information, you leave your readers no room for imagination. But if you’re appropriately coy, the reader will want more. It’s like playing with a cat with a ball of yarn. If you dangle the yarn, the cat will try to catch it over and over again, even after the string slides through its paws. Every paragraph you write might be like the string you tease a cat with.
Miranda Williams’s “The Apocalypse in Stages or Your First Kiss,” anthologized in The Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2022), is a good example of a flash story that pulls you along, as if trying to grasp that string. The story is constructed around snippets that function like gapes in a garment, each of the six sections offering a peek at the progression of the narrator’s first kiss alongside equally brief and fragmentary views of the apocalypse. We read about “dresses the color of chewing gum,” a boy’s “honey-coated hair,” “fruit-scented perfume,” and the taste of “summer dew or saliva.” These details pull the reader forward, abutting apocalyptic descriptions of motionless vessels littering the streets, bodies disintegrating, the end of life. These apocalyptic visions also function as gapes in the garment. The two stories live alongside each other, touching each other, existing within each other—kissing each other, in their way. The last lines read, “He doesn’t speak to you again, but you keep grasping. Grasping at nothing. Like a child reaching for fairytales.” A world has ended. And begun.
One of my favorite images to describe the essence of flash fiction is lipstick traces left on a Kleenex. So suggestive. So colorful. So mysterious. And then the question: Is it the mark of a kiss that has happened, or the sign of a kiss yet to come?
Exercise: The Gape of the Garment
“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke,” wrote Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (Random House, 1997). Write a single flash story of attraction that includes just one touch, but not necessarily a sexual touch. Focusing on a single touch allows you to tell the story of a moment, as opposed to the sweep of a longer story or novel. The narrative has to reside in the gape of the garment—the oblique, the tantalizing, the unspoken. How can a single touch be a charged moment?
One of the most erotic moments of my youth might have been during a movie when I was fourteen and very romantically shy: My leg brushed against the leg of a girl whom I had a crush on. Or did her leg press against mine? And if it did, was it an accident? That might be the story I write for this exercise. Brevity is about the tiniest of moments, the fleeting. That is when the garment gapes, when life opens with hope or expectation.
After you write your story, ask yourself: How did thinking of the compressed form of your story as sensuous, as something centered around a touch, affect it?
Adapted from The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story, published this month by the University of New Mexico Press.
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and cofounder of 100 Word Story. He is the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017), and Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories (Press 53, 2015). He is also an editor of Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story (Outpost19, 2019). Faulkner’s stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Southwest Review, and Tin House, among other publications, and have been anthologized in collections such as New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton, 2018) and The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017). His essays on creativity have been published on Literary Hub and in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Writer, and Writer’s Digest. Find Grant online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen to his podcast Write-minded and subscribe to his newsletter Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 154.
Poetry is a form of storytelling, particularly in the case of narrative poetry. Narrative poems contain all the parts of a story, but it is within the line that narrative poetry unfolds: through its use of diction, syntax, and line breaks.
Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005) is a historical narrative, a doorway into the world of blues and folk musician Huddie William Ledbetter, also known as Leadbelly. Jess creates a unique Southern voice in the poems by combining words in a way that skillfully and seamlessly recreates the music of the blues, ultimately enhancing the story he tells in his book. Lines like this from the poem “leadbelly: from sugarland” evoke Leadbelly’s music:
I push groan from gut, birthing a blood light into song, black wave of Texas roil rippin’ cross cane field, heat mirage of field holler syncopation, missin’ link in a chain of gospel moans
This elaborate arrangement describes Leadbelly playing guitar and singing his song. The poem’s active verbs—“birthing,” “push,” and “rippin”—and double-noun combinations, “blood light” and “heat mirage,” emphasize the phrasing of blues music.
Jess frequently uses nouns as adjectives to mimic blues lyrics, and the subsequent syntactical rearrangement creates energetic lines like the opening sentence from “misfire”:
when jake carter’s scotch and whiskey hands came too close to the music growling its way out of my baby’s hip, i told him slow behind a clenched excuse for smile that them watermelon hips and sundown lips was mine for dinner that night.
The phrase “scotch and whiskey hands” immediately evokes a tense situation; there’s alcohol involved, and there’s danger.
Jess pays careful attention to the sound of words throughout the book. His use of long lines and long vowel sounds in the excerpt above, for example, slows down the narrative. The second stanza unfolds more quickly: “the .32 colt kicked hot into my grip, snarled its way level with / the head of a man who refused to take death seriously.” This sentence contains a mix of short and long vowel sounds. But the rapid-fire, short vowel sounds—“kicked” and “grip,” for example—intensify the action in the poem, pushing the reader to its conclusion:
i tackled him hard, cocked back the hammer, but I only recall the empty shutter snap that froze him dead for a shell-shocked heartbeat, then released, filled him full of Lazarus. left me with only a gun butt to blast him into black and blue sleep.
leadbelly’s narrative poemsare full of diction and syntactical choices that feel specially attuned to their subject matter, enabling Jess to better tell the story of the blues icon: his hard-scrabble life, the characters he interacted with, and the struggle for survival that was twentieth-century Black life.
While leadbelly told a comprehensive narrative capturing the life of a historical figure, storytelling can also be smaller scale and personal. The poems in Gerald Stern’s American Sonnets, for example, read like detailed recollections of singular moments. Between twenty and twenty-three lines, Stern’s sonnets are not the traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets. Each begins with an anecdote: the speaker invoking the memory of a person, place, or thing. Reading American Sonnets can feel like eavesdropping on a personal conversation. “I grew up with bituminous in my mouth,” he writes in “Winter Thirst.” “It was Jane Miller who called my lips beautiful,” he recalls in “Rebecca.”
To tell the poems’ stories, Stern utilizes a kind of right-branching syntax, defined by Ellen Bryant Voigt in her book The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (Graywolf Press, 2009):“when modification follows in closest proximity to what is modified.” As an example, Voigt gives the text of the Pledge of Allegiance. In Stern’s improvisation, every phrase that follows the fundament, or initial statement, builds on or adds to the original phrase.
Stern’s poem “For the Bee” is a perfect example:
The fence itself can’t breathe, jewelweeds are choking the life out of the dirt, not one tomato plant can even survive
Stern is describing a scene, adding description as he goes. Stern’s narrative is also enhanced by his use of independent clauses, one after another. The combined effect is a heightening tension that pulls the reader more deeply into the story. For example:
the crows are leaving, the worms themselves won’t stay, the bricks are hot, the water in one of my buckets has disappeared
The end of every line is also enjambed, propelling the story forward. Stern continues:
and I am trying to get a pencil out of my pocket without breaking the point though it is painful lifting my leg like that;
Stern uses the conjunction “and” fourteen times in “For the Bee,” as he does throughout the collection’s other sonnets. The word serves as connective tissue while giving the sonnets their conversational feel.
Both Jess’s and Stern’s use of diction, syntax, and enjambment in storytelling inspires me to push the boundaries of my own craft.
Roberto Carlos Garcia is the author of several books, including What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022) and Traveling Freely, an essay collection forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2024. He is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 153.
At the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, poet Willie Perdomo spoke to teachers about the importance of being in tune with the language their students bring into the classroom. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist is that recognizing students’ language validates their experience. Perdomo is uniquely positioned to speak on this subject. He has taught writing workshops and retreats for years. His poetry continues to give countless poets permission, myself included, to speak in their own specific dialect to tell the story of where they come from.
For a poet, finding her voice and the language of her world is imperative. I’m constantly searching for the reassurance I get from the vernacular of my place and time: the streets I grew up on, the music I listened to, and the people I dialogued or “rapped” with daily. I find comfort in the often-problematic lyrics of most 1990s hip hop music—not the misogyny or the glorified violence, but the hustle-and-grind lexicon of the culture back then, and the creativity intertwined with braggadocio. The reaffirming element of slang, signifying, and other vernacular devices resonated with me, the child of hardworking immigrants, and gave my life a soundtrack that helped me make sense of the world.
If hip hop was the soundtrack, then Perdomo’s poetic voice served as narrator—like Morgan Freeman and shit. See that, the “and shit?” Isn’t that familiar? Don’t you recognize that, connect to that? That’s vernacular currency. In an interview in the Common, Perdomo states: “The more specific the language, the more liberated the speaker.”
In “That’s My Heart Right There”—a ghazal from his poetry collection The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Books, 2019)—Perdomo uses the vernacular phrase “that’s my heart right there” to communicate the depths of love one character in the book, Skinicky, feels for another, Josephine. In the poem, “my heart” has various meanings: a person or object that literally keeps the speaker alive, gives their life meaning, or elicits joy. Yet “my heart” can also be the cause of heartache, melancolía, suffering, or other painful feelings. The phrase “right there” is epistrophe or epiphora, a phrase repeated at the end of a line to signify immediacy. It exhorts, rallies, and—to use a cliché—delivers a point: that one, right there, that specific person, inhabiting that or this specific space, inside me and my life.
If vernacular is the dialect spoken by ordinary people, then the repetition and the frankness of “That’s My Heart Right There” can touch a wide, unpretentious audience. Yet vernacular can be vulgar. “Sucker for Love Ass Ni**a”—also from The Crazy Bunch—makes excellent use of vulgar vernacular as the poem’s speaker playfully mocks Skinicky for getting caught up in unrequited love for Josephine. Divided into four parts, the poem mashes up formal poetic devices—such as anaphora, syllabics, and a regular rhyme scheme—with informal vocabulary, including the “n-word” and “jimbrowski,” which is a late-1980s slang term for penis or sex. The poem begins with the tercet:
Skinicky Jimbrowski ass ni**a That sucker for love ass ni**a
Here the speaker is chiding Skinicky for not only being a hopeless romantic, but also for chasing sex. In the next three four-line stanzas the speaker defines and redefines the kind of love Skinicky is a sucker for: “The love that curses & sweats,” as Perdomo puts it in one stanza.
In the third part of the poem, Josephine enters, and we learn that she does not suffer fools. Skinicky’s idea of love is suffocating, and Josephine cherishes her autonomy. For her, love doesn’t mean shackles, and it definitely doesn’t mean sappy and mushy feelings.
That night, Skinicky had the nerve to pull out his black composition book.
In all of her waking language, Josephine needed to be free. She put her hand up like a crossing guard. Wait up, she said. There you go. Already putting shit in the game.
Josephine’s lack of sentimentality is only underscored by her use of the vulgar vernacular phrase “putting shit in the game.”
The final part of the poem finds Skinicky thoroughly dismissed and morose. His idealized and stylized love isn’t real enough for Josephine, and the poem ends on a powerful note:
Two couplets later, Skinicky was back on the Block heading straight toward the Age of Fuck It, and it was true then, as it is now, that there were only a few of us holding the street down with our hearts.
By the “Age of Fuck It,” the speaker means diving headlong into self-destruction. The phrase makes the last revelation, that Skinicky was among the few with “hearts,” all the more moving.
As a poet, I strive to capture not just the way people talk in general, but specifically how my people talk. The Crazy Bunch, and Perdomo’s body of work overall, are full of the living breathing energy of vernacular language that helps guide me.
Roberto Carlos Garcia is the author of several books, including What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022) and Traveling Freely, an essay collection forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2024. He is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 152.
I’m a lyric poet. Many of my poems have a first-person point of view led by an immediate and steady “I.” You see, I’m a storyteller. “I” have something to tell you, to share with you: my interior life, my experience, the depths of my emotion, my music. The lyric “I” is a vessel for this and more. At the Academy of American Poets’ 2015 Poets Forum in New York City, I attended a panel called “Tracing the Lyric” featuring Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, and Jane Hirshfield. I review my notes from this panel often, and there is one idea in particular that has stayed with me: “We inherit this idea of the lyric as private,” I jotted down. “Yet it has the ability to be social, unstable, aggrieved, one among many.”
This notion of the lyric as “social, unstable, aggrieved” felt relevant to my reading of Randall Horton’s most recent poetry collection, {#289-128} (University Press of Kentucky, 2020), titled after his state prison number. As I’ve been exploring ways to be more flexible in my poetry—to rely less on the “private” lyric “I”— I’ve been seeking poetry that takes a different approach. The poems in Horton’s {#289-128} “address the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, the criminal justice system, racism, violence, love, resilience, hope, and despair while exploring the idea of freedom in a cell,” as a description on Horton’s website puts it.
Horton’s radical approach to the lyric is apparent from the collection’s opening poem. In “: ANIMALS,” the speaker takes the perspective of both a fly on the wall and an intimate part of the environment. The poem is less concerned with narrating the speaker’s “private” experience than with providing the bigger picture, setting both the scene and the condition of the people incarcerated. The poem opens on the prison’s exterior:
a heatwave envelops the mid-atlantic abnormal like the notion of prison outside an unrelenting centigrade
As it goes on, Horton enters the prison:
there is a spell cast over the complex a 5” fan oscillates the aroma of piss from the toilet bowl & it’s jungle-like
The poem closes on the incarcerated individuals themselves, “asking is this how the story ends?”
In an interview with Gee Henry in Hypertext, Horton describes his strategy in the collection as “forsaking the ‘I’ for the sake of the ‘I.’ If I am going to bear witness, then the narrative needs to tell the whole truth.”
Part of the “whole truth” of prison life is the way it breaks down the humanity of those who are incarcerated: in effect, a killing of the “I” within oneself. A direct result of the dehumanizing prison experience is dissociation from emotions like fear and empathy, a disintegrated sense of self, and being trapped in survival mode. In an interview with Steven C. Tracy in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Etheridge Knight explains:
See, when you go in prison, the first thing most guys do in jail is to somehow build a still kind of protection around their bellies. They try not to feel ‘cause it’s painful to feel in that joint, you know what I mean? Sometimes they build such a deep shield they become cut off from their feelings almost. I mean this is a situation.
Unsurprisingly, then, the first-person only appears twice in the sixteen poems of the first section of Horton’s book, aptly titled “Property of the State.” The poems in this section emphasize the speaker’s break with the self—that killing of the lyric “I.” Observe these lines from “: .OR. THIS MALUS THING NEVER TO BE CONFUSED WITH JUSTICE”:
nothing symbolic. okay. dark is dark— cage is cage. hunted & hunter are both
in the literal. make believe & what ifs do not exist: a lie. nothing cryptic here.
okay. rape is rape. prey must pray. no minute in the future safe from quiet
The punctuation creates a staccato effect, projecting the utterances in a matter-of-fact tone, and presenting the dehumanizing realities of prison life: rape, murder, suicide, and the constant threat of other kinds of physical violence. We can hear in the pacing of these lines—of the repeated “okay,” almost breathless—the process of dissociation from self, or the “I.”
In the collection’s second section, “Poet in Residence,” the “I” becomes present through an ever more intrusive poetic consciousness, as opposed to a singular voice. The section’s title is a play on the academic position of poet-in-residence, but in this case the distinguished position is in prison. (Horton jokingly claims the distinction of being the only tenured college professor with seven felony convictions.) These poems are marked by an intentional use of punctuation that creates a unique typography, squeezing, bending, and breaking open of the stream of consciousness. The poems blend images of the concrete prison environment with meditations on and philosophical interrogations of the so-called justice system and ideas of guilt versus innocence. Horton says, again in the Hypertext interview:
I have always been more interested in everything around the “I” in terms of personal aesthetics. There is a collective (We) in {#289-128} that puts humanity on display and trial. Yes, I have witnessed and/or experienced the ugly that is the inside, and I could situate myself as a rhetorical witness and recount from memory countless thematic threads, but in doing that, I feel that I’m not giving the reader everything I can in terms of a total experience—what about the couple in Cell 22? Actually, I feel I am doing the reader and poetry a disservice if I don’t go down these roads of creative inquiry.
Horton’s aesthetic ideas about first-person narrators echo traditions of the Black Aesthetic. One of Ron Karenga’s three criteria for the Black Arts Movement come to mind: that “the artist must be prepared to sacrifice her or his own individuality and, instead, always write with the good of the people in mind.” Unofficially, it is commonly accepted that a refusal to adhere to “standard English” conventions must also be present. For example, as the “I” begins to enter the poems in {#289-128}, it is lowercased. In the poem “: On Reflection,” Horton writes: “because a box is a box humans are cultivated / into said box without choice or explanation, specimens / only existing—as in: (you—i—us). frame & flesh.” In other poems, he uses a capital “I” in brackets—“[I]”—deemphasizing the importance of the “I,” but still acknowledging its presence.
This exploration of the lyric “I” continues and expands in the book’s third section, as the deemphasized “I” becomes a blended omniscient narrator. The speaker is still a fly on the wall, as in the book’s opening section. “: SUBWAY CHRONICLES” offers an interesting example of what Horton’s “[I]” enables him to accomplish:
& [I] of no significance until he exits— the grinding wheels pull away from 155th—a ghost compartment now analogous to time spent in solitary. i occupied this same mute hush
It is clear that Horton has taken up Knight’s call for Black poets to “create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones).” By disturbing the “I” and expanding the speaker’s possibilities, Horton also expands how and what the reader feels, experiences, and understands.
Roberto Carlos Garcia is the author of several books, including What CanI Tell You?: Selected Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022) and Traveling Freely, an essay collection forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2024. He is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 151.
My first lesson in a fiction workshop was that a story can be defined as “a sequence of scenes that defines a conflict.” But what about those parts of a story that are definitively not scenic? Ever since that lesson, I’ve wondered about this. Zadie Smith has argued that fiction writers must justify why their stories need words at all, and that often the best answer is that novels and short stories give readers access to characters’ heads in ways movies and TV cannot. Indeed, many of my favorite parts of stories are ones where I learn about the consciousness of a protagonist, their inner emotional states. I’m thinking in classic terms, for example, about the delicious psychology of Jane Austen’s protagonists, or the compelling morass of guilt and madness to be found in Dostoevsky. But I’m also thinking about more contemporary mind trips like André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name or the memories and interior states of the female protagonists in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina.
For writers, this involves having characters either remember things (i.e. giving backstory) or process thoughts (i.e. revealing interiority). But how to do these things well? In the hands of an amateur storyteller, there is nothing more certain to turn off a reader than to digress into an expository paragraph that feels superfluous, or to insert a character’s thoughts at what seems like an artificial moment. But how to discern when witnessing a character’s way of thinking might be precisely what the reader wants? How to tell when backstory or exposition is superfluous, versus when it might become the very passage that unlocks something essential for a reader’s understanding of a character’s experience of living?
Brandon Taylor addresses this in his newsletter, which is so good it’s been praised by the Paris Review: “When taking on backstory, it’s not just When I was little, I got my leg broken,” he writes. “Backstory should flow from the needs of the character and the story and the moment, and it should, or can at least, operate as a modulating force upon the story. Don’t just fill in the gaps in the narrative. Consider the emotional dimension of your characters’ history. And how…the revelation of the past…shape[s]…what a character is feeling or doing in the present.”
Here Taylor is speaking of backstory—that is, what happened before the present action of a narrative—versus interiority, perhaps defined as writing that accesses a character’s inner life. But in both cases the point of such writing should not be to fill plot holes, but to help us get to know a character better. Flannery O’Connor once said that she knew that a story was finished when it had fully revealed the mystery of a character’s personality. If we think about interiority or backstory in that light, it becomes easier to justify why one might “resort” to these modes.
Early in my drafting process, I’m not so much writing interiority or backstory to reveal the mystery of character, but rather because I’m still inventing the character. I’m still figuring out what happened. I’m still figuring out what the inner life of my character even is, more so than carefully controlling when and how I reveal that information. It’s only after I’ve done that work of invention that I can think wisely about where and when to place interiority or backstory, how much of it might be needed, how to insert it.
And even then, I’m judicious in doling it out. I look for ways to combine scene and interiority together. Take as an example this passage from Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man, in which interiority and scene are blended so well. In what follows, an excerpt from his story “No More Than a Bubble,” two single guys on the make have crashed a house party, hoping to hook up. Then, after meeting two women they’ll pursue the rest of the story, Brinkley gives us this:
“Dizzy chicks,” Claudius said, and we gave each other these goofy, knowing grins. The main difference between a house party in Brooklyn and a college party uptown was that on campus you were just practicing. You could half-ass it or go extra hard, either play the wall or go balls-out booty hound, and there would be no actual stakes, no real edge to the consequences. Nothing sharp to press your chest against, nothing to brave. You might get dissed, or you might get some play. You would almost certainly get cheaply looped. But at the end of the night, no matter what, you would drift off to sleep in the narrows of a dorm bed, surrounded by cinder block walls, swaddled in twin extra-long sheets purchased by someone’s mom.
The first sentence grounds us in scene. The rest of the paragraph offers both interiority, a commentary on parties of this sort, and some backstory: information about the characters’ forays off campus to festivities in Brooklyn and how they approach them. Why does it work? Because it delineates a specific way this narrator sees his life at this time. Because knowing that the narrator thinks this way teaches me how to witness his pursuits later in the story. Because the language is sharp and precise, and it’s fascinating to be inside this head. And importantly, his commentary is directly related to the present scene. As a result, we are not pulled out of the moment. And in that subtlety lies the magic of this trick of fiction: the art of providing a character’s modes of thought while masking the fact that we’ve stepped out of the scene for a moment. Ultimately even if we as readers don’t always know it, this is what we want from story: to be held in a scene, yes, but also to inhabit that scene from inside the head of a specific character whose vision lends the action a particular shape and color that can only be communicated via the written word.
Blake Sanz is the author of the story collection The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, winner of the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, and other literary magazines. He and his writing have been featured in Writers’ Digest, Electric Literature, and other national forums. Originally from Louisiana, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 150.
If you’ve tried writing stories or novels for some time, you’ve probably come to hold a few rules as inviolable. For example, there is a belief in MFA circles that switching point of view without obvious signaling is a blatant mistake, that to do so constitutes a mortal sin against the reader’s attention and may even indicate a writer who has lost control of their story—or worse yet, a writer who seems not to care about controlling it. Yet I can think of many moments in well-regarded works by award-winning writers in which precisely this move is made: The point of view abruptly shifts. Those moments engage meas a reader, and they clearly worked for the editors and publishers who vetted them. But I wonder what might have been said of those point-of-view shifts if the stories in which they appeared had been put up for critique in an MFA workshop.
I’m thinking about Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup, her 2001 novel that closely follows several characters from an omniscient point of view: Ibrahim, a Muslim immigrant to South Africa working as a mechanic; Julie, a white woman of wealthy lineage; and a distant third-person voice unattached to either character. As we watch Ibrahim and Julie cautiously move toward and through an unlikely romantic pairing, Gordimer takes great, almost reckless license with when and how she moves in and out of the characters’ heads. Sometimes those moves happen within a single chapter, without any clear signal to indicate a perspective shift; a few times, they even occur mid-paragraph.
I should admit that, as a professor in an MFA program, I usually flinch when I witness a student shift point of view in the middle of a paragraph, or even when one tries more intentionally to braid two or three points of view within a seven-page story. It’s a natural teacher-reflex, one that was likely inculcated in me during my own time as a student, though I can no longer remember where I originally picked it up. I mostly believe what I tell my students: Point of view is such a fundamental part of the architecture of any story that changing it often creates more problems than it solves. The change can be a sign that the writer is still figuring out how best to tell the story, or a subconscious attempt at experimentation. And even when a student is more intentional about point-of-view modulations, they may be unsuccessful because we as readers feel robbed of the joy of sinking into one character’s unique way of seeing life unfold.
I believe all of this. And yet I also love The Pickup precisely for how Gordimer manages to undo my understanding of what is possible with point of view. How does she get away with it? And when and how can any of us mere mortals do the same?
My sense is that in The Pickup—a novel in which readers’ intrigue emerges from the chance to witness wildly different and abutting perceptions of culture, class, and race—the shifts work because they show us those tensions in real time, within a single moment. In one part of the book, for example, the couple faces immigration issues for Ibrahim and must leave South Africa for the tiny unnamed African village from which he came. It’s an adventure for her, a moment of dread for him, and that gulf between them becomes apparent in the following scene soon before they depart, with Julie speaking first:
Come. We must take coffee.
He does not like this sort of claim by intimacy, this manner of talk doesn’t come well from a woman one makes love to. A woman who was not even considered to be for him.
She was not aware that she had offended his sensibilities but she once again took and squeezed his hand while they sat at a little tin table outside the shop and drank two small glass cups of coffee. I’m here, I’m here. We’re here.
He sees that this—the first cup of coffee at the EL-AY Café, the love-making in her bed, the wild decision to come to this place, this country, from which she could not be dissuaded, even—yes—the marriage he then had no choice to but to insist on—all this was another of the adventures she prided herself on being far enough from her father’s beautiful house always to be ready for. But how ready, now, for what is at the end of the bus ride.
Gawk with me! First we are in Ibrahim’s head for a comment on Julie’s “claim by intimacy,” then we shift into Julie’s head to witness her squeezing his hand and telling herself, We’re here. Then we return to Ibrahim’s head to recall what their relationship has been like, and what dread is associated with what it is becoming. How does Gordimer manage it? Maybe because she is so bold. Because she switches perspective often enough that we’re never in doubt that such moves are intentional. Because she knows that the engine that drives the story is the unspoken difference in how each of these characters perceive their circumstances together. And what better way to dramatize this difference than to continually juxtapose the characters’ private thoughts?
The hard part for those of us who would like to take a lesson from this example is that those reasons might not apply to our own, very different story drafts. What works for her may not work for us. But the lesson might be this: If you’ve got a clear vision for how some radically “wrong” move might benefit your narrative, then maybe you should at least allow yourself to draft toward that “wrongness,” even if you seem to be violating some long-revered principle of fiction writing. None of us are Gordimer, but the more we allow ourselves to think outside the confines of long-held maxims of fiction writing, the more likely it is that we’ll find a path forward that our stories are wanting us to discover.
Blake Sanz is the author of the story collection The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, winner of the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, and other literary magazines. He and his writing have been featured in Writers’ Digest, Electric Literature, and other national forums. Originally from Louisiana, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 149.
There’s a scene at the beginning of an episode of The Wire that, as I write draft five of my novel-in-progress, I think about often. Drug lord Marlo Stanfield enters a convenience store as a security guard watches, aware of Stanfield’s power. Knowing he’s being watched, Stanfield takes a sucker from the counter without paying for it. Looking at the guard as he walks out, Stanfield puts it in his mouth. The guard can’t take it. He follows Stanfield out and confronts him. He calls out Stanfield for disrespecting his authority. Stanfield throws the sucker wrapper on the ground and says, “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.”
As an impotent witness to my draft’s unfolding, I am that security guard. My draft is Marlo Stanfield. I want my presence to matter to it, but my draft hardly acknowledges me. You want it to be one way, it says, then walks away unfazed.
And the way it is, I’ve relented, is this: My draft is a novel told from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged protagonist looking back at events from his youth—a change from my planned third-person. Thinking of that episode of The Wire weirdly helped me realize that I needed to acquiesce to the narrative’s demands. So did Sunset Boulevard and Goodfellas, movies famous for their protagonists’ retrospective voiceover narration.
On the one hand, I hesitate to admit these influences. They’re not “literary,” and a couple of them make it sound like I’m trying to write in some overly masculine register, which isn’t true. On the other hand, I want to affirm that this is how influence works. As writers, we are the art we consume, and that is not only okay, it’s liberating. My novel is better for the fact that, in revision, I am pulling as much from The Wire as from, say, James Baldwin. The more diverse our influences, the more chance there is for our drafts to take us in surprising directions.
I mention Baldwin because, as I work on this new first-person point of view, I’m carrying around Giovanni’s Room. I’m also rereading Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. In both cases, I hope to glean some sense of what effects those writers have created through their uses of first-person that I might write toward. And yet, even as I first thought to pull those books off my shelf, I hesitated. I worried that, by this fifth draft, I should know what my book is—that the time has passed for allowing in more influence.
We often imagine that a writer’s influences exist a priori, before the first draft was composed. But influence doesn’t always work this way. Sometimes, you think your story is one thing, but then, after rereading it many times—and hearing others talk about it—you realize it’s another. That is as it should be.
Changing my novel’s point of view after four drafts may seem drastic. But the narrative wasn’t right before, and when I initially tried out the first-person after reading Baldwin, after watching Sunset Boulevard and Goodfellas, I could see plainly that it worked. It’s crucial to be open to influence throughout the entire process, to follow one’s draft where it wants to go. This means nurturing a habit of thought toward your project that not only accepts but also requires you to consider as fodder all influences you come across—whatever images you see, video games you play, songs you listen to, or TV you watch. If your mind is always trending toward your novel and its characters, then anything you experience becomes ripe for affecting revision.
Yet the truth is that most of your new ideas will not work. Briefly, for example, I was sure that the TV show Fleabag was the solution to my revision. During another moment, I thought the key to unlock everything lay in a recent podcast about the power of the Catholic mystics. In yet another moment, spiritual biographies like Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain felt like the “right” writing to consult. Those works have so far turned out to be less important to what I was creating than I would’ve thought.
But if you’re open to multiple influences, then experimenting with diverse ones will help you attune to the right choice: Thomas Edison tried over six thousand different materials for the filament in his electric lamp before landing on carbonized cotton thread. It’s only because I’ve tried in so many ways to make my third-person drafts work that I can feel sure about moving to the first-person. Fleabag and Goodfellas and Merton have all played their roles in my drafting process. I now keep opening Baldwin and Greenwell and—in a way that has not been true before now—I can see clearly that doing so has value. I’ve finally accepted that my draft is the kingpin it always knew it was.
Blake Sanz is the author of the story collection The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, winner of the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, and other literary magazines. He and his writing have been featured in Writers’ Digest, Electric Literature, and other national forums. Originally from Louisiana, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 148.
Five times over, you read the same sentence taken at random from your 150,000-word draft. Each time, you have a different emotional response to it.
You receive contradictory feedback from three or more readers whose opinions, you have reason to believe, are each worth listening to.
Having changed the narrator’s point of view, you compare the old and new drafts to each other, unsure which is better or how to tell.
You have a moment of liberation and write toward some new and exciting goal, but then abandon it after weeks of heavy rewriting, certain that it’s not so great after all.
Waiting in line at a concert, a guy has naively asked what you do for a living. When you gather that he might be a potential reader, you ask whether he thinks a story about a monk could be interesting if the monk has gone back on his blood-promise of loyalty to family by joining a monastery.
You cut your word-count by a third, then go back and add the scenes you’d just cut.
At a loss for how to make substantial changes, you remove all the extra pronouns, conjunctions, and other throwaway words—which, yes, needed to be done, but now what?
You’ve had the project rejected by agents and editors, and what little feedback they’ve given muddles rather than clarifies what you worried might be the problem with the narrative.
You’ve pulled out a minor character and decided that the whole story should be told from her point of view. You’ve begun to write it that way, only to discover that this idea doesn’t work either.
You’ve decided to start at page 50 and make all the scenes that appeared earlier exposition, which you disperse in small increments across the entire manuscript.
Despite the book’s lingering flaws, and against all evidence that such a thing might ever happen, an agent whom you queried too early—months ago—writes back. She doesn’t take you on as a client, but she suggests a change you’ve never considered, one you immediately realize is worth your time to investigate.
You put down the old work and start something new. In the process, you see something about how the new work is being composed that could be a solution to the problems you were facing in your old work.
You attend a conference where you bond with someone who feels equally lost in their own project, and that person becomes a trusted reader of your subsequent drafts.
A major life event forces you to see a possibility for your story that you wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
You print out the whole jumbled mess and begin to retype it. In the process, you catch a problem you hadn’t seen before.
You listen to an author you admire discuss their work, describing one of their own challenges and how they moved past them. While you don’t have the same challenges, something about how they explain their process sparks a new thought about a solution to your own writing issues.
During the weeks in which you’re fretting over a problem in your story, you attend a concert. Or go on a long walk. Or have a lengthy, unrelated conversation with an old friend. When you return to the work, your approach is different enough that you nudge yourself in an important new direction.
Some other story you’ve been working on is accepted for publication, and your newfound confidence gives you motivation to confront your old project anew.
You force yourself to read something from it aloud to a public audience, and this experience finally gets you to see it how others do, and in a way that reinvigorates your sense of possibility.
On the forty-third try, having experienced most of the frustrations listed above, you enact yet another change to the project and, for whatever inexplicable reason, the change works. You do not look back. You do not look back.
Blake Sanz is the author of the story collection The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, winner of the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, and other literary magazines. He and his writing have been featured in Writers’ Digest, Electric Literature, and other national forums. Originally from Louisiana, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 147.
I want to talk about the quotidian and the code. These are what the novel is made of: the ephemera, the details, the everyday, and also the ancient narratives, the inherited structures, the myths.
The novel is made of days spent walking around the city of Dublin, and it is made of the voyage of Odysseus.
When the novel emphasizes the quotidian—when it’s steeped in the random details of daily life, when its myths are subordinated or occluded—it’s a realist narrative. When the novel emphasizes the code—when its details build purposefully toward the romance, the battle, the crime—it’s genre fiction.
The code is structure; the quotidian is fragment. The code is system; the quotidian is glitch. The code is theme; the quotidian is variation. The code is night, the dreamtime; the quotidian is day. The code is pattern; the quotidian is chaos. The code is tradition; the quotidian is modernity.
In his last lecture course, Roland Barthes explored the preparation of the novel. He wanted to know how one passes from what he called “Notation”—or “the Note”—to the novel itself. How does the writer get from the discontinuous to the flowing? He explained that the present is distinct from the topical: “The present is alive (I’m in the process of creating it myself) whereas the topical can only be a noise.”
Barthes’s notion of the topical resembles what he calls “studium” in his discussion of photography: the functional aspect of art, involving discipline, education, and the photographer’s intent. When he says present, he might be speaking of what he calls photography’s “punctum”: “the accident which pricks, bruises me.”
The quotidian pricks because it has no point. It’s beside the point. It might not be accidental, but it feels that way. It’s gratuitous, a surplus. In the realist novel, writes James Wood, “the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive.”
The novel is a narrative that is also made of this “margin of surplus,” or what Franco Moretti calls “fillers”: those everyday details that are “the opposite of narrative.” The novel consists of narrative and its opposite.
Narrative is told, passed on; its opposite is forgotten. The code is long-term memory. The quotidian is short-term memory. Short-term memory is ruptured and multiple. Long-term memory is continuous. It is family, society, civilization. Perhaps it is also planet.
Perhaps only the code has a memory long enough to approach the geologic, while the modern so-called realist novel, as Amitav Ghosh has argued, with its glut of quotidian detail, its obsession with the inner lives of its protagonists, amounts to “a concealment of the real.”
Ghosh is concerned that the modern novel cannot address climate change because it depends on probability. Developed in the era of statistics, under a regime of regular time, the realist novel banishes happenings considered unlikely, such as freak weather events, to the disdained genres of fantasy and science fiction. This suggests that the realist novel is not simply made of the quotidian and the code, but functions to separate those things: that this type of novel creates an opposite for narrative, an opposite that is privileged because it defines realism against older forms such as fairy tale and myth, as well as the contemporary rivals of genre fiction. So what Wood calls margin and Moretti calls filler, what’s described as peripheral and extraneous, is not merely characteristic of the realist novel; it constitutes its purpose.
This emphasis on the regular, ordinary, and everyday defines this quotidian literature not only against other forms of narrative, but also against life, which is stranger than fiction. This is why Ghosh, who experienced the first recorded tornado in Delhi, finds it impossible to describe the event in a novel.
“I buried my head in my arms and lay still,” he writes in a work of nonfiction. “Moments later,” he goes on, “the noise died down and was replaced by an eerie silence. When at last I climbed out of the balcony, I was confronted by a scene of devastation such as I had never before beheld.”
In a response to Ghosh, McKenzie Wark declares the obsolescence of the bourgeois novel in the Anthropocene. “Science fiction,” writes Wark, “is more, not less, ‘realist’ than literary fiction. It does not produce the fiction of a severed part of a world, as if the rest was predictable from the part. It produces a fiction of a whole different world as real.” But the problem Ghosh describes cannot be solved by science fiction or fantasy as we know them. He is not looking for a fiction of a whole different world; he wants a novel for this one. He desires an uncanny novel: one that evokes not the supernatural but the unthinkable—the narratively intolerable—reality of nature. He wants a novel that breaks its own rules, that understands the numbers and dodges them, that slips out from under the domination of probability. He wants a literature that creates a new reading experience, transforming the relationship between the quotidian and the code.
My terms are beginning to fail. I see that the quotidian, if it’s truly the experience of the everyday, has to include disaster. I see that the code, if it’s preserved in long-term memory, if it is in fact a code, is on the side of probability. So write me a novel there, where the terms fail. Write me a novel of this planet that isn’t topical, a novel that’s more than noise. The bourgeois novel may be obsolete; the quotidian is not. Rescue the everyday from the clutches of the plausible.
Rescue the code. Work the space between gradual and catastrophic time. Write me a fantasy that doesn’t produce the fiction of a totality. Write me the uncanny kitchen, the porch volcanic. Write me a science-fiction novel of short-term memory and of the flesh. Write me space-time in scattered notes. Make room for the transformed Delhi street of Amitav Ghosh: “In the dim glow that was shining down from above, I saw an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past—bicycles, scooters, lampposts, sheets of corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls.” Write me that dim glow: the weather, the wind, the change, the historical fracture, the glitch that revises all the probabilities. Don’t write me a novel about mutation, but write me a mutated, monstrous novel, the ghost story of your DNA, a book that a plant could read.
Be my accident. Prick me, bruise me a novel.
Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque, published in October by Catapult. Her works include the World Fantasy Award-winning A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Monster Portraits (Rose Metal Press, 2018) a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 146.
What is this about? Last night, in my book club, we discussed Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which begins as a surreal fantasy and turns into detective fiction. Someone said this novel is about illness. Someone else said it’s about an innocent spirit that triumphs over trauma. A third person insisted it’s about the complex history and national identity of the town of Piran in southwestern Slovenia.
In the novel, there is a description of a film that exists in the world of the story called Moon/Wood. The film was shot in color, but “the feel of it is almost entirely monochrome—black woods, white snow, gray sky etc.—with occasional splashes of blood-red.”Moon/Wood shows a woman’s entrapment by, and eventual escape from, the abusive leader of an ancient cult. The characters speak an unknown language. “The true language of Moon/Wood,” we are told, “is simple, stark imagery: moon, darkness, water, trees.”
Moon/Wood is a found object. It flashes up in the narrative for a moment, then sinks into the background, a lost work by a character the reader will never meet. Vivid yet mute, it communicates in a language made of images that combine to produce an experience: “the feel of it.” The few paragraphs describing this nonexistent film send a pulse through the novel, a wash of color, a moody glow.
I didn’t mean to write about Piranesi here. I intended to begin with Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: the moment when Charles Swann attempts to explain the mesmeric power of a certain piece of music. The sonata is almost a character in its own right in Proust’s novel, emerging and disappearing, engaging in relationships with the other characters, aging and changing throughout the story. At one point, Swann found the sonata full of profound, mysterious meaning. But now, he tells the narrator, what it means is simply “the moment when night is falling among the trees.” The music doesn’t reveal any grand truth; it restores a particular atmosphere, a springtime Swann lived, but to which he “paid no attention then,” a moment now encapsulated in the sonata and only available there. What the music shows is not merely the past, but the part of the past that seemed unimportant while it was being lived. The sonata preserves the lost part of life. It is precious to Swann because, he explains, it shows him “not ‘the triumph of the Will’ or ‘In Tune with the Infinite,’ but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock coat in the palmhouse in the Zoological Gardens.”
Another found object: old Verdurin in his frock coat, whom Swann used to see in the Zoological Gardens. For Proust, art is the place where all the found objects are held. The home of the accidental, the random, and the stray.
I didn’t mean to write about Piranesi, but then book club happened, and I thought, if art is the home of accident, then let’s start with what just happened to happen. Let’s consider writing as the act of injecting the found objects of one’s existence into the fabric of the language. Everything that’s missing from a resumé, everything that doesn’t fit into the “About” page on a website, everything obituaries fail to mention: the unplanned, unforeseen, everyday things, the conjunction of moon and water, the glimpse of an acquaintance in a public park. For Swann, the sonata is precious because it preserves what life is not about. It’s a reliquary for the minor, an amber casing for the incidental, a treasure trove of the fleeting moments he once considered useless, a bezel for old Verdurin in his frock coat.
I became a literature professor in order to make my life resemble a giant book club. I want book club all day long. In book club, you can argue over what it’s about. What a relief! I love the debate between Piranesi-as-illness-narrative and Piranesi-as-commentary-on-the-history-of-Slovenia. I play with conflicting interpretations like a happy kid. Yet while we talk about the book, existence is slipping away from us: the casual, the inapplicable, the real. Some of it will be lost forever, but some of it will be found by art.
In Piranesi, an occultist describes how excess energy from this world creates a second one. “Picture it,” he says, “like rainwater lying on a field. The next day the field is dry. Where has the rainwater gone? Some has evaporated into the air. Some has been drunk by plants and animals. But some has seeped down into the earth.”
Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque, published this month by Catapult. Her works include the World Fantasy Award-winning A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Monster Portraits (Rose Metal Press, 2018) a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 145.
Recently, at the Mennonite/s Writing Conference in Goshen, Indiana, I attended a panel discussion in which the scholar and crime writer Daniel Born was asked, “What is the function of the noir genre?” Born gave the best possible answer: “Noir is an atmosphere.” This wasn’t enough for the person who had asked the question, and an interesting conversation followed, considering violence, capitalism, urban decay, and the manifestation of power. These are all excellent themes for a study of the social function of noir, but they fail to explain why a person’s hand has picked up a certain book, much less—and for me this is the question of literature—why, once the person has read the book, that same hand might pick it up again.
A question of rereading. Once you know what a book contains, why read it again? Because literature is not information. It’s an atmosphere, a location, a space, a landscape you can enter, with its own weather and light that can be found nowhere else.
The German philologist Erich Auerbach offered a study of atmospheres in his investigation of literary worlds: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Committed to a Western tradition whose brutal underside had driven him into exile by the Nazis in 1935, Auerbach wrote the book in Istanbul; published in Berlin in 1946, it was soon translated into several languages, arguably establishing the field of modern comparative literature. Mimesis is a dazzling voyage through Western narrative, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, in search of what Auerbach calls “the serious treatment of everyday reality.”
Auerbach digs deep into sentences, then tosses the flare of his attention to illuminate whole caverns. He’s interested in the dimensions of literary space, in foreground and background, extension and depth. He wants to know how the separation of styles in the classical Latin tradition—elevated language for noble themes, colloquial speech for comedy—breaks down, eventually leading to the birth of the modern novel. With intense exactitude, he traces feeling from form, showing how literary style calls up the ghost of bodily sensation, how reading can be like stepping into an airless, tapestried chamber (Medieval allegory); a perfumed garden (Giovanni Boccaccio); or a crowded city during a thunderstorm (Henri de Saint-Simon).
Here’s his commentary on a phrase from Genesis: dixitque Deus: fiat lux, et facta est lux (And God said, Let there be light: and there was light). This sentence has been a key subject in discussions of the sublime going back to Longinus; Auerbach shows how it creates a sense of space:
The sublime in this sentence from Genesis is not contained in a magnificent display of rolling periods nor in the splendor of abundant figures of speech but in the impressive brevity which is in such contrast to the immense content and which for that very reason has a note of obscurity which fills the listener with a shuddering awe.
In a sentence on light, Auerbach finds the darkness. He shows how the lightning strike of fiat lux reveals a vast, surrounding gloom, an expanse that can’t be fully plumbed: a world. The contours of an unknown land take shape out of the void. The listener stands in the dark, heart pounding. The words induce proprioception, a sense of the body’s position in space, a physical shudder.
Read Auerbach to see how arrangements of words create atmospheres. Read him to find out why Greek epic is horizontal and Old Testament epic is vertical. Follow him through Latin classics and medieval legends so he can prove to you that Dante is a miracle. Stick with him all the way to the final chapter, so you can completely freak out when he links Woolf to Greek epic and Proust to Old Testament epic, in a return to his first chapter that makes a whole field of literature stand up out of the page—like the town and gardens leaping out of Proust’s famous teacup—and might help you understand why someone would reach for To the Lighthouse on a particular day and not In Search of Lost Time, or vice versa: To the Lighthouse is limpid, tinny, watery, reflective, flashing, spreading, and luminous, while In Search of Lost Time is layered, reverberant, rhythmic, concentrated, verdant, tangled, rocky, and crumbly like ancient brick.
For what are we doing here? As writers, we are making worlds. In the atomic theory of Lucretius, atoms are like letters: The letters of the alphabet combine in different ways to make words, just as a limited set of elements produces grain, trees, and human beings. In his pursuit of “everyday reality” in literature, his effort to understand how abstract shapes on a page can induce complex feelings of being alive, Auerbach shows that letters are also like atoms. Every piece of writing calls a particular world into being, an environment through which a reader moves.
Rereading means returning to a landscape: running down ill-lit streets, gliding through radiant fields, climbing up mountains buffeted by the wind. To write is to generate a space, with its topography, its temperature, the quality of its air. Fiat lux.
Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque, forthcoming in October from Catapult. Her works include the World Fantasy Award-winning A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Monster Portraits (Rose Metal Press, 2018) a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 144.
What is the joy of quoting? How to explain its curious, addictive charm?
I’m taking notes. I’m copying the words of others. As the pen moves, I have the sensation of becoming someone else, someone more observant and eloquent than myself, the person who wrote the words I’m transcribing. Sometimes there are layers of distance: I might be copying words cited in an essay or translated from another language. But the line of energy comes through. My hand guides the pen, tracing shapes on the page, entering someone else’s precise, miniature gesture.
An embarrassing pleasure. I can’t quite justify it. Yes, I’m a scholar; yes, my nonfiction writing incorporates many notes. But not this many. Anxious dreams of sudden hospitalization, of my notebooks being found while I’m still alive. A figure of nightmare inquires: “What are you going to do with all those notes?” I’m caught, busted! How to explain that these writings are both treasure and dross, both a glittering reservoir (I might use them someday!) and, like sawdust or coffee grounds, the residue of a practice whose goal is already achieved?
“Blessed citation!” writes the scholar Antoine Compagnon. “Among all the words in our vocabulary, it has the privilege of simultaneously representing two operations, one of removal, the other of graft, as well as the object of these operations—the object removed and the object grafted on, as if the word remained the same in these two different states.”
As if being cut off was the same as being joined. The marvel of language: It is taken, it is absorbed, and it remains. “Is there known elsewhere,” Compagnon asks, “in whatever other field of human activity, a similar reconciliation, in one and the same word, of the incompatible fundamentals which are disjunction and conjunction, mutilation and wholeness, the less and the more, export and import, decoupage and collage?”
I’m taking notes. The sensation of my hand rubbing against the page enchants me. My notebook is a magic lamp.
I have dreamt of giving birth to myself, of creating my own vernacular. In my twenties, while writing an epic fantasy novel, I went so far as to develop a lexicon, a morphological system, and a number of grammatical features for three imaginary languages. I understand the lure of that crystalline playpen. But no one is, or can be, alone in words. Before birth, language is already given, granted without being asked for, without having been earned. In my religious tradition, this is the definition of grace.
When I take notes, I touch this truth: I am the language of others. The knowledge lasts as long as the pen is in motion. I am Clarice Lispector. I am Franz Kafka. I am Suzanne Césaire. I am Imru’ al-Qays, who has been dead for 1,400 years. I am all the translators: Stefan Tobler, Michael Hofmann, Keith L. Walker. I am Antoine Compagnon and Marjorie Perloff. “The dialectic of citation is all-powerful: one of the vigorous mechanisms of displacement, it is even stronger than surgery,” Compagnon writes.
Blessed citation, requiring so little—just a spark of recognition, a sudden yes, I must write this—and giving so much. The surgical, healing genre.
The line of energy flickers. Decoupage meets collage. Borders dissolve. I fall asleep in Cairo and wake up in Damascus. I vagabond through literature. I am not my mother tongue alone; I am no particular language. I am language itself.
“We need more you,” an editor told me recently. “You cite all these other writers, but there’s not enough you in here.” Dude, I’m right there. I’m in the quotations. I am the quotations.
Blessed citation, already present, dormant, requiring only one touch to awaken.
My hand rubs against the page, and the genie, the genius, rises.
Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque, forthcoming in October from Catapult. Her works include the World Fantasy Award-winning A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Monster Portraits (Rose Metal Press, 2018) a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 143.
Specificity is the anchor of poetry as we write it now. Who can forget—or is allowed to forget—William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow? We may believe that love is a major concept and value and thus should be celebrated in poems, but we also know that abstractions are not all that vivid or useful in poetry. Behind every personal experience that we might label “love,” there is a specificity to be seized by language and put in a poem. That is: There is a who (or what), a where, and a when—the basics of context, the beginnings of story. What follows is an exercise in developing specificity of context and storytelling.
Close your eyes and imagine some person who is significant to you. Try to bring that figure into focus in your mind: Picturing things like what clothes they are wearing might help. Now draw back from that figure a little bit, as if you were a movie camera. Where is this person? Are they indoors or outdoors? If indoors, in what space or room? If outdoors, where? Is it morning, afternoon, or night? Now the key part: What are they doing? For instance: “My Aunt Betty knitting in front of the TV” might be something someone envisions.
The next step is to create your own involvement in the scene, discovering its possible significance. So add that pronoun that stands for yourself: “I watch as Aunt Betty knits in front of the TV.” The personal pronoun and the presence it implies—though only in your imagination, which is fine—allows you to extend this image into a story:
I watch as Aunt Betty knits in front of the TV. It’s another ugly sweater no one will wear.
Or:
I watch as Aunt Betty knits in front of the TV, Her head bent so low over the needles She can’t possibly see what’s happening On the screen in front of her. It’s a red scarf For my sister who doesn’t even like her For my sister who lives in Florida And will never need it.
The trick is to keep exploring, keep extending. Maybe the I is present and active in this scene:
I watch as Aunt Betty knits in front of the TV, Her head bent so intently over the needles I’m afraid to speak and startle her…
And so on. Why should a scene like this reveal anything interesting or urgent? Because our memory and imagination are also symbolic. What action and setting we visualize for a given figure is symbolic of our attitude toward them, our assessment of them. If we remember or imagine our mother cooking, perhaps we felt her to be nurturing. Or not. Maybe she’s microwaving another TV dinner that everyone detests. In another memory, perhaps Grandpa Fred is planting tomatoes in the backyard: “I watch as my grandfather bends among the tomato plants.” Where will such a scene take the poet—and the reader? Each new line should add some noun or verb that is specific and moves the scene along.
When you run out of steam for extending and modifying the story, then stop. Is it a good place to end the poem? Maybe you wrote past the strongest lines, and so should cross out the last line or two. We—I—often write past the dramatically effective place to end, overlooking that gesture or detail that “says it all” and completes the poem.
Gregory Orr is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Selected Books of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). His prose books include A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry (Norton, 2018) and Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, Orr taught there from 1975–2019 and was founder and first director of its MFA Program in Writing.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 142.
Story is one of the basic structural and meaning-bearing forms of language in human culture. Even lyric poems are often structured around story principles. Stories seem designed to tell us important things about ourselves as we live in and move through the world. They are also a deeply satisfying form of ordering for experience.
The most basic dynamic of stories is this: two centers of energy in tension with each other. With that in mind, it’s easy to create an intense narrative lyric. All you have to do is set up the centers of energy—two nouns or pronouns—and create tension between them with a strong verb. Then let it flow. For example: How about using the pronouns I and you in the opening of your poem, the start of your story?
I you…
Who is you? It doesn’t matter. It’s up to you who the you of your story is.
Now place a verb between the pronouns, one of your own choosing. Why not start with a strong one? Love or hate, detest or fear?
I (verb) you…
I love you, I hate you, I fear you, I detest you, I disgust you—with this verb “disgust” the energy reverses toward the speaker—I envy you, I bore you. Okay, we’ve started. We’ve created an emotional tension that the story needs to get going and will seek, finally, to resolve. Let’s add another word: because.
I (love/hate/fear/detest/envy/disgust) you because…
What happens next? How do you extend and explore this situation you have created with just a few words? It’s simple: Ask yourself, What happens next? Use verbs and nouns to move the story forward. Don’t judge yourself or think too much. Give yourself permission to let the words flow. This is story in its essential form: This happens; then that happens.
The only rule is to try to surprise yourself or your reader: Suspense and surprise are essential to the pleasure and fascination of story. Keep the language interesting, full of concrete details:
I hate you because Of that day at the laundromat I hate you because You cut down that maple
Keep extending. If your imagination falters, and you can’t think of any new twists or elements, then stop. Keep the last good line and cross out the rest.
What you are likely to discover with this exercise is that the story—or many stories—are waiting for you to invite them out onto the page of your poem. A trigger sentence can start them off, and your own ingenuity can extend them forward. The emotion, concrete actions, and details you choose may lead you into charged memories, or charged imaginings that contain a “true” story of the I and you.
Gregory Orr is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Selected Books of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). His prose books include A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry (Norton, 2018) and Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, Orr taught there from 1975–2019 and was founder and first director of its MFA Program in Writing.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 141.
It doesn’t hurt to think of poems as a project of ordering disorder—of turning lived confusion into structured coherence by translating the “world” into “words,” then shuffling those words into some cohesion that feels like a poem. One of the simplest and most ancient ordering principles is the list.
Lists are curious things. They might seem a bit uncool as a structuring principle for a poem, but it’s easy enough to give them an edge: All you have to do is make your list a bit challenging to yourself, emotionally and imaginatively. Poems, lyric poems in particular, often get their force by going all the way in one emotional direction, seeking the maximum intensity of expression in a single emotional register rather than a “wise” balance. Think of the strongest lyrics of Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath, for example. In poetry where there’s little risk, there’s little gain.
So why not compose a list poem with the title “A Few Things I Love About Myself”? Or if that’s too fraught—but shouldn’t poems be fraught?—you could tone it down a notch and try the title “A Few Things I Like About Myself.” Or—is this easier or more difficult?—a list generated by the title “A Few Things I Hate (Dislike?) About Myself.” Even better might be to try both: a list poem centered on love/like and another on hate/dislike. The two list poems together might give you a kind of existential or psychological balance by setting one strong utterance against the other.
If one poem is easier to write than the other, then that’s all the more reason to work hard—imagining freely and nonjudgmentally—on the more difficult list. You might follow this rule: Keep each item on the list to two lines, or a single line if possible. If some scene, memory, or detail threatens to expand strongly, why not consider that you are being invited to write a separate poem about it? Treat that item as a spin-off seeking to become a poem of its own—a freebie.
But back to that initial list-poem exercise.
Is there an order to such a list poem? There should be. It can, and probably will, start with random things, with the first things that pop into your head. But who knows? Give yourself permission, and try not to censor yourself too soon or severely. When you’ve got a fairly extensive list, ask yourself: Are these all interesting ideas, with at least some of them unpredictable? Cross out the least interesting lines. The most important step is to ask yourself: Which line is a good one to end on? Try to be both playful and nimble.
List poems can be and usually are rearranged after the initial draft to achieve an effect on the reader. As you go through this crafting process, consider this question: Should my list poem with the strongly charged title “Some Things I Love about Myself” end with something “big” and grand—“I love that I like everyone I meet”—or something that seems minor? Such an ending—“I love that I like ginger snaps”—has an anticlimactic power, a charge of unexpected understatement.
Gregory Orr is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Selected Books of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). His prose books include A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry (Norton, 2018) and Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, Orr taught there from 1975–2019 and was founder and first director of its MFA Program in Writing.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 140.
The American poet Theodore Roethke, like his contemporary Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet, loved sonic richness in poems. This is perhaps most evident in Roethke’s lyrics about the commercial greenhouse his father ran, where the poet worked as a child. In his poem “Root Cellar,” for example, Roethke uses sound to create a dense composition that is the sonic equivalent of the intense odors and textures of that place:
Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime piled against slippery planks.
That we may not have any experience of root cellars doesn’t matter much: The nouns are pretty common, and the sonic intensity born of thumping monosyllables—alive with vowel variety, assonance, and the dance of plosives—carries us along.
Sonic pleasures of various kinds are at the heart of poetry. They derive from the language intensification that defines this curious form of literature. If you’re interested in cultivating such pleasure for your readers—and yourself—here’s an exercise that involves playing with sound while at the same time encouraging inventiveness.
The exercise consists of using eight specific words and following a few rules. Here are the words:
Green
Grab
Brag
Gravel
Bashful
Habit
Fish (used as a verb or a noun, it doesn’t matter)
Hollow
Here are the rules:
Use all eight words in a poem that is ten to twelve lines long.
You can use them in whatever order you wish.
You can’t use more than one of the listed words in each line (i.e. no trying to jam all the leftovers into the last line).
If you find yourself engaged by the echoes and effects that these eight words produce, feel free to use words of your own choosing that continue, expand on, or play off their sounds. To do so will heighten, and possibly alter, the sonic texture of your poem.
If my chosen words have no appeal for you, then draft your own sonic-cluster of random words, then try them with the above rules. It’s a deep and mysterious fact of poetry that we all respond to sounds and sound patterns differently. My ear and tongue take pleasure in those lines of Roethke, but they may be too rich or cloying for another reader. Fifty years of writing poems has taught me this: Find the “music” that you most enjoy, and try to use it in your poems. No one can or should legislate another poet’s sense of sound-pleasure.
Gregory Orr is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Selected Books of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). His prose books include A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry (Norton, 2018) and Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, Orr taught there from 1975–2019 and was founder and first director of its MFA Program in Writing.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 139.
Writers often berate themselves for not working, by which they mean sitting down with a notebook or computer and producing writing that seems presentable to others. Yet much work occurs when we are doing something else, when our focus is on a physical or habitual task—walking the dog, making dinner—and we are less likely to censor the thoughts that pass into our mind.
There are ideas we consciously construct and ideas we are given—“involuntary ideas,” in Freud’s terminology—that emerge of their own free will when our critical faculty steps out of the way. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud depicts these involuntary ideas, which are crucial to free-association and poetic creation, as being policed by guards stationed at the gateway of our conscious mind to reject certain thoughts before they are perceived. He borrows this image from a letter Friedrich Schiller wrote in response to a friend who bemoaned a lack of productivity:
It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in—at the very gateway, as it were…. [W]here there is a creative mind, Reason—so it seems to me—relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass.—You critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.
Reason places watchers at the gateway of the mind to bar entry of “the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds.” To be creative, you must relax your watch upon the gates, let involuntary thoughts and ideas enter freely. Part of the work of an artist is to dream.
The challenge is that the “transient extravagances” that tumble out of us, if judged too soon, can make us feel “ashamed or frightened.” If we reject ideas too quickly, we will not be able to see where they might lead: “Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link,” Schiller wrote. As in dream analysis or writing poetry, following a trail of associations often leads to an unexpected, previously unknown revelation. But inhibitions need to be lifted for that to be possible.
When you free yourself from the goal of constructing meaning, pleasing the watchers at the gateway of the mind with Reason, you leave open the possibility of connections that are made with the participation of more than just your logical faculty, as I discussed in my last Craft Capsule: “To access genuine emotion, for your writing to be alive, it helps to soften your brain and let your impulses spontaneously express themselves.” The next time you feel unproductive, ask yourself whether the problem is “unfruitfulness” or what you have deemed edible.
Nuar Alsadir is the author of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press, 2022) and the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland, and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). She works as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 138.
People often think that to move your reader, you need to find the right idea or story, but the most effective way is to be moved yourself in the process of writing. I learned this lesson in clown school, which I attended as research for my book Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, published last week by Graywolf Press. For a clown, the equivalent of moving your reader is to make your audience laugh. The laughter occurs not because what you say is funny, but because it’s honest. If a performer’s expressions feel honest rather than rehearsed, the audience senses an authentic conversation, connects, and marks that connection with laughter.
In other words, it’s not only the content of what you bring onto the stage that has an effect, but also your relationship to what you bring. That’s because it’s not your material that the audience connects to, but the emotion you feel in relation to that material. For example, when a woman in clown school with me was on stage describing her love of eating chicken feet—particularly the sensation of moving the bones around in her mouth with her tongue—our class didn’t laugh because we thought her description was funny or clever. We laughed because we could sense the enjoyment she felt as she imaginatively enacted the process on stage. We connected viscerally with her pleasure—her genuine emotion—not with the idea of eating chicken feet.
But how does witnessing another person’s emotion provoke emotion in us? When we witness someone experiencing a strong feeling, that feeling is transmitted to us through mirror mechanisms in the brain, including mirror neurons. Mirror neurons allow us to feel the emotions of others inside ourselves as though they were our own. If you see someone cry, for example, your mirror neurons fire, causing the crying sensation to be mirrored within, so that you may even cry yourself. Because the same mirror neurons fire when we witness an emotion or action as when we feel or act ourselves, we are able to experience what happens outside of ourselves as part of our own subjective experience—to feel moved by experiences that are not our own.
That is why the most direct way for others to connect with your writing is by connecting with the emotion you feel in relation to the work. If you genuinely experience emotion within yourself during the writing process, that emotion will be transmitted to readers by way of mirror mechanisms in the brain. They will then experience your feeling within their bodies as though it were their own. “Indeed, a work of art,” writes composer Arnold Schoenberg, “can produce no greater effect than when it transmits the emotions which raged in the creator to the listener, in such a way that they also rage and storm in him.”
Accessing emotions that rage and storm in you is as much a psychoanalytic issue as it is an issue of craft. To lead with your emotions, it is helpful to avoid imitating your work that has been received well in the past, what you think your reader will like, or a voluntary idea. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion similarly advised psychoanalysts not to enter sessions with “memory, desire, [or] understanding.” This precept is repeated often in psychoanalytic circles, although most people drop “understanding” from the list. We are trained from our earliest days to lead with understanding: to have a thesis before writing a paper, an idea before pitching a piece. But what’s known is dead. “When you’re writing,” James Baldwin explains, “you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
To access genuine emotion, for your writing to be alive, it helps to soften your brain and let your impulses spontaneously express themselves. You shouldn’t try to control what comes out, even when it doesn’t align with how you’d like to be perceived. Sometimes our idea of ourselves—who we’d like to be, how we’d like to be perceived by others—can get in the way of becoming who we are.
Nuar Alsadir is the author of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press, 2022) and the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland, and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). She works as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 137.
When writers discover that I am a psychoanalyst, they often ask whether I think psychoanalysis can be helpful to the creative process. It seemed to help Samuel Beckett, who was in analysis with Wilfred Bion, I tell them, and H.D., who was analyzed by Sigmund Freud. But even without taking the plunge and going into an analytic treatment, a writer can benefit from thinking about their work through the lens of psychoanalytic principles. One area in which psychoanalytic thinking can be particularly useful is in understanding the unconscious dynamics that are at play in selecting your imagined reader.
A key concept in psychoanalysis is transference: We transfer expectations and emotions developed through experiences with people from our past onto figures in the present. If your father challenged your ideas in a mocking way when you shared them at dinner, for example, you may expect the instructor of your writing workshop to similarly take you down when you present your work to the group seated around a table. The more important the person from your past was to you—a primary caregiver, for instance—the more likely you will be to anticipate their responses from people you encounter in the present, your imagined reader included.
The figure you address when writing shapes your work through a psychological process literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin terms “addressivity.” In the split second before speaking, we project ourselves into the position of our addressee, imagine how they will take what we are about to say, then adjust our communication to fit those expectations. Addressivity explains why you can feel “on” while talking to one person but awkward, or bored, when talking about the same thing with someone else. This mechanism, performed in milliseconds, leads us to alter spontaneous expressions to account for how we predict our addressee will think and feel.
If your imagined reader is based on a person from your past who was judgmental, you will likely imagine and anticipate a critical response and adjust your writing accordingly. It’s important to note that the adjustments you make will aim to protect against being viewed critically, not to improve your writing. In other words, you risk sacrificing your writing in the interest of preserving your image of self—in your own eyes and in the eyes of your imagined reader, which are essentially the same, as you are projecting yourself into the reader’s position in imagining how they will respond. Thinking about transference can help you disentangle the work from the interpersonal issues in your life. If you don’t give thought to your imagined reader, you are likely to unconsciously adopt a figure based on a real person from your past. I’m always surprised by how often writers unknowingly address imagined readers who are rejecting, critical, or demeaning.
Why not be proactive and consciously choose your addressee instead? There’s a classic poetry writing exercise that taps into the dynamic of addressivity: Write the same poem four times, addressing each draft to a different figure—your lover, your mother, your childhood self, an editor at a well-known mainstream magazine. The exercise gets at how our writing changes according to the figure we conjure as our addressee.
Bakhtin suggests we address a “superaddressee,” a “(third), whose absolutely just understanding is presumed.” For some writers, this ideal reader is an “indefinite strange[r],” in critic Michael Warner’s terms, a figure that allows you to speak into a “social imaginary,” an “environment of strangerhood [that] is the necessary premise of some of our most prized ways of being.” How might your writing change if instead of addressing your harshest critic you imagined your reader as a superaddressee, an indefinite stranger, your most affirming friend?
Nuar Alsadir is the author of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press, 2022) and the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland, and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). She works as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 136.
From 1916 to 1919, Edward Hopper painted the same stretch of rocks on Maine’s Monhegan Island multiple times. He rendered those rocks in charcoal, conte crayon, and oils. He sketched and painted, over and over again. Sometimes he was sloppy; he treated them roughly. He rendered the shapes in impasto, thick and heavy. He revealed them in shades of gray, olive green, and other muddy colors. Other times, he drew them with a delicate touch, barely there. Depicted so variously, the very same rocks might produce different emotional responses in the viewer.
I understand Hopper’s urge to return to the same subject. When something has hooked into my mind or heart, I write it into many drafts. I’d like to write one damn good poem on the subject, then move on. But that’s not how it goes.
I wrote more than one hundred poems about my father as he was struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. His memory started to disappear before anyone realized it. Long after we were in the depths of it, I found a card I’d written to him five years earlier, promising that his brain was fine. But he knew he was susceptible. His mother and brother had died of Alzheimer’s. A cousin. Another brother had been diagnosed. A sister.
For three and a half years, I wrote poems that looked at his slipping memory. Or drafts. Or grabbed images of my father’s room, his clothing, his face. A single line could hold a remarkable moment. And in this way, I collected many sweet little realities and some strange and devastating ones.
Like Hopper with his rocks, I repainted my father’s confusion and my exhaustion so often that they weren’t even “rocks” anymore, but shapes, sounds, and sustained moments. I never wanted tragedy. In my poem “Goodbye to Aggressions and Generous Gestures,” the disease is still everywhere, but the poem meshes the peculiar shifts of thought and action through enjambed lines, sharp breaks, and spaces.
Another poem I wrote on the same subject, “Reason Out,” is as full of holes and confusion as the disease is, but by this time in my writing I wanted the mismatched thoughts in an Alzheimer’s patient’s mind to be reflected in the structure I used.
There are so many ways to write about a topic, and the more you write about it, the deeper you can go. I challenge you to write five poems on the same subject you’ve been circling. Write until you discover what was previously unknown, or articulate something familiar in a new way. Or maybe five poems won’t be enough. Push harder. Write more. Allow yourself to try something unexpected: a form, maybe? Come at the subject from another angle. Change the perspective, the tone, the timing. Allow yourself to write what you hadn’t known you could say. Then work to build a rhythm for your words.
Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections, including Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which received the American Fiction Award in Poetry, and One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 135.
If you are convinced that a creative project isn’t working AND WILL NEVER WORK, you have been set free to do anything at all to it. I learned this when I was actively working as a visual artist. One day I took a fiber portrait I couldn’t fix and—deep breath—I cut it up. It was shocking—and freeing. I rearranged those cut pieces and introduced other fabrics. No longer tied to the palette I’d been using, I was able to incorporate new colors and patterns and see what they’d do. In one instance, the eye of the face I had cut up turned into shapes. It was exciting—a fresh, unexpected composition. From that moment, I never went back to an organized, directed way of creating again. That earlier approach seemed too stagnant, too perfect.
The cut-up method I’d used as a visual artist often informs my writing. To create my poem, “A Partial List of Here and Far,” for example, I pulled apart drafts of two poems that weren’t satisfying to me. I saved the best parts of each and pushed them together to see what they could do when they interacted. As with the fiber portrait, I added new elements—thoughts, lines, and phrases, in the case of the poem—building surprise and complexity into the text.
Let’s look a little more closely: I selected the line “we evaluate our mortgage” from one draft poem; it was not particularly interesting. I thought about losing it, but decided to add in some new material, which would shift its meaning. I like to take something so darn normal, like paying bills, and spin it into strangeness. That’s how I ended up with the lines, “We evaluate our mortgage / to see what we owe / on the trees.” From another draft poem, I gathered the line about the man stirring “a pot and the town below tips sideways.” Such a fascinating image—I didn’t want to lose that! Put close together, the two lines start to tell a far bigger and more mystifying story than either did alone.
One way you might achieve a similar effect in your own poetry is through the cut-up method I’ve described. If you have a few less-than-wonderful drafts, try splicing them together. In a way, it’s like braiding hair: You pull a line from here and a line from there, weaving them together until you have created a more complex structure than what you had to begin with. If your original two drafts are on the same subject, they may fit organically together to form a new poem. But it’s especially interesting if the original poems are very different from each other. You’ll likely have to weave in new thoughts too. For those of you who keep a file of evocative fragments, as I recommended in my first craft capsule, that file would be a good source to consult for a project like this.
It has always been important to me to capture ideas, sights, and sounds in my poetry in unexpected ways. I want to shake loose anything that feels too familiar, to confuse—just slightly—what I know and expect.
Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections, including Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which received the American Fiction Award in Poetry, and One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 134.
Sometimes you have to admit that the most precious part of your poem isn’t working. Yes, it might include some of the more elegant lines you’ve ever written, and yes, it shows your grand talent in alliteration, line breaks, enjambment, or some other poetic technique. But the line just doesn’t fit this particular poem. So what do you do with it?
William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings,” a directive almost every writer seems to know. But I want to make the case for holding your darlings. Over the last few decades, I have maintained a Word document—I call it my “Keeps” document—in which I collect phrases that weren’t right for whatever poem they first appeared in yet strike me as worth rescuing. Into this file I paste my “darlings,” margin to margin across the width and length of the page, smooshing them together with other beauties I couldn’t make work. When I’m drafting a new poem and looking for a remarkable verb or a fresh way to describe an action or emotion, I scan the hundreds of words jammed onto those pages of my “Keeps” document. There’s almost always something surprisingly ideal. And when I find that word or phrase that, by serendipity, suits the new poem I’m crafting, it’s exhilarating.
In a 2010 interview with the Times Union, a New York daily newspaper, poet Chase Twichell explained a poet’s evolving approach to composition this way: “Like many younger poets, you’re kind of self-conscious about the language that you’re using. You find a word that you really love, like ‘flinch,’ and you want it in the line. It may or may not be the perfect word, but you commit to it, and the line takes shape around it. Whereas later it’s the tenor of the experience itself that you’re trying to go for, and language becomes more of a means to get there.”
Like Twichell’s “means to get there,” my “Keeps” document is a pathway to access what I want to say. When I draw from it, I am searching for surprising and powerful language to invigorate the themes and images within the poem. I go shopping in that document: When I want to use a line or phrase, I mark it in red; when I’m sure that line or phrase will stay in a new poem draft, I delete it from the document. At its apex, my “Keeps” document was thirty-two pages; it’s currently only nineteen. It’s an unholy mess, and a treasure trove. This process of returning to my “Keeps” document also allows me to work with a different version of myself, an earlier me that liked a certain description enough to keep it. The later version of me is gleeful to grab a stored phrase or image. Words that at one time may have described a favorite object can now be used to characterize, say, wind or sun—two elements that claim my desert landscape frequently.
I could probably look at any of my poems and find at least one word or phrase that originated in “Keeps.” In my poem “Learn the Silken Rendering,” for example, the words “lucky hum” in the line “The lucky hum of plums and peaches” was a fortunate find I owe to “Keeps.” I found “reason” in my “Keeps” document too, using it to enhance the line “I turn around, talk reason into a microphone to a blank wall.” The entire eighth stanza was composed with language from “Keeps” that turned out to be aligned with the emotional truth of this poem. I like the way my “Keeps” document enables a blending of my earlier self and present self. I’ve often found that I make my most intriguing poems when I reclaim some of my earlier vocabulary or perspective.
Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections, including Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which received the American Fiction Award in Poetry, and One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 133.
Let’s begin with a question: Who do you write for, generally speaking? Take a minute to sit with that and see what you come up with.
All right. Now what kind of answer did you find? Do you write for yourself? Your community? Your family? Do you write for children? Teens? Adults? Do you write for people like you? People unlike you? Do you write for someone specific? Do you write for the world? For as many people as possible? For one person? These are important questions: Even if you only write for yourself, you should always have a reader in mind. And I don’t mean the amorphous phantasm which most workshops refer to as “the reader,” which so often undermines or dismisses the work of marginalized writers: I’m just not sure the reader will make that leap. Will the reader be generous enough to believe this story? I’m not sure the reader can engage meaningfully with this work. While such questions and comments might seem geared toward helping a writer avoid navel-gazing, they often mask an interest in maintaining dominant narratives and perspectives. So when I say, “a reader,” I mean someone you’d really like to read your work, not a figure that embodies white, straight, cis, hetero-patriarchal hegemony disguised as neutrality.
For me, identifying the reader is an essential part of starting any project. I’ll use my books as examples. I wrote my first poetry collection, [WHITE], published by the University of Georgia Press in 2021, for those like my parents and professors: white people between fifty and sixty-five years old who—while decent and caring in many ways—have resisted addressing the insidious, artificial nature of whiteness because of their own defensiveness. When whiteness comes up in discussion, they act as if they’re being accused of something. [WHITE] is meant to provide a new angle of engagement with the problems inherent in leaving whiteness uninterrogated. My second book—The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2023—is a love letter to other queer folks, an exploration and fracture of the various facets of my experience of queerness, queer culture, and sexuality. My third manuscript-in-progress is for me: It’s a delicate, slightly pretentious book with a lot about birds and plants, which delight me more and more as I grow older (predictable, I know).
Because their audiences vary so widely, the books themselves have dramatically different aesthetics, shapes, and lexicons. In a workshop a few years ago, I shared poems that would eventually appear in my second book; another member of the workshop, who had liked my earlier work, vocally disliked these new poems: “I mean, they just don’t sound like the same poet.” This expectation of consistency echoes the demands of social media, where poets—along with other writers and artists—are pressured to treat their work like products of a personal brand. The question tacitly being asked is this: If people can’t depend on you to deliver a predictable stream of work they’re sure to like, then who is going to support you?
This question came to haunt me less, however, while I was drafting [WHITE]. For that book, I spent a great deal of time contemplating mid-twentieth century artist Robert Rauschenberg; many of the poems in the collection are in direct conversation with his work. Rauschenberg’s practices changed wildly across his life and career, creating an incredibly rich and varied oeuvre. Once he felt he’d accomplished what he wanted with an approach to painting or assemblage, he’d move on to whatever new mode of art-making he found most exciting at the time. For Rauschenberg, his audience—his reader—was himself; he worked to find personal delight in whatever he did. Rauschenberg’s experimentalism helped me realize I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with my craft as a writer.
This realization was not easy for a writer like me who had formerly been a literary agent. I had grown used to thinking in terms of the market as opposed to the audience. While I think these are both essential concerns for writers to keep in mind if they want to publish, the problem is mistaking them for the same thing. Your audience is your ideal reader, the person with whom you most want to communicate. That reader should always be considered—especially during the writing process. Your market, on the other hand, is the type of person or organization you think would pay to support your work (whether by buying it, in the case of individuals, or funding it through grants or fellowships, in the case of organizations). Personally, I don’t think the market should be considered until after you’ve written and decided to publish. Targeting your market while writing is an easy way to eliminate all originality or risk-taking in what you make. What’s more important is to ask yourself who you’re trying to reach with your writing, not who you’re trying to sell it to.
The permission I felt I’d received from Rauschenberg to think less about the market and more about my audience, the reader, enabled me to approach my writing differently. Rather than wonder who might follow me on Twitter or buy my work, I could contemplate what formal decisions—what aesthetics—would touch the reader I pictured sitting with each specific piece. I could truly think about how to speak with each readership—whether that meant my parents, past lovers, fellow poets, or my future self. Many writers try to write for everyone and instead write for no one. But if you can write to a specific someone—or to a group of specific someones—the massive void that the world is waiting hungrily for you to fill suddenly becomes a more manageable and intimate space. The page gains a new shape. For me it takes the form of a kitchen table where I’m settling in for good conversation. My manuscripts, different as they are, have allowed me to enter very different kitchens, to sit down at very different tables where I can greet each reader: “Welcome, friend. Nice to meet you.”
Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2023, and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021), selected as the winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 132.
When it comes to finishing our work, I think writers, of all artists, have the hardest time. In large part I think this is because we can so easily edit our writing, on both grand and granular scales. In a Word or Google doc, or on the notes app on our phones, we can poke and prod and fiddle with a piece forever. But this ability to incessantly fuss under the guise of editing can often stop us from actually revising our work to make it better.
It’s useful to remember that the word revision can be broken down into the prefix re—meaning “again”—and the root word vision. To revise, then, requires us to envision, or see, our work again, to find a new perspective. While this idea comes up in pretty much any decent writing workshop, it’s one that has always stuck with me. When I really sit with what it means to see my own work again, I realize that I must find a certain distance from what I’ve made that is difficult to achieve, a struggle I think I share with many other writers.
It’s at this point that I take my cue from our creative siblings: painters. When you look at the oeuvre of almost any major painter, you will find a lot of repetition of imagery and themes across multiple mediums. From quick sketches to more detailed plans for larger works to multiple large works on the same subject or using similar composition, painters quite literally create new visions from existing ideas. They adapt the successful elements of sketches or earlier pieces to draft new works, applying different techniques or perspectives gained during the time that elapsed since they last undertook a subject. Two painters with particularly dramatic approaches to revision come to mind: Edvard Munch, with his painting The Scream, and Claude Monet, with Haystacks.
In the case of Munch, the Norwegian artist created multiple versions of the same composition in different mediums over the course of seventeen years. According to one account, Munch initially composed The Scream in 1893 as a full-color pastel sketch. Later that same year he used tempera and crayon on cardboard to create a second version. Two years later, Munch created another stunning rendition in pastel on cardboard for a friend. He then created between thirty and forty-five lithographs, some of which he printed on paper of various colors and others he completed with watercolors. Finally, in 1910, Munch painted another tempera version, which is believed to be a personal copy he made for himself after selling the 1893 painting. Even after all those versions across all those years, many of us likely only know of one: Munch’s second iteration of The Scream, which is now on display at The National Museum in Oslo, Norway.
Perhaps better known than Munch’s many interpretations of The Scream are Monet’s Haystacks,a series of some thirty different takes on the eponymous subject. As the story goes, Monet observed how the light hit the haystacks in his neighbor’s field in Giverny, France, and he set out to paint two versions of the scene—one when the sun was out and one when the sky was cloudy. However, Monet found that two paintings were not enough to capture all the interesting changes he noticed in the field given the subtle variations in sunlight. Eventually he and his stepdaughter got in the habit of wheeling out (quite literally, in a wheelbarrow) canvases and easels near his neighbor’s field. Monet would observe the weather to figure out which of the many works he was simultaneously painting to continue that day, matching the outdoor lighting with the appropriate canvas. From this repetitive process came one of the world’s most well-known series of impressionist paintings.
Okay, but what can we as writers take away from Munch and Monet? Well, Munch shows us how changes in medium can enrich a composition that is, more or less, the same across versions. Monet shows us how much our perception can change over time, that sustained close observation of a subject can revise how we see it. In my last essay in this series, I advised writers to try a new genre when they find themselves stuck. But Munch and Monet offer ideas for changing things up even within the same genre: What happens if you rewrite a piece using a different tone? What if you change the verb tense? If you’re struggling to write about something emotionally difficult for you, what happens if you attempt to write it as if from a completely different emotional space? What happens if you print out a poem ten times and edit each one by hand rapid-fire, without referencing the others? Or if you keep five drafts going of a poem on the same subject? What happens if you take five minutes a day for a month to write about the same thing?
What I love about painters is that they don’t seem worried about the idea of exhausting their vision. In many ways, they seem to come to each canvas from a place of utter unknowing, even when, as in the case of Monet, what is before them is a field they’ve seen a hundred times. Rather than give up in boredom, they use that creative space to ask new questions of familiar subjects. By revising our own writing from this place of curiosity, of wonder, we can find the right angle to approach a topic and to write about it well—eventually, at least. And even if we don’t today, well, the haystacks will be there again tomorrow. And who knows? The light then could very well make all the difference.
Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2023, and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021), selected as the winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 131.
Many of you may know that the English word gender is derived from the French word genre, meaning “kind” or “sort.” So maybe it follows that, as a nonbinary writer, I find the breaking or bending of genre to be an essential element of my craft. There is power in subverting the expectations that come from identifying as writers of poetry or fiction or nonfiction. By writing in a genre different from our norm, we can improve our craft as writers both in and outside our primary genres.
One of the first times I learned this lesson was as a young poet in an MFA program, where I’d struggled with a project that involved writing poems about my father. Previously, I’d had some success processing my mother’s chronic illness in poetry. But, much like my relationship with my father itself, writing poems about him was complicated; I continually found myself frustrated by how limited each poem felt in addressing this complexity. Then I took a nonfiction seminar with memoirist Patricia Hampl. One of the texts she assigned was a missive Franz Kafka wrote to his father—first published in English as Letter to His Father by Schocken Books in 1966—and something clicked for me when I read it. Now, Kafka’s father was narcissistic and abusive, and my father was neither of those things. But what Kafka’s piece opened up for me was—in some ways quite literally—the space for complexity. It showed me that, in part, what each of the poems about my father lacked was the larger context: Every poem was held in its own little poem space, isolated from the other poems that, together, formed a more complete portrait. In some ways, then, the problem was that the topic literally lacked the space it needed for full exploration—my poet’s canvas was too small.
So for my workshop in Hampl’s class, I decided to combine the poems in the form of a lyric essay. I thoughtfully stitched the poems together, sequencing them so that they would be read with and against one another in a single unified piece rather than as separate poems. Arranging them this way gave each poem context and gave me room to explicitly address the limitations of writing about other people. Ultimately I ended up with something that I found moving, vulnerable, and satisfying. I was even lucky enough to work with editor Mary-Kim Arnold on the essay further to ready it for publication in the Rumpus under the title “Something Small and Heavy.”
By breaking out of my literary milieu, I achieved a couple of things. First, I avoided the tics and habits of language that allowed me to write without being intentional about my process, which in turn saved me from having to engage fully with a difficult subject. By repositioning the poems in a prose context, the poetic maneuvers that permitted me to avoid directly addressing my relationship with my father fell away. I couldn’t necessarily lean on the quick gesture of a line break or the muddied water of metaphor when I hit a part of our relationship I didn’t want to talk about, as I had done in the poems. I simply had to write straight into the complexity of what telling this story meant for me. Second, I entered a space that required me to actively reconsider how my own writing works. The images that provided the foundation for my original poems became, in the context of an essay, suddenly responsible to an entirely new paradigm of narrative and character, which, even if they played a role in the original poems, had to be approached and understood in new ways and from new perspectives. In short: The logic of the piece had changed. This meant that the relationships, the ratios, among the parts of the piece had to be reestablished. Balance in an essay can look very different from balance in a poem.
As a poet, this is what I learned by picking up the tools of an essayist. But maybe you’re coming at this from the perspective of an essayist who could use some of the tools of a fiction writer to solve one of your writing problems. If so, here’s a bonus tip I picked up from that Hampl workshop: Just about any fanciful notion or fictionalized scene or impossible image can come after the word “perhaps” in an essay and still technically be creative nonfiction. In any case, by writing in an unfamiliar genre, we free ourselves from the pressures of being experts or technicians in our primary genre. We become amateurs and, as such, our only possible goal can be to try and see what comes out of that attempt. That’s how we learn new things about our writing, things we can take back with us into the genres where we feel most at home. As amateurs, we are freed, too, from the need for this writing, this thing on the page in front of us, to be “publishable.” When we remove publishing from the equation, we can identify what actually makes a piece work according to our own judgment. What makes me want to continue reading this? How is this communicating my point or topic? Is this language coming together? These questions put us in direct contact with the writing itself—which, frankly, is how we should all be writing in our own genres anyway.
Now you might be saying, “Well, Trevor, that’s easy for you to say. The essay you wrote ended up getting published in the Rumpus!” And that’s a fair knock. However, I would say it is important that thegoal for writing not always be publication. I worked on my essay with no expectation that it would be read by anyone outside of that seminar, much less published. I worked in the essay form because the story about my relationship with my father showed me that the best way to tell it wasn’t a poem or even a series of poems; this story needed to be told in an essay. Ultimately, by writing the story in the form it needed, I ended up with something I was proud of. That someone thought it was worth publishing was a bonus. I truly think I could have worked on those poems for years and still not have been happy with them. It took stepping into a new space, the space of an essay, to shift my perspective enough to reenvision the work in its most successful form.
So if you’re stuck on a piece, try making it something completely different. That problem chapter? Make it a poem. That poem that just can’t find its shape? Make it reportage. That wandering essay? Make it a stage play. Instead of repeatedly hitting your head against the same problems you always encounter in your genre, you’ll find new problems that require you to think in new ways to solve them. And who knows, you might end up with something amazing! Even if you don’t, you’ll likely have freed up at least some part of yourself from whatever was limiting your writing.
Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2023, and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021), selected as the winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 130.
In March of 2020, I got very sick. The doctor I consulted at CityMD here in New York City told me it was “a flu that’s been going around” and sent me home. I could barely get out of bed for two weeks, then developed what was likely pneumonia. I say “likely” because by that point hospitals were so full that there was no way I could get into one or see a doctor. I say “I got sick” because at that point it was difficult to get a diagnosis for what I’m now fairly certain I had: COVID-19.
As I recovered over the next year (and the next; I am still recovering as I write this) I simultaneously felt the desire to write and was utterly overwhelmed by the prospect. I was having difficulty focusing on any one task and felt like the life I was living in quarantine wasn’t worth writing about. Even so, I wanted to write. So I decided to experiment by creating a set of parameters to guide my writing.
I had done something similar with my first book, [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021), which includes a series of poems based on the major arcana cards of the tarot. Because the major arcana comprises twenty-two cards, I wrote twenty-two poems of twenty-two lines each. Those parameters gave me a confined space in which to work and, paradoxically, actually freed me up as a writer: By removing the variable of a poem’s length from my writing process, I found I could better focus on the language I would use to fill those twenty-two lines. It surprised me that something as simple, arbitrary even, as a set number of lines did so much to allow me to write.
I thought a similarly prescriptive process could help me write through the difficult period of my COVID-19 recovery. As my main struggle was coming up with my own language, I thought working with preexisting text seemed like a good option. But I knew I didn’t want to use erasure as a method, given how politically complex it can be, as Solmaz Sharif so thoughtfully articulates in a 2013 essay in the Volta. Instead, I wanted to see if I could keep all the language in a preexisting text on the page, using the language, quite literally, as material. At the time, I’d been enjoying the New York Times Spelling Bee, an anagram-style game in which players are given seven letters from which to make as many English words as they can. So I thought anagramming seemed promising as a poetic process. In this case, I would repurpose every letter in each line of the original poem to create the corresponding line in my own poem of the same length. I explicitly aimed to use the pool of letters in each line to form words that didn’t exist in the original line.
Having established my method, I implemented another parameter: to work with language from poems that wouldn’t be overshadowed by my interaction with them. I knew I didn’t want to anagram the work of a living poet. Manipulating the work of the living can be a brutal gesture, even when well-intentioned, and must be handled with great care. For the most part I just wanted to be playful with language by using this method, so I looked to the canon because, frankly, I think it’s fine to mess with the canon—biased, white supremacist, and classist as it so often is. I decided on Shakespeare’s sonnets because they were easily accessible online, well known in their own right, and, to be honest, there were a lot of them to choose from. So it was decided: I would take a Shakespearan sonnet and—using the first line as the title of my new poem—write my own “anagram sonnets.”
This process helped me in several ways. First, it radically expanded my syntactical and lexical range. It also allowed me to discover, in an organic way, a thematic thread of queer desire, kink, and pagan imagery that unfurled as I went, following my own interests as a writer. And it produced some solid poems. After completing five or so of these anagram sonnets, I could see a full project forming. With encouragement from a trusted writing friend, a lot of research, some amazing fellowship opportunities, a year or two of writing, and a well-timed query letter, these sonnets (all 154 of them) were accepted by Wesleyan University Press in the form of my second full-length poetry collection, The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire, which will be released next year.
At a time when writing can seem so small an act, and speaking up feels so essential, I hope that sharing my truly desperate attempt to find some way (any way) back into writing—some way to say something when it felt impossible—has encouraged you somehow. By breaking down a larger project into a series of smaller projects with distinct, prescriptive parameters, I was able to write again, to cut through the knot forming my writer’s block with the swift blade of process. And even if this particular experiment hadn’t led to a book—if it had only led to me writing those five original sonnets and putting them in a drawer—it proved valuable for enabling me to write again at a time when I was afraid I’d lost the ability to do it at all. And that, too, would have been a success.
Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2023, and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021), selected as the winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 129.
When people ask how long it took me to write my first novel, Country of Origin, I sometimes say fifteen years. Or I share a different truth: Over the past fifteen years I’ve written several different novels about the same characters, and it was the last one that finally worked. I know that many writers have to retire early novels to the proverbial drawer and move on in order to find success. For whatever reason, I could not give up on my characters.
To be honest it probably has something to do with the fact that I am very stubborn. I do not like to accept defeat. Not that I have ever judged any of my fellow writers for abandoning projects that did not become published books, but I didn’t want to accept that fate for my book. Looking back, my ambitions for the novel far exceeded my abilities at the beginning. I had to grow considerably as a writer in order to realize my vision. When I began writing my novel(s), the books I most admired—Zadie Smith’s entire catalog, Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (Nan A. Talese, 2001), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009)—featured multiple perspectives and seamlessly spanned decades. That was how I wanted to write.
I set out to write a multi-generational story about a family of Egyptian immigrants in the United States, investigating the family members’ bifurcated identities. But I pursued the wrong track for a while. This was shortly after 9/11, and at that time I erroneously believed that a book centering on Arab American characters absolutely needed to include this horrific tragedy. I lived in New York City then, and my experiences of this catastrophic event and its aftermath informed the story. I explored the complex feelings about my Arab American identity evoked by 9/11—which compounded with my experience growing up in the shadow of Arab terrorism—but through feedback from others and my own fatigue with the narrative, I found my way to excavating the backstory of the early twenty-first century characters I was creating. I progressively moved back in time, eventually landing in Egypt in the 1950s, before the family in the first version of my novel immigrated to the United States. I decided to let go of the contemporary era entirely—even though it had provided an entry point into the story. The novel would still be about multiple generations of a family, but it would unfold from the 1950s to 1980s.
This was when the writing really started to come alive. But even once I discovered this way into the story, I struggled considerably with finding the right structure, especially with how to balance the multiple perspectives that braid the narrative together. At this point I was juggling six distinct third-person perspectives and for multiple drafts/years I felt I had to give equal page time to each character in order to justify my choice to rotate between perspectives. Every ten to twenty pages I would switch perspectives, which in hindsight ultimately caused the narrative to drag and lose momentum.
I have a slash-and-burn approach to revision, so each time I started again, I truly started over. Once I finally abandoned my attachment to short, rotating chapters, I was able to go deep within my characters. This time when I began again on page one, I let myself linger inside the perspective of a single character, Halah, and shifted her section to first-person perspective while keeping the other POVs in third person. I let myself linger with her until the arc of her storyline reached a natural conclusion—more than one hundred pages into the novel. Ultimately her perspective comprises almost half of the book, and when I shifted into other characters’ viewpoints, it was not about giving them page equity, but because the heart of the narrative moved with them.
So when people ask me how many drafts it took before I finished my novel, or at least struck on the version that was published, I don’t know how to accurately answer. For a long time I avoided interrogating this question. I also played little tricks on myself, like numbering new drafts with decimals (1.2, 2.3) instead of jumping to the next whole number. I suppose that a lot of writers rely on self-subterfuge to persist, when it can be so challenging to write books and get them published. I’m glad that I was able to fool myself into continuing in spite of the obstacles. Now that my novel is out in the world, I can also say that I am happy I remained committed to my characters and that they will have a chance to live in other people’s minds.
Dalia Azim is the author of the novel Country of Origin, forthcoming from Deep Vellum on April 12. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train, Other Voices, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 128.
While sitting at my desk in Texas trying to write about Egypt, I listened to a lot of Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Abdel Halim Hafez, and other old-school Arabic music. Short of boarding a plane and traveling seven thousand miles, or accessing a time machine that could take me back sixty years, this was one of the most effective ways I found to put me into the right mindset to write about Egypt in the 1950s. I would close my eyes, fingers poised over my keyboard, and feel like I was in another time and place.
Perhaps it was the quavering vocal stylings particular to Egyptian singers, the reverberatory lamentations of the flute-like oud, or the beat of the darbuka percussing in the background. Listening, I was transported back to my cousins’ late-night weddings at hotels in Cairo, where bands played and singers sang and belly dancers danced. I returned to the sense of wonder I felt at these parties, recognizing that this was my cultural heritage.
Listening to Egyptian music from the 1950s, I would guess that we are a somber people. Granted, if I advanced a few decades and put on a more contemporary Arabic soundtrack while I wrote, I’d find plenty of spirited pop or techno music, but the solemn artists of the mid-twentieth century captured a mood that better aligned with the emotional landscape of my book. These artists were also chronologically synchronous with the time period I wanted to capture—Egypt at the dawn of the postcolonial period. Abdel Halim Hafez, in particular, is known as an artistic emblem of this revolutionary era who gave voice to Egyptian patriotism and independence at a time when Egypt was wresting itself from British control. In fact, his patriotic songs were revived as part of the battle cry of the populace during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, sixty years after the revolution that originally gave birth to his art.
Umm Kulthum’s music is also considered a national treasure. Her famous song “Wallah Zaman Ya Selahy” was adopted as Egypt’s national anthem from 1960 to 1979 and captures the metaphorical energy of a country battling for its independence. I listened to this song over and over while writing scenes at the beginning of the book in which Cairo is burning in protest of British rule. And then there is Abdel Halim’s epic, airy, orchestral song “Ahwak,” which helped me access the nostalgic, homesick pining experienced by my character Halah—a young Egyptian woman who runs away from home and country—when she first settles in America. There are long passages in the song where the strings and drums almost seem to compete but ultimately collide into an energetic marriage—like the forces battling within Halah.
I credit my father with giving me access to this music, long before platforms like Spotify. He was the DJ of my youth, filling our home with an eclectic, rotating soundtrack of Arabic music from his younger days, as well as classical and opera, a lot of Beatles, and a selection of American folk music. Later he started building a large digital collection of Arabic music, expanding my exposure from the few CDs he had when I was young. When I still actively kept an iTunes music library, a large proportion of it was dedicated to Arabic artists shared with me by my father—music to accompany my writing. Though I listened to these songs over and over again, their lyrics never penetrated my consciousness the way that Beatles’ songs did (play a Beatles album, and you’ll likely be subjected to me singing along with every word of every song). I have a decent facility with slow-paced conversational Egyptian Arabic, but put on an Arabic television show, news broadcast, or album, and the language will wash over me, more atmosphere than anything. Normally I can’t write to music that has lyrics without getting distracted by the language, but for better or worse, Arabic music is obscure enough to my ears not to be distracting.
Rhythm is an essential element of both music and literature. There is a unique kind of alchemy that can be unleashed when listening to the right kind of music while writing. When the chemistry works, and the writing flows in tandem with music that activates the brain, it is a special kind of magic.
Dalia Azim is the author of the novel Country of Origin, forthcoming from Deep Vellum on April 12. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train, Other Voices, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Use our weekly writing prompts—poetry on Tuesdays, fiction on Wednesdays, and creative nonfiction on Thursdays—to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. And sign up for our free newsletter to receive new writing prompts delivered via e-mail every Friday morning.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 127.
There were few things that brought me more joy as a child than when my dad took the slide projector and folding screen out from the closet and set them up in our living room. We had a stack of carousels filled with slides chronologically arranged within large plastic rings. Like silent movies from the past, the slides transported me to places and times that preceded my birth and were not part of my memories. Sitting on the couch in our darkened living room, listening to the loud whir of the projector’s fan as images from the family archive glowed on the screen, an imaginative space opened up inside of me. In my mind I entered the vivid images, wanting to know everything about them—Where is that? Who is that? How are they connected to me?
There were many photos in which different configurations of family members posed in various homes in Cairo belonging to my relatives. There was my maternal grandparents’ aging villa and my paternal grandparents’ familiar and cozy living room, my uncle and aunt’s museum-like apartment densely cluttered with antiques, and the dwellings of other aunts and uncles enlivened by dark wallpapers and gauzy drapes and ornate brass chandeliers. I loved all of the people in the pictures, and I was also besotted with these settings, places that were familiar to me from visits to Egypt, but all somewhat hazy in my memories.
My parents emigrated from Egypt three years before I was born, settling in Canada and eventually in the United States. We traveled to their homeland almost every year, my parents scrupulously saving to fund these trips, especially in the beginning when they were living lean on graduate student salaries. I had my obsessions with photo-objects in Egypt, too. My grandmother kept a collection of black-and-white pictures in a red cookie tin with a white woman’s face on it. The ritual of opening that box and going through the prints was something I looked forward to every year. I slowly studied the familiar images, like savoring a delicious piece of chocolate cake. These photographs were generally from the 1950s and 1960s, decades older than the Kodachrome slides we had in Denver. They pictured a more spacious and elegant version of Cairo than the dense and hectic metropolis that I knew. A strong European influence was evident in my distant relatives’ fashion, a stark contrast to my immediate relatives’ less form-fitting, conservative wardrobes.
I likely inherited my love of photography from my father and his older brother Lotfy. The two of them were always in possession of still cameras and an assortment of ever-advancing movie technologies, from Super 8 to video cameras. I eventually followed their lead, requesting cameras for birthdays and studying photography in high school and college. After graduating from college, I worked for a gallery that specializes in photography and after that took a job in the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA has an extraordinary photography collection and working with it for four years gave me a robust education in the history of the medium. Unlike my colleagues who had an eye and an appetite for acquiring work by contemporary photographers for the museum, my interests lay entirely with historical photographs. At the time I thought of this as a professional failing, but looking back it makes sense why I gravitated toward photographic documents from the past.
Archival photographs were essential to me when writing my debut novel, Country of Origin. I relied on my family’s collections, as well as amazing digital archives one can access online, including the Arab Image Foundation. To imagine myself into the Egypt of my novel, I studied photographs that evoked past versions of Cairo and anchored my imagination in physical facts and details. The villa where the character Halah grows up is directly inspired by my grandparents’ house. My grandmother lived there until I was fifteen, and I spent many long summer days exploring its aging corridors. It felt like something from another time, and indeed it was almost a hundred years old by the time I arrived on the scene. My memories of the house are imprecise, but the pictures remind me of the stucco walls and the intricate wooden lattice work that covered the windows. They help me remember what hung on the walls and the contours of their Louis XVI–style furniture.
Photographs are powerful tools, portals into bygone times. What else can describe the architecture, furniture, decor, food, clothing, and styles of a particular era as well as pictures can? Since the middle of the nineteenth century, we have had these remarkable records of the past. It is difficult for me to imagine writing historical fiction without them. Would I have found my way to writing if I did not first discover my love of photographs? Probably. Have photographs enriched my creative life and helped me imaginatively travel through time? Certainly. My passions for writing and pictures feel very interrelated. I am not sure who I would be as a writer—or as a human—without these means of expression.
Dalia Azim is the author of the novel Country of Origin, forthcoming from Deep Vellum on April 12. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train, Other Voices, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Use our weekly writing prompts—poetry on Tuesdays, fiction on Wednesdays, and creative nonfiction on Thursdays—to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. And sign up for our free newsletter to receive new writing prompts delivered via e-mail every Friday morning.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 126.
After years of struggling to get published through New York City agents and editors, I was chuffed to ultimately break into publishing via Texas channels. I have lived in Austin for fifteen years and wrote most of my debut novel, Country of Origin, here. But before I moved to Texas, I lived for a period in Brooklyn, and like a lot of people who have lived there, I maintained a bias toward New York as the pinnacle of American culture. I thought I needed the city to get my novel published. It turns out that I did not.
This is ultimately a story about cultivating community, which is the path that most writers must take in order to find success. Unfortunately, publishing opportunities do not usually come knocking; we must go out and find them. When I first moved to Texas, I was surprised by how welcoming the literary community was in Austin. Socializing with other writers in New York was often an exercise in maintaining my confidence in the face of overwhelming self-doubt and insecurity. When writers at these events asked me about my books, and I shared that I hadn’t published any yet, I sensed their attention wavering to other people in the room—presumably writers who had bona fide credentials. Perhaps some (all?) of this was in my head, for we writers are nothing if not imaginative and prone to projection.
My husband’s acceptance into the MFA program at the Michener Center for Writers initially brought us to Texas. We naturally met a lot of writers through his program, but it was important to me to establish my own group of writer friends outside of his cohort. Luckily, I didn’t have to try very hard. At every reading or book event it seemed I met someone new, and soon I had a crew of writers to call my own. A lot of my early memories of being in Texas involve engaging in spirited dialogues about books and writing at backyard parties, where no one seemed to care whether I had published a book of my own or not.
Soon I was surprised to receive invitations to interview authors like Cristina García, Héctor Tobar, Brit Bennett, and others for the Texas Book Festival. The opportunity to be in conversation with writers I admired prompted a mind-shift, helping me to see myself as a “real” member of the writing community. Meanwhile I continued to feel like a failure by New York standards. I’d managed to find an agent who was based there, but year after year she told me that various revisions of my novel were not publication-ready. So I continued to revise and revise. I’m not one of those writers who chafes at suggestions for revision; in fact, one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I am, perhaps, too open to criticism and can easily lose sight of my own vision in the process. During the seven years I worked with my agent, this is precisely what happened: I lost my way. The problem was, my heart wasn’t always in these revisions, and this lack of emotional commitment came through on the page.
I typically experienced starry-eyed euphoria whenever I completed a manuscript draft, thinking it was brilliant and that my agent would love it, only to turn around and hate everything about it a few months later and hit a wall with my agent again and again. But when I discovered the structure that finally worked for the book, I thought, This is it. In early 2019 I sent off the latest draft to my agent, feeling uniquely confident about my success. After a long few weeks she wrote back and essentially said that the book was going nowhere, and she thought it might be time for me to put it aside.
I was heartbroken. But this time when I looked back at the pages I’d sent her, I still loved them and believed in their power. I also had the assurance of writer friends whom I greatly admire, who were always more than nice about my book and inspired me to keep going. If I didn’t have writer friends, I probably would have given up a long time ago. Then something miraculous happened: Jill Meyers, a writer from the Austin community who founded an independent press in 2012, inquired about publishing my novel. She had been an outspoken fan of my writing for years, and her words of admiration and encouragement had always been the perfect antidote whenever I received discouraging news from my agent. I knew that if she thought my book was great, then it had to be worthy of publication.
When you are going through the process of trying to get published, people will tell you that all you need is to find someone who shares your vision. I did not think I would find that person so close to home. In the end, finding my people in Austin wasn’t only necessary for my creative life and mental health, it was also a means to making my dreams come true. It makes me anxious to think, What if I hadn’t connected with Jill? But I did, and she changed my life, and there is no predicting how our books will ultimately find their way into the world.
Dalia Azim is the author of the novel Country of Origin, forthcoming from Deep Vellum on April 12. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train, Other Voices, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 125.
Who among us has not wandered into a Delphic grotto, or a haunted mansion full of portraits of veiled ladies, or a be-stickered dive bar bathroom, and thought: If only these walls could talk?!
The presumption is that these places—the grotto, the mansion, the bathroom—have served as the container for a parade of human dramas. Love affairs, prophecies, betrayals, murders have all transpired within them. And if these settings could speak, then we would be delighted and entertained.
It is generally agreed, though, that walls cannot speak. At most the settings for our human dramas can share only clues of what has come before: a wisp of incense, a bloodied knife, a sticker for a middling indie-folk band.
Alas, we think, all these potentially thrilling tales have evaporated in the ceaseless march of time!
Or have they?
When writing fiction, we could, if we wanted, give literal voice to stones or bricks or plaster—but we can also think of the “walls” of a story more broadly. Setting is often reduced to a simplistic notion of physical place and date—say a pirate ship in the Caribbean in 1675—when, in fact, the container for a story can be understood in more nuanced terms. Setting can be an economic context. It can be a cultural context as well—and an attendant moral code. Setting can be a social class, as well as a political reality. Setting can be demographics and it can be the density of human bodies packed into a pirate ship.
Setting, to put this all another way, can be people.
And people, as we all know, tell stories.
Which is to say: When a group of people embody a time and place, they can speak on behalf of setting. A story’s context—its walls, in a figurative sense—can also be its point of view. We see this famously in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” The tale of Miss Emily and her ill-fated love interest is narrated by a first-person voice that speaks for the collective members of a small Southern town around the turn of the twentieth century. The town has specific beliefs, norms, and histories that it brings to its fixation on Miss Emily’s choices. This perspective is not omniscient—in fact, it is through the limitations of this scope that we come to understand the preoccupations and biases of the setting itself. These limitations generate narrative energy. Setting does the telling of a story—and is also the story itself.
A contemporary example of setting as point of view can be observed in Brit Bennett’s The Mothers (Riverhead Books, 2016). In Bennett’s novel, every chapter begins with a passage narrated by a group of gossipy elder church women—The Mothers—who all worship at Upper Room Chapel. The women represent a social milieu, a specific morality, an overall subjectivity connected to a Christian church located within a Black community in contemporary San Diego County. They are the voice of setting, therefore, and speak for the context that propels the novel’s primary fixations:
When we first heard, we thought it might be that type of secret, although, we have to admit, it had felt different. Tasted different too. All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn’t. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the spring Nadia Turner got knocked up by the pastor’s son and went to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it.
Setting is more than a backdrop in Bennett’s novel. Setting listens. Setting sees. Setting—as a collective consciousness—can share its perception of events, a perception shaped by a specific value system. Setting speaks and causes things to happen because setting is people and people are full of contradictions, biases, agendas.
This is all great news for fiction writers—though it also reminds us that, if walls could truly talk, we might not always like what they have to say.
Allegra Hyde’s first novel, Eleutheria, was published by Vintage on March 8. Her debut short story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. Born in New Hampshire, she lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 124.
Let’s face the facts: Setting is undercelebrated compared to its flashier craft cousins. This is especially true when it comes to discussing narrative engines. While we talk about character-driven fiction, concept-driven fiction, and even voice-driven fiction, rarely do we discuss setting-driven fiction. Setting is often an afterthought. A touch of color. A splash of imagery as toothless as a stage set—or worse: intangible as air.
When setting does receive attention in discussions of narrative momentum, typically it is within the framework of “man versus nature”—one of several traditional sources of conflict in literature. A person is pitted against forces of the wilderness: a grizzly bear, an icy river, a very tall mountain. The person must fight or succumb. The possibility of death looms, and this generates conflict, choices, consequences—which drives plot. Canonical examples include Herman Melville’s Moby Dick andErnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Cool…but isn’t this construct a bit antiquated and limiting? Perhaps even an expression of the subjugation-minded colonial heteropatriarchy? Of an outsized fear of the wild? Other settings can provoke just as much conflict and danger in our everyday lives. Characters need not wander mountain forests to be antagonized by their surroundings. A Panera Bread, or a maternity ward, or a corner office in a high-rise skyscraper can impose challenges, which in turn can generate conflicts, choices, and consequences for our fictional characters.
But here’s the other thing: What if setting need not be antagonistic to be narratively propulsive? What if we expanded beyond “versus” to include other kinds of relationships to a setting—relationships that perhaps involve care and maintenance, or even affection?
An example of such a relationship can be seen in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. In this novel, the protagonist, Keiko Furukura, works at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart. She is diligently—even religiously—committed to caring for and maintaining the store’s atmosphere of consistency. Here’s an except (translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori):
As I arrange the display of newly delivered rice balls, my body picks up information from the multitude of sounds around the store. At this time of day, rice balls, sandwiches, and salads are what sell best. Another part-timer, Sugawara, is over at the other side of the store checking off items with a handheld scanner. I continue laying out the pristine, machine-made food neatly on the shelves of the cold display: in the middle I place two rows of the new flavor, spicy cod roe with cream cheese, alongside two rows of the store’s best-selling flavor, tuna mayonnaise, and then I line the less popular dry bonito shavings in soy sauce flavor next to those. Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.
At this Smile Mart, the drinks and snacks never run out because Keiko replaces them. She is reacting to her setting—forever in flux due to consumer purchases and the passage of time—and her choices have consequences, especially as her commitment to the store pushes her further from cultural norms around age and gender. This creates conflict.
Care for a setting—be it for a convenience store or a grove of saguaro cacti—can generate conflict, as much as a battle with these places. This seems significant for fiction writers looking to create dynamic, complex narratives. It also seems significant for those interested in changing our relationship to our environments, natural and otherwise. If a tree falls in the forest, maybe we won’t hear it—we assume setting has no impact upon us. Or we do hear the tree and we run out of its way, screaming—antagonized. Or maybe, just maybe, we hurry toward the tree to see if we can help. Maybe we find a bird nest knocked to the ground—a nest we choose to place carefully, consequentially, in the branches of a yet upright tree.
Allegra Hyde’s first novel, Eleutheria, is forthcoming from Vintage on March 8. Her debut short story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. Born in New Hampshire, she lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
Use our weekly writing prompts—poetry on Tuesdays, fiction on Wednesdays, and creative nonfiction on Thursdays—to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. And sign up for our free newsletter to receive new writing prompts delivered via e-mail every Friday morning.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 123.
When I (ill-advisedly) joined Twitter in 2016, I often scrolled through an account dedicated to images of nonliving things that appeared to have a face. A smiling banana slice, for instance. Or a frowning toaster. Or a surprised-looking cottage. None of these things were intentionally designed to look like a face, but once a viewer like me registered a pair of eyes and a mouth, the face was impossible to unsee.
I perused these images to amuse myself, but actual scientists have studied this face-perceiving phenomenon. Called face pareidolia, it is a product of evolution. We see faces where faces are none because our brains constantly scan for people—specifically for the presence of friends or foes. To search for people—then plumb their expressions for meaning—is an inherently human impulse.
It is also a literary one. Folklore and mythology across cultures are full of surreal faces. Volcanoes, trees, lightning storms are given consciousnesses, if not outright god-formed representation. Take Scylla and Charybdis, who appear in TheOdyssey as a multi-headed cave dweller and toothy whirlpool, respectively. They are characters in the story—monsters who give Odysseus a hard time—but they also embody a real place: the Strait of Messina, which separates Italy and Sicily. This channel was once deadly for sailors because of its rocks and whirlpools. Applying faces to the waterway helps depict the experience of moving through a dangerous landscape.
Rendering the Strait of Messina into characters also serves the overall narrative. If Odysseus had merely struggled with ocean currents and rocky cliffs, that would not have been nearly as exciting as seeing him face a pair of characters with their own goals, stakes, and personal histories. A setting with a face has something to gain or lose; it can have an emotional reaction to changing circumstances. Readers can better recognize the dynamic relationships between people and the world they move through. After all, we affect our environments, just as they affect us. There is no way to truly leave no trace on our world, nor can we remain uninfluenced by our surroundings. Thus, when Scylla howls after being tricked by Odysseus, we register her rage as a part of this truth.
For contemporary fiction writers—even those not working in overtly magical or fantastical modes—I’d argue that there is much to be gained from embracing the human impulse to see faces where faces are not really there. A recent novel that demonstrates such narrative benefits is Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021). In the universe of the novel, synthetic water—or WAT-R—has become ubiquitous in California. As this artificial substance leaks into the landscape, its ecological and meteorological permutations are often described in personified terms that give aspects of the setting an animate and sinister quality. Take this description of clouds formed from evaporated WAT-R: “They remain still and quietly watching, waiting for their moment to approach, waiting for their moment to show what they really are.” Setting, in this instance, is given a human-like motive, which heightens the drama of the overall description.
Kleeman breaths humanness into other descriptions of setting as well. A starlet’s mansion is “half-living, multi-lunged and plushly organed, steeped in electricity and suspended in a continual sigh.” And though these household functions are “too massive, too slow, for any real creature,” a reader registers the animacy and near-consciousness of the home. It seems to breathe. To think. To live. This is a setting that could, perhaps, feel. There are stakes around the mansion’s existence, so when something happens—say, the house burns down—the sense of damage reverberates outward, not just for what was lost, but for who. And in the long hallucination that is lived human reality, whether there was ever actually a character there, a person—a face—is less important than how this lens helps us navigate the world and tell the stories we need to tell to survive.
Allegra Hyde’s first novel, Eleutheria, is forthcoming from Vintage on March 8. Her debut short story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. Born in New Hampshire, she lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
Use our weekly writing prompts—poetry on Tuesdays, fiction on Wednesdays, and creative nonfiction on Thursdays—to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. And sign up for our free newsletter to receive new writing prompts delivered via e-mail every Friday morning.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 122.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m obsessed with terrariums. Maybe this couldn’t be helped. As a child in rural New Hampshire, there wasn’t much to do besides roam the woods or, god forbid, read. So I made terrariums: I collected soil, moss, saplings, and bits of rotting logs during my woodland wanderings, then arranged these ingredients as tiny landscapes in glass jars. Once I was satisfied with my creations, I sealed each container with plastic wrap and placed them on windowsills in my bedroom. I waited, watched. As small, isolated universes, the terrariums collected condensation, sprinkled moisture in miniature rainstorms. Vegetation grew, died, and decomposed, fertilizing new growth. Sometimes moths or mosquitoes hatched, flitted around, expired. The terrariums were in constant motion. Every element impacted every other element. Terrariums compressed and made visible the ecosystem mechanics beyond my bedroom walls.
For young Allegra, this was thrilling.
Was my interest in inventing tiny worlds a sign of burgeoning megalomania? Perhaps. But it is also possible that by making terrariums, I was preparing to be a writer. Because what are we doing when writing fiction, if not gathering ingredients, putting them together into small new worlds, and seeing what happens?
When crafting fiction these days—be it a story or a novel—I try to think in terrarium terms. Ecological principles, I have found, also make great writing advice. By considering the laws of nature and applying them to our stories, we can render fictional worlds that are multidimensional yet singular, structurally sound yet ever in flux. Worlds like Macondo in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a town intertwined with the legacy of a family. Or Guadeloupe in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond, an island inextricable from the experiences of the narrator, Telumee. Or the house in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, a singular structure that reverberates with the warp and weft of German history while also shaping the lives of those it shelters.
What are some of these ecological principles, you ask?
Quoting from Ecology—a textbook authored by Michael L. Cain, William D. Bowman, and Sally D. Hacker—let’s start with: “You can never just do one thing.” Or as the editors elaborate in italics: “Events in nature are connected, and what affects one organism or place can affect others as well.” Likewise, the elements of a fictional world are interconnected, and any action can have multiple implications. A character might eat a bowl of cereal because he is hungry—an event of mild interest—but what if that cereal is the last food item in a house full of twelve ravenous sisters? There’s a story I’d like to keep reading.
Or take another maxim: “Everything goes somewhere.” The idea here is that “There is no ‘away’ into which waste materials disappear.” In the context of fiction this means that any action—such as eating the last of the cereal, escaping into the woods, hiding for years in a cave—needs to have some consequence. Consequences, after all, are what help create a sense causality: the key to establishing plot.
Then there are maxims like “Evolution matters,” “Space matters,” “Time matters”—which are all pretty self-explanatory. In fiction these factors matter too. Evolution is at the heart of human drama. A person changes, or a situation does, or a place, and this prompts a reaction—which in turn generates story. “Evolution is an ongoing process because organisms continually face new challenges,” write our ecological experts, which speaks to the narrative benefits of giving characters the obstacles they would least like to face. And on the topic of time—that backbone of narrative—science reminds us, rather lyrically: “When we look at the world as we know it, it is easy to forget how past events may have affected our present, and how our present actions may affect the future.”
As writers, let us not forget. In the “real world” we human creatures are interconnected, interdependent, ever reacting and causing reactions. To begin to capture this in the space of fiction is not only to mimic the realities of our existence, it is to generate a miniature world that, if all goes well, can be placed on a proverbial windowsill to be learned from and admired.
Allegra Hyde’s first novel, Eleutheria, is forthcoming from Vintage on March 8. Her debut short story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. Born in New Hampshire, she lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 119.
Though Agnes Kirkkendoll appears last in my forthcoming triptych novel, Nobody’s Magic, she was my first character, and let me say this with my whole chest, I fucking hated her in the beginning. She was and is everything I am most afraid of: my worst fleeting thoughts, my most bizarre impulses, my deepest fears about what I might have become without friends or poetry or therapy. When I read her biographical info in reviews, I cringe. She’s too close to home with her designer degrees and her deep-rooted traumas. I wanted to erase every sentence I wrote about her in my early drafts. In a proto-version of her section of the novel, I sent her off in a car with a stranger to parts unknown. I wanted her gone. But as I drafted and redrafted, I slowly came to feel something like a grudging admiration, and after a while—dare I say it?—love. When Agnes gets into confrontations, the petty person in me screams, “Yes! Clear that bitch!” I still find myself torn between rooting for her and being ashamed of the bareness of her life.
Agnes isn’t me, nor vice versa. I’ve never destroyed anyone else’s property, unless you count shattering a phone, borrowed from my sister, in a fit of frustration over a cheating boyfriend. Unlike Agnes, I’m wary of getting in cars with strangers and I’ve never gone to a tanning salon. Still, her audacity thrills me. In spite of her basement-level self-esteem and all the ways she has allowed people to exploit her (especially Colin and the university at which she’s employed), Agnes believes deeply in her own capabilities and her intrinsic value (even if she doesn’t know exactly where that value lies). More important, she believes in retribution. When she gets the chance to pay someone back in spades, she takes it. As both her creator and a reader, I enjoyed fantasizing about embodying her rage. It’s nice to think about a Black woman, and particularly a Black woman with albinism, seeking her own form of justice after being fed up with other people’s bullshit. How often does that get to happen in real life without dire consequences? How often does that happen and the character survives, free to live another day?
So yeah, I hate Agnes, but over time she evolved into a character I still want to win in the end. Even now, I imagine her in another place, living a better life than the lives she’s survived thus far, and maybe even a better one than what she finds herself in by the end of the novel. For all her imperfections, I want there to be a place for Agnes somewhere because she deserves it. She deserves to be fucked up and annoying and still have a chance to make good on her untapped potential.
I know, I know, literature is rife with unlikable heroes, women with mommy issues, and siblings who hate each other. And there’s plenty about women who choose terrible men. All of this is vintage Agnes. But none of this consistently happens to people with albinism. In literature and popular culture, we’re either martyrs or villains with pitiable back stories, and I wanted to make a character who is sometimes good and sometimes bad, yet neither comically nor tragically so. She’s just misguided, self-absorbed, and wrong. I wanted a character I could relate to even when I didn’t want to, because in many ways, that’s what coming into myself as a person with albinism has been about. I know I am not the tragedy™ that complete strangers often view me as, but it took me some time to understand I am also not the paradigm of underdog perfection. I am not someone who is always performing goodness in the face of evil, someone everyone wants to root for because I’m always doing the right thing.
In short, I’m not a total victim. Neither is Agnes nor any other person with albinism. We’ve done our shit too. Sometimes we’re exceptional. Sometimes, we’re just regular and trifling. So perhaps what I wanted—and still want—in creating Agnes wasn’t an unlikeable hero, but someone a reader finds herself liking because she’s not that different from the rest of us. That, for me, is what diversity and inclusion can be: hearing a story and thinking, “Damn, never been there or done that. And I can’t even say I agree with it. But I understand.”
Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Catapult, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Her first novel, Nobody’s Magic, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on February 8.
Something magical happens when a poet turns their attention to prose. Sentences take on the lyric quality of the line, and paragraphs assume the compact perfection of stanzas. Multiple truths are given equal weight, and every single word is intentional.
Such is the case with Clint Smith’s second book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, an ambitious volume published in June by Little, Brown about the ways America remembers its history of slavery. Each chapter is devoted to a location or landmark, and while some cover familiar sites like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, others feature lesser-known places, like Blandford Church and Cemetery, which houses one of the largest mass interments of Confederate soldiers in the U.S. South. Stories about Smith’s travels and his conversations with employees and visitors slip seamlessly into history and historiography—all of which are knit together with the beauty of his magnetic prose.
“You’ll probably hear my children in the background,” says Smith, who lives in Maryland with his wife and two kids, as we sit down for a Zoom interview near the end of March. My first question is about his new book’s inception, and I quickly learn that it began in another genre. Smith discovered his love of writing in 2008 during a visit to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a haven for Black and Brown poets located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Back then he was a self-described “disillusioned English major struggling to connect with the canon,” but after one night at the Nuyorican, Smith was hooked. He would go on to an illustrious career as a poet, winning the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review in 2017 and the National Poetry Slam championship in 2014 with the Beltway Poetry Slam team. He would also publish Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), a prize-winning collection exploring themes of race, genealogy, and coming-of-age.
Less than a year later, after Smith’s hometown, New Orleans, removed a statue of Robert E. Lee in the spring of 2017, Smith began planning a second collection in which each poem would discuss a Confederate monument in the city. “At first it was just one poem, because poetry is how I entered my life as a writer,” he says. Smith envisioned a book that grappled with the question, What did it mean to grow up in a place in which there were more homages to enslavers than to enslaved people? The idea most certainly could have worked, but soon he felt he needed more space, so he decided to try his hand with an essay, penning “An Intimate History of America”—about visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture with his parents and grandparents—for the Paris Review Daily in late 2017. In an instant a would-be poetry book turned to prose, and the rest is—quite literally—history.
Over time the project’s geographical scope changed to include other U.S. cities and Gorée Island, a major slave-trading post off the coast of modern-day Senegal. Still, the book’s concept wasn’t fully realized until Smith visited Monticello in 2018, shortly after learning about a newly added Sally Hemings tour. On the day of his planned visit, the Hemings slots were full, so he opted for a tour that dealt specifically with Jefferson’s relationship with slavery. Afterward he approached fellow visitors to hear their thoughts. His aha moment came during a conversation with Donna and Grace, two white women whose reactions to learning the truth about Jefferson are included in the Monticello chapter. “Reporting isn’t a natural thing for me,” says Smith, who recently became a staff writer at the Atlantic but is still surprised when people call him a journalist. “Walking up to strangers and asking them questions runs counter to my ethos, but I did it when I was at Monticello. And I was like, Oh, okay. This is what this book needs to be.” As the women talked, Smith realized he wanted How the Word Is Passed to contain more than self-meditation and personal reflection. “It had to be about the multiplicity of voices…how we all converge in these places and experience them in different ways depending on who we are.”
During our interview I got to witness firsthand the attentive nature with which Smith approaches difficult conversations about slavery, racism, and systemic carceral violence. But don’t be fooled: Though he maintains a down-to-earth air, Smith holds an impressive résumé and has enjoyed a wildly successful writing career, one that has seen viral TED Talks, a formidable social media following (even his most casual tweets, like a recent one about air fryers, garner thousands of likes), and a doctorate in education from Harvard University. A simple Google search speaks to the breadth and depth of his accolades: links to old poetry slam videos are listed alongside New Yorker essays about racism in soccer, a sport he played from childhood to his undergraduate days at Davidson College. And his awards are just as prestigious as his publications. Counting Descent won the 2017 poetry award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and in 2017 was chosen as the One Book One New Orleans citywide read. [Smith is also a contributing editor of this magazine.]
Yet, in the midst of all this, his deep commitment to education remains. Over the past decade, he has taught in high schools, jails, and prisons and currently teaches writing and literature in the D.C. Central Detention Facility. Smith is an ambidextrous scholar; his intellectual influences range from the work of noted historian Walter Johnson to the 2011 execution of Troy Davis, whose conviction for the 1989 murder of a police officer was based on dubious witness testimony and shoddy evidence. Indeed, Clint Smith wears many hats—poet, incarceration scholar, educator, father—all of which come to bear on the extensive research, incisive social critiques, and careful consideration of multiple perspectives that compose How the Word Is Passed.
Perhaps the hallmark of Smith’s capacity for inclusivity—not to mention journalistic objectivity—lies in the new book’s fourth chapter, which chronicles his trip to Blandford Cemetery’s Memorial Day celebration, hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). The event included a color guard led by men in battle regalia, an acoustic rendition of the Confederacy’s de facto national anthem “Dixie,” and a speech by Paul C. Gramling Jr., SCV’s commander in chief at the time. Accompanied by a white friend, Smith stood apart from the attendants, but once the ceremony was over, he approached several individuals for interviews. When I confessed that I would have been unable to do a similar thing, Smith spoke candidly about his discomfort but explained the importance of hearing the attendees speak. “It was really helpful to see what the contemporary manifestation of the ‘Lost Cause’ looks like and to really understand that lineage and loyalty take precedence over evidence,” he says. “I couldn’t let my own issues with every inaccuracy they may have propagated get in the way of them telling me how they felt.”
Still, How the Word Is Passed pulls no punches when dismantling the specious rhetoric of Confederate sympathizers. When Gramling, during his speech, attributes Memorial Day’s inception to a group of white Mississippi women in 1866, Smith follows up by tracing the holiday’s history to newly freed Black South Carolinians commemorating Union soldiers one year before. When an attendee mentions Richard Poplar, a Black man he claims willingly fought for the Confederacy, Smith produces historical evidence suggesting that Poplar was more likely a cook for the soldiers, since the Confederate Army prohibited Black men from enlisting for essentially the entire war.
Earlier in the same chapter there was a similar moment I was eager to discuss with Smith. It was a conversation he had with a visitor center employee after visiting a site across from the cemetery: Blandford Church, its commissioned Tiffany glass windows their own monument to the Confederate States of America. It was Smith’s visit to the church that would lead him to attend the Memorial Day event. When he discovers a flyer for it on a counter at the visitor center, the employee apologizes profusely, insisting she was bothered by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who, according to her, take Southern pride too far. “I don’t think that Robert E. Lee would have been pleased with all this deitizing. He was a very humble person,” she insists. But again, Smith quickly parses fantasy from fact, writing that, while it was true Lee was hesitant to erect postwar memorials, it was not because he imagined an egalitarian society. Lee was a brutal enslaver who separated families and made examples of individuals who escaped. Smith includes the account of one such person, who describes how he was captured, beaten, and, in an act of excessive depravity, had his wounds doused with brine.
During our conversation I describe how, while reading the passage, I found myself refusing to think about the beating for fear that, if I focused on it too intently, I might enter a dangerous emotional space. I asked Smith if, during any of his trips, there were moments when he felt similarly. He points immediately to two places he discusses in detail in the book: the Field of Angels and Angola prison.
As Smith writes, the Field of Angels is particularly haunting. Located approximately fifty miles west of New Orleans on the Whitney Plantation, the Field of Angels is a courtyard filled with granite plaques listing the names of dead enslaved children. In its center sits the statue of an angel cradling one of the deceased. In the book, Smith says that, at the time of his visit, he was the father of a toddler, with another child on the way, which made standing in the Field of Angels undeniably emotional. He elaborates on the experience during our interview, explaining how, as a tour guide discussed rates of infanticide, he quickly became overwhelmed. “This is something we’ve heard from folks like Toni Morrison, and you hear it in the historiography…[but] that that would even cross someone’s mind is so—I don’t even have words for it,” he sighs. “I tried to lean into it emotionally as a writer, even if in the moment I was experiencing an emotional paralysis.”
Smith’s visit to Louisiana State Penitentiary—also known as Angola—is another experience that still haunts him. Though How the Word Is Passed recounts Smith’s trip to the facility in harrowing detail, the statistical evidence it provides tells its own story. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the country. Seventy-one percent of its inmates are serving life sentences, and 75 percent of them are Black. At the time of Smith’s visit there were sixty-nine people on death row, and incarcerated workers in Angola’s massive fields earned seven cents an hour. Still, Smith says the execution chamber was the most frightening space, and during our conversation, he explains why: “Physically being in that room and experiencing the stillness, and just reflecting on the fact that we do this on purpose, and very, very intentionally…is something that will remain with me for the rest of my life.”
When I tell him that reading about Angola made me, a fellow Louisianan, feel ashamed, Smith is careful to point out that the blame is not regionally specific. He notes that the prison, which was nicknamed after the plantation on which it now stands and the people who were enslaved there, is more than a local problem. It is an American problem. Experts’ comparisons of Louisiana’s incarcerated population to those of authoritarian regimes like China and Iran single out the state in ways that make it seem like a carceral anomaly instead of a national norm. And according to Smith, that is not the full story. “What are the specific manifestations of white supremacy and anti-Blackness in the U.S. that allow this plantation to be turned into a prison?” he asks me. “What are the failures of our collective memory and understanding of enslavement that have allowed the afterlife of slavery to be so present in the landscape of that space?”
These are questions How the Word Is Passed answers with tact and clarity—in the chapters mentioned as well as in others, like the one about Gorée Island, where captured Africans embarked on the Middle Passage, and New York City, where Smith reveals how banking companies, like what is now known as JPMorgan Chase, accepted enslaved people as collateral and seized them when plantation owners defaulted on loans. The book ends with an account of Smith’s own family history with slavery and Jim Crow segregation and his coming to understand the ways the two institutions have shaped both his personal and ancestral histories.
Smith is, in fact, always aware of his subjectivity as both the descendant of working-class Black Southerners and a Harvard-educated PhD. But these multiple identities are also highly mutualistic. He says that his dissertation, which explores the relationship between education and incarceration, was heavily influenced by growing up in a city with the reputation as the murder capital of the United States. “That language was so central to my childhood,” he tells me. “Thinking about criminality and incarceration very much shaped the scholarly decisions that I made. [It was] the white noise of my coming-of-age.”
Each chapter of How the Word Is Passed illustrates how, for better or worse, institutions shape how we see ourselves individually and collectively, how we think about the world around us, and how we remember the past. It also calls for a national reckoning with the amnesia that makes places like the ones discussed in the book so vitally important—and, in the case of sites like Blandford Church and Cemetery, deeply problematic.
As our conversation drew to a close, we returned to the institution of slavery, whose importance remains the focus of the book from the first page to the last. Perhaps one of the most eloquent passages in How the Word Is Passed is about Frederick Douglass and how his exceptionalism might create a skewed sense of how difficult it was to escape bondage. “No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass,” writes Smith. “There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways…. [Their] stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.” During our call we laugh about the sheer scope of Douglass’s genius; there was scarcely a contemporary about whom Douglass did not write, sometimes with scathing commentary included in the book because, according to Smith, Douglass often said things better than Smith felt he ever could. “He is literally one of the best writers this country has ever had. On a literary level, like on the level of the sentence,” says Smith, smiling. “There are not a lot of human beings like Frederick Douglass that ever exist in this world.” Yet he is quick to point out that Douglass’s story is not the definitive one about enslavement. In order to get a larger sense of the institution, “you have to look at folks who were illiterate,” he says. “You have to look at folks who lived in the Deep South. You have to look at folks whose sense of personhood was made clear in the moments where they hid behind a tree to kiss the person they loved, or cooked a meal for their children after they’d been in the fields all day. The small ways that people every day tried to carve out a space for their own fullness.”
The task of making room for the totality of the Black American experience is one How the Word Is Passed handles beautifully. The book’s final note, in which Smith is as careful to point out the subjectivity of this historical text as he is loath to call himself an historian, belies the expansive nature of his analyses and the dexterity with which he makes sense of the triangular relationship between history, memory, and narrative—bodies of knowledge that complement but often contradict one another. Still, his ambitions for the book extend far beyond its potential for pedagogical utility. “So often books by Black writers and writers of color are read almost singularly through the lens of what they can teach someone, and I hope that this book does serve as an educational resource,” says Smith just before we end our call. “Part of what I wanted to do was write a history book that, in some ways felt like a novel and that took seriously questions of craft. That took seriously questions of syntax…. I also want it to exist in the world as a piece of literature.”
Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Catapult, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, is forthcoming in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing.
