I
bought some plums at the farm market Saturday. They’re not round like grocery
store plums, but more oblong. Maybe from local farms, but the farmer I got them
from sometimes has stuff from other places. None of the other vendors had
plums; they’ve moved on to apples. There’s also still a lot of watermelon, so I bought a watermelon with yellow fruit inside. The plums, if I wait until
they’re soft, until they’re almost too soft, are sweet. Delicious. I love
plums. And never buy them because usually they’re always disappointing.
I’ve been listening to Elissa Washuta’s interview with Jordan Kisner on the podcast Thresholds. I discovered the podcast when K. mentioned it during our Sunday writing group meeting in zoom. She suggested the episode with Eileen Myles, which I did listen to and loved, and then listened to a few others. I love hearing these writers talk about writing process, inner anxiety, their inward and outward journeys along various writing paths. No one has the same process but what’s not always said out loud has to do with a faith or silent motivation to keep going, to keep doing the work, regardless of outside factors or internal worries. Something deeper pushes the writers and their writing, especially when they don’t know what it’s going to be, where it’s going.
There is often something messy, or unclear, or even something reacted against negatively. Myles talked a lot about saying “No” to ideas, opportunities, potential changes to whatever “status quo” in her life at various points. As if saying No is part of her process, and in the conversation it seems to become clear that it may be a real and important part of that process. Listening, I thought, I do that. All the time. I don’t like things to change sometimes, even when I desire change more than anything. I don’t like things to shift, especially not unexpectedly. I tend to see the negative, to critique before I reflect, in so many things. And reflecting on that, I think maybe it’s not always bad but part of my process: for thinking, for analyzing, for considering, for adjusting and transitioning, and for writing.
All of the writers talk about “thresholds” of various sorts. Elissa Washuta writes in her recent book, White magic, and talks in the interview, about getting sober and beginning to work through her many traumatic experiences, including sexual abuse.
She shares reflection on her journey writing the book as part of the transition into and through sobriety over a number of years, of the difficult and emotional move away from Seattle and her Cowlitz homelands, and how using “form” in essay writing can help one deal with content that is messy or unclear. I interpret this as about how one can both contain content to a formal structure, in a way, and let the content go where it will, allowing the writer to get at difficult material while resonances or connections arise even if one doesn’t know what those might be ahead of time. In more lyric kinds of creative nonfiction, there are some more “formal” kinds of forms like braided essays or hermit crab essays. And there are ways to push those forms further, to invent or mesh forms together. In another talk I heard Washuta give, she said that she used forms less in White Magic than in her earlier book, My Body is a Book of Rules. But braiding and structuring the essays in White magic, from my own writing perspective, often feels like certain kinds of structures both help construct parameters around the content and allow the content to discover its myriad possibilities.
In one long essay made of short pieces that are more like stand-alone flash
essays than sections, sometimes overt and
sometimes subtle resonances or connections float between them. The 50-page piece is titled, “The Spirit Corridor” and begins in second person:
“You’re standing in front of two doors.” The narrator explains that one leads
to Heaven and the other to Hell, but you don't know which is which and can only
ask one question. “What is the question?” Wahsuta writes, “I don’t know and I
don’t care. I’ve been looking for a different door.” Individually titled
sections of the essay are about different kinds of doors–"crying room” doors,
“forbidden” doors, “dream” doors–riddles vs jokes, Mark Twain, symbols in
“astrology, tarot, and witchcraft,” and other topics. Throughout the whole book
she weaves layers of personal story, Indigenous history, history of coal
miners, Catholicism, witchcraft and so much more.
We’ve been eating a lot of tomatoes, coming in all at once in late summer and early fall, the basil in the garden already finished with the cool nights, so I overpaid for a small basil plant from the grocery store. Sliced tomatoes with olive oil and balsamic, cherry tomatoes and corn salad with red onion and sometimes with mint or parsley or basil, sometimes with feta. Tomato pie, pizza with with pesto from the garden basil and roasted tomatoes. Some of the tomatoes have started going bad. We can’t eat them fast enough. Meant to make some sauce but didn’t get to it. It’s fine. I’ve put my anxiety about it aside. We’ll enjoy the summer tomatoes while they last, and like the early spring lettuce, the strawberries and peaches and cucumbers, we’ll have to remember them fondly until next summer’s harvests.
I have a 20-page essay I’ve been sending out, getting rejected, revising and sending again for more than a year now (two years now maybe). One journal I sent it to gave me written comments from three readers. This was an amazing gift, it seemed, since most journals barely personalize rejection notes. This journal, though, I realized later, was publishing work much more linearly narrative than the essay I had sent. I read a number of essays in the journal before sending, but I also had been thinking of my essay as pretty narratively straightforward, apparently more so than how it has been read. So I was dismayed to read not very useful comments, one reader in particular crude and cutting in their remarks about the essay being hard to follow or understand. I was frustrated. But instead of making it more “easy” I’ve played with revisions to “clarify” or refine in other ways. I’m not sure what that means except to say the essay is doing what I want it to. And even though it hasn't been accepted, reading at times complexly layered writing like Washuta’s helps me think about the negotiation between intent, personal discovery in writing, intuition, audience, and revision in ways that also help me feel more confident as a writer. I did a lot of gardening and writing this summer. And now it’s time to move forward into fall.
