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Getting (Re)Started: Mostly Practical Pieces of Advice

2026-01-23T00:00:00Z

It’s amazing to me how hard it is to come back to some things. Even the things we enjoy, or love. Even the things we suspect we might be good at or that we’ve put a lot of time into.

As I’ve discussed previously, I’ve been feeling unwell for some time now. In November I took time off for an unexpected surgery and my healing wasn’t as smooth or as quick as promised. The stress of it and the mental and emotional fog of my illness took me away from the creative practice I had been cultivating. It also has meant not running and not going to the gym in all these weeks.

It would stand to reason that taking a break and coming back would be simple. Like picking up a book from the marked spot, or seeing an old friend after time apart. That I would be able to start where I left off. Reason would tell me that coming back to a creative practice I have fought hard for and spent much time with would be easy, but it is not.

Reason though, is not the guiding force in our lives and it falls apart here. It is more like coming back to running, which will ache and wind me as if I had never done it to begin with. But it is also worse than running, because not being able to run does not fill me with the existential dread of never being able to run again.

Like Louise Gluck saying in a Poets & Writers’ interview, “… you don’t know in those periods that the silence will end, that you will recover speech. … When I’m not writing, all the old work becomes a reprimand: Look what you could do once, you pathetic slug.”

To start again is to start for the first time, each time. Uncertain that you can do it.

But hard is not impossible. Difficult is not insurmountable. Louise Gluck was never quite sure she’d write another poem, but she did always seem to write another one, right up until we lost her a few years ago.

We experience time linearly and we’ve come to expect that our projects, our process, our lives behave this way. Linearity is our limited perception and experience of a vast and complicated universe. It may be all we have to understand our lives, but it’s not reality.

In reality, we stop and we start. We circle back. We dance around the same spots and wait for something to happen.

Here are some of the things that I have done to help myself get started… again. Maybe you’ll need them some day too.

credit where credit is due

Start with what you’re doing well. List your accomplishments from the previous day, week, month, and year. Identify places where you have grown, persevered, or developed. Let yourself notice what you are doing well.

Too often goal setting starts from a negative place. The way we frame our goals or ambitions often relies on identifying what we feel we didn’t do well or well enough. I think striving for more is great, but it should come from a place of abundance, not lack.

Maybe you managed to meet your word count or time spent goals twice last week. That’s incredible! Maybe the day before you wrote down a bit of dialogue you overheard. Maybe you’ve found in re-reading work from this past year that you managed to craft resonant images or present clear arguments.

There is no accomplishment or feat too small for this exercise. You get credit even when what you did didn’t live up to what you might have wanted or expected from yourself. Any amount of time, any amount of thought, that went into your creative practice or into yourself was time you wrested away from the hundreds and thousands of things that demanded your attention.

Even if all you did was think about your practice, even if all you did was want to be creative, that is a huge accomplishment! There are not any rewards for being creative, for wanting to strive in the process of creation, to return to the slow pace of making in a fast world.

To want to make something uniquely and uniquely your own in a world saturated with easy access is an accomplishment worth celebrating.

break your box

If you’re struggling with your creative practice, maybe try someone else’s.

If you’re a novelist with a block, try writing non-fiction or a poem! If you’re a poet who can’t feel the rhythm, try writing a short story! If you’re stuck on any project, just try writing something else. That doesn’t have to mean abandoning the work in progress, but letting yourself take a break to recalibrate.

Here are some starter ideas for your un-scheduled writing in a different genre. These ideas can be applied to any genre.

A fact: On Venus it rains diamonds.
Write about the best (or worst) meal you’ve ever eaten.
Think about some firsts in your life— first kiss, first job, first car, first fight with a spouse, etc.

But maybe that’s not enough of a break. Maybe you need to try drawing, painting, dancing, or music making. For me, I find myself turning to thread-crafts like knitting, embroidery, or even darning when writing isn’t working for me. I like that it’s not a blank page, but a tangible object that I can then point to and say “Look, I made this.” Which is why in the winter of 2021 I wrote nothing, but knit two (child-sized) sweaters and some hats.

Allow yourself to be creative in new ways and see what it unleashes.

read poetry

All writers (and other non-writer humans) benefit from reading poetry. Because poets have the uncanny ability to talk about many things at once and to subvert our expectations for language, poetry is an excellent antidote for creative block.

Here are just some suggestions, all available online.

Louise Gluck, Afterword

Frank Stanford, In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot

Frank Stanford, What About This

Tracy K. Smith, Garden of Eden

Kaveh Akbar, Gloves

While you read, let yourself drift and linger with whatever associations come up. Don’t focus on “getting” the poem, but rather on feeling the poem or seeing the poem. Give yourself space to sit with the images than came to you. Maybe try writing on them.

If these poems don’t work, try looking for others that spark something in you. Let yourself be carried away with the language like they are made of music.

permission to suck

Most of the time the things that keep us from our writing are our other obligations, things like work, family, eating, sleeping, and the state of the world generally.

But sometimes, the thing that keeps us from writing is nothing but ourselves.

What we write on the page doesn’t match the version in our head. So we don’t write, thinking that we can think it into submission before we get started. We imagine we can avoid all the painful starting and stopping, all the unrealized plot elements, cliched metaphors, and trope-y characters, but the only way to avoid all that bad writing is to never start at all.

Bad writing is, unfortunately, a part of the process, but our fear of writing badly can keep us from starting. You have to give yourself permission to suck at writing to be able to get started. If you don’t want my permission though, here’s Barbara Kingslover’s:

“To begin, give yourself permission to write a bad book. Writer’s block is another name for writer’s dread—the paralyzing fear that our work won’t measure up. It doesn’t matter how many books I’ve published, starting the next one always feels as daunting as the first. A day comes when I just have to make a deal with myself: write something anyway, even if it’s awful. Nobody has to know. Maybe it never leaves this room! Just go. Bang out a draft.”

-Barbara Kingslover

channel nike

When you can’t write, paint, sing, draw, etc, when you feel uninspired, or lost, or otherwise downtrodden, sometimes the only thing thing to do is to just do it anyways. Even poorly, even when you don’t want to, even when you think you don’ t have anything in you to write.

Even and especially when you can only do a little. Doing a little at a time will pry the doors back open and you’ll be flush with ideas and enthusiasm again soon.

If you feel so inclined, send me an email and let me know if any of these tips worked for you.

Happy writing friends,
SJ

Data Limits

2026-01-09T00:00:00Z

On Christmas morning I “found” a new dictionary in my stocking. I realized several months ago that I’ve never owned a proper dictionary. Some speciality ones, foreign language ones, and more than a couple of styles guides, but never a real, proper dictionary.

I’ve had the Oxford Dictionary of English on my Kindle since college and I’ve had a laptop with Google since then too, but I’m growing increasingly skeptical of all these online things, how long they’ll keep and how reliable they’ll be now that all this software has to be profitable and there’s not money to pay for things. What words get deleted when we aren’t looking? What kind of ads will show up when we search for words, what will the Google Ad Spend look like and what kind of profitability will be assigned to each definition? What large-language-model hallucinations will replace the things we used to agree on?

So far my favorite thing to do with my dictionary is look up words with my daughter, who loves to ask “what does blank mean?” (She also loves to ask why are we and why are we here, so her existential dread is on target for development by ten years old, I’d wager, if I was a betting kind of woman.)

We look them up together, pulling the tome from it’s shelf. I show her how to find the first letter, trailing a fingertip along the scalloped recesses of each one and then we spell it out, flipping to the right page. I read her the entry and point at the synonyms. We try to find new sentences to use it in.

I can imagine, already, how this will go when she is older. She’ll ask what something means and I will tell her to look it up in the dictionary. She will roll her eyes and ask me why I can’t just look it up on Nano Banana or TikTok or whatever new hellscape they have devised for us. I will unplug the Wifi router, I will dismantle it and throw it into a lake or else a volcano. I will ground her for eternity.

But for now she is amused by this new book, the novelty. She likes to do things together. I like it too. And I like the big book with it’s stately presence and it’s thin, packed pages. I like the concision of the definitions and the different lists that they’ll have depending on the word, it’s synonyms and special usages.

Mostly though, I like that I am teaching her a kind of magic. A lost knowledge. Not a forbidden art, but one that is becoming rarer.

There was, during the time I was involved in computer sciences, a panic developing. There was a new generation coming into computer science classrooms who had no concept of file structure, of how to create, store, find, or access files based on these structures. With all the advances in personal computers and laptops, it had become easier and easier to use a computer without this knowledge. Search functions had improved, the Mac OS’s Finder helped obfuscate the structures that existed.

File structure, file hierarchy, has been one of these places of deep thought and intense debate in computer sciences, in software and hardware development and deployment. There are schools of thought, entrenched camps, powerful voices, but when it came time to start training the next generation of computer scientist at the university level… there was not awareness for the young people of any such problem.

It’s hard to explain the concern, but, put simply, there are limitations to what a computer can process and understand and when you’re working on software and especially systems level there is a big difference between files store inside folder ⇒ folder ⇒ folder and those stored inside folder. (This is a simplified example, don’t @ me, I know what a root is.) A file with the same information stored in different places is not the same file, but two separate objects in the computer’s memory and this has big ramifications if you’re updating one file thinking it’s the other or that it will also update the other.

There was a belief amongst Gen Z that it didn’t matter and that they’d always be able to search and find what they were looking for.

I’ve looked just now and would you like to guess how many files on my computer are “init” (required for running python, standard in other computer languages) or some simple variation thereof? 3856.

This same problem goes back though and I’m not immune to it. I didn’t have a dictionary, remember?

But also, I remember in college being both astonished and intimidated by the library’s vast resources… and only using sources I found online, almost always eschewing the practice of identifying and then finding and looking up the physical media that might have been available to me.

Are we losing something when we forget—or never know—how to structure and identify our data? Will my daughter be one of the few Gen Alpha who knows how to look things up alphabetically? Does it matter, or am I, already, an old woman shaking her fist at the sky asking for things to be how they used to be? Even if it didn’t use to be that way for me.

I’m in another search right now, still looking for answers. Seven weeks after my operation, I am still not “back to normal”.

Even more obfuscated than file structures, my body remains a loud mystery. An obvious secret. Present yet perniciously hidden. Here it is with all it
s feelings and nerves, fluids and viscera, its pains and complaints and limitations.

I cannot stop thinking about it and I know nothing of its needs and wants at this time.

For once it is not me waging war on my body, but the other way around. I have found that medical science is more limited than I’d imagined. It has taken two ER visits, a surgery, four visits with the surgeon, and countless hours trying to Dr. Google myself.

I didn’t realize, with my anti-authoritarian streak, that I still held on to the belief that doctors would be able to tell me, precisely, what was happening when I needed them too. That they could tell me what I needed to do. I didn’t realize I’d be so disappointed when they couldn’t.

Like I thought there might be a book that they had. A map. A library. Something mere mortals didn’t have access to that organized, categorized, color-coded all the messy things inside of us and what could go wrong.

That I could give them my symptoms and they could run their finger along my recessed edges and find an answer.

Post-Cholecystectomy

2025-12-12T00:00:00Z

Last month’s workshop was cancelled because I had to have my gallbladder removed the next day. My surgery, while routine, was significant.

The pain that preceded my surgery was some of the most intense physical pain I have experienced. I struggled to eat and mostly did without. Even water began to cause discomfort and struggle. I lost a significant amount of weight in a short amount of time.

In short, I suffered.

But I am aware of great privilege in what I suffered. My sister, who had driven me to the emergency room, and I waited less than ten minutes to be called back after we arrived. I described my symptoms, first to the nurse and then the doctor who quickly followed behind her.

“Do you still have your gallbladder?” the doctor asked. I affirmed that I did.

“I don’t expect you will for much longer.”

This wasn’t news in the strictest sense. I had Google. There’s a Reddit forum dedicated to gallbladders. Even though the likeliest culprits of gallbladder troubles are “fatty foods” and my diet didn’t resemble that, the symptoms themselves were textbook.

As the nurses began their tasks, prepping me for blood draws, setting me up on an IV and pain medicine, I began to shake.

It wasn’t in my head. I wasn’t making it up. They’re going to help me.

To my great embarrassment, I began to cry, a mix of anxiety, fear, and relief crashing through my willful insistence on holding it together. The nurses who watched me offered warm blankets and reassurance, patting my arms and legs and letting me know it was okay to cry and that they would take care of me.

I believe that this should be everyone’s experience when they report their suffering, but I know that it is not. It has not even always been my experience with doctors. My pain was believed and validated, but even before that, to get to go to a safe hospital a short distance for my house, this is a privilege too.

To have been driven by someone and able to leave my young daughter with yet someone else, so that I could attend to my pain without being tied up in my motherhood, this is a wealth my bank accounts cannot measure.

Following some tests and imaging, the doctor concluded what he’d initially diagnosed, and I was referred to surgery for scheduling. When my pain and troubles had started, removal seemed unthinkable and undesirable, but sitting there then, it sounded like a welcome answer.

I had my surgery scheduled as quickly as they could get me in. Another blessing, because I didn’t have to argue with my workplace, I didn’t have to find childcare. I knew who would take me and pick me up and make sure I got my medications. I could take off as much time as I needed, I could hand off the responsibility of getting my daughter to school and home and fed without needing to worry. I had more hands than I needed.

These are simple things maybe, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has them. These are things that I have not had to worry about in my lifetime, but I can see how easy it could be to end up without them.

I got to have surgery and then come home and sleep and sleep and sleep. That was three weeks ago.

I feel so much better! Is my answer when anyone asks.

And I do. I do feel much better, but I am not wholly well.

On the other side of my surgery, the intense pain has subsided, but there is a lot of pain and much more discomfort that remain. I continue to struggle with food, bouncing always between hungry and nauseated. I do not feel like myself, still, and I remain very tired, the regular lengths of my days becoming unbearably long as I move through them.

For weeks now, my mind has been penned, circumscribed to the size of my body. Each minutia of physical feeling I turn over and examine. Is this normal? Should I be worried?

Will this end? There are whole minutes where I become lost in a place where I cannot recall not feeling this way. It is like falling down a well, a deep place where the light is somewhere I will never be able to reach again.

It’s not that bad. I think of the scale of grimacing faces at the doctor’s office, how the nurses would ask me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. How would I rate this pain?

I have seen this scale before, though not in my surgeon’s office, somewhere else, a version that haunts me. Ten, it said, meant unimaginable pain.

Unimaginable.

It’s not ten then, not even at it’s worse was it ten, it can’t be ten. A number I cannot reach no matter how big my imagination is.

Not nine either then, because I can imagine worse than this. The square pole of a stop sign through a kidney, that would be worse than this. Orbital sockets shattered by concrete stops.

Then there are the things I have seen in pictures, a genocide half a world away, and the things that are done to bodies during them.

Not eight either, because there’s so much that I’ve seen here too. I think of the limp body that dangled the wrong direction when they pulled it from the other car, whatever that was would be worse than this.

Not seven, my mother’s cough after the chemo and the way it shakes her whole body, how it takes her somewhere else. Two years since the diagnosis and she goes to school every day, a portable oxygen tank on her arm, the size of a large handbag, the plastic cord of it tethering her as she teaches.

Couldn’t be six, because I know cures can be as bad as the poison. The pins and rods of a re-constructed ankle. The screw, as long as my two hands stacked together, that put her hips back together.

Five then? Not hardly, that only on the worst days of all, when my abdominals insisted on the birth or eviction, or perhaps evisceration, of that organ.

Four though, four makes it seem so small.

So, I look into my closet and shed some tears, the thought of getting dressed, avoiding the press on my incisions internal and external, and then putting on a brave face I do not quite feel too exhausting, too impossible.

There was a time, after my car accident, when the pain was worse and my mobility still bad, something stuck in my spine that had changed the way I moved. I complained to a friend about the things I was afraid I would never do again.

“Isn’t this what aging is though? Collecting chronic pains until we die?” he said. I froze.

I don’t know. I hope not.

Four then, but mostly not. A three maybe, maybe less. My whole world only as big as my body, as small as my suffering. I remember being young and believing that our goals should be something along the lines of ending suffering. Removing pain.

I pick the slacks with a stretchy waistband, a long sweater the color of a Christmas tree, and I find the face I need. I am alive. There are not alternatives.

Building Hope

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

Opportunities to Write This Month

We will have another informal writing session this Thursday morning, the 13th at 8:30am. This is a casual writing group meeting intended to give time and space to write together. Please bring your current work in progress or feel free to use a provided prompt. We will end the quiet writing time with an opportunity to share and network. Meeting is inside the Co-Create Innovation Hub on Arkansas Avenue.

Next week, on November 20th, we will meet for our regular workshop which is free and open to the public. We will continue our discussion on using lived experiences and concrete details to bring an embodied reality to our storytelling, essay weaving, and poem making. All levels, all genres, this generative workshop invites you to explore a piece of writing together, opening the floor to craft discussions and using writing exercises to create new work.

For Next Month

For my local writers, please respond to this email and let me know if you are interested in finding a date for a workshop evening in December! It’s a very busy time of year and I know people can struggle to find the time amidst other obligations. If I get enough interest, I will get a conference room booked for the 18th, if it is available.

Building Hope

Not to point out the obvious here, but things are tough right now for a lot of people and if you’re one of those people, I’d like to let you know that you are not alone. As we head into a darker time of year and the holiday seasons, I think it can be easy to feel alone in our struggles. I think that Thanksgiving and the winter holidays are a time of real cheer and merriment for many, but I think they also serve as ways to guilt us into acting as if we are joyful and hopeful.

I am both joyful and deeply troubled. I carry my hope and my fears in two hands, not as contradictions but as living truths.

I have been thinking a lot about a story I listened to with my daughter several weeks ago. A story about beavers.

Beavers have an interesting impact on the environment around them. While beavers have a long history of being considered a nuisance (or a fashionable hat accessory), new research shows that beavers actually help repair wetlands, boost biodiversity, and improve water quality.

By creating their dams, beavers make the places around them a lot healthier. The dams themselves work as a kind of water filtration, purifying the water, even from agricultural chemicals. Air is cooler and moister near the pools they create, encouraging plant growth and visits from other animals. Between the dam’s filtration and the increased biodiversity, the soil health around beaver dams begins to improve as well, enriched by and enriching the systems around them.

Beavers often build more than one dam in an area, creating a network of surface water and vegetation. These networks, called “beaver wetland complexes” provide long-term water storage solutions and work to repair and recharge groundwater supplies. Amidst these complexes, there’s more greenery and more animals coming to the space, effectively making beavers expert watershed engineers, providing solutions to issues of conservation human engineers have been struggling with for decades.

Dr. Emily Fairfax has spent years studying beavers and she shared a story about a particular beaver family she’d been following in the mountains of Northern California at Little Last Chance Creek. The beaver family she was following included a mom and a dad and “definitely three to four babies”.

Fairfax spent months observing the family, watching the many ways the beavers effected the area around them; building their dams, taking part in and changing the ecosystems around them.

In the summer of 2021, the forest in which Dr. Fairfax was studying the beaver family caught fire. It became a massive wildfire, causing evacuations for thousands of residents and burning hundreds of homes. It was October before humans were able to contain the flames.

Dr. Fairfax was not optimistic about the beaver’s chances for survival, but she made the long trip up the mountain anyways. What she recalled in the miles of travel, past burned houses and charred land, was the silence of the woods, a sense of eeriness and isolation.

But, as they neared the location of the beaver family’s dam… things changed. There was a breeze that blew threw green leaves. There were leaves. There was bird song. The wetlands the beavers had made hadn’t burned. Even the creek seemed to be clear of the ash and debris.

And when they arrived at the home of the beaver family, there they were, swimming in the refuge they had made.

This particular beaver dam, this one little beaver family, sat at the center of a 7.5 acre space of unaffected forest. A space, a small, tiny space, that still held all this beauty and life, that contained the great possibility for hope and renewal, because the beavers were beavers and they’d been there.

This story tells us a lot about what beavers can do and how we might continue to battle the effects of climate change, but I think it can also tell us a lot about what to do in the face of our own conflagrations.

Even in the face of the world burning, there was still something living. Even at the place beyond hope, there was possibility. The beavers didn’t know that when they chewed down those trees, they’d provide a space for so much to live.

We’re not beavers and we’re not building dams, but when we show up for ourselves and our communities, when we write, when we share, when we listen, we are taking part in something, some monumental human effort to stay human in an inhumane world. There is no perfect solution, no all encompassing way to ease the wrongs of the world, but if everything is burning, 7.5 acres sounds like a hell of a lot.

October Updates

2025-10-14T00:00:00Z

Friends,

I hope you’ll join me for our October Writing Workshop, scheduled for Thursday, October 23. We’re going to continue discussing how to implement the advice of “show, don’t tell” using sensory details and layering in lived experiences.

While you’re waiting for that event, I have plenty of recommended reading for you!

In last month’s session we discussed this Amy Hempel short story, “A Full-Service Shelter”, which takes place in an animal shelter. This piece is an excellent of example of using our lived experiences to fuel our creative practice, without necessarily writing memoir or non-fiction. Amy Hempel is an animal lover and has spent much of her time volunteering in animal shelters. This piece uses the specific sensory details of those experiences to elicit strong emotional responses in the reader.

Work takes up so much (too much) of our lives and it’s an area with a lot of opportunity for exploration. What are ways your work experiences can become material for your creative practice? Consider writing a scene or story based in a workplace similar to somewhere you’ve worked before. What sort of specifics can you use to create a sense of the world quickly?

From Rebecca Gayle Howell’s wonderful Substack, there’s this piece on what it means to practice, especially when there are so many “easier” options. Rebecca Gayle Howell is a Kentucky poet, artist, translator, and editor whose work reflects the sublime in the ordinary and I cannot recommend her work highly enough. If you enjoy The Practice, be sure to follow her Substack.

And for your earbuds, here’s this series from the Paris Review podcast, that features writers reading their own first-person essays. This one on visiting strip clubs in Paris and America is delightful and much less provocative than the title and contents might indicate. And while the two strip clubs become a unique lens for the writer to explore the different cultural experiences of her time in Paris and from her midwestern roots, I’m recommending it primarily because she says “boobies” with the infectious gleefulness of a middle-schooler.

Looking closely at this series, what do these small moments of personal exploration tell us about what is possible in non-fiction? Powerful moments can be found in our lives at the heights of activity, those peaks and valleys of the human experience, but also in more everyday ones, like eating at Dunkin’ Donuts, or visiting old haunts with fresh eyes. Proof that all our experiences, with careful attention and craft, can become part of the creative process.

For my local readers, please be sure to put the upcoming Hot Springs Poetry Festival on your calendar!

Though we’ve flipped the calendar to October, it still very much feels like summer in Arkansas and no number of porch pumpkins seems to be able to change that. I’m wishing you all cooler weather and slower seasons and hoping for them myself.

If you feel inclined, I invite you to respond to this post and let me know what you’re working on, what you’re reading, or what you’re thinking about at my email address.

I look forward to seeing you all again soon!

Best,

SJ Poulton

Two Steps to Writing Well

2025-09-12T00:00:00Z

If you want to be a writer, and since you’re reading this, I suspect you do, there is a lot of advice out there. There are many great examples of craft and criticism that can help a writer structure, ponder, and explore in new ways. We’ll get to some of these in a later discussion. But a large part of what is out there, in the great internet age of coaches, webinars, and late-stage capitalism generally, should be considered with suspicion. A lot of it is intended to sell something unnecessary. Most of the broad writing advice you’ll encounter—avoid adverbs, show don’t tell, etc—are rules that are open to interpretation, and act as invitations to destruction. Other admonishments, to “cycle-sync” your creativity, to join yet another webinar on growing a six-figure writing career, should be glanced at with distrust and deleted from your inbox.

There are only two hard and fast rules to being a “better” writer. Luckily, they are both simple, but unfortunately, they require time and effort: to be a great writer you have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot.

That’s it. Both as much and as often as you can.

Being a writer requires you to read widely, promiscuously even, and to read deeply. There is the first layer of reading, which most writers have already spent their lives practicing, and that is reading for the experience, which is often pleasure, but sometimes something less definable. Sometimes, the experience of reading is the pursuit of a kind of pain, or at least melancholy, something that mirrors the uncertainty and vastness of the experience of life. The experience of reading and a reader’s attachment to it is what draws people to stories and poems. Writing is intended to create this experience, whatever it is.

The next kind of reading is the kind that must be developed with time and conscious effort. To be a writer one must learn to read like a writer. This is where the work of deep thought and careful consideration must be deployed. To read in this way is to think while reading, to slow down and pay attention to the craft of the writing. Reflecting on our reading is the next step in developing our reading capacity, in refining our ability to read like writers. Consider:
How is the experience created? What is the construction of the work? What are the choices that have been made that make the story or poem or essay feel as if it could not have been written any other way?

To read like a writer is to pay attention, to study writing as other artist’s study colors, forms, compositions. Reading a work once will not be enough to learn from it. In parts or in whole, the object of study will have to be read and re-read and likely read again. Learn to feel delight in this, to see new things with each reading, to bring full attention to the work. Besides, great writing, truly great writing, bares up under additional reading, finds new ways to entice, delight, destroy, because it is layered and buried enough that to read it multiple times bears multiple baskets of fruit.

Reading like a writer is a skill the must be cultivated over time. Each work will have its own instructions for reading, its own particular means of construction and mode of delivery. Denis Johnson and Alice Munro cannot be read in the same way. There are some basics to begin with, starting off points to begin to develop writerly awareness. These are the first questions to ask after (or during) a first reading—whose story is it? When and where does the story take place? In what tense and perspective is the story told? Each of these answers were choices made by the writer.

As to what to read, the answer is as much as you can, as often as you can. Read in the genre and form in which you desire to write and read beyond it. Whatever style or genre you write in, you should be reading poetry, because poetry will teach rhythm, it will show how to crack language open. It is that beautiful, new, exposed language that makes great writing, that makes readers react even when they don’t know why they are reacting. Read great writing (I have suggestions!) so that you know what the heights to which you’re aiming, but find writing you think is bad too, so you know what to avoid.

Which brings us to necessity number two—write and keep writing. This means to keep writing stories and poems and essays, but it also means to write just to write. It is important to sit down with the intention to write a thing, but it is equally important to have the material notes to pull from in the writing. Write snippets, write scenes, write down things that may never become anything. Write in the mornings and at night and the small still moments that slip away between our fingers. Carry a notebook and call it your artist’s daybook. Keep a diary. Record language that you love and language that you hate. Impress upon the page what it felt like to move inside of life today, how the body felt as it ambulated through its day. While studying great writing, write down the lines and paragraphs that express that cracking open of language, of story, of vision. You do not need to have an hour for a session of writing to be meaningful. It is just as important, just as meaningful, to find still moments where three or five minutes are stolen for writing, for taking notes on life and the experience of living it.

Learning to write well is the embracing of the re. Re-reading as we have discussed, but also re-writing. Write and write and write enough that later there is stuff to re-write which will be the hard work of making the story you have written to tell yourself into the story that other people will read. Re-writing, revision, is the real work of a writer, it is the line in the sand where one evolves from dreamer to craftsman. It is also the point at which most writers begin to give up. There is something disheartening about coming back to something you have written and having to take the eyes out of your head and read the thing that has poured out of you as if you have never seen it before.

In re-writing you stop loving the work as a child born of your heart and remember that it will be a labor created of your soul. Then you take your pen to it and slash it into ribbons and try to rebuild it again, into something that is closer to the vision that lived in your head.

There are few tools necessary in writing—there is the language and there is the page and everything that a reader is to see, feel, hear, touch, believe, intuit, and know about the work must be made with those things. Plots, worlds, characters, are all parts of a story, but they are constructed out of the language. Language is the first place we must study, the key to building all of the other things. A story starts in the sentences, a poem lives in its lines.

All of this reading and writing, all of this paying attention, is a way of falling in love with language.

Read a lot, write a lot. Two deceptively simple tasks for the writer. It is not easier, but more manageable, if there is a community around to do this work with. In community, we are given the opportunity to share the burdens, to read and write together and to help one another see and consider in new ways. It is a way of putting many eyes on the same things and giving voice to the same problems.

Community is not always easy to find though, especially now, which is why we have a proliferation of internet coaches and webinars and influencers, even in the scared space of making art. So, sometimes, that community is in works of craft or criticism—James’ Woods The Art of Fiction, Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, and the non-fiction work of Mary Oliver are some of my favorites, and sometimes that community is a newsletter.

If you are very lucky, sometimes you get to make community in the place where you live, even if you have to wrest it from the ground up. (It’s me, I’m lucky!)

So, if you are nearby or if you are not, I hope that I can be a part of your community.

Happy writing friends and see you soon.

I Went to Grad School and All I Got was Everything I Asked For

2025-07-08T00:00:00Z

Is six weeks long enough to change your life? Can your brain—or maybe your spirit, maybe something equally unknowable but more tangible, like your writing—change in six weeks? I think yes but I think it’s not that easy.

When I was sixteen, the summer before my senior year of high school, I attended a state program called Governor’s School, which was a six-week introduction to liberal arts studies with 399 other high achieving students about to start their senior years. At the time the program was hosted by Hendrix College. Before the six weeks were up, I felt like a changed person. I tasted something there that I wanted for myself—possibility, opportunity. I met people that agreed with me and challenged me to greater levels of rigor and thought, something that I wasn’t finding in my own life. I’d been living in the little bubble of my town of two thousand people, bored and defeated and willing to bet nothing could change, but I came back from that program with a will and determination.

That summer created huge changes in my life. I had a new vision of myself and for myself. I ended up going to Hendrix for my undergraduate. I left that summer with a belief I’d not entered it with, but it was the ideas and actions after that summer that changed everything, that changed me. That summer was a first step that led me to several others.

That summer was on my mind a lot this summer, as I drove east towards the Smokey Mountains and up to the Sewanee campus in early June. I was again headed for a six-week sojourn from my “real life”, exchanging the Arkansas River Valley and the perils of entrepreneurship for time in the mountains, studying creative writing as part of an MFA program. I was afraid as I faced the sun, driving towards a horizon line that refused to reveal itself, moving in and out, up and down. I was afraid that everything would change or, worse, that nothing would.

I arrived on Sunday afternoon with just enough time to find my on-campus apartment, toss a couple of things into it and make it to the welcome dinner where a few dozen of us ate grilled meats on a patio. I put on my best networking voice and forged ahead, pretending to be unafraid as I introduced myself, inserting myself into groups and walking up with my hand ready to shake.

I left that first dinner exhausted, worn out by the trip and my own exuberant socializing. The other students impressed me. I went away feeling like a fraud, a faker, but I had little time to ponder it as I had many bags to unpack. The next day we hit the ground running with workshop, for which we’d already done reading and feedback pieces.

We started and we didn’t stop. It was, in two words, a lot. I took a workshop class and a seminar and attended every additional event that came up—readings, talks, social events, everything. I read and I wrote, waking up at 5am and seemingly not stopping until I got into bed each night. Which is not so different from my regular life, but now there was just the reading and writing, the occasional small bit of work-work that needed to be done not withstanding. In the first two weeks and the last two weeks, I was there without my partner and my child. It is somewhat astounding how much longer a single meal will last when you’re the only one who will eat it.

At the end of it I left with two short stories that had been thoroughly workshopped, a handful of new starts, a few new relationships, and some confidence I didn’t have going in. I’m a better reader and a better writer than I was before, with a keen eye turned to the ways in which I am trying to evade the truth or the pain at the heart of a story in my own writing. I have the words now for something I had known—I am a good writer, but being good will not be enough. Creativity is the birthright of each person, but creativity and talent are not enough. I will need to be good, I will need to work very hard, and I will need to be lucky. There’s no way around it.

The timeline of creation, of art, is very long, even within the scope of our own lives. Six weeks was a single gasping breath of the creative life, one good inhale and half of an exhale. It was enough time to plant new seeds and to weed out some beliefs I’ve spent too long cultivating. It was enough for the changes to begin, but I am not changed yet. There’s no time lapse where I bloom quickly. No matter how good the instruction is, how deep the connections are, six weeks is not enough to become. It is only enough to begin. The writing life is measured in years, with the number of drafts for a short story living in the dozens and for a novel going as high as fifty, maybe even higher.

On the other side of this first summer, I have some idea of my next steps. Two to three more years of graduate school—a couple more summers like this one, one-on-one classes with published authors, and rounds and rounds of drafting and revision. I have some goal posts in mind, sketched hastily so I have something to aim for. I have some people to walk beside. I have the people who supported me to and during these first steps. And I have a million new ideas about the workshops I host each month and the newsletter I am trying to write right now and how they are part of my journey and, hopefully, a part of yours.

Out of Office (And In the Woods!)

2025-06-08T00:00:00Z

There will be no RWG events for June or July

I’m leaving for grad school today. There is a chorus that borders on cacophony inside me when I say the words, when I think them.

There is first, the goosebumps trailing up my arm. There is a kind of suppressed delight, a bit like a child being picked up from school and being told there is a surprise in store. I’m buckled into the car and anything is possible.

I think heading off to the Smokey mountains for six weeks of workshop, writing, and literature classes is, as an adult, what Disneyworld would have been for a child. Excitement feels like too small a word.

There is the practical voice that keeps asking me if I have remembered everything. It doesn’t matter that I’ve made lists and checked it two, three, four times. I will keep wondering and I will still have forgotten something.

There is the still, small voice that reminds me six weeks is a long time and there is so much that I love that I am leaving behind, at least for a little while. She also reminds me that I like to be home, will this new place be as comfortable as home?

No, silly voice, but comfort is not the point.

There are some meaner voices. Nasty old hags who have things to say about debt, about the place of higher education in the creative fields, who want to ask me “who do you think you are” and “if this place was any good why would they let you in”.

If this were a story I was writing, I would tell you something evocative, like how they speak with my mother’s voice, but this isn’t a story, and those mean voices are entirely my own. For years those voices have been the left and right weight around my ankles, my wrists. They have been the tape over my mouth. They have been the soft and false call of stability, they have been the reminder to remain grounded, the dampers on the burning flames of my desires.

They have always been mine.

Until recently, this path had seemed an impossible dream. A thing meant for other people.

When I had fewer responsibilities and more freedom to uproot myself for an MFA program, I wasn’t writing enough to seriously consider it. The voices of my fear and self-doubt were too loud. I was too chicken-shit.

I seem to have worked in reverse order. Becoming a mom, growing into my adult self, helped me write more, not less. These becomings meant addressing the voices holding me back, they meant unburdening myself of the ineffective coping mechanisms that held my dreams at bay. I found time when I had less time. I found devotion when I had learned it elsewhere.

The question for others seems to be what will I do with this new degree once I get it. What is the point? Do I want to be a professor? What kind of job prospects are there?

I want to laugh, and I want to cry. There aren’t job prospects. There isn’t a plan here. There’s just this desire—I want to be a better writer. I have reached the limits of what I can do on my own. I arrived at a place I had strived for and dreamed of, and I didn’t know where to go from there.

I am—in my thirties—finally doing the kind of experimenting I should have been doing in my twenties. I am writing without a reason. I am writing a lot. I am letting myself be bad without self-flagellating. I am working without reward. I let the rejections, dozens and dozens of them, flow over me without crushing me.

I have let go of the illusion that I deserve anything, that I am owed anything. I have decided that to write will be enough.

At the precipice of this change, I am charged and my mind is chattering. Pure kinetic energy, everything full of possibility. There is no knowing what happens next, but it’s happening is inevitable, the falling irrevocable.

My feet on the path, the world falling away. Be right back, I’m off to live my dreams.

Craft Thoughts: Carrier Bags and Primordial Soup

2025-05-28T00:00:00Z

In the beginning there was no hero.

In the beginning, life rippled along the hot and murky shores of a wet and rocky world, alone.

Maybe there was divine intervention, a hand at play, I’m not here to argue against it, but first there was inert earth. Then, suddenly life in one cell. The first glimpse of infinity. Something very, very small and it got bigger. One cell, then later, later, two.

All the other bits, the bits about fighting for our survival, of nature red in tooth and claw, those were later stories, added for plot. The first one is a tide pool that couldn’t go anywhere, but it couldn’t be still either. The heat of the sun, of the rocks and salt and minerals of that ancient ocean pulled back and forth in the waves of a closer moon that waxed and waned. The primordial pot is stirred and something new is born.

The smallest thing in the universe and the most important.

Can’t you feel the primordial soup gurgling in your belly still? Do you not hear the call of the ocean waves? Life formed first in the shallow tide pool, the majesty of accidents taking shape. Every action a consequence of that first day and every gasp and attempt to grasp at staying alive since.

Here is the story of everything and it went not in a line, but stirred, swirled, pushed and pulled, rose, fell, retreated. It bubbled. It popped. It did not proceed according to precedent. It faltered. It failed. It went on.

Here is how we first learn to tell a story. First this, then that. Followed by the other. We are told that this is how life proceeds. We are told that with enough of these steps, first rising in action to the climax and release and then falling to a new statis, the plot will be finished, our characters transformed. This is the hero’s journey.

I have yet to see it this way. Mostly I meander, I return. I tread over and over the same paths. I have a new thought and when I have written it down, I see that I had the same thought three notebooks ago. The world turns, I am forced along with it. I am under no illusions that I will be the hero.

Ursula K. Le Guin describes her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in an essay of the same name. She has curbed the idea, in part, from the “Carrier Bag Theory of Culture” which posits that the first cultural invention, that skill and moment that distinguishes us as the animals that make, is a receptacle, a bag or a bottle to hold what cannot be eaten right away or carried in the hands. It is the container that makes us what we are, that makes room for civilization.

This other thing we have been given, the hard bone, the stick, the spear, is only one kind of story. It was written for and about the Hero, it is the killer story, but there are so many others, and they could take so many shapes.

Beloved, award-wining, irascible Le Guin reminds us that, “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” In her bag there will be room for all the things that delight and sustain us, that confuse or complicate us.

It can be populated not with heroes, but with people.

In her bag, just like in the first tide pool that held the ingredients, we will have our room to spiral, to tread. To begin without ending and end without beginning. When we unburden the narrative from the linear constraints of progress, we can leave ourselves to wander in and out, to sit and watch the sky change. We can sit by the fire, be allowed to linger.

You don’t have to throw that spear away though, it’s good for stirring the pot.

Writing Exercise and Response

2025-05-21T00:00:00Z

I began writing this week thinking about creativity and motherhood. I enjoyed the writing, but absolutely nothing succinct came out, so I’ll have to save those thoughts for a longer format. Instead, you’ll find below a prose-poem of sorts and the writing exercise that inspired it.

Happy Writing!

Writing Exercise

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“Writing is about exposing what is unexposed, otherwise you’re just rearranging the furniture in the castle.” - Anne Lammot

Write about exposure or about trying to expose something. Set a timer for 7 minutes or aim for 500 words, but write without stopping or editing.
Some thoughts: Writing is more than describing what’s in front of us. What is not being said? Or what would it mean to have something exposed? What do the details of an image tell us about what’s going on underneath the surface?

Response

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Exposed, exposé, like if I talk enough that’s another kind of covering. We don’t live in a world with secrets anymore, actually I’d like it if you could learn to be a little more quiet. This is all it takes to be a mystery these days—don’t post everything you think or say.

I realize, over and over again and for the very first time, that I am aging. These are old people ways of thinking. Like when I saw that picture of that girl who is probably actually a woman and is very very famous though I’m not sure what for, and all I could think about were the way her breasts were pushed up and back like she could choke on the fat and silicone of them. I thought, huh we’re bringing back that aspect of corsets, the full half moon top of the breast visible, the bottom emptied out, barely covered. I am a great lover of period dramas and also breasts so I know it well. Then I think, it looks so uncomfortable, are people really supposed to dress like that?

A good reminder to toss the phone away, lose it under the bedsheets. Better yet, sacrifice it to some volcano god and set myself free. I don’t wear bras anymore, haven’t since the car accident, mostly I let the soft weight of my breasts drag me down. I know there are people who see me now and think, “You used to be pretty”.

This is a kind of free.

But what’s all this exposure really hiding? I don’t think each of you with your bird songs online are being honest. Tweet tweet and trill trill but you’re not fooling me. Birds make though sounds in the morning to let others know they have lived through the night. Is that hopeful or is that bleak? Are you announcing how you were not snatched away in the night or are you sending up a warning more dire, the snakes mouth closing slowly, slowly, swallowing you whole.

I take the shopping cart of myself out of the store, the heavy bags of all the things that I am. The cupboards are dark, they are warm and I have seen no signs of war or mice or worse inside of them, so I stack the cans of all my markers and memories and leave behind the lacy things I don’t wear anymore, close the cupboard doors. Inside the house there’s nothing left but my flesh and my bones and all this hair and then, a single birdsong, from my lips into that empty air.

Re-reading Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

2025-05-14T00:00:00Z

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante can be found at all fine book sellers and at bookshop.org. The novel was originally released in 2011.

The story begins at the end. In My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Elena the narrator, receives a phone call from her friend’s adult son where he tells her his mother, Raffaella is her “real name” but to the narrator—to us—she is Lila, is gone. Not that she has passed, but that she is missing.

Elena tells him to look around the house and tell her what he finds. Lila’s son is confused, but when he calls back later, Elena already knows what he will tell her.

Lila, her friend of five decades, is trying to disappear. She has taken every trace of herself out of the house, removed herself from family photos, exorcising herself from the past. No speck of her remains. Her son is scared, confused, but Elena knows exactly what her friend is trying to do.

And she is not willing to let Lila slip away so easily.

Lila’s overdoing it again Elena tells us, and she sits down to write her friend back into being, to put it all down so that Lila can’t escape her.

What follows is Elena’s story and Lila’s story, beginning with the dolls of their childhood and the march to face their fears at the door of the neighborhood boogeyman (and loan shark) Don Achille and following them through four volumes. The series is five decades of their lives together, apart, paralleled, intersecting, and diverging through time and place. It is a story of Naples, of girls, of women, of friendship, of place and poverty. It is the story of the inextricable ties that bind, about the creation and re-creation of self in the eyes and arms of those we love.

The language of the novels is clear and straightforward, but since I have read the work in translation it’s worth acknowledging the fraught tension that exists between a work and its translation. The novels, less a series of books and more a single novel released in four volumes, meanders through childhood, adolescence, marriage, affairs, divorce, motherhood, more affairs, death, and old age. The story spirals and reflects upon and itself and its own creation, a mirror pointing in on itself. Moments expand and contract, a single trip up the stairs to a door takes chapters; months elapse in the space between paragraphs.

This is the second time I’ve read the series; the first time was in the second summer of the Covid pandemic in a lock down that wasn’t so locked down, but amidst my own personal hiatus from social life. This time around I am listening to them on audiobook, particularly delightful as the person performing the audiobook pronounces the Italian names and words with a delicious precision my single-lingual mind could not bring to them. I have always enjoyed reading and re-reading works, especially when they pay such fruitful dividends for the attention. The prose and story are so gorgeous, it takes restraint to not devour the novels this time around like I did the first. The urge to forgo my life and work in favor of these audiobooks is strong.

On this re-read I am struck by Elena’s—the narrator and perhaps the writer through her—development as a writer, the particular attention the story pays to this development. Slowing down, I’m able to see the choices both Elena’s make on where their gaze rests, on the importance of those lingering moments, the ways that shadows, hands, slips of words, or the turn of mere minutes have these rippling affects throughout the work, throughout the characters life. Elena narrates a life where she is trying to find the words, to make meaning out of the random events; her friend Lila is trying to find a container that will keep her from spilling over herself and seeping out into nothingness. Elena becomes an author in the later novels; in the second novel we discover that Lila too is a writer, though privately, in her notebooks.

The series is long and detailed. It winds through their lives without shying away from the ugly, within them and around them. What lives and breathes at the heart of the novels is the friendship, but this is an overtly political novel. They come of age in a post-world war Italy, feeling the effects of all that came before them and what it has given rise to. They are young women from a poor neighborhood rife with violence and crime and they must learn to negotiate their place within it and decide who they will be with the options they are given and the ones they take anyways.

The question of opportunity lingers on the story. Of the two girls both are smart and capable, but only one is afforded the opportunity to pursue her education. Elena is allowed to continue beyond elementary school, one of the few from that neighborhood who does, moving along alone to high school and then university. It sets her apart, it marks her, but it fails to make her part of the other world too. She remains a girl from a poor neighborhood—that neighborhood—no matter her degrees, no matter the prestige she wins for herself as a writer.

And for Lila, despite her academic progress and the blazing light of her mind, she must make her own way in the world without access to the education Elena has. She marries young, it does not go well. Lila isn’t without successes though, but her opportunities and her abilities must be forced to take shape. Her trajectory and the characters themselves beg the question, what could have been?

HBO has made a series of the books, and I hear that people like it very much. I haven’t seen it. I think there is a tendency around these novels to brush the work off as “women’s fiction”, perhaps because of the covers, perhaps because it centers women. It is likely that this concept “women’s fiction” does us all a great disservice, that the phrase seeks to diminish the work and its contents. We’ll ignore the larger concept and it’s problems. This book reminds me more of Dostoyevsky than Confessions of a Shopaholic. Perhaps it’s the use of multiple names to refer to a single person that follow a pattern I don’t understand as a linguistic and cultural outsider, but undoubtedly it is because of the careful machinations of the political on the lives of Elena and Lila, those that they recognize and those that they don’t.

This book, these books, aren’t an easy acceptance of the way things are. They aren’t a simpering exploration of the enduring power of female friendship. They are deft and careful examinations into the development of a person, of a sense of self and others, and of a writer and writerly sensibility specifically. Each thing that touches Elena Greco leaves its mark on her and she is trying to see it, trying to see herself without clouding, without obfuscation that might make it more digestible. Her life, Lila’s life. Two sides of a coin and the edges between too.

“Is she with you?” Lila’s son asks Elena at the beginning. She tells him no, because Lila isn’t there with her, not in her house, not in that city, but Lila lives inside Elena’s skin, lives as the parts of herself she can’t turn away from. As alive within her as her mother and her father, as the forces that have shaped her, as the place she is from.

Personal Narrative: Dream Life

2025-05-01T00:00:00Z

I didn’t plan to leave my tech job for writing. But I did dream of leaving my tech job for writing. It was a version of a dream a lot of people have but insert winning the lottery/getting an unexpected inheritance/suddenly marrying into wealth in place of “tech startup goes public, and my shares are worth millions”.

“I see what you have done for other tech bros,” I would intone mock-piously, hands raised to the sky. I was joking except of course that I wasn’t joking. When it happened, I would simply pay off my debts, invest soundly, and spend my life living simply, tending my garden and writing, finally balancing my desires with my need to exist. Deus ex pecunia, god from the money, if you will.

Until then, I was stuck and my writing would stay at the margins of my life.

Despite this dream of never touching another line of code and retreating to a luddite existence, I enjoyed my job. It was challenging and stimulating and allowed me to use my skills in an effective way. And I was good at it! The people I worked with and for were genuinely good people. I found it satisfying and also I like having a house and food, which is the byproduct of gainful employment.

It’s probably not a spoiler to tell you that I did not sell my shares for millions of dollars. But, due to circumstances beyond my control, I did find that it was time to leave that job that I liked very much. The parting was amicable—in its own way it was a long time coming while also being very sudden.

I was sad and because it seems important to be honest, I’ll tell you I was scared. Very scared. I’m a single mom. That’s a lot of responsibility. The job market had changed drastically since I’d last been looking. I had more experience now, but there were fewer opportunities. My LinkedIn feed was dismal. The brief, bright moment of optimism in tech hiring had already elapsed.

Once I had separated the things I could change from the things I couldn’t and accepted them both, it was supposed to be a sabbatical. The idea was to do six weeks of reading, writing, and working around the house and then diving back into the job market, refreshed and ready to fight.

I let the writing sprawl, let it fill my days. It was exactly what I’d been dreaming of—time and space to write, no more squishing it into those pre-dawn hours before my daughter woke up. Maybe it’s dramatic to say, but things changed, I changed. I could literally feel my brain shifting into new modes, creating new pathways. I don’t want to pretend it was easy—it wasn’t. It was a weirdly emotionally turbulent time and not in the ways I would have predicted.

The days and weeks accumulated so fast behind me and… it still wasn’t enough.

It’s been more than six months since I worked a “regular” job.

I am still scared. But also, I’m figuring it out. I’m selling my other skills in a different package and working on being a writer. I have no idea how to do either, but I’m never going to figure it out until I’m throwing myself at the wall, trying to stick.

The truth is, I’m working much more than I ever was before. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job and there are no metrics, no KPI’s no PML’s I can use to gauge that. There are the pages, but they ravel and unravel themselves. Penelope at her shroud making and unmaking.

I remembered my garden this past weekend, weedy, overgrown. Seeds should have been planted in March; compost laid out long before that.

My lawn never died this winter, it stayed green. There was a moment, in the midst of the election seasons’ depressing and inevitable end that my grass threatened to keep growing into something wild and unkempt. I found myself staring into it and thinking it would be the final straw. To have to mow my lawn as the year approached December. Too much to bear.

The weeds had declared their war while I thought they were sleeping, I thought there’d be reprieve and I had been so busy, trying to fit a lifetime of my dreams into six weeks. The garden beds I’d worked so hard to wrest from the earth, from the lawn, were ready to return. The fucking weeds were winning.

I put on gloves and dug in. I pulled and followed the root with my fingers, tracing its path over, over, and down and down, pulling gently to hear the ripping, popping sound.

How’d these roots get this long? God, these things run deep.

A mountain of roots and leaves grew behind my shoulder where they were thrown. Sweat pooled in the small of my back, cooled in the mild air and bright sun. The ants I disturbed attacked my ankle and sunscreen trickled into my eye, carried by my sweat.

It is everything I had ever dreamed it would be.

Craft Thoughts: Strategic Opacity

2025-04-23T00:00:00Z

“Strategic Opacity” is an idea that I got from this really wonderful talk from writer Torrey Peters, which she gave a couple years ago as part of the Tin House Workshop series and is available online for free. In her talk she discusses Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the non-sensical actions of the people and protagonist in that work. Hamlet’s actions and professed motivations seem to be at tremendous odds, in direct opposition. It doesn’t make sense, not in the way we have come to believe we should understand character development and motivation. It is exactly these unexplained bits that make Hamlet a great play.

The linked talk is a great one because the topic is thoughtful and provocative—I originally listened to it more than a month ago and I am still thinking about it—and because Torrey Peters is an engaging speaker whose work is at the forefront of contemporary writing. Her latest book, Stag Dance, was recently released and, in addition to new work, republishes some of her previously self-published novellas. Her work bends genre to the point of breaking and pushes us to question the things we think we know, to look easy answers in the eye and see the Scooby-Doo villain mask they use to hide the messier, cosmic, nebulous truths.

I have found myself turning over the term “strategic opacity” like a stone since listening to this talk. It has helped me solidify something I had been seeing in my own work that I didn’t like and couldn’t name.

When I begin a short story, or an essay, or anything else really, I tend to have things start “in media res” as it where, at this particular action point and then I move backwards in time to explain things. Over and over again when I am writing I find myself moving away from the MOMENT and into the backstory. I find myself developing complex backgrounds and set pieces from the past that will explain the “present” of the story. Sometimes that background becomes much bigger than the story I set down to write.

To a point, this is helpful, it is even perhaps interesting to the reader, but most often, it slams the breaks on my narrative. It answers questions no one was asking. It flattens the complex, complicated, inexplicable into something formulaic.

It supposes that character or human actions or motivations can be explained that every action is a direct result of a previous event.

It assumes that a story must be a certain thing, a character study. A psychological examination into the past of a character.

I don’t believe in that, in stories or in people. I cannot look at you, or anyone I may meet or already know, and see into your past or your present or brain. Even if I could, it wouldn’t answer everything for me. I CAN do that for myself and I remain largely unknowable, finding my own desires somewhat nebulous, occasionally concerning.

So, I turn the stone of “strategic opacity” over again and again, I am wearing it smooth in my hands. There is what I can know and what I can’t and then there is the question of how much it matters. I am thinking about how much to give and how much to hide and how storytelling is the tension between the two.

And I ask, what do you need to know?