All I can conjure to write is the cliche about raining and pouring, but I’ll spare you that. Another essay I wrote went live today on the Jaded Ibis Productions blog, Bleed. (You can read the essay here. And the essay at the Manifest-Station is here.) I’m so grateful to be able to share these fragilities with others. Sending my personal essays into the world is wholly new for me, and my baby legs are tottery. I’ve been inspired by the brave writing of people around me, including Rachel McKibbens, Taylor Mali, and Tara Hardy, the awesome poets I wrote about in the essay. Witnessing their courage, I awaken my own. My hope is that if I act brave, others will, too. And the world will become more whole.
Although many things distract me from knowing that it’s really this simple, lately I keep circling back to the core: For me, the whole point of doing this work (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, anything) is to connect with our shared humanity. That’s it. There are tools for this work (the craft) and plenty of folderol but really, it’s about finding and seeing the spark that lives in each of us.
(On Saturday night, I was with a group of others at Ellis Pond in Yellow Springs. A blue heron stood on spindle legs in the water, undisturbed by our gathering. Calmly teaching us about how to live.)
Two of my short pieces (a story and an essay) that will be published within the year include lyrics from Jack Hardy’s songs. (Read some posts about Jack here.) In my response to his family’s granting permission for me to use his words, I wrote:
His music has been (and continues to be) the tea in which my soul steeps, often, almost without thought, which must be why the lyrics make their way into my writing. I know that part of what he intended with his songs was that they be incantatory. I hope that in immortalizing them in these short pieces, his incantations will ripple outward…
This is how life works. And what glorious tea in which to steep!
(What are you steeping in right now? How does your life-tea suit you?)
I got an email from a writer friend who is working on a complicated memoir. She is stuck in the process. In her email, she described the self-doubt that crept in after witnessing a commercial agent dispensing what I consider toxic advice at a workshop. When another writer at the workshop described her own work-in-progress to the agent, because the described work falls outside the expected form for a self-help book, the agent said it was a bad idea and it would never sell.
To repeat: The agent said it was a bad idea and it would never sell.
When I think of this, a cliché tingles the back of my neck (clichés are based in truth, right?): the hair at the nape prickles, a shortcut for anger. Thanks, Agent. Way to shut a writer down! Here’s an adaptation of what I wrote back to my friend:
DISBELIEVE WHAT THAT AGENT SAID! WHATEVER MESHUGAS THE AGENT SAID, WRITE THE AGENT’S WORDS ON A PIECE OF PAPER AND THEN BURN IT!!!!!! KISS THAT ADVICE GOODBYE! That agent only has experience with commercial, old school, traditional publishing, and there is room for SO MUCH MORE in the world of writing. That agent doesn’t know everything! NO ONE knows everything!
From all I understand about writing a complicated memoir, you are in exactly the right spot—excavating the words, memories, feelings, and then shaping and giving it form is a messy and idiosyncratic experience. I know it’s incredibly rough. (I have sprawling, passionate fragments that I might some day shape into a whole memoir, but I’m not yet ready. Even the questions I have to uncover and ask in that process are too intimidating for now.) One message that emerged from all the writers at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop this summer is that EVERYONE operates in the world of self-doubt. EVEN keynoter Andre Dubus III said as much, and so did everyone else presenting. (“The faster I write, the more I’m able to outrun my self-doubt,” said writer Gayle Brandeis. I want to tattoo that line inside my eyelids.)
I’m coming to understand that self-doubt is our fuel.
Self-doubt keeps us honest and also helps us do the work. A paradox, because self-doubt can also cripple the writer. Many writers (more seasoned and articulate than I am) write about the plague of self-doubt. My advice (which I give freely to myself, yet have a hard time taking) is to acknowledge the self-doubt, realize that it’s part of the process, whether you’re writing work based on your direct experiences, or creating fictional worlds. Tie it up in a bundle, give it a name, and then laugh at it. Let it be your fuel.
Trudge through the snowstorm of self-doubt, and do the work (she tells herself).
For anyone following the story of my recent quitting Facebook, I need to confess what I did just now: I reactivated my Facebook account. I have found that completely not existing there (which is how deactivating an account reads to other users—as if Rebecca Kuder doesn’t exist) seems like it’s more a hindrance to me and my writing. This is another experiment, and we’ll see how it goes. I decided to re-activate and thereby re-exist in the weird place that’s not a place, and then log out and staying off for (at least) the rest of summer, and then will reapproach how or if I will use it.
I’ve never been a smoker, but this metaphor might explain: If Facebook was a lit cigarette in the ash tray on my desk, from which I could take a drag whenever I wanted (and I did, regularly, habitually, without thought), I intend that reactivating my account is allowing the pack of cigarettes to sit across the room, present, but untouched. That is my intention. (I will keep investigating this metaphor, to make sure it works, and to make sure I am working.)
I realize this post might be akin to telling you what I had for breakfast. Maybe I’m being a hypocrite, or undisciplined. Quite likely I’m the only one who cares about this shift in my relationship with Facebook. But in the interest of being honest, I needed to post what I did here.
The other day, I extricated myself from Facebook. Quitting Facebook has been on my mind for a long time, and I’ve been brewing a sort of confessional essay about why, but that’s still brewing. (In the previous sentence, I first typed, “Leaving Facebook…” but thought it was more apt to say “quit” because I don’t know if it’s possible to leave a place that isn’t a place.)
I’m using an addiction metaphor, which in my case fits. Facebook—which an aged relative erroneously but aptly once referred to as “Fishhook”—has become too visually and mentally noisy for me. I can’t be a casual/social drinker there, can’t (or haven’t been able to) limit myself to checking occasionally and not over-partaking. My time on Facebook leaves me feeling unbalanced and drained, hung over. As well, I’ve been reading The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (which comes in the midst of my extended rumination about managing distraction in the digital age, reading David Ulin’s The Lost Art Of Reading: Why Books Matter In a Distracted Time, etc…) and I’m convinced that I need to step away from my unthinking daily dips into social media. I don’t like who I’m becoming over there. What I really hope to do is train my brain to focus and sustain a long narrative again, a.k.a. read a book, and, let’s say, write a book, without feeling constantly distracted.
I have lost count of how many people have told me they can no longer read a novel. People who used to be novel-readers and novel-lovers. It’s starting to really scare me, because reading fiction makes us more human.
Why did I finally quit Facebook the other day? A dear (actual, real-world) friend posted something that jumped the shark for me. I don’t blame her, and I don’t judge her. But when I saw her post, I thought, “Okay, I’m done!” I have yet to thank her, because I don’t know how to frame that thanks, but she inadvertently helped me hit bottom (to continue the addiction metaphor). So in a perverse way, I’m grateful to her. It was clearly my time. The post gave me an excuse, and a decision.
I feel a need to make a public confession about my addiction to Facebook, and my quitting, so that I am held accountable. So that if someone sees me at the virtual bar, they can call a cab and send me home. I hope that having witnesses will help me self-regulate. (If you are reading this, thank you.) It’s similar to how my “Hang Up And Drive” bumper sticker keeps me from answering the cell phone (or I risk being a hypocrite!) when I’m on the road.
I want my brain back. I want to believe my brain is plastic enough, and my will strong enough, that I can regain what really matters to me. There are many things I love about Facebook. That’s the problem: Facebook is too many things to me. It’s postcards from friends, pithy humor, relevant professional and personal articles and shares, community bulletin boards, event announcements, messages, a constant party, more. It’s an accumulation of “Likes,” ego strokes when I post something celebratory or clever. I will miss these things. I have noticed many events are no longer posted on websites or in newspapers, but only on Facebook. I will miss some events because I won’t be there. I hope my friends will still find me in other ways, will still include me. Meanwhile I resume the quaint practice of joining email lists rather than “Liking” Facebook pages.
One prompt for my desire to quit Facebook last fall when I read Kathryn Schultz’s article about Twitter. She discusses how a writer needs to sustain attention, and needs the cave of isolation that is writing a long narrative. In the article, Schultz writes:
I began this piece by noting that writing my book involved spending four years in a figurative cave. In my experience, and the experience of most writers I know, that cave is the necessary setting for serious writing. Unfortunately, it is also a dreadful place: cold, dark, desperately lonely. Twitter, by contrast, is a warm, cheerful, readily accessible, 24-hour-a-day antidote to isolation. And that is exactly the issue. The trouble with Twitter isn’t that it’s full of inanity and self-promoting jerks. The trouble is that it’s a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be solved. Eighty percent of the battle of writing involves keeping yourself in that cave: waiting out the loneliness and opacity and emptiness and frustration and bad sentences and dead ends and despair until the damn thing resolves into words. That kind of patience, a steady turning away from everything but the mind and the topic at hand, can only be accomplished by cultivating the habit of attention and a tolerance for solitude.
I am intentionally conflating my Facebook with her Twitter because Facebook is the social media platform to which I have given my time and energy, and it’s a true equivalent for me. I keep coming back to the idea of “a problem that shouldn’t be solved.” There’s an echo of Orwell’s cave in Schultz’s cave: she describes it as“the necessary setting for serious writing. Unfortunately, it is also a dreadful place: cold, dark, desperately lonely.” In Orwell’s cave, from his essay, “Why I Write,” “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” A human may not want to subject herself to such a place, such an illness, but if she wants to write a book, it must be done.
Schultz’s “problem that shouldn’t be solved” is also echoed in how I am raising my daughter. I am not here to solve the problem of my child’s boredom. No parent (no pacifier, no gadget) should be. Boredom is necessary for human development, problem-solving, and building anything based upon imagination (which I think encompasses most of living, actually). Boredom is another problem that shouldn’t be solved. With a creative mind, boredom solves itself. Boredom is necessary for writers.
We have a choice. We can accept or reject the stew, the default happy meal of overwhelming information to which we have access, and which we now assume is normal and somehow sustainable, and which we assume will somehow sustain us. I’ve been inadvertently assuming this too long; I don’t like this soup. I need other nourishment.
While I experience my detox from that part of my digital click-diction, while I brace myself against the tremors, likely you readers of my blog will be subjected to more about the transition. Perhaps I add to the noise and the too much, here on my blog. I hope you’ll bear with me.
If not, at least maybe you’ll read my novel someday.
September 2013: Snuck back into the Earlham College makeup room, where I used to get into character…
I just wrote a note to one of my students, and thought it blog-worthy. I don’t think you need any back story, except that my student is writing a novel and the protagonist has some things in common with the writer, both having lost a beloved. Here’s what I wrote:
If you are comfortable with it (or maybe even if you’re a bit uncomfortable–stretching is really important!), spend some time reflecting on paper about your experience and how it might shape your approach to the protagonist’s loss. I think acknowledging this will be a way to make the protagonist’s story deeper and more authentic. (Do you know about method acting? It’s the parallel that comes to mind right now–where an actor accesses past experiences and emotions to help portray a character. In a weird way, this is similar. I think about this a lot as a writer, and do it fairly often, sometimes without realizing that’s what I’m doing.) I would really like to see this in your proposal. This linking who we are as humans to who we are as writers is the kind of reaching and growing that seems very appropriate in a graduate level writing program.
If you were to sort of skirt around it or not really “own” it, it might not get to the richness that is possible by owning it.
Joan Didion gets at a related something in her essay, “On Keeping A Notebook.” Didion writes, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not.” Otherwise, as she goes on, these former selves tend to haunt us.
I’m happpy to announce that my story, “Rabbit, Cat, Girl” was accepted by Resurrection House for XIII. Here’s something about the anthology XIII from the website: “When Mark Teppo, the founder of Resurrection House, acquired Underland Press, he wanted to start numbering the titles that would be released under the new imprint. Before doing so, he wishes to acknowledge and celebrate What Was and What Will Be. “Thirteen” is the first month of a new yearly cycle, wherein the old skins have been shed and the newborns are still learning to walk. “One” and “Three” make “Four,” which is the number of completion, of coming home, and of realizing the form that has been in process for some time. Nothing is true; everything is possible. And the more things change, the more they stay the same. The thirteenth Tarot card is Death, and he is the symbol of transformation and rebirth.
This is the genesis and root of XIII.”
Ironic, to me, that when I heard the story had been accepted, in a vase in my house we had exactly what I describe in the story they’ll publish: “How lovely the lilies of the valley are, dead, brown-edged, drooping in the vase, the stem-slope curvier than when fresh, somehow more truly themselves, more graceful as they relax, tender bells now browning, baby hats tumbling off.”
Here’s another hint about the story. I’ll let you know when you can read more.
Now everything (about me and why I care about sentences) starts to make sense…
“Writers who are sticklers for control find the agreeable rigor that punctuation, sentence and paragraph construction impose on unruly thoughts and words.”
Last Saturday, at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop seminar, Paths to Publication, my understanding about the revolution in publishing deepened. The thread through the day showed how the conversation has shifted: even those in traditional publishing now acknowledge (rather gracefully) that self-publishing is no longer simply what we used to know as vanity publishing and that there are about a thousand smart and thoughtful ways to do whatever a writer wants to do. This kind of event—involving agents, editors, and people who help others self-publish—would not have been as collegial and open even a couple years ago. It might have been because the people in the room were generous and respectful of each other, but I also think it has to do with the changing marketplace, and with the idea of literary citizenship.
Presenter Cathy Day teaches a course in literary citizenship at Ball State University. Day encountered the term on Dinty W. Moore’s post at Brevity. Though I’ve been thinking about literary citizenship for a while, and doing my part when I make time for it, the conversation on Saturday opened up how I had been thinking about the quest for a publisher. And beyond that, opened up how I had been thinking about what it is to be part of a literary community, to walk in the landscape of creative writing.
My epiphany, coming after the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Seattle (my first ever AWP conference) is interesting timing. I’ve been a lurker in the world of words. Depending on the day and my mood, I blame this tendency to lurk on being an introvert, or not knowing everyone, or not being connected, or being a slow reader, or not having read everything that I know somehow I should have read. (For instance, I feel a sense of shame when I look at the end of Francine Prose’s book Reading Like A Writer where she provides a four page list entitled, “Books To Be Read Immediately.”) At age 47, there are many areas in my life where I have grown comfortable taking charge, and where I feel a sense of balance. Approaching the public with my work is not one of them. But I woke on Saturday morning (before the AWW seminar) with a new clarity: 1) I want my work to be read, and 2) I don’t want to be at the mercy of others to make that happen. I’m not sure what these two facts will manifest. (Stay tuned.)
And as the day went on, I realized that getting published (which sometimes seems like the only thing, as a thirsty plant needs water) is a relatively small part of the work of a literary life. Yes, it’s nice to have recognition, and not to feel invisible. But there’s more to it than that. “Ask not what you can to do get published. Ask what you can do for books,” read Cathy Day’s first slide in her presentation on literary citizenship. A great place to start reframing things…
Literary citizenship seems a bit like taking care of the planet. But it goes beyond a literary version of Woodsy Owl’s “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!” It’s not just avoiding throwing a beer can out of your car window, and it goes beyond picking up the cigarette butts you see on the sidewalk. It’s composting, and taking the humus to the community garden. Earnest literary citizenship is a deeper way to care for the environment of books and words, and it is not self-serving, unless we think of maintaining the environment of books as a good thing in itself, and good for us humans (which it is). It’s giving thought (beyond our own writing) to what we give to the world, what we leave behind for future generations of readers…and it’s really about sustaining and contributing to a community.
(“We make the world. We make it!” I wrote a long time ago in a post here. It’s just now sinking in that this applies not just to the world but also to the world of books and words. We have a lot of work to do. I have a lot of work to do. But what else would I rather be doing?)
I’m grateful for all the presenters at Saturday’s AWW publishing seminar for a wonderful day: Jeff Herman, Deborah Herman, Kirby Gann, David Braughler, Steve Saus, and Cathy Day. As often happens at AWW events, early in the day, a sort of narrative thread emerged: Do your work, connect with others, practice the good form of nurturing books and supporting the community of writers, read the small print, you can do anything. Make something happen.
And finally after a long, oppressive winter, it’s spring.
Rebecca Kuder 