Logistics update:
This newsletter was born from a CNF class I taught for a few years online. Students seemed to like the setup, and I thought it’s be nice to blast it to a wider audience. This year, we’ll turn in a different direction: a little more lyric, a little less of the teacher vibes. I’m doing this because it’s the kind of thing I’d want to see in my inbox. I’ll send yall prompts a couple times a month for the first six months of the year and a craft musing once a month, toward the end. I’m opening up comments. Post what you write, if you want.
My tone is a little bit different these days. Last year was a year of exploding illusions, like growing up in Disney World then walking out and finding out real life is not only Orlando, but Florida, this country, this world. With illusions gone, some definitions are changing. Like how beautiful and terrible can mean the exact same thing.
For January, some lists, some excavations:
I count on my ability to reframe a shitty situation and keep going. I’m a single mom of three kids who have disabilities. I’ve been overemployed since I was fourteen because I had to take care of my dad, who was dying, then my brother, and later my children. These are emotionless facts of life. Moving forward, relentlessly, has been my battery.
I realized last year that sometimes reframing is a kind of prison. It’s an attempt to brighten what is real, but sometimes that brightening turns into a kind of addictive illusion. It’s hard for me to admit when anything is too hard or too much. It’s hard for me to say no or I can’t. It’s hard for me to admit with out reframing that last year was an intensely brutal year in a lifetime of brutalities. It’s hard for me to even write: Mine has been a lifetime of brutalities. Writing it makes me worry that I’m being dramatic, victimizing myself, complaining. It makes me feel that I’m against grit, success, resolve.
It also happens to be true.
Brutal means savage, vicious, cruel. It also means: direct without any attempt to hide. The way honesty sometimes crashes. The way a new truth can make your whole world feel cracked or distant or clean.
To me, a brutality is an event that carries some kind of savagery, good or bad, enough savagery to split you into at least two entirely different versions of yourself: the you that lived before the split, and the you that carries on after. It’s the moment before Katniss volunteered in the hunger games, when she thought her 12 year old sister had been condemned to death. It’s the moment you have to make an impossible decision. It’s the moment, like yesterday, when I received a text that my 12 year old daughter’s middle school was in lock down because of gunfire in a nearby building. It’s the moment that carves into you. If you’re lucky, you’re only carved in exactly half.
There’s been a lot of talk of the before/after perspective since last fall. I’ve interviewed authors for Parley Lit’s Totally Biased Reviews, one with Anne Gudger whose lovely book The Fifth Chamber is organized in Before/After chapters. I did a grief-based reading on Coffee Talk. I’m editing and collaborating on two animated films (for adults) with Parley. I’ve talked to friends and colleagues about grief and loss and the motherfucking holidays. In all of these conversations, it’s become clear to me that at least a handful of people in this world only experience one or two brutalities like this in their lifetimes. At first, I felt a little jealous of those folks. I thought how cushy, just that one tragedy or two. It was a low feeling, like the slouching rage I carried for a year after my first baby was stillborn, every time I saw a happy family with a little one who had a face like my imagined baby may have had.
Back then, I shoved that rage slouch aside every time I felt it, embarrassed, thinking I was such an ass for hating on these totally pleasant strangers. Lately, when I felt jealous of all the imagined people with their teeny coin purses filled with tragedy and me with my freight train, I thought: I wonder what’s inside of this jealousy. Not like jealousy is a mask for something beautiful. Not like let’s mine the darkness until we slam into light.
More like: What does this jealousy look like? What are the scenes, the images, the shapes? How does it move within my body? Where is the landscape in which that jealousy would purr and hum?
Lists are one of my favorite techniques in writing because of all the different actions they can take. A list of different scenes can show perspective, contrast. A list of things you love or hate or ate last week can tell stories about virtually anything. Some of the most effective lists include opposites: I knew/didn’t know, wanted/didn’t get/got, I fucked up/succeeded, etc etc etc
My favorite duos this month are list of brutalities and wants, savageries and jealousies. My favorite way to shift these lists from a seemingly low burn of some of our most embarrassing or even shame-inducing thoughts is to think about how they work in the before and after. Not like we must shift our slouchy feelings into something constructive or bright. More like: It’s mighty interesting to excavate them, and it’s a lot more fun to excavate with a map. Here’s mine.
Before I got the gunfire text yesterday, I was so hungry without an appetite. Afterward, I could only think about the spot in the middle of my chest where a ball of trapped static had formed, I could only think about my hands, what to do with them. There was nothing to do with them.
Before I read the headline, Fourteen year old found dead, self inflicted gunshot wound, I thought, If I don’t find something to do with my hands, I will die. After, I thought not my kid, thank god and then there was only the parents, the unknowable parents, people who probably have eyes and a heart and now an empty space in the shape of that child tethered to their whole bodies for the rest of their lives. I thought about what it would take to rewind time. I wanted to spit some kind of weapon. I wanted to melt all the weapons in the world. I understood for a single, temporary, flash why religion exists and why people often make themselves into monsters to adhere to it. I understood this wasn’t my pain. I wondered what is the fabric of potential pain.
Some seeds:
Make a list of your lowest burns or a list of your brutalities or a list of your embarrassments. Excavate them. Make this year about coming out from behind whatever it is in your life that you hide behind.
Or make a list of your hiding places, your prisons, stay there as long as you need to, and list all the reasons you aren’t ready to leave.