Marcie McCauley

This month I’m inspired to write about David Naimon’s Between the Covers interview with Vi Khi Nao. Usually I listen to these interviews without having read the books discussed but, recently, I’ve been relistening to a few, to see if aspects of the conversation resonate differently with more familiarity with the author’s work.

With Vi Khi Nao, neither of the works at the heart of this interview—Umbilical Hospital (poems) and A Brief Alphabet of Torture (short stories)—were available via the public library, but I was able to find Fish in Exile. Although I had previously enjoyed the interview (his series is one of my favourites), reading did add another layer of appreciation.

In the context of her work, she talks about how people should view her story collection as an older sister to Fish in Exile. But Fish was unique, too, in the sense that it was written while she was in an abusive relationship, with some aspects of the narrative omitted in early stage; her lover had been reading the manuscript in progress, so the sections that were not encoded were added after the relationship had ended.

How it’s written does matter, she says: “The concept is boring but the actual art of writing is not.” And she issues a kind of warning to readers, that something deep and introspective is afoot; you have to drop out of reality to engage with the book.

Some of the interview is very serious, as when Naimon comments on a sense of rumination and repetition—which can sometimes be incantatory, and which can deepen engagement. (This word, incantatory, I love it.) But there’s another layer to the interview, as with the talk of sheeps’ assholes and how they blend in with the landscape.

There’s discussion of how Lydia Davis was inspired by cows and how one of her books came out of that. (I wonder how many of Naimon’s interviews don’t include a reference to Davis.) But these sheep that Vi Khi Nao is writing about? They actually exist in film.

She was writing those poems, inspired by the sheep, in 10-minute chunks of time, without editing until the entire chapbook was drafted. She describes this kind of writing as feeling like she was breathing for the first time in her life, like it was sacred.

And, generally, she does not edit her own poems or stories. But Fish was edited, however; twice before landing with Coffee House Press and then a third time, with about 95% of the suggestions accepted by the author.

When she does edit her own work, she is dramatic and creates a wholly different work so that the first version is barely (if at all) recognizable. “It’s not for everyone,” she giggles, “the hammer method versus the tweezer.”

There’s talk about significant influences (C.D. Wright, a poet and teacher at Brown, and Forrest Gander) and she mentions how they affect/ed her energy, in the moment of contact and in a lingering kind of way (for instance, she still feels C.D. Wright’s consciousness with her, even now, although she died in 2016).

When asked why she doesn’t write like Nam Le (The Boat) or Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer), she says that writing in English gives her the opportunity for distance. Vietnamese is a beautiful and poetic language, she observes: tender and, she believes, evident in her writing but invisible.

There are some sentences, she notes, which one might feel are ‘strange’ and she thinks these are revealing a slant that exists first in Vietnamese, an expression of her somatic Vietnamese self. It’s playing out like a phantom, she says, like a sonic volume. So even if you don’t see diacritical marks in her language, they take place in the works’ experimental form.

She calls herself an eco-writer because she recycles things that she’s written previously, includes them in a later assignment. And she has different writing rituals, some of which developed out of individual assignments or calls.

She’d started out writing what she imagined to be a more accessible story, the kind she imagined her family would be able to read and appreciate, but the first page that emerged was Fish in Exile. She read Harlequins to try to grasp a more mainstream style, but it just didn’t work—after only one page, she realized it wasn’t going to be a mainstream story.

This interview series: a tremendous resource for literary writers and poets.

Based on the 2011 book by Robin R. Means Coleman, the documentary Horror Noire (Dir. Xavier Burgin, 2021) is an excellent introduction to identifying socio-political realities in film and possibly a way to lengthen your TBW list. (I added Girl with All the Gifts to mine.)

Early on, there’s some discussion of classic films, like Birth of a Nation—and its reflection of the government’s approval of political persecution by groups like the KKK—and King Kong. Commentary by people like Tananarive Due (her books are great, if you’re into horror) outlines the kinds of opportunities available to Black actors in Hollywood: how, initially, they were simply played by white actors, then they were represented as aliens (e.g. Creature of the Black Lagoon), and then had limited roles as second-class citizens or mystical figures (e.g. Uncle Remus).

With films like 1973’s Ganja and Hess (directed by Bill Gunn) and Scream Blacula Scream (starring Pam Grier) horror movies begin to move past the limitations of Blaxploitation films. Gunn’s film, exploring links between addiction and vampirism, was too smart and too stylized for many viewers, Due explains; more commonly, Black actors in horror films suffered from Red Shirt Phenomenon (i.e. the disposable characters in a Star Trek landing party, the first to die).

Clive Barker’s Candyman, a story originally designed to provoke conversations about class differences on the page, introduced conversations about race in regards to casting: was it an opportunity for a Black actor to take the lead role, or was it perpetuating patterns of Black men as predators? In Attack the Block, Black actors have lead roles with agency and the lead in Girl With All the Gifts was cast—but not written—as a Black character. Jordan Peele figures prominently as well, with a juicy bit of information about his having rewritten the ending of Get Out, in order to offer something he perceived audiences needed at the time, with BLM protests prominent and ongoing.

A great resource for horror writers.

This Graywolf series is a mainstay in my writer’s stack: whatever the theme, whoever the author, I’m down for it.

Admittedly, however, there are topics that pull me into the reading more quickly: The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts immediately appealed, whereas The Art of Mystery was unexpectedly relevant.

My hunch is that my response is more to do with the author than with the topic (although obviously that author selected that topic as a meaningful aspect of craft for them, so there’s a relationship).

Davies defines revision succinctly: “Call it, for now, the sum of what changes, and what stays the same, and the alchemical reaction between them.”

Then he elaborates and hints where the complexity lies: “Revision, after all, is the journey of a story—the story of a story, if you like—and of its writer’s relationship with that story. As such—like any journey, like any story—it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning of revision, appropriately enough, is vision. Yet seeing revision is easier said than done.”

To demonstrate the art of seeing revision, Davies considers the first and last published stories by American author Flannery O’Connor: “The Geranium” and “Judgement Day”. One opens Complete Stories and the other closes it (the collection was 1972’s posthumous winner of the National Book Award in the United States). The discussion is detailed and mechanical; it’s just the kind of gritty analysis that writers honing their craft will appreciate.

Davies also considers the impact on Raymond Carver’s short stories of his editor, who pared down Carver’s narrative into what readers view as Carver-esque, quintessentially polished and exacting, which is actually as much Lish’s style as Carver’s. This is fascinating because Carver wasn’t tossing early drafts to his editor: Carver revised the work many times himself.

All these different layers of seeing, of revisioning, provoke even more contemplation: “(It’s worth noting at this point that while Carver’s versions of these stories predate the Lish versions, they’re by no means early drafts. Carver is on record as saying, ‘I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts.’)”

I also really appreciated Davies’s ideas about adjacent craft questions. For instance, his discussion of endings, when he says that not all endings need to be breath-taking, because “the right ending can also make us exhale, sign with aesthetic satisfaction.” This isn’t a book about endings, but when revision is considered a journey, then the destination matters a great deal.

One of the most intriguing ideas, for me, is what Davies views as “the sheer ubiquity of revision” in the form of “[r]emakes, reboots, retcons, sequels, revisionary ratios.” This broadens the cultural conversation, so it’s not only about elements of craft but also raising questions about the audience and what the revisioner’s choices “amount to, what they serve…the elaboration, articulation, alteration, and enriching of meaning.”

A great resource for writers.

Peter Ho Davies. The Art of Revision. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2021.

There will still be posts dedicated to books about writing and storytelling, but I’m broadening the conversation to include other media.

So, in a couple of weeks, there’s talk of a newer volume in Graywolf’s writing series and, later, talk of a documentary film about storytelling in another medium and an interview via podcast.

Why? I’m already discussing the books I read on BuriedInPrint, but there are so many outstanding films and TV series, podcasts and broadcasts, that go unmentioned. Often they employ the very techniques that I most enjoy on-the-page and I’m itching to say so.

I suspect that many of the storytelling techniques that I consider favourites were introduced to me as a young viewer, like shifting perspectives. (My So-Called Life’s shifting povs, for instance: with the initial episodes revolving about the main character but, in time, episodes devoted to the perspectives of “secondary” characters, who are the main characters in their own specific arcs.)

Often my favourite writers draw readers’ attention and focus to what’s left unsaid, or to events that unfold out-of-sight. Something which the recent film The Zone of Interest explores brilliantly, for instance.

There’s always a book about craft in my stacks (right now, it’s Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words), but I hope there’s room for the conversation to expand beyond books too.

Because I enjoyed all the talk of writing in her autobiographical Auto da Fay (2002), I was excited to see this palm-sized volume on a remainder shelf.

But, honestly, I wasn’t expecting much: its size and length suggested someone had been thinking more about marketing and stocking-stuffer possibilities than its contents.

There is concrete and helpful advice here. As the subtitle indicates, Weldon is writing “A Handbook for the Rejected Writer” but, of course, that’s every writer, to some degree.

There’s comic potential and Weldon puts it to work. What are your options when you’ve received yet another rejection? “You can spend the rest of your life disappointed and aggrieved,” she posits, to start. But she present hands-on solutions too.

No quick-fixes, but reliable problem-solving. “So look for what you were trying to say in the first place. It’s in there somewhere, the good idea that launched the whole process: the loving phrase spoken, the hateful comment made, the telling conversation overheard, the news item read—whatever it was that impelled you to take up your pen or keyboard.”

She’s a career writer. “Readers, I would suggest, don’t much change over the centuries,” she suggests.  “They like a good simple robust story: a lot of sex, a hint of mortality, to be made to laugh, to be made to cry and with any luck, to think.” There’s the basic outline for success (i.e. to avoid further rejection). With one solid solution: “So provide it.”

There are many reasons why an editor or agent might not connect with a writer’s work. She’s often quietly funny when describing them:

“This [too much fine writing, too little plot] too can happen. You’ve been a natural writer since you took up a pen. Teachers have marvelled at your skill with words, the beauty of your prose, your astonishing gift for metaphor and so on. It’s not just your mother who thinks you are wonderful, but colleagues and established writers who wish they could write as well as you. But the fact is you’re not a novelist, you’re more of a poet, though since you write to the end of the line you haven’t realized it.”

Sometimes her humour is bolder. She writes a funny scene about how things go awry in a publishing house. “This is the worst possible case,” she admits, “but I had fun writing it, and these things happen. If it has, don’t give in, take steps.” Partly due to the nature of the book, compact and concise, the focus of her advice is to act.

One limitation of this volume’s size is the limited capacity to refer to other writers’ work and experiences, to recommend other volumes on craft. There are a few references in the text, like Graham Greene’s advice on intuition, which Weldon summarises: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses, the moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

There are two Gone Girl references wedged in with the classic examples and nine recommendations on the last page (two Vonneguts). Writers looking for contemporary references must look elsewhere. But Weldon makes the classics work: “Hardy worked from press cuttings for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Flaubert for Madame Bovary; don’t be sniffy.”

Ultimately, Weldon rests on the oft-repeated truth: “All novelists go about things differently. There is no one way of doing anything.” Which is a comfort, after she’s shared so much of her own way.

A useful resource for writers.

Fay Weldon. Why Will No-One Publish My Novel? A Handbook for the Rejected Writer. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Clearly stating his intention from the start, Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World is an invitation to discuss the foundational ideas and practices that define writers and their work.

“This book is intended to begin further conversation—it should never be taken as an exhaustive or definitive resource,” he says. And, because “craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations”, that conversation may range widely.

[And, speaking of conversations, I’d heard about this book, but it wasn’t until I saw Rebecca Upjohn‘s recommendation, her describing how it had impacted her thinking and reading, that I decided to purchase a copy myself.]

Up for discussion are not only the stories that have been analysed, lauded and celebrated, but also the stories that have been neglected, misunderstood, and overlooked:

“Craft is the history of which kind of stories have typically held power—and for whom—so it also is the history of which stories have typically been omitted.”

He references other writers and thinkers who value and prioritise difference and views himself as part of a community that aims to broaden the understanding of stories told as well as the power dynamics simmering beneath the decisions at work in their telling, in their reception, and in their proliferation.

Like many others, he quotes Audre Lorde: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean.” Because I’ve been rereading Lorde’s essays of late, and had recently finished Alexis De Veaux’s biography of her, I felt like I was contributing to this discussion. But with his reference to Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Chinweizu et al.) and the four conventions identified therein about the tradition of incorporating the fantastic into everyday life, I felt like a student, reaching into my reading experience to locate stories that fit with these conventions.

(Curious what they are? First, the spirit beings have a non-human trait that gives them away—like floating—and second, a human’s visit to the spiritland involves a dangerous border-crossing, and third, spirits not only have agency but can possess humans and, finally, spirits aren’t subject to human concepts of space/time. If I had understood this when I read Ben Okri’s The Famished Road after it won the Booker Prize, I wouldn’t have had quite so many questions!)

In imagining myself in conversation with these essays, there were times where I disagreed, but although he presents his ideas with certainty and authority, there is something about his tone which suggests that he might enjoy the process of broadening the conversation to include disagreement. Having read Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays about writing the Earthsea stories for instance (not only the original trilogy, but the volumes and stories that followed), I believe her intentions are slightly different than he understood them to be, in the context of their original publication, and I think that would be a rewarding conversation to explore, particularly in the context of how some of the later stories differ from the early ones. I don’t think this is the kind of discussion that has a resolution…the merit is in having the discussion.

Despite the volume’s compactness, Salesses is committed to nuance. Despite his spare prose, he’s prepared to get gritty. (“Diversity,” he writes, for examples, “in the parlance of our times, should not be tokenism.” Not everyone is prepared to acknowledge a distinction.)

He’s also prepared to admit that needing to have certain conversations doesn’t mean that we are prepared to do so. He writes: “It’s impossible to trace an entire tradition, including its experiments, in a single essay—this is the point. Writers must read much more widely and much more deeply, if we are to know enough craft to start to critique other writers fairly and to write truly for ourselves.”

There are plenty of references for readers who are just beginning to explore literature, just beginning to broaden their understanding of it, but Salesses admits that the work required to change conventional understanding of craft resides outside the scope of any single book, including his own.

One of my favourite passages in the books is this: “I believe in workshop as a shared act of imagination, in the ability of many minds to foster the growth of one by one by one through conversation. I believe in the vulnerability of process and the process of vulnerability.”

At first, maybe it sounds like all the most commercial parts of workshop culture, heavy on trendy words and light on meaning but, on closer examination there’s a profound idea there that I’ve longed to articulate myself. It’s harder to be vulnerable by engaging in a process these days, to reflect on it and adjust as necessary, than it is to adopt a position of certainty (or conform to someone else’s) and defend it loudly.

There’s a lot of theoretical material here, but Salesses gets practical too. I’m particularly fond of this bit of advice to writers who are evaluating another writer’s work: “Be specific and precise, and ask questions you don’t know how to answer, and give suggestions that come from reading the story for what the author wants it to be, not what you want it to be.”  (He’s speaking about the workshop environment, but the underlying concept is also valid for reviewers.)

His “Syllabus Example” is the first piece I’ve read that made me feel a little less crazy for writing so many notes about my own writing as a means of exploring intentions and results (sometimes a word count that competes with the length of the work itself!). I photocopied three of his 34 Revision Exercises and filed them with a simmering WIP. And I flagged “A List of Craft Questions to Take into Consideration” because it looks useful. (He presents these pieces as beginnings, a foundation for further development.)

A fine resource for writers.

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. NY: Catapult, 2021.

This is a most suitable companion for last autumn’s resource, Miss Chloe, in which A. J. Verdelle considered her relationship with Toni Morrison in the context of Verdelle’s life of letters, as reader and writer. Here, Helen Humphreys considers her life as reader and writer in the context of the relationships she’s had over the years with her dogs—most recently, Fig.

It’s hard to imagine this book without the dogs, and even though I’ve never had a years-long dog friend, I flagged several passages about them. “If all else fails in a conversation,” Humphreys notes, “particularly when writers are forced to socialize with one another at a literary event, I know that if the person I am speaking with has a dog, we will never run out of things to say.”

When she talks about Fig’s fidgeting while trying to prep her for a walk, she discovers an unexpectedly simple solution:

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before and have been fighting her this whole time when instead I could have just let her hold something in her mouth and made the whole enterprise much easier. Another example of the way a dog tells us what to do with them, and if we’re paying attention and not fixated on having our way, by listening to what they’re trying to communicate, we could get along with them better.”

Organically, from this realisation, this emerges: “This is not dissimilar to writing, where it is more effective to listen to intuition instead of trying to force your will upon a piece of work.”

She seamlessly stitches the two topics together, structurally and granularly: her relationships with dogs and her relationships with creative projects. And just as each dog she has loved is unique in her experience, so each book has been: “Each new novel requires that everything be learned all over again, because no two books are alike, and there are different sets of problems requiring different solutions when creating each one.”

Humphreys also contemplates the relationship between reading and writing: “It was reading that made me want to be a writer. I had cried uncontrollably for an entire day after reading Charlotte’s Web and was so affected by stories—unable to separate them from real life—that I decided the only way to loosen their hold on me would be to create them myself, because then I would know what was coming in the story and wouldn’t get so upset.” As a young reader and burgeoning writer, she could have selected several stories to illustrate her point, but E.B. White’s novel is perfect in the context of her relationships with four-legged and wild creatures.

For those familiar with Humphreys’ work beyond this book, there’s an additional layer of interest as she discloses elements of process for specific projects. About Leaving Earth, for instance, she writes: “I couldn’t figure out how to transition from one scene to the next, so I simply ended a scene and moved on to another one. This made the pace fairly quick, which, luckily for me, suited the story I was telling, so the short scenes don’t betray my lack of ability, and instead seem to be there as a deliberate device.”

And readers familiar with her body of work will not be surprised to find grief a central tenet here: “The natural world became even more important to me than it had before, and the smallest wonder in it was enough to calm my spirit for another day.” Her prose is spare, which affords the opportunity to deep emotion to settle between the sentences and paragraphs: readers coping with a recent or long-ago loss may find additional comfort here, perhaps unexpected in a volume which also contains valuable writing advice.

And A Dog Called Fig is a meditative and tender book about loneliness and companionship, love and grief, based in reflections on a life shared with dogs and shared with story; Helen Humphreys illuminates that the way we build (and lose) relationships is not all that different from how we create (and release) narratives into the world.

An excellent resource for writers.

Helen Humphreys. And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, and the Writing Life. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2022

A. J. Verdelle chronicles not only her friendship with a renowned writer, but also her own personal relationship with words—as a reader and as a writer—and the development of this lasting relationship over the years. About three dozen pages into the volume, this quotation reveals how she found her community:

“Eventually, of course, I developed acuity enough and autonomy enough to choose more deliberately, more cautiously. I chose Morrison frequently, and from a thrumming list of others: Maya Angelou Alice Walker, Julia Peterkin, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston. Much later, I read Ann Petry and Nella Larsen. Reading this roster of Black women helped me understand that Morrison was not writing alone.”

So many of these names are familiar to me (but I would have added Terri McMillan, Bebe Moore Campbell, Shay Youngblood, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy West, Marita Golden, and April Sinclair) that I knew I would enjoy this volume, if only for Verdelle’s thoughts on reading. She writes: “If you let a Black girl loose in a library, you may not recognize the woman who emerges.”

Her discussion of the vital importance of other writers’ words—to her personhood and her creative work—is impassioned: “We/I owe so much to books. Books changed my sight lines, my expectations, my sense of the enormity of time and the complexity of humanity.”

This theme continues through her account of the years that Toni Morrison herself spent in editorial work. Questions she poses from Morrison’s point-of-view remain valid today: “Why shouldn’t we stand on shelves in the libraries? Why shouldn’t our spines be straight? Why shouldn’t she change which books were published?”

Verdelle celebrates the act of reading generally, but also reading Toni Morrison specifically. Close rereadings of Morrison’s work lead to incisive commentary about individual narratives and characters, Morrison’s oeuvre, and her overarching intent and underlying preoccupations:

“Morrison’s novels are full of teenage girls showcasing or dramatizing the discoveries, the misdirections, and the assaults that implode and plague their lives. Even as the decades pass for the characters, and they mature into parents and grandparents and exhausted observers, still, the novels spotlight teenager girls.”

For those who explore Verdelle’s memoir with the experience of only one or two of Morrison’s novels, there are plenty of passages to tempt further exploration:

“If you look, you will find specific reflections on complex and straightforward human endeavors, including handling atonement and forgiveness (complex) or cooking soft-boiled eggs (straightforward). You can find full treatises on slavery, naming, Reconstruction, and the Jazz Age. You can find secondary treatises on the Korean War, Black posterity, Black women’s friendships, mothering. You can also find ribbons, and red velvet rose petals, and a clearing in the woods where a woman can preach.”

Inextricably intertwined with her love and respect for reading is Verdelle’s desire to write. “Writing had been what I’d wanted to do,” she explains, since “well, since learning that somebody wrote everything I was reading.” Many of us who are compelled to write can recall the moment at which we realized that someone—a person—wrote the words inside of books. Verdelle’s tone—so direct and clear—includes her readers in this conversation. It feels, as we absorb her relatable prose, as though she has already included us in her circle.

This circle includes everyone who has influenced her work, including James Baldwin who, Verdelle writes, “famously said that writers have eighty million decisions to make. (So get busy.) The number is not an exaggeration.” (This immediately becomes one of my favourite observations about writing life!) Sometimes she carries on to make specific suggestions, following another writer’s advice, as in this instance: “So, those of us who intend to write need to build our decision-making skills. And we need to make all those decisions against our human backdrop—the ticking clock we know as mortality.” Her natural inclination to twin commentary on both art and life ensures that readers are attuned to the universal elements at work, so I suspect creatives of all sorts (not only writers) would find value here.

Verdelle returns, consistently, to Morrison, however. And because she has the experience of a long-time friendship with the writer, there are additional layers to reflect upon, in comparison with another writer who could only glean wisdom from Morrison’s own writing or lectures about the craft of writing. For instance: “From writing, we learn the power of the pause; from Morrison, I learned about power in pause in person. I am neither afraid nor made uncomfortable by pause, by silence, by moments where thoughts make their connections, rendezvous in sit. Some pauses are pregnant and worth the wait.” (And, if you’re wondering, their friendship had its challenges.)

Most often the advice is Morrison’s, or is rooted directly in a consideration of her work. For instance: “Morrison expected that writers would take on the task of independently teaching themselves. Regulating their own lives, their own writing practice, their own schedules.” The importance of initiative and self-regulation, especially for freelancers, cannot be overstated.

Verdelle is not dismissing more formal education, though she doesn’t overlook its limitations: “Imagination can only be nurtured; technique can be taught, identified, explained.” And, because she is herself an accomplished writer (her debut novel, The Good Negress was a critic’s darling in 1995), she has her own advice to share. Consider: “Characters blister their feet on the roads in their environment, their era. We writers have to recognize, and sometimes set aside, the lens of now.”

Though particularly rewarding for me, combining elements of a bibliomemoir with a chronicle of a literary friendship which includes one of my personal favourite writers, A.J. Verdelle’s Miss Chloe is rich and thought-provoking enough that readers with only one of these inclinations will find it a rewarding read.

Great stuff for writers.

A. J. Verdelle. Miss Chloe. NY: HC-Amistad, 2022.

Simply by reading the title and author’s name, you will have an inkling of whether or not there’s a match to be made between you and this book. There’s the prominence of the word ‘soul’ for one thing, and the fact that the author adopted this name based on a message she received in a dream for another. And if you are the kind of person for whom an inkling matters, you are in good company and, if you count Natalie Goldberg among your favourite authors of books about writing and you have completed (or dreamed of completing) Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, you will feel like you’ve found your circle.

The emphasis on spirituality and personal growth did not suit my current frame of mind (and, further, I was craving a book on creativity in general, not about writing specifically) but I was encouraged to read on by this passage: “We have to let go of our ideas about ideal conditions for beginning if we are going to start.” With my work routine disrupted by a recent move—and compounded by a protracted illness—I struggled to focus; this simple concept (familiar, but freshly present, and in print) snapped my resolve into place.

What kept me reading was the author’s reference to one of my favourite writers (“reading the book The Stone Angel by author Margaret Laurence…made me want to write”) and to a writer whose work I have admired in general, whose work felt particularly pertinent with Russia’s war on Ukraine, the ongoing war in Ethiopia, unrest in Lebanon and continued conflict in Syria:

“Susan Griffin’s books Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War are two that repeatedly reinspire me to remember the mysterious process whereby writing or any other creative endeavor, can reveal the wholeness of life and the meaning embedded in interwoven colors and sounds and stories.”

I was reassured to discover this truism on these pages: “Sometimes it just takes a shift in perspective to help us see the world a little differently, to spark the imagination in new ways.” And I, too, took comfort in the works of others, while I felt unable to do my own work: “Getting in the mood to do our own creative work may mean deliberately cultivating our connection to a particular expression of someone else’s work.” At times, I marvelled at the room in these new surroundings (both indoors and outdoors) and thought that this might be true for some—“Too often we have little sense of spaciousness in our lives”—but, for me, broader spaces felt disorienting and strange.

At the end of each chapter, there are things to think about, sometimes things to write about. Mostly, the text seems to speak directly to a single reader, but occasionally it’s clear that the audience is a group or class, working through the book methodically and collegially.

In the “Doing the Work” chapter, readers are invited to complete the following phrases:
“I am committed to…
I find it difficult to persevere at…
I am patient with…
I am impatient with….” Although likely most useful for those who write primarily for personal growth, What We Ache For contains some solid advice.

Fair stuff for writers, good stuff for journallers.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer. What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.