Shit has blown up in my life over the last three years, but in a way that I was really proud of managing and surviving. Now, this fall, a deeper but maybe even more important level of emergency has emerged, one that promises positive change.
First: how’s that sentence for a kind of chocolate torte of vagueness?
Second: To be clear—in our moment of global horror, this is a domestic emergency, a bread-and-butter emergency, not violence and bombing and war. It is an emergency of white people in the United States who have decent jobs and education and passports. And health insurance that often lets us down and makes things worse.
Third: “emergency” and “emerge”—what the heck? Is an Emergency a moment at which something is Emerging? Despite everything, being on Team Word delivers its joys. I can be in the middle of a difficult thing and yet words are a tether, a series of meanings that work together to make a net. My friend Dennis is a philosopher who has been working for years on a book about “emergence,” and I need to ask him about this overlap.
Fourth: Yes, things have emerged. They are emerging as old trauma felt for the first time like one’s skin will sometimes work out debris in the months and years after a car accident, birthing sharp bits that the body has held and incapsulated.
My book, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, got me thinking and reading and learning more deeply about audience, and learning all over again how important audience is to what we write and say. More specifically, I am reminded to imagine a caring audience—the opposite of that surly, hostile reader we are taught to write to in order to “hook” and “persuade” and “grab attention.” This was also, I think, why people like my essay collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys: it was written with pain people in mind as the intended audience, as part of an imagined safe conversation about pain. I specifically set aside any concerns about having to “translate” my experience to readers who wouldn’t get it. I think the imagined hostile reader has broken a lot of sentences and turned a lot of people away from writing. Who wants to start a fight with some random stranger? Sometimes me, but often not me.
So, in the midst of a crisis weekend that might deliver some changes on Monday, I am writing to you about words. About half an hour ago, I was writing the bare facts of what has been happening in our lives, the lives of my husband and myself. I know I will need these notes later because I will need to write this in some form. It’s excruciating writing, just stenography really, about the details as they are encapsulated in each of our recent days.
Sometimes the research for memoir is stenography. It’s taking notes as shit is happening. And that’s perfect and fine and absolutely okay. It’s both/and: journaling can be helpful for venting feelings, and a timeline can be helpful as a tether in an emergency and for later. And that writing can also be processed and processed and used as a foundation to make something else. That document, entitled “Mondays in November” on my desktop, is filled with hard stuff, but not impossible stuff, just hard stuff we are getting through.
What is magical to me is the way in which my brain was a chef’s salad of complete chaos all night, in the spurts of worry and tossing and turning, and then I got up to hack out some sentences as functional as a grocery list in my “Mondays” document. I submitted receipts to various places and moved money around because money is a current and future worry.
And then I opened this document, with the hope to only write down some phrases toward a post I’d send out much later, when my brain comes back online and I can think. And I am held by this document, but more than that held by audience, by the kind people I know who thought enough of my writing to click a “subscribe” button. And it was the knowing of those people—not the vague general hard edge of a social media post, but the known names of people who for whatever reason have wanted to read what I’ve written in the past and have said nice things—that called forth sentences with verbs and subjects, saying the kinds of things I needed to hear. It was you, my list of subscribers, who summoned the kind of voice that is making sense in the midst of chaos, like walking on a tightrope of letters 12 points wide, so that I feel less alone.
So thank you for giving me the clarity of being in conversation with you.
Thank you for this, and for letting us be in it with you, however chocolately. The idea of writing to the caring audience and the concept of stenography as memoir research have already changed the way I'm thinking about my work today.
“…like walking on a tightrope of letters 12 points wide, so that I feel less alone.”—wow. I am amazed and grateful for your writing through this and so glad to be part of your audience. I was feeling low this morning and am inspired now to write.