After a decade in Tokyo, I left in 2002 for a writing residency at Interlochen Arts Academy in rural northern Michigan. A campus maintenance worker met me at the Traverse City airport in an old school van. As we drove through the woods, we talked about winters of the northern tundra. She advised me to stock my cupboards and bookshelves for the long, silent months of snow. I appreciated her words on furnishing solitude with nourishment and pleasure--for reasons beyond contemplative hibernation. The arrival of cold seasons is not always heralded merely by calendar. My marriage in Japan had grown lonely, and was nearing its end.
That winter, I walked along the lakeshore, where the snow turned blue in the dusk, and fishing shanties dotted the ice. In a barely insulated, former summer music-camp cabin at night, I chopped onions and root vegetables for the soup pot, and lit candles at my table for one. Sometimes, I drank too much red wine. And yes, I wrote. I learned how to live alone again in that cabin, until one semester stretched into two years. In the process, I reckoned with the fact that one must not just tolerate solitude to write; one must make friends with it.
No matter how I cultivated the fine arts of nesting, however, I grappled with self-doubt that can shadow protracted periods of monologue. When no reply comes, one's voice may falter in the stillness. In Building the Cold From Memory, northern Michigan novelist/poet Jack Driscoll describes the winter nightscape stranded on an uneasy edge between tranquility and abandonment:
For now the wind will sort out its missing gloves
and hold the barn door hinges silent for a while.
If we listen
our fathers might drag a block of ice for the last time
on a sled.
That's enough to begin.
Even without the stars
someone keeps ringing a heavy bell,
the distant voice of a buoy praying on the far
shore.
In seclusion, my self-doubt often became a preemptive censor that scorned and rejected sentences before they could reach the page. Then the quiet felt as mute and lost as those missing gloves. On frozen weekends, I drove a half-hour into town, where I sat with the newspaper in a coffee shop, to eavesdrop on strangers' conversations, and discuss severe weather with the cashier-- just to hear the voices of others.
Regardless of climate conditions or place, in a writing life, two yearnings can feel both urgent and in conflict: to possess sufficient time to oneself, and to exist in community. Companionship is so crucial to our sense of well-being that solitary confinement has historically been considered extreme punishment, and more recently, debated as a form of torture. In Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller notes how 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume and many of his contemporaries believed that neglecting the craft of conversation would risk violent civil discord in Britain. After all, when we fail to engage each other with words, chaos often ensues; the collapse or lack of negotiation has preceded countless wars, whether between spouses or nations.
Real dialogue is predicated upon the capacity for empathy: the will to hear and respond to another's experience and perceptions--and thus, to acknowledge the fundamental humanity of an other. As an act of mutual inquiry, conversation expands our awareness of what Hume called "the conversible world" beyond the self. At its best, writing creates that intimate connection with a reader. When it succeeds, both writer and reader are less alone.
As Jack Driscoll told me recently: "Maybe turning toward each other is art's function." Snowed in again last weekend, I'd called Jack to ask about Twin Sons of Different Mirrors, a poetry collection written in dialogue with his friend, poet Bill Meissner. For ten years, Driscoll and Meissner exchanged envelopes containing two lines of poetry at a time between their homes in Michigan and Minnesota. Their words traveled via US Postal Service (this was the pre-internet era), and when the collection was eventually complete, neither writer remembered who had begun or ended each poem.
A conversation's outcome is the shared responsibility of its participants. As a result, for Jack, writing poetry as dialogue dismantled the skeptical self-consciousness that muscles in, ruthlessly, to subdue the human imagination. "The poem was never mine nor Bill's--" Jack says, "and so we never spent time fighting that internal censor whose job it is to doubt and scold, and remind us that we may not, in fact, be ready to engage this impossible passion called writing." The correspondence in poetry helped Jack through ten hard winters in snow country, while his own work was unfurling between poems and short stories, finally, to novels.
Collaboration yielded insights about the revision process as well, he recalls: "It taught me not to be embarrassed...or to edit myself prematurely, to grow too timid or tidy. I mean, really, wasn't it all Bill's fault for feeding me those crazy lines? We went with what we were given, and it freed us up to speak in ways unanticipated, ways that helped me later to relax more when I returned to my own poems and stories."
Emerging writers often fixate on the cultivation of their distinctive, individual voice. What strikes me about Twin Sons is the seamless quality of these poems--written by two writers, early in their careers, practicing conversation in its most attentive, authentic form: without insistence on scoring points, or raising the volume of one's own voice, but instead discovering something together. That kind of conversation makes us feel profoundly connected, and ultimately, it girds us with the essential courage for those things that we must do alone.
My next post here will delve into several other books (both prose and poetry) written in conversation. I'll also explore ways to practice writing in dialogue--not just to survive the depth of winter, but to navigate any season or any place where creative companionship is needed.
Please do send me occassional reminders of your blog posts as I have to admit that due to the busyness of my life I don't check.
them. Loved the latest!
2) What constitutes a "fruitful" writing life? Is it measured by output volume or recognition? Is it enough to have a small body of work that moves others deeply? Or to write for the desk drawer, and occasionally publish a poem or story? Or not publish at all, but to read to a loved one? This can be defined in more than one way: the market can tell us in profit terms what amounts to a meaningful career. We can also turn inward, and ask: did this book/poem/story add to my understanding of what it is to do justice to a human life? You must have much to discuss with your classes. Lucky you! And lucky them.
Many women writers of my generation went to solitude - willingly, voluntarily, joyfully. We came into connection with that which sustains. After that, we were home everywhere.
Among my favorite related books is environmentalist Stephanie Mill's wonderful "Epicurean Simplicity," in which, among other things, she addresses the accessible joys that cost nothing: a walk in the woods; or the discovery of an unfamiliar but perfect word. Mills, like Driscoll, is at home in the woods of northern Michigan. Returning to rural northern MI after 10 years in the densely urban crush of Tokyo was also a homecoming for me. Imagine that first scent of wild mint underfoot in the lake-shore mud, after years of walking on dead concrete.
I, too, welcome Jack Driscoll's excerpted lines. They are so powerful. To my mind, Jack owns the "novel-poem" It's a rare line of his prose that in some way couldn't blossom into a poem.
You quote Albrecht's conviction that people have their heart's ease when they're on their country. I think about this while returning to that powerful image in Jack's poem about the father dragging the block of ice on a sled. I wonder -- what was the equivalent of that for my parents? They were isolated, displaced. Without realizing it, they turned their life into one of daily figure-making (metaphor/simile.) For example, I recall my mother dragging a table out to the middle of our snow-covered ten acres in winter so that we could eat there, feeling nothing but the hunger of mid-January barren trees and silenced scrub pines around us. Everything had to, in some way, point back to another time, another place. I didn't understand then -- I just assumed they (particularly my mother) were theatrical beings -- constantly creating new frames for us to step into, to inhabit. But now I understand the process as living metaphor. It saved my parents when they needed to feel the drag of that heavy sled behind them.
Is it possible that the writer ends up being alone in the first place, because they do not find that "capacity for empathy"? or better, do not find the "will to hear and respond"?
Because to respond, there must be a connection - there must be some shared knowledge, known or unknown.
Not odd then that Jack and Bill corresponded - seems likely that the would have something shared.
Odd is, that great solitary writers, even though they could not relate to the very persons they loved the most, and were indeed shunned by their society, ended in the broadest of all imaginable connections. I'm thinking of someone like Proust - an enigma, to say the least. But how many people he reached, from his solitude.