Tag Archives: Writing

“Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” -William Faulkner

What Breaks Open the Seed

3 Replies

“Nature reinvents itself over and over again. This process of constant creation leaves behind a track record of successes and failures, new life forms that live or die depending on their innate genetic flexibility, their ability to find and fit into their own niche. This learning to live with others may take seconds or years or millennia.” – Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, 41

A second year in Indiana has not prepared me for how startling winter is in the forests, how completely the deciduous woodlands shed their leaves and transform into quiet, desolate fogs of spindly twigs. I am still too used to the coniferous evergreens of the west, where the ponderosas only shrug at the changing seasons.

I started 2024 with two goals in mind: To write more and to read more books. I didn’t keep track of these goals, of course. Famously, I dislike quantifying previous years. I’m more interested in qualitative reflections on the past. This has been a very difficult year for me for a lot of reasons; I know this year has been exceptionally horrifying for so many. A new year won’t change that. Instead, I want to attend to the quality of the days ahead, to the slowness of winter and what possibilities I can find in that slowness.

Maybe it was fitting, then, that the last book I read in 2024 was Our Green Heart, by Irish botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, about forest ecology, Celtic history, growth, and the strangeness of forest ecosystems.

I appreciate (and am jealous of) the sense of wonder in Beresford-Kroeger’s prose. Her description of seeds was particularly striking: “Most seeds,” she writes, “carry a dormancy factor, the proteins of their endosperm food supply coiled and folded into resting states that wait for a particular signal. These signals are a form of divination, an assurance strong enough that the seed bets its future on that message. They are not properly understood in science and have not been studied in great depth” (85). Here, there is poetry in unexplained biology. Some seeds evolved to sprout in reaction to heat from wildfires; others evolved to travel far distances, to be eaten and carried off by birds and rodents. Dormant seeds are hard and singular for months or years until the right external prompt cracks them open and they grow into roots, trunks, branches.

When I teach, I emphasize revision as the more important process in writing, more than drafting or research. Recently, I have brought in a novel-revising technique from Jane Smiley’s notion that sentences are either seeds or pebbles. Matt Bell elaborates on this idea in his craft book Refuse to be Done, writing that “If it’s a pebble, it’s just the next sentence and it sits there. But if it’s a seed it grows into something that becomes an important part of the life of the novel. The problem is, you can’t know ahead of time whether a sentence will be a seed or a pebble, or how important a seed is going to be” (Bell 77).

I’ve never before thought of this exercise as an exploration of dormancy. If a sentence, a paragraph, or even an unspoken idea is a seed, that means it is awaiting something external to activate it, to bring it out of its shell. This is not that far from artistic inspiration, almost all of which, I believe, comes from external experience: long walks, a healthy community, traveling someplace new, the changing seasons. At least, these are the things that put me in a writing mood. It’s true that when I’m writing, I never know which ideas will take root and grow. Maybe all writing is secretly fertile in this way.

This past year has felt thoroughly dormant, but this is also normal for me. I live in a shell that I rarely come out of, and for such painfully long periods of time that I think dormancy is my natural state. But I have also been rootless for a decade now, following grad school programs and jobs from town to town, leaving behind friends and family for other valleys. What spark am I waiting for? What divination will finally break me open?

Beresford-Kroeger also finds comfort in the secret and illegal hedge schools that existed in Ireland for “those five hundred years during which the Penal Laws made it illegal for the Irish to teach their children” (35). She describes one school as having been nestled in the wilderness, protected by the landscape. It is partly through these hedge schools that Irish language and culture were passed on from generation to generation, where old knowledge was stored, sustained, kept safe like the dormant trees preserved within seeds. These secret schools were a long-standing form of resistance to the occupying British colonists, who could not stamp out Irish identity through force or erasure, an important lesson for the coming year.

Maybe I’ll take this to heart: Dormancy is protective, not restrictive. In writing, this is true of the stories we want to tell and those that need more time.

In the town I grew up, at a museum of regional history, there happened to be a poetry display I had the privilege of visiting last week. A local poet had her typewriter stationed there, along with post cards, paperclips, fancy paper. When she offered to write me a poem, the prompt I gave was full of the obvious cliches: a new year, getting back into a healthy routine, trying to break out of a sense of stagnation. The poem, of course, was much more thoughtful than my jumbled words. The museum display was full of poems commemorating the beauty of the Coconino National Forest, the huge and ancestral evergreens that loom over my hometown.

This year, I intend to slow down, take my time, pay attention. I don’t want to toss out any seeds thinking they’re only pebbles. I don’t think there’s a magical break between one year and the next, but I do think growth continues, even if that growth only takes the form of preservation. Eventually, once winter has stayed its welcome, the spindly, empty trees in Indiana will sprout their leaves again.

Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Revise a Novel in Three Drafts. Soho Press, 2022.

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests. Random House Canada, 2024.

Writers Are Against Forgetting

Leave a reply

The poet Aaron Abeyta spoke these words in his keynote address at the 37th Annual Fishtrap Gathering of Writers near Wallowa Lake in eastern Oregon. This line, more than anything else, has stuck with me for almost a month. Writers are tasked with remembrance. Writers are responsible for carrying ancestral memory, childhood memory, cultural memory, everything that might be easily forgotten. Writing is a way of taking an experience, preserving it in a jar, and handing it to someone else, saying “Here, hold onto this while I’m gone.” Abeyta made it clear that in his view, remembrance is an act of love, as painful as it can often be.

I spent July recollecting the 1990s. I had the chance to see a defining ’90s creature-feature from my childhood, Tremors, in theaters. The hours I spent in a car driving from Indiana to Oregon to Arizona, I listened to podcasts, often movies and books and culture from the ’90s. Because of a last-minute schedule change, I spent a few days in western Washington after Fishtrap as an accidental tourist. I’ve driven past the turn to Roslyn a dozen times before, but never realized that it was the same Roslyn where Northern Exposure was filmed until eating cherry pie in North Bend, where Twin Peaks was filmed, and happened to overhear a customer behind me mention the other cult ’90s show filmed an hour away.

I can’t really claim proper nostalgia for the show. I watched Northern Exposure on DVD when I was in high school in the late aughts, more than a decade removed from the show’s original audience. The town of Roslyn remembers the show, though, and it was surreal to walk the same street that became familiar and mysterious to me on screen. I have a stronger emotional attachment to the fictional town of Cicily, Alaska, than other fictional towns. Northern Exposure luxuriated in the inexplicable, forcing its logic-driven protagonist to accept his limits, the meaninglessness and disorder of life, first for comic relief but later in the show with a more serious attention to the stakes of that mystery. It was the one artifact I remember from adolescence whose message was to confront impermanence rather than attack, deny, or confine it.

The truth is that lately, I’ve lost my appetite for TV. It was always on when I was a child, often when nobody was watching. It’s not that I find it bad or not worthwhile, but something about episodic structures turns me off these days. I’m reading more books, and watching more movies, and often thinking to myself at the end of a movie, that needed at least twenty more minutes. I want things to take time. I want to be slower.

The last night of Fishtrap, I talked with familiar writers from the Northwest. I met writers from Butte, Spokane, Moscow, Portland, Eugene. Every night, writers used their platform to discuss the importance of investing their time and energy into something larger than themselves, into a community that will outlast them and probably forget them.

Still half-asleep on that last night, I ran into another writer where I camped, who was packing her things for an early departure. She Bugs Bunnied a tarot deck from an impossibly small backpack pocket and asked if I was up for a reading. I drew the Three of Cups, the High Priestess, and the Princess of Pentacles. Her advice, after interpreting the cards, was to embrace feminine energies and be courageous in going through weird doors, to walk confidently into the unfamiliar.

Three days later, I found out a friend of mine had passed away two months earlier. Hers was the second funeral I should have gone to this year, but missed.

As easy as it is to talk about mining the past for stories, the phrase “writers are against forgetting” took on a very different meaning at the end of the month when I saw an image of Al Jazeera journalists mourning 27-year-old Ismail al-Ghoul, one of the most recent of the 165 journalists Israel has killed in Gaza since October. In the image, journalists hold up their PRESS signage, otherwise a symbol meant to protect war correspondents, writers, keepers of memory.

Roslyn, Washington, is also a coal town. There is an immense memorial to coal miners killed in the extraction process, overlooking the town’s main intersection. The names go on and on, and because the monument is located where tourists will stop to see the storefront used as the radio station in Northern Exposure, the town has proven that it, too, is against forgetting.

That’s a memoirist trick. There is a narrative thread on the surface and a hidden thread below. There is the town where a cult TV show was filmed, and then there’s a memorial to the town’s working class. Essayists remember everything all at once, all the time, because everything reminds us of everything else, because our job is to remember everything. This is an essay about traveling in July but it’s also about memory and TV and grief. It’s about writing, and writing about writing, and a willingness to disavow conclusion.

Year-End Celebratory Broth

4 Replies

“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.” -Melissa Febos

Since moving to southern Indiana in August, I’ve kept the refuse from the produce I cook with, storing it in plastic cubes in my freezer. For four months, I added skins, stems, and seeds to the stockpile, until yesterday, when I emptied the freezer-burned garbage into a pot of water, sprinkling in peppercorns and cooking over medium heat to make, approximately, a month’s worth of vegetable broth.

Stock and broth can be used interchangeably when discussing vegetables, but I prefer broth because it describes the process, stemming from the Germanic bru, itself the origin of brewing. That process demands patience. Broth is versatile, a necessary part of soup but useful for plenty of other dishes.

But the main reason I make broth is to repurpose produce that I would normally throw in the garbage. The thawing mess is a grafted-together pile of compost: onion skins, carrot ends, sprigs of parsley I couldn’t find a use for, the top of a butternut squash, the seeds of a bell pepper, wrinkly garlic cloves, kale stems, squeezed lemon rinds, half a jalapeno, tomato innards, stray mushrooms, apple cores. Summer into fall into winter, cooked for hours into a liquid the color of Irish breakfast tea.

The nutrients in vegetable skins and stems are locked within unpalatable textures and disquieting flavors. Cooking broth is a way of transforming endings into beginnings, or at least the beginning of another meal, a way of expanding limits.

What have I accumulated this year that I can’t stomach? How can I be resourceful with the loneliness and anxiety I’ve kept hidden away, shoved deep in the cold parts? What dormant memories can I distill to warm me for the winter? Here at the beginning of 2024, in looking back, I really don’t have much to work with. I am at the cutting board again, still hungry for a better world.

Kristine Langley Mahler writes that the “ending of every essay is the same ending of every heavily weighted moment: a return to routine with the incredulity that life goes on, as boring and insultingly indifferent as the moment before the change began. It is not a literary trick to revert to banality as much as it is an acknowledgment that epochs end without fanfare; they begin without obviousness; we are meant to pay attention all the time” (27).

Generally, I dislike New Year resolutions. Spring and fall present more obvious opportunities to measure change, but winter is a dormant period. We’re meant to slow down this time of year, stay together, stick to our routines and cook the apples and squash we accumulated during the harvest. This is, of course, an extremely limited experience with seasons, true to just a handful of ecosystems, and even here, in so many thick, leafless forests on the Ohio River, seasons are becoming, if nothing else, false expectations.

The end of predictable seasons has been on my mind all year, but especially this month because I’ve been reading C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey, a near-future dystopian novel about a professional chef wrestling with her ambitions after a sun-blotting smog causes most crops to go extinct. Shortly after she is hired by an enormously wealthy financier to cook elaborate meals at his private estate, to woo scientists and technologists over the long-gone cuisines of their childhoods, the narrator discovers that her taste in organic produce has vanished after years of flavorless, extinction-resistant monocrops:

“After tasting from my employer’s menu, guts roiling with cream and questions of my future, I found myself craving a dab, a pinch, just a soupcon of mung-protein flour. That metallic tang, like medicine. Without my knowing, it had gotten familiar—a link, as I floated alone through days of terrifying uncertain abundance, to the world of gray plates and empty shelves, of starving children in Louisville and Addis Ababa. I imagined small faces pressed against the glass as they watched me throw out pounds of pommes dauphine. The sameness of the smog, it occurred to me, had also felt safe: it was unchanging” (20).

This metallic tang of gray sameness resonates with me. I’ve gotten comfortable in a sick abundance of distractions, screens, voices. So many of the experiences I’ve accumulated have been blandly scripted, redundant, disposable. Lately, it’s gotten to a point where I’ve forgotten that life isn’t meant to be a numb replication of itself.

My disdain for the Gregorian calendar, rigid and anticlimactic, likely has more to do with my disdain for quantification. I understand the impulse to number one’s achievements at the end of the year, to tally up pages written, books read, publications, rejections. But a fixation on numbers, to me, is unappetizingly stale. I don’t remember the meals I cooked in August, or September, or October. I didn’t keep track of new recipes, numbers of ingredients, nutrient totals. What I know is that the broth I cooked from those meals’ residue is layered, unfixed, earthy the way a body is after sweating in a forest but by some miracle a tiny bit sweet.

If I’m going to look back at the year, I don’t want to measure it by numbers, but by the taste and texture of what the year has made of me. How many podcasts did I listen to? Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine, but I learned a lot more than I used to know about the history of Palestine, the politics of unionizing, drafting novels, the nervous system. I learned that Soviet science textbooks are still used in India because their tone was far less condescending than western textbooks, that Martin Luther was fond of fecal jokes, and that perfectionists tend to engage in more self-harm. I read more novels than memoirs. I got better at cooking spaghetti squash. I spent more time on trains, more time looking at rivers. I talked with different writers. I live in Indiana and I teach with more joy than I used to.

It might not be the case that writing, on its own, can shake me out of my numbness, but when Melissa Febos calls writing a life-saving practice, it gives me hope: She writes, “I cannot imagine nurturing a devotion to any practice more consistently than one which yields the reward of transformation, the assurance of lovability, and the eradication of regret. No professional ambition could possibly matter more than the freedom to return, again and again” (151).

If writing doesn’t change the writer, how will it change the reader? Writing this ridiculous blog post after over a year of adding nothing to this silly little website has been, if nothing else, a taste-test of who I am right now.

I want a life of textures, a year of multitudes. I don’t want abundance; too many Americans have too much of that already, to the detriment of the planet. What I want is a more precise way of being. I want smaller numbers and slower minutes. I want to pay attention to everything, for attendance to become a devotion all its own.

Febos, Melissa. Body Work. Catapult, 2022.

Mahler, Kristine Langley. A Calendar is a Snakeskin. Autofocus, 2023.

Zhang, C Pam. Land of Milk and Honey. Riverhead Books, 2023.

Soup For Eternity

1 Reply

A late spring frost followed by a heat wave suppressed most of my grandparents’ garden this summer. The weather stunted their otherwise abundant fruits, their berries and apricots and grapes. Some crops made it through, though, a steady supply of carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and lots of squash.

The last few times I’ve visited, I’ve made them food with the same combination of ingredients: roasted squash and carrots in a tomato sauce, ratatouille in a cast iron, pizza with beet greens and thinly sliced yellow squash, and most recently tomato soup, which was probably the best meal I’ve made for my grandparents.

Soup becomes a daily meal for me in winter. Starting in November, I make a pot of soup every Sunday to last through the week: Lentil tomato, cream of mushroom, leek and potato. When there isn’t a readily obvious protein, I throw in beans or lentils, catered to my own vegetarian needs and wants.

M.F.K Fisher writes on the subject, “As a steady diet, plain water is inclined to make thin fare, and even saints, of which there are an unexpected number these days, will gladly agree that a few herbs and perhaps a carrot or two and maybe a bit of meager bone on feast days can mightily improve the somewhat monotonous flavor of the hot liquid. Soup, in other words, is good” (209).

Soup is intuitive. Soup is ubiquitous. I almost never use a recipe these days, instead relying on basic soup principles (start with onions and garlic in oil, evenly cut vegetables, simmer with broth, salt along the way) and different combinations of the ingredients I have, the nutrients I need, and the flavors of the season. Soup is necessary. Soup is forever.

Goodness aside, Fisher is right that soup connotes simplicity, even meagerness. During the Irish Famine, Irish farmers mockingly referred to famine relief measures as the Soup Kitchen Act (Preet). In western cuisine, soup is a side dish, essential only as a complement to other dishes. Frances Moore Lappé writes in Diet for a Small Planet that her soup recipes are based on ingredients she usually has on hand: “carrots, potatoes, canned tomatoes, and onions” (289). She even titles her soup chapter “A Meal in a Soup Pot.”

However good it might be, to live on soup alone is considered foolhardy martyrdom. Here, I think of the “bread ale soup” in the 1987 film Babette’s Feast. In the film, two sisters named Martine and Philippa keep the modest traditions of their father’s pious Protestant congregation alive on the Danish coast, whose typical meal is a brown viscous soup possibly based on Øllebrød, a Danish porridge of rye bread, dark beer, and honey.

Babette, a friend of a former suitor of one of the sisters, seeks refuge with them after fleeing political violence in France. She, like the audience, is unsettled by the blandness of the sisters’ food. As their new cook, she adds simple ingredients, an onion, sugar. The whole congregation comes to appreciate the small additions. When Babette receives an immense fortune from France, her decision to spend it on a feast for her hosts is an act of grace (for Protestants) or sacrifice (for Catholics).

Scene from Babette’s Feast

Culinary traditions are historically and culturally informed. Babette brings to the modest piety of small-town Protestants the traditions of upper-class Catholic French society, two unique styles that come to benefit from one another as the congregants’ modesty playfully competes with the cook’s exuberance. The film is not about a snobby French chef looking down on peasant food, nor is it about salt-of-the-earth farmers turning their noses up at pretentious gluttony, but about characters whose trajectories require them, simply, to try new things.

I think one of the reasons I enjoy cooking with and for my grandparents is that our cultural contexts for food are quite similar: We both learned to cook during financial crises that coincided with national obsessions over health and nutrition.

Nutritional science is a relatively recent field. The first isolation of a vitamin was only in 1926, and post-WWI crises sparked greater interest in food efficiency to combat scarcity. The 1933 Federal Emergency Relief Act, for example, included the distribution of household nutritional guides. One such pamphlet, Food Budgets for Nutrition and Production Programs, detailed nutritional estimates for a “liberal diet,” an “adequate diet,” and an emergency “restricted diet.” However, nutritional standards were still highly experimental at the time. As Ziegelman and Coe put it, “the scientific precision of federal food relief was illusory” (174).

Food pyramids and panics over nutrition shaped my childhood in an inverse way. In middle school, we were required to watch Supersize Me multiple times, were regularly shown “got milk?” corporate ads, and the standard 2,000 calories per day we were told we needed is actually a very rough estimation. Budgeting wasn’t our concern. Instead, as public schools installed soda machines, we were told to take personal responsibility for our own healthy decision-making.

Megan Elias, in an article titled “Summoning the Food Ghosts: Food History as Public History,” describes the disconnect between nutritionists’ emphasis on budgeting the healthiest ingredients and the recipes different American communities were used to. Nutritionists “saw canned tomatoes as a good source of vitamin C” and so they encouraged Americans to buy tomatoes instead of other vitamin C-rich foods. However, most American households “had no idea what to do with tomatoes aside from making tomato soup, which was one of the few tomato recipes to consistently appear in American cookbooks at the time,” most of which called for butter or milk, both in short supply (Elias 26). Nevertheless, Italian-American families fared well with this suggestion because Italian-American cuisine frequently used tomatoes in many recipes, making them “heroes to the relief agency.”

Elias’s point is that “expectations, tastes, and cultural biases do not disappear when the food does” (26). Food is historically informed and culturally interpreted, and therefore cannot be reduced only to its chemical components in a time of food scarcity. When I make soup, I have a bad habit of overvaluing nutritional efficiency. Like the Protestants in Babette’s Feast, I’m slowly attending to taste.

My grandmother tells me that her father’s garden in Kennewick was a lifesaver. This was and is true for many, many families. In a time of crisis, a modest plot of land to grow fruits and vegetables on produced enough to keep the family afloat. My family cooked with what grew best in the landscape, with what would keep well in winter or was easily canned for the pantry.

This fall, I experimented with what was available in their garden. I tested out different combinations of familiar ingredients in a time of relative scarcity, making use of small abundance. I don’t know what ingredients will be unavailable in coming years, as climate change worsens agriculture, but I do know that culinary adaptation will succeed only through a willingness, above all else, to try new things.

Elias, Megan. “Summoning the Food Ghosts: Food History as Public History.” The Public Historian Vol. 34 no. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 13-29.

Fisher, MFK. The Art of Eating. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Lappé, Frances Moor. Diet for a Small Planet. Ballantine Books, 1982.

Preet, Edythe. “The History of Irish Soup.” Irish America Vol. 16 no. 6. January 31, 2001.

Ziegelman, Jane, Andrew Coe. A Square Meal. Harper Collins, 2016.

Where the Time Went

Leave a reply

In the last year, I did not write a single blog posts. No updates, no quirky lists, no publication news, no under-researched history essays with unoriginal theses.

That’s not because I had nothing to write about. In 2020, I finished my MFA in creative writing and launched into the academic job market (though launch is hardly the right word for it). I started reading manuscripts for Split/Lip Press and co-edited a print issue of Fugue. I had a few essays published, and one was nominated for Best American Travel Writing.

Last year was rough. Beginning in January, I started applying for teaching jobs. In Spring, I shifted my last semester to online only and did my best to shelter in place. In Summer, I worked at one of Idaho’s state parks for the season. When Fall started, I was able to teach part-time online composition courses for a university and a community college, but as an adjunct, the work was not sustainable into the next semester. Now, in January, as I apply for another round of teaching jobs and brace myself for another season of rejections, it feels like I’m exactly where I was a year ago, except that now I have a degree and am no longer a student.

I spent the last year waiting for emails and phone calls that mostly never came. I spent my time waiting for things to get better, waiting for leaders to act, waiting for many of my fellow Idahoans to do their part, wear a mask at the grocery store, stop going to large indoor parties, stop treating other people’s health like a joke. 2021 will most definitely have more of the same.

But I also did a lot of hiking (safe and outdoors) and spent time with someone I love. I got better at making bean salads and had a few publications at the end of the year. Some writers tally up their submissions, rejections, and acceptances, but I’m just not that competitive. I think that’s why I don’t normally do New Year’s resolutions: I don’t want to turn my life into a series of measurements, quantifying their accomplishments and setbacks. I already check my email after dinner; I need to draw the line between work and life somewhere.

But this year, the idea of a list of concrete resolutions appeals to me because it has the potential to establish something different. I want the next chapter of my life to start, and right now I feel stuck in a second draft of the last one. I don’t believe a resolution will help me get to that next chapter, but maybe it could help give it shape.

So, this year, I resolve as much as possible to

  1. get a steady job doing something with my degree;
  2. publish a book;
  3. hike new places;
  4. become a better baker;
  5. cook more vegan meals;
  6. participate in more (safely distanced) community activism; and
  7. practice more humility.

Some of these resolutions are more pressing than others. An implicit resolution, too, is to blog more. This blog has become more a professional website and portfolio (though I have plenty of work to do to actually professionalize it), and I’m sure I’ll tinker with this site in coming months. Until then, please stay safe.

-jk

Short Story Published in Bodega

1 Reply

DublinAmong some great prose and poetry in the July issue of Bodega, I have a single unit of flash fiction, “All Good Things.” This monthly journal puts out consistent, constant writing, and I’m grateful to have a space in it.

This story is one more piece of historical fiction, set in Dublin. Strangely, like most of the fiction I’ve had published, it has mysteriously never been in a creative writing workshop.

-jk

On Revisiting a Daybook I Gave Up On

Leave a reply

Garden.jpgHere’s what happened: on September 1, 2018, I started a daybook. My goal was to write a few paragraphs every single day, usually a detailed description of something I observed or did. The goal was to think in the present tense, to not compare moments, but simply describe what happened.

I made it two months and six days, stopping short at Election Day, adding a few posts in November and December. By January, I cut my losses. Life got weird. I was involved with some political activism and needed to grade mid-term and term papers for my composition classes, and holiday travel coupled with other writing goals pushed the daybook out of my routine. What I have as a result is a detailed sketch of life in Moscow, Idaho, during the autumn of 2018. An artifact from which I can mine for inspiration.

I wrote a total of seventy posts. Most of them were redundant, but some choice scenes emerged. Here is one scene: one evening in October, I stopped to pet a dog named Tuna outside the one good bar in town, the Garden, and a woman ran out to let Tuna lick her face. Tuna’s human apologized for the dog’s bad breath, but the woman said, “It’s okay,  I just had a shot of gin so I can’t smell anything,” before jogging off in the direction of the police station.

I spent a lot of time in the daybook reflecting on the Muscovites I see everywhere. There is a man with a beard and a panama hat. There are the Neo-Confederate church members downtown. There are the activists I trucked with, a retired state senator I ate donuts with every Saturday morning in October.

This last year, I’ve started to view my writing in the long tradition of creative nonfiction stemming from journalism: the dispatch, the report, the place study, the travelogue. I wonder how many notes essayists record that never make it to print, the observations that get cut. The simplest description of creative nonfiction I can think of is this: to describe what happened.

In mining my daybook from last fall, I have now collected material for three essays by categorizing and cutting. I wrote a lot about food, a lot about politics, a lot about anxiety, plenty about the sheer weirdness of this town in the Idaho panhandle. I described, in the most boring details possible, what happened between September 1 and November 6, not just my experience, but the lay of the land writ large, the season, the changes and my acclimation to the changes.

After the experience, I cannot recommend the practice of keeping a daybook strongly enough to other writers. It is tedious and boring in the moment, but so is exercise and meditation and learning to play music. A daybook for a writer is like scales for a musician. It is foundational, elemental, the bedrock of storytelling and keen observation. Maybe I’m becoming more of a reporter like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe. Maybe I’m just doing what poets and novelists do to build image and character. In any case, my writing style has come out better for the exercise, simply a paragraph at the end of a long day, a scene, a drink, a ritual like prayer.

-jk

Essay Published in Dark Mountain

Leave a reply

Sunset in the WoodsI’m pleased to announce that my flash essay “Notes on Preparing for a Wildfire Evacuation” appears in Dark Mountain 15, which is themed around forest fires. The Dark Mountain Project is a UK-based literary and arts organization whose goal (they literally wrote a manifesto about it) is to use art to realistically address global ecological crises.

Much of my writing is environmentally focused, and this particular essay is about growing up in the mountain West, where wildfire season is a yearly, ongoing fact of life. I’m glad to have an essay in Dark Mountain, and I’m glad for the encouragement for the weird, at times discomforting direction my personal essays are going. Now that I live in northern Idaho, wildfire season remains a fact of day-to-day life. So too, though, are forests and mountains, the quieter features of the mountain West, the areas I’m used to exploring freely, that I hope to continue to explore. My writing will inevitably dwell on forests and fires alike. Now that I am about to enter my final year in an MFA program, as I prepare a book of essays for my final defense, I’m grateful for institutions like Dark Mountain whom I can trust with my weird, discomforting work.

-jk

Notes from Portland

1 Reply

Portland

“Maybe 1978 was the year the 1960s ended and the 1980s began. Maybe there were no 1970s.” -Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

My generation talks about Portland, Oregon, the way my parents’ generation talked about California in the 1960s, in that supposedly magical decade when Haight-Ashbury was for free-thinkers and runaways and Hollywood was a place of romance rather than violence, a place of paradise, freedom, and escapism, or at least just a place to escape to.

For a lot of us born in the 1990s, I think, the Pacific Northwest is still seen as a kind of paradise. I know a dozen people who went to Portland after graduating from college or instead of college, and I know more who talk about going there sometime in the future. In the American West, I think, many of us see it as the only remaining authentic counter-cultural scene, now that Seattle has been corrupted by Amazon and Boeing. It’s paradise, and like California before the cults and murders, this reputation is equally earned and exaggerated.

I will admit that, when I visited last week, I was struck by this city, by its oblique beauty and opaque optimism. But I’m also ambivalent. It’s not romantic to me, but familiar. It’s just like being back home in Flagstaff, Arizona in all the best and worst ways, because it’s a tourist destination, which means that what is visible to the visitor is only one side of the stage the city wants to present. Tourists never peek behind the curtain to see the other city inside the city, or rather, they do, constantly, but choose to ignore anything that disrupts the sense of paradise, the escapism that tourism is built on, a centuries-old colonial logic that treats any visited people or place as a cultural buffet. I recognize the theatricality, the performativity. I lived for two decades as a local in Flagstaff, on the side of town the tourists never go to.

Gentrification is to tourism as imperialism is to capitalism, in which those with economic power, in a given city’s financial Center, invade a marginalized community or neighborhood, buy out its necessary businesses (laundromats, corner stores, diners), and replace them with yuppy businesses that those in the community cannot afford, forcing them to look elsewhere for laundry or food. Meanwhile, the gentry have a new colony in a part of town with cheap rent from which to sell artisinal donuts to wealthy newcomers, or to all the tourists.

I went to Portland as a tourist—as the gentry, as the colonist—for the annual AWP conference. 15,000 writers and publishers descended on the City of Roses to network and share journals and thoughts and their creative work. To be clear, this conference was productive for publishers, writers, for a variety of literary communities, and for me personally as well as professionally. But like all conferences, it came at the expense of the environment and the local community.

Portland is a strange place because it simultaneously compels me to want to be more compassionate to others, while also reminding me how insufficient compassion is, despite its urgency, despite its necessity.

But I see the appeal of the dream here, too. I see why my friends relocated to this gritty, green, rusting city, this place of wondrous contradiction, where the river pushes past the streets and Mount Hood is always watching over the mossy brown cacophony of the landscape, the patches of cherry blossom trees, the network of trains and the bicyclists and the sense of cheerful nihilism. I want to be a part of this scene. I want to fit in here. I do fit in here, feel a kinship with the sense of possibility, the sense of communal towardness to one another, despite the likeliness that this sense is more a product of my 1990s imagination, driven by Twin Peaks and The X-Files. But, like any glorified past, maybe there were no 1990s.

Portland is no paradise—I’m not naïve; I grew up in a city that people from Phoenix called utopic when they came to ski and drink while my friends on the other side of the tracks dealt with floods, fires, and catastrophic rent hikes. But still: I’ve always felt out-of-place until coming to Portland, where I felt like it didn’t matter if I was a tourist or a local, as if the difference dissolved and waking up in Portland felt like deja vu, but in a good way, like delirium. A tourist seals this feeling up for himself, like a trinket; what can I do, instead, to fight for a world in which this sense of immediate community, this impulse toward affinity despite factual difference, is common for everyone else?

-jk

Who am I to Write This?

2 Replies

Resource Management.JPGRecently, Jonathan Franzen published his “10 Rules for Novelists” on lithub. Essayist Dinty W. Moore, who also edits one of my favorite journals, Brevity, countered with a satirical “10 Rules for Essayists.” Franzen makes a lot of predictable moves in his 10 rules. Echoing Stephen King, who railed against writers watching TV in his 2000 memoir On Writing (despite now producing several TV shows based on his work), Franzen’s eighth rule states that it is “doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” which Moore counters in his own eighth rule by proclaiming that it’s “doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is not being observed by the NSA,” which is more accurate given the things that writers have to look up on the Internet, especially when writing historical fiction (I was once asked by Google to prove I wasn’t a robot for looking up information about trials in the USSR, because freedom).

To be clear, I love Stephen King’s memoir. It was the first writing-about-writing that I read. But the idea that writing should be driven by rules seems strange when so many of those rules are highly fluid and riddled with exceptions. It is odd to me that King and Franzen and even Moore do not mention ethics in their writing rules. I’ve never lost sleep over using too many adverbs or researching too much. Instead, what keeps me up is whether or not I should write what I’m writing.

The underlying assumption is that can should always be read as should, but I want to dispute this assumption. Writing isn’t auto-mechanics. It’s not motorcycle maintenance or plumbing. Its success or failure cannot and should not be measured by the technicalities of performance and the structural questions of craft. Maybe writers should ask the question “Does this work” only after they have answered the question “Who am I to write this?”

This is partly a question of authenticity, but for me, it is primarily about ethics. In nonfiction, I have the ability to, as Joan Didion puts it in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “sell out” the people I am around. And like Didion, I am “so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate” (xiv) that my presence in any situation is like a sponge. I collect stories that do not belong to me. I have an excellent memory. I know what you said offhandedly around me three years ago. I remember the argument we had five years ago. I remember everything. So who am I to commit those memories to paper?

This is my one and only writing rule: As a general policy, I don’t write someone else’s story. If someone’s story intersects with mine, I only include them if I have their permission. I have asked friends what they think of an essay that mentions them, for approval, for accuracy, for kindness. As such, most of what I want to write about will never be written, and I’m fine with that. If I need to exploit people for stories, then I don’t think I can call myself a real writer. Anyone can write down the most memorable conflicts in their life. All interpersonal conflicts are personally meaningful, by their nature. It takes talent to find meaning around, between, and beyond those contentious moments.

-jk