Rites and Writes for the Autumn Equinox

It’s that time of year again – autumn always seems to be the favourite season of writers. Our inner nerd must associate the cooler air and autumn leaves with the wide-open prairies of unused exercise books. And we’re off!

Not that there are as many leaves left to turn orange and fall round here after the summer that we’ve had. Summer: increasingly my least fave season, though this year I did enjoy an excellent Zen meditation course as well as a wonderful introduction to natural history with the Natural History Museum. It’s been a weird year – heat and drought and war and politics and divisions, plus loss and grief that never really seems to budge. Perhaps the cycle of the year puts us in a space to start again.

Autumn, though. It’s something about the light, I think – the slant of the light in September, a thinner yellow that catches something: what? It was there in Orleans House Gardens in Twickenham this morning (see above). It was there on the English Channel last week when I taught a Four Elements workshop at the Hastings Book Festival (thanks for having me!). Something that changes in the light makes me see or maybe just feel things differently: a certain lift happens.

Thinking about that: as a writing experiment, take an old piece of writing and rewrite all or some of it by telling it slant.

A different perspective, a new setting in time or place, a fresh register: bring the subject matter in another direction.

Perhaps think about the quality of light this work might sit within, and let that feel its way into the writing. And maybe you could prepare by doing a meditation or visualisation that draws on a particular quality of the light.

To illuminate (ha!) this writing experiment, try this ritual for the Equinox from Bhanu Kapil, first published in the Ignota Diary 2019:

23 September
Ritual for Autumn Equinox
Invert yourself at the edge of the water, so that the top of your skull or your hair makes contact with the current or wave. And if this is not possible, if your capacity to take this posture is restricted in any way, then feel it in your body first. And if that is not possible, or if feeling is not possible in this moment, then take a glass of water and add some pink Himalayan salt, fresh lemon juice and pepper. Drink this. And if this is not possible, then lift your face to the rain. And if it never rains, then wait until the water finds you. Wait for the unexpected emotion that changes or charges your very real heart. And then: step through the indigo door, as Rachel Pollack said, into another world.

All of that! Some Bhanu (and Rachel) magic to send you on your writing way. Let the light lead you into another world of your own creation.

And spookily (or maybe not), as I type this post Bhanu also informs me about this. If you’ve ever enjoyed the great wisdom of Rachel Pollack’s writings, you might want to show your assistance. (And if you are interested in tarot but have never read her Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: you must seek it out! It is widely regarded as the best book on the subject.)

***

While I’m here, coming soon:

* Reawakenings, a Four Elements workshop run with Words Away, at a central London location tbc, 26 November 2022. Thinking about the changes we’ve experienced in the last few years since we last came together in person, let’s explore together ways to reawaken our writing: reset or reboot it, rebirth it even!

* Masterclasses on craft and practice, structured around an updated syllabus for my DIY MA in Creative Writing, on Zoom, January 2023 onwards.

 

Happy Autumn!

 

Only Connect: Writing Experiment No. 74

1.

I saw Bhanu Kapil reading at the LRB Bookshop on Friday. An intense but joyful event – tales of migrants, tales of violence, tales of family, rites of mud and glitter. Also: birthday cake on the summer solstice: that magical.

Bhanu posed a question – two questions – directly, simply in her writing:

What did you inherit?

What did you reproduce?

Inheritance and reproduction: energies to seek out in our writing.

2.

I am reading Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. And O! It really is gorgeous. I also recently read the profile Ocean Vuong’s Life Sentences in the New Yorker, and noted the following description of his style:

The structural hallmarks of Vuong’s poetry—his skill with elision, juxtaposition, and sequencing—shape the novel, too, and they work on overlapping scales: passages are organized by recurring phrases, as are the chapters, which build momentum as a poetry collection does, line by line. Most of the novel centers on Little Dog’s childhood and adolescence, but Vuong roams in non-chronological circles through a wide field of intensified memory. The narrative occasionally extends backward, to visions of Little Dog’s mother and grandmother in Vietnam, before he was born, and it briefly reaches forward, in a few passages that signal that Little Dog has become a writer.

(Update 25 June 2019) I’ve since completed the novel. It really is gorgeous, and brilliant, and in so many ways. I’ve also since read a couple of reviews – one of which comments on how in the book ‘a lot of information … comes to the reader in a jumble, out of sequence, as remembrances after the fact’.

Now: this response suggests that this book might not be for every reader, particularly those who want their stories laid out clearly in the manner of representative realism.

But: for me these very dislocations and refusals are part of the book’s design – they are its essence. I think some things in this book – scenes, images, statements, fragments – operate outside of the usual conventions of rendering time and space, lacking obvious consequence.

And that’s fine by me. In fact, that’s more than fine. This is a novel that among other things is about the Vietnam war, immigrant experience, gay lives, and the limits of the body. It’s inevitable that such things leak out, resist definition.

Some writers might consider this in their own work with caution, perhaps. This is after all a novel written by a poet and some of its forms and gestures will feel more familiar to readers who’re comfortable with some of the conventions of experimental poetry. But I strongly feel there are matters here that any writer can consider: character, voice, story, and what happens when things refuse to be pinned down. This should have an appeal to any reader or writer who lets themselves be: open.

Ocean Vuong talks more about some of these matters in a podcast with Barnes and Noble. I quote one selection:

Desire plus powerlessness is momentous feeling. I wanted the characters to move a little and feel a lot … The [fiction textbook] is all about plot: what’s the plot, and secondly: what’s the conflict? That’s also the formula: you need a plot to move through, and you need conflict.

And I was very suspicious of that. Perhaps because I’m a poet, in many senses we are plotless. And I thought: I don’t know if that’s how I feel as an American, as a person. I wonder if I live in a linear plot? To me it feels much more like proximity. The way we sit beside our loved ones. The way we move through the world, meaning tension and drama happen simply by proximity. The way chemistry works, you have oxygen and hydrogen: fine on their own. Put them side by side and all of a sudden: water. That was how I thought of the structure of the novel. It was blind faith. It was not the go-to form.

But I wanted something more faithful to what it meant to live as an American, in which we move from space to space, and meaning, drama and the substance of our lives happens because we are side by side each other, not because we are in a linear plot device.

3.

I relate these ideas to my recent blog post on alternatives to conflict in plotting.

Whether you are writing something that’s non-chronological or something that’s more linear, have a go at this writing experiment:

* Take some index cards and some Post-it notes. (You could use Scrivener or some mind-mapping software, if you prefer, but I really do think there is a great value in physical interaction.)

* Use the index cards to write down the chapters and/or scenes of your book, identifying the key CHANGE that happens within that chapter or scene. What takes the story forward?

* Then lay the cards out on a table or desk. (Or if you have lots of cards or not enough desk space, do a few at a time, perhaps moving through a stack of cards you keep at your right then gradually stack to the left as you work through them.)

* Next, using the Post-its, identify the CONNECTING ENERGY that fills the space between each of the index cards, and how that energy is achieved. It might be an overt matter of cause and effect: what happens in one chapter might lead to the events of the next. Or it could be more subtle, or the jolt that comes from a twist, or an abrupt shift of setting or point of view that delivers some reward through juxtaposition, or the question that’s raised at such a point (it might be as simple as: why are we now here?). Consider, for example, the energy arising from:

  • twists
  • information gaps
  • surprises
  • unexpected changes
  • reversals of fortune
  • turns
  • recurrences
  • variations
  • juxtapositions
  • elisions
  • chronology
  • jump cuts
  • flashbacks
  • flashforwards
  • overlaps
  • frames
  • contrasts
  • dislocations
  • mosaics
  • fragments sitting beside each other
  • alignments
  • questions
  • inheritances
  • reproductions
  • expanding horizons
  • contractions in focus
  • refusals
  • leakages
  • reactions by characters
  • cause and effect

That last one – cause and effect – strikes me as an important one overall.

For these points, think about: spikes of energy; connections; questions that prick our curiosity. How are these scenes/chapters and connections SEQUENCED? How might a CONTRAST create a forward propulsion? I am also thinking how both Ocean Vuong and Bhanu Kapil are writing narratives of migration that are made up of smaller pieces, even fragments: how do your own stories possess a quality of MOVEMENT that arises from the whole being greater than the sum of the parts?

Do this for both scenes as well as chapters eventually. It’s useful to consider both the connections between bigger units of narrative, and also those closer up, scene by scene.

Once you have finished this exercise, you might want to spread out all the Post-its in order, and see what you have: what patterns emerge? You might want to tabulate the connections and energies you find into a list. Are there gaps that could be made into something more interesting, or could the very fact of their gappy nature be heightened and made into a feature of the work? Are there points where the writing feels a bit too chronological (ploddy): might it increase the energy to introduce a gap or a disruption between two chapters or sections? How can the larger work gather MOMENTUM? Consider the types of connections listed above, and others of your own reckoning. See what you can find.

What’s the mud and glitter that holds together your work?

If you want to take this exercise further: use your index cards and Post-its to compose an outline in narrative form of a next draft.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 4: A Date With An Artist

Today I had the great pleasure of spending the afternoon with my good and special friend the magical, starry writer Bhanu Kapil. We drank tea, ate plum muffins, took a ferry across the Thames with a lanky Alsatian, gossiped, walked in the rain, and read tarot cards as I drank chai and she drank energy tea. (I also cleaned house before her arrival. That special a friend.)

We also did some serious writerly stuff: read poetry; talked about teaching; shared our notebooks; discussed approaches to structure and form; set targets (mine from Bhanu included a list of gratitudes); the general upbeat coaching, coaxing, and bullying you can do with those you know and those who know you (and those who know those you both know). Except it never felt serious. It was playful, fun, rejuvenating.

(Also, we sat at a table numbered 108, which is a magic number. It’s the number of beads in a seat of Hindu prayer beads, it has all sorts of association with the number of 3 – it inspired, e.g., the number of sections in Eat Pray Love: look at all the multiples of 3 that it’s divisible by. Accidental magics.)

But this is supposed to be a Friday Writing Experiment (and I have twenty minutes left of Friday).

This week, put a twist on the warm and wonderful Julia Cameron’s idea of the Artist Date (and see video below). Julia asks us to take ourselves on a ‘once-weekly, festive, solo expedition’ to fire up the imagination and rediscover our sense of play; how about taking such an expedition with a good friend? Maybe they write too, or practise other forms of art, or maybe they’re just inspiring. Call them, or email them, and arrange to take yourselves to some place that’s new to at least one of you: a garden, a new coffeeshop, a neighbourhood a short train journey away. Or maybe this is your chance to try a videocall on Skype for the first time? You could also visit a gallery, or attend a literary event, but make sure you make time for each other too; go somewhere that you can talk and look at each other without needing to be polite to things on sales racks or in exhibition cases. The only other requirements are a notebook and pen.

Then do some/all of the following:

* Document the meeting.

* Read aloud some of your recent work.

* Discuss some of the accomplishments and challenges in your recent writing.

* Gossip. (Gossip is at the heart of all the best stories. Gossip gives voice. Gossip is good.)

* Make an offering (we left a petal and a berry on a statue of Ganesh, but you can leave any old rock under a tree, if you wish – just pick both rock and tree purposefully).

* Later on, or there and then if you have time, take two random images/words/sounds from your time together and create a story or poem that unites these items.

* Give each other writing experiments, but only do them there and there if it feels fun; otherwise do them that evening before you go to bed.

* Commit acts of creative divination.

* Look for the tilts in the landscape. Seek out the points of entry and departure. Be alert for the unexpected, and accidental magics.

* Bring/buy each other an inexpensive gift that is in some way meaningful to your meeting and/or each other’s practice.

* Take photographs.

* Bring an umbrella.

At the very least, write something inspired by this meeting, even if it’s just a journal entry, or an email describing the day to another friend. But a story or a poem could be even nicer.

Most of all: be sustained. Creative health relies on such friendships. As my date said in correspondence later:

Gossip recalibrates, talking about writing reminds one of one’s fate. Being with a friend rejuvenates.

 

Basic Tool: Artist Date from Julia Cameron on Vimeo.

Crazy Wisdom: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

A super film called Crazy Wisdom: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics about my Alma Mater, Naropa University.

It’s lovely, from thousands of miles away, to see Bobbie, Bhanu, Jack, Reed, Steven, the Beat Book Shop, the flags on the Sycamore lawn, hear some of the tales, the myths, the wartiness and all. The energy. It’s a magical place. When I first arrived there it felt like coming home.

Crazy Wisdom: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Kate Linhardt on Vimeo.

(Impressed that this film was created as someone’s final project at Vassar.)