Continuing to explore the Four Elements practice in writing, I want to think about Fire in a particular way.
Among other things, I relate Fire to intention in writing – what purpose fires you up and inspires you in a positive way and helps create a focus in your work? Sometimes writing is about tearing things down, but sometimes writing is about creating things fresh and new in ways that represent your ideal vision of the world. And this is where we can add a little Earth to create a particular setting and populate it with preferred characters for whom we makes stories with desired outcomes: utopias.
The dystopian novel is a well-established trend right now, and it’s not even funny to joke that we are living through dystopian times. So that is a good enough reason to make space for something a little less gloomy in our writing, perhaps?
I think, for example, about queer utopias. When I first came out, one of my favourite novels was Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, whose rainbow vision I ended up living when I moved to a Big Gay Flatshare in central London. I’ve kept on seeking out these idealised literary spaces in both books and the real world. Just last year I very much enjoyed the fluid forms of the novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, whose author, Andrea Lawlor, led me to the classic The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell.
It’s easy for me to make a leap from that book to Salmon Creek Farm, a queer commune in northern California that I stumbled across on Instagram. And then I am led back to Naropa University, where I studied and taught, which was most definitely born of a utopian impulse to bring mindfulness and contemplative education to the West.
And let’s not forget too that utopias also have their dystopian moments; in an odd quirk of serendipity, I received Lit Hub Daily as I typed the previous sentence, and that email led with a story about a shocking little incident in Naropa’s history when poet WS Merwin and his girlfriend were forced to strip naked at a party. Which reminded me of a Naropa Summer Writing Program panel devoted to utopias, where it was proposed that everyone has their own personal utopia, and one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia.
And maybe that is something to work out in the writing – teasing out tensions and conflicts is the stuff of good drama.
I also think the idea of community is important to utopias, and at this moment, when meeting up in person is less than straightforward, I think about gatherings such as Words Away – Kellie Jackson’s monthly salons and zalons devoted to books and the craft of writing.
The great thing about utopias is that they stimulate the imagination – not just for adventures in writing and reading, but for good ways to be together in the world.
As a writing experiment: Create a utopia.
First: draw a map of it.
Then: create a constitution or a manifesto for its guiding principles and inspirations.
Next: write a scene where a newcomer experiences the promise of this utopian space for the first time.
Then: write a subsequent scene where the complications or compromises of utopias are revealed …
Throughout, make space for your wildest desires and intentions – your preferred ways of being in the world.