I’m on a writing retreat at my brother’s in Florida, staying in the garage apartment in his backyard that he renovated and uses as an AirBnb. I feel lucky and antsy and here and not here, my mind casting about into the future and the past and the what-if, both as part of my writing process and because minds work that way.
Here’s a picture from my retreat. Among the books featured is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, which I first got as an undergraduate for a poetry writing class. (Also pictured is Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas, a book of flash memoir that I dearly love.) In case you’re not familiar with Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg draws on her background as a Zen Buddhist as she encourages us to do daily writing “practice” in order to maintain and strengthen our writing “chops” (as my musician ex might say). The rules of writing practice are:
Keep your hand moving.
Don’t cross out.
Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
Lose control.
Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
Go for the jugular.
It’s been hard for me lately to do numbers 4, 5, and 6. This year has been so much about maintaining control, in a way. Keeping my fears and hopes under the surface, so as to keep things steady for myself and for my son.
I’m working on my next book, the tentative title of which is A Wilderness of Her Own, which is also the title of an essay I wrote a couple years ago about grief and the ultimate unknowability of another person. About the things that people, especially mothers, keep under the surface. In the essay, I ask “what is in there?” when we’re holding it together. There’s trauma, perhaps, but there’s also a valuable wildness of spirit, one that we wouldn’t lose. It’s tied to art and to play and to intimacy and privacy. It’s tricky to talk about and also to write about. I’m still finding my ways in.
I’ve been thinking on and off about the idea of maintaining a light touch, of leaving space, both in our closest relationships and in writing. How can we trust the other person to meet us, rather than worrying about hammering home a point? I think one answer is in play. I’m teaching an online course called “Writing Beyond the Known” starting on Monday June 14th— an asynchronous course in which students go through written materials together, posting their responses and receiving feedback from each other and from me1. Here is something I wrote for the course material:
This week, we will continue thinking about ways into speculative nonfiction, by which we mean essays that make unexpected connections, speculate on existential questions, and/or represent unusual states of consciousness or the dream-like state life can sometimes take on. As we continue thinking about creative exploration and speculative nonfiction, I’d like to point to the importance of play in the creative process. So much of life (and art) is about holding two apparently opposing thoughts at once, but doing so in such a way that it creates an energizing dynamic rather than a feeling of cognitive dissonance. For example, being a creative person involves constantly reminding yourself to take yourself seriously enough to have a creative practice but being playful enough to see it as a practice/process and not about instant perfection. It is easy for even accomplished artists to forget about this element of fun or play, so part of the process becomes reminding oneself of that. Even when writing about serious things, we can play around with bits and pieces of thought and language, finding enjoyment in how that process can take on its own life.
The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott wrote about this dynamic-- the playful quality of creative activity-- as the "intermediate space" or "third area" between the self and other. Here are Winnicott’s words on the subject from his 1971 book Playing and Reality:
I have tried to draw attention to the importance both in theory and in practice of a third area, that of play, which expands into creative living and into the whole cultural life of man… [this] intermediate area of experiencing is an area that exists as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated… it can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.
This idea is fascinating to me for what it suggests about art as a means of connecting what is “in here” with what is “out there,” and I also enjoy pondering the connections among artmaking, play, intimacy, and even dreaming.
So, this is what I’m sitting with this week— play and lightness, and how that combines with “going for the jugular.” No big deal. But it has me thinking about how so much of creative production— and so much of parenting— is about loosening up enough to let yourself connect with what matters. Holding space. And, as a parent, creating a safe container for exploration until such time that this completely separate, mysterious human being is ready to wander out into the wilderness of the world on his own.
There are still spaces left in this class! For updates about other upcoming classes, feel free to sign up for the JPC events newsletter here: https://tinyletter.com/JoannaPennCooper