austerity? intimacy? residency?

(This article has been sitting in a folder for about a month. I've made a few minor edits recently, but truthfully I still don't know if I love it. That said, what is this newsletter for if not documenting my thoughts about various experiences? And these are, indeed, my thoughts about an experience. A brand new experience. So, here you are, you can have it, after all.)

Is my writing—the topics I choose to write about, the way I structure and word my essays, my stories—is it corny? Obvious? Or conversely, impenetrable? If it is regularly any of those things, do I care?

I spent last month at a writer’s residency and there I started questioning everything, predictably. Writing has always been something immensely private for me, and because it has been private, my writing projects, while they are in-progress, have remained free of the weight of others’ thoughts. Others’ thoughts, or at least my imagination of them, which in almost every other aspect of my life weigh me down and hamper and hinder me constantly. But back in June there were nineteen other writers exposed to my unedited fiction work, asked to think about and comment on what my brain has imperfectly hallucinated.

I dislike revealing myself to people, while at the same time seek connection. When I returned home I read Mrs. Dalloway and was soon thinking histrionically about lines like ‘Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it—but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.’’ and ‘There is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect … for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect—something, after all, priceless.’

I have always been worried that my writing will be taken and held up in the wrong light, by other people, before it’s ready to be held up at all, and then what they will relay to me will change my idea of myself and my own stories forever, irreparably. In a way that will make my life and my stories unable to be successfully completed, or at least will make these things significantly more difficult to contend with. I know, logically, reasonably, that collaboration is good. That it is very difficult to operate in isolation. That input given to a developing writer by a multitude of different people with different experiences and expertise is very good—and yet.

And yet I have grown up with people around me trampling over things, telling me things were one way, only for me to painstakingly—over years, sometimes—discover to my relief that they are actually another. I am concerned, essentially, about my ideas of my experiences being corrupted, intruded upon, sunk into some annoying maze that I’ll have to crawl through to retrieve them again. The starkest example of this doesn’t have to do with my writing but with my sexuality. It is a different thing to be a lesbian in the sunshine of queer friends than it is to be a lesbian beneath a murky cloud of homophobic people, or heterosexual people who don’t understand. The weight of being an outsider is uniquely taxing, makes me less creative and less myself and much more clumsy and doubtful—and I hate that. Since my early twenties, I have been consciously trying to cultivate trust in myself and in certain voices I choose to consult. Being hesitant, independent, has been part of how I’ve protected myself from unkind or careless people. And so I only feel able to breathe freely into my writing when it’s just me, my light, however alternately coruscating and obscured and blinding.

‘And yet Clarissa [Dalloway] prefers austerity to intimacy,’ writes one analysis of the theme of privacy in Mrs. Dalloway. In order to retain some core individual or artistic experience of life, Mrs. Dalloway enforces a distance between certain people, certain experiences, and herself.

I could say something about mental fortitude, resilience: I shouldn’t let people affect me, no matter what I do or say; I should just write and share things without caring what others think, and I should know what advice to take and what not to. I should embrace intimacy, in perhaps more instances than I do now.

If only these things were so straightforwardly accomplished.

This residency was the first chance I’ve ever had to write and study in the company of other writers. I loved many aspects of it, never once was dreading any part of it, rushed around engaged and determined all week, even if my mind reduced to static when I was asked to write at a table with one person sitting on my right and one sitting on my left. Write, for ten minutes. Write without stopping. But the people! The possibility that I will be asked to read, in several minutes, what I have failed to write!

But I did choose to do this. I anticipated the week throwing my brain into chaos, my perspective on small pieces of my writing into different lights. I was fortunate that everyone I shared the week with made an effort at every turn to be kind and helpful. It astounded me, actually, how kind everyone was. The kindness that saturated the week helped me slowly unscrew my reservations about sharing my work, even if none of the residents were familiar with some of the novels that mean the most to me and inspire me the most, or understood facets of and nuances to a story I’ve been writing for the better part of a year.

Is my writing occasionally corny, obvious, or impenetrable? Maybe it is. On the final day of the residency, I wrote a small thing about a moth I had seen early that morning. It was intended to be—we were instructed to write—a message to next year’s residents, and basically I wrote that like the Tulip-tree Beauty that was on the front door to the residents’ house, the Tulip-tree Beauty which was an inchworm before it was a moth, writers too map the earth inch by inch. We travel across it slowly and diligently describing it, and we also get to experience and indulge in the magnificent green world around us—and that is a gift. To be able to write about our experiences and spend time on this earth, no matter how bad things get, is amazing, and thinking about it fills me with a heady, effervescent happiness.

Corny? Perhaps. But also, I think, a relatively true sentiment for many writers, including myself. I want to slowly collect pieces of the earth and portray them, I want to enjoy my time here moving gradually across the planet and seeing what I can see, then translating it into language. The character Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway says that as one grows older, ‘the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.’

I read aloud my little message about the moth right after I had written it. And of course it was not trampled over. All week my writing was received with nothing less than openness and interest. As an anxious, secretive, strange little lesbian, that meant a lot to me. This whole week meant a lot to me.

Would I like my writing to be relatable and understandable and also inventive and fun and thought-provoking to other people? Yes. I also want it to be sincerely me. An insane task that I’ll spend my life working on, I’m sure. I’d like to care less about certain opinions of my writing, but I’d also like to care more about some—I’d like to become somewhat less sequestered, as a writer. This residency demonstrated that when people are careful and kind, the light they cast over my writing doesn’t mar it, but only illuminates it, helpfully, usefully.

For that knowledge, I am very thankful.