Experiments in Writing from Nothing

Isolation isn’t good for the human spirit. People are social creatures; we require & rely on the presence & emotion of others to calibrate our standing in the world. When our normal patterns of socialization were interrupted by health concerns of more immediate importance, my entire relationship to writing & the world was challenged. I lost the people, the communities, I measured my life against. I lost the productive social spaces that kept the dynamism of learning rewarding, fresh, & funny. Without the joy of creating in community, my tether to good writing habits weakened. I have annoyed many a student by repeating, over & over again, that learning & writing are social processes. But, like my students & peers, I was tested by the scope of this truth as I struggled to learn & create through COVID-19 lockdown.

What does the writer mine when they’re cut off from the dynamism of life, the fuel of art? How does a writer create inspiring circumstances when they are, for example, on Day 142 of living, working, writing, & bouncing off the walls in a 700 square foot apartment? After exhausting all available episodes of, & commentary on as well as critique of, Tiger King, I decided to construct an answer to this question in my own life. In my nonfiction workshop, under the pressure of looming deadlines, I reached immediately for what most writers probably reach for when they feel drained of inspiration: the past.

Looking backward & completing creative research to spur memory was a task that focused my attention toward writing despite the difficult circumstances of virtual school & the all-encompassing reality of illness. I took pleasure in revisiting my stories, familiar to me in a chaotic world, whose problems have the benefits of hindsight. I have enough distance from these struggles that I can invent coherent narratives for them in my writing (whereas current life is never that neat). This satisfied me for a while, & so I dove into researching ladybugs, Anthony Bourdain, bipolar depression, & other facets of a personal essay that tackled a personally tumultuous time. The problem? My past includes many instances of isolation & neglect. After a few weeks of perfecting the piece, its themes began to mirror too closely the lonely hours I spent remembering them. I put the piece away, determined to wrench myself into a new vein of writing that wasn’t going to reinforce my mandatory loneliness. What is the opposite of hard memories, of struggles since overcome?

I settled on wonder as an antidote. But awe is hard to come by when you’re on Day 183 of the same easy egg breakfasts, the same Zoom links for weekly meetings, & the same ache in your lower back from an at-home desk chair that was never supposed to see so much use. This is where I returned to basics: the body, to whom all this bullcrap was happening & who felt most deeply the consequences of all this sameness. My body was feeling the effects of talking to people that I could not physically sense as present. When I looked at the raw materials in front of me, I saw my flesh & missed its ways of responding to the world physically, a world that now felt very distant. I wanted to use my writing to remind myself of the capacity to connect that my body has, or the capacity to be impacted. This time, I wrote about goosebumps & the tiny muscles that raise the hairs on our arms like flags whenever something moves us. I wrote about all the things that give me goosebumps, interviewing my friends to ask what gives them chills, & wove these experiences together in lyrical prose. But without the face-to-face contact with the outside world, I struggled to imbue wonder into a piece that wonder inspired, & yet again I wrote a piece that I needed to walk away from. Writing about goosebumps did not replicate, for me, opportunities to have them.

My final piece for this workshop was also the most successful; an advice column titled Dear Self. When I finally posed my creative questions inward, I found a truth running deeply underground, something to counter other painful truths of isolation & its withering effects. I found that I still contained some connection to wisdom, some patience, some otherwise-untapped estuary. It is not the world that makes me a writer. Only I can do that. Whatever attitude I practice in my life will determine the level of inspiration I can gain from my surroundings & even, it turns out, from myself. If I have any advice to give another, it is only the advice I have already given myself:

Dear Self,

I seem to not be able to really say what’s on my mind lately. It seems like there’s something beyond the cliché to say, but I just can’t quite do it. I’m having trouble articulating the things I care about and value the most. When I do, I sound childish and naïve. I’m worried that the pervasive cynicism I have isn’t steeping my innermost virtue, because when I look inside and see what I think is really important, it just looks like bubblegum and rainbows and warm breath, like the kind I breathe into the collar of someone I love. I thought by now I’d have a sharpened steel of word to work with, to whittle away the frippery and human-interest angles I’ve got running through me. Instead, I think about what’s important to me and I wilt, I sigh, I curl inward. The words don’t come. Can you help me?

Signed,

For Someone Who’s An Open Book I Don’t Think I’m Saying Much

Dear Not Saying Much,

Shut up and listen. I don’t want to hate us, but you're making it pretty hard with all this “What’s the meaning of life? Can’t we just be kind to each other?” stuff. What if you sat down and put that fist-sized heart in our mouth so we couldn’t talk anymore, huh? I bet some amazing things would happen. I could even read to you, if you'd like, to simulate those people talking. I understand that it’s tough to sit in silence, to work alone, but what I can’t stand is how we don’t even look at the lace tied around the neck of our husband’s mandolin. Like there aren’t a thousand lessons, just there, about tenderness and a man’s careful devotion, like his tough hands haven’t tied something pretty onto a tool he uses just to offset our existential dread. We look past that every day wondering what’s important and the damn gift of it all is smacking us in the face.

Do not start with what is important. Start with what is small. See what it touches. There is no end. If we became a carpet of moss, we would still need to sigh, curl inward, be silent. There’s nothing to be done for it.

Love,

Self

Eileen Winn is a poet and author from Ohio currently earning their MFA from Florida Atlantic University. They work on the editorial boards of Swamp Ape Review and Alien Literary Magazine. You can find their work in or forthcoming from the 2020 Sundress Anthology Best of the Net, Cherry Tree, The Shore, in the Breakup Book anthology from Purpled Palm Press, and more. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.

A Matter of Focus: Thoughts on Craft in Poetry

When A Thing happens, when I feel a poem begin, I feel it as the base of my brain stem humming. It happens when I notice river-water curling around the legs of a motionless heron on the opposite bank. It also happens when I feel the weighty comparison of petty bickering on the Food Network contrasted with a multi-car pileup, the burned-out wreckage alongside my commute. 

It happened when I went to church and it happened when I saw my bare feet framed by stars through my best friend’s windshield way past curfew. I feel the same sensation when I begin a nonfiction piece, or the beginnings of inspiration related to an academic paper, but with a poem it’s different. Less puzzled, more exultant. Less in the front of my brain, more in the back where my molars are anchored, where I hold tension, where tension holds me.

Do I notice the times I describe above, these generative moments, easily? Do I record them? My body certainly records them, my sense of living anxiety as good as a notepad for taking ideas. Not that I don’t use my journal (or even the Notes app of my iPhone) to jot down phrases that sound pretty or stir my sensibilities. 

But more often, it’s common for me to feel the poem in my chest and my stomach before my mind can articulate the words that my guts seem to be singing. When this happens, it’s best for me to get to some paper, pen, and some silence so the poem can emerge, mostly whole, as quickly as possible. Often, this visceral response to a situation is so broad and feels so specific (a macrocosm and microcosm all at once) that my main decision in terms of craft is to appropriately focus the lens of my perception. My poems, painted in large swaths, are unwieldy, licking at the seams of cells with the same fervor that they attempt to use in devouring the stars. 

To rein in my poem, I focus on pulling that abundant response to the world back to what I can ostensibly know about my environment, my body, my immediate surroundings. This might mean using my senses only: what can I touch with my skin? What type of dirt is stuck under my fingernails right this second, and where did it come from? What is it about this particular Marlboro that tastes differently, and what does it taste of?

When that exploration of detail becomes mundane, or indistinguishable from the experiences of anyone else digging in the same field or smoking the same brand of cigarette, then I begin to explore the broader questions (at the risk of challenging my earlier, established focus). Why did that dirt cause me remember the farm I took my first job at, my grandmother who tended those fields, my grandfather who faithfully ran the tilling machines? Where did the smoke of the cigarette go that enchanted me to follow it? 

It’s in this connection between the stimulus and what memory was stimulated that I find the poem. It is the attempt to feel a chill and write, while shivering, what it means to be cold before I am warm again. My decision of craft is less a carefully measured editing or author’s mechanism and more a dreamer’s earnest attempt to explain the dream, to grasp at it with language before it fades from the body upon waking. Eileen Winn is a first year MFA student with a concentration in poetry and an interest in nonfiction. Originally from Ohio, Eileen lives in Florida with their husband and their cat. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.