top of page
Writing
Welcome to my extended portfolio! Below you'll find a collection of my published work across various creative medias and platforms, including Substack and YouTube.
'Dear Naked Stranger'
When the first nude model came into the studio and removed his black compression shorts, quickly and efficiently, gasps and shocked laughs echoed around the room. As with the first shock of cold jumping into a pool, we were taken aback by the sudden appearance of fleshiness. Some of us turned away; modesty is only a learned instinct, after all. The instructor chuckled, unsurprised by our reactions. I looked, and then kept looking.
Four others were enrolled in this class at London’s National Gallery, led by portrait artist Adele Wagstaff. I was the youngest by at least two decades. On the first day, our cohort smiled uncertainly at one another, shuffling our feet and our belongings. “Blistering out there, isn’t it?” (It was 26°C; by British standards, Saharan).
In grueling HIIT session form, we stood behind our easels and did three rounds of twenty-minute sketches, or five-minute scrambles, or hour-long drawings, our incipient artistic sensibilities not yet accustomed to the tolls of looking for so long. My arms and calves ached. In these initial sketches, my light, wavering lines depicting the model’s penis reflected my inhibition; I was also anxious about doing the model any injustice via length, shape, or shade. I quickly realized that the other injustices I was inflicting on the model’s form, through proportion, space, or line, were far larger, and so capturing the exactitudes of his genitalia soon disappeared beyond my scope of worry.
The model was not overly muscular, but still, you could see the ridges of tone where light and shadow hit. He had blondish hair across his shoulders and chest, extending downwards towards his gently rounded belly. No matter what I could possibly think during the sketching process, he continued standing straight, staring fixedly at a point in the distance.
In between poses, the model made no movements to cover himself up. He was postulated just as he would have been while wearing clothes, leaning casually on the prop blocks, stretching out his quads, even manspreading a little, while chatting with the instructor about what was to come on the schedule. Any questions we directed towards him were asked demurely at first, eyes cast away. Art questions our arbitrary binaries: we were unsteadied by the constant shift from the model as the unwavering object of our focused attention, to just another human being in the shared room. But why not both?
In between sketches, we wandered within the Galleries, pressing between droves of tourists and sweating Londoners alike to see Michelangelo’s unfinished The Entombment, and attempt replicas in our sketchbooks. Throughout the course, the live models would imitate poses similar to those found in the oil-finished paintings, and through the rhythm of practice, we would get closer to capturing the full figure of the subject.
After twenty minutes of staring, and as we began to shuffle back towards the studio, the model complimented my sketchbook iteration of Christ’s pose. We got to talking. He, like the other models (I would get to learn in time), had gotten into modelling through word of a friend. According to him, he’d first been terrified of the concept, not having felt at home in his body then. I understood the feeling. He’d been referred to a gig— and on a whim, knowing nothing else, simply decided to go for it. Since then, he told me he’d written a book on how transformative the experience had been for him, and how it led to a career, ongoing for several years, of standing before knit-browed students and artists alike with their pencils and brushes. And in doing so, he found himself appreciating his own body as art itself.
ii. the female nude; social and societal permissions around voyeurism
Women’s bodies appear to me first as steamy shapes in the bathhouse. Onsens are one of Japan’s national treasures; I remember dipping in mineral-scented springs up to my shoulders, trying to keep my towel-wrapped head out of the water. Women everywhere. Sluicing away soap at the pre-onsen shower stations; murmuring as they soaked, watching their young children from a distance; shivering as they danced back inside from the snowy outdoor pools, gripping onto each other’s arms so as not to slip on the damp floors.
The bathhouse bodies of all kinds, all sizes, all ages, lounged about like housecats. There was no performance needed about the way you walked or lowered yourself into the water; nobody gave a shit. So long as you kept quiet and respectful and considerate of everyone’s space, you could soak as long as you wanted and just be, half-aware only of the heat creeping back into your limbs, inch by inch.
When we met the female model on the second day, beautiful was what I thought. The model had broad, athletic shoulders; she had soft curves, and she wasn’t a size zero. Unlike with drawing the male model, I didn’t shrink from tracing the lines of her nipple or breast, or feel awkward watching. Naturally, having faced myself all my life, these parts are familiar to me. Fluidity is the word our Day 2 instructional booklet used; the model was a dancer, and her poses held both rigor and grace.
Drawn on Day 2; comté and white pencil. One of my favorites to come out of this class.
I found myself watching with a fascination that wasn’t tied to desire or to criticism or any of the markers we typically find ourselves attached to when considering naked people. I cannot fully say I watched with absolutely nothing from the outside world reflected in my gaze, for the stool, and the pencil, and the air-conditioning, and the coffee breath were all very much real; perhaps gone unnoticed, but just as integral to the making as anything else.
There, as she blinked, looking out in profile, as I tried to follow the curve and fold of her belly, the expanse of her thigh, the shades in her back marking her scapulae, unconcealed freckles and moles, I was entranced.
In emulation of the Carracci cartoons (as shown above), charcoal was the primary medium we used on this second day; I like it because it permits mess. You start off by scraping your stick of black across the blank page, smearing it with your hand to create a grey, foglike background. Adele then got us into the practice of squinting towards the model, in order to determine the most defined areas of light and dark, before using the eraser to sculpt away in negative.
The idea is to start seeing bodies as shapes first; you don’t even have to have a fixed image in your head at all to start creating. When we look at these masterworks, the tendency might be to spring back, hesitant. How the fuck did they do that; how could I possibly do that? Look closer; it’s all just lines, play of light and shadow. That’s all it takes to start.
Female nudes have passed through periods of being marked historically taboo, we learned; one of the most famously controversial was Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus. “The portrayal of nudes was officially discouraged in 17th-century Spain. Works could be seized or repainting demanded by the Inquisition, and artists who painted licentious or immoral works were often excommunicated, fined, or banished from Spain for a year.” (Wikipedia)
The critic Natasha Wallace discerns ‘The Rokeby Venus’ as “an image of self-absorbed beauty”; at first glance, the reclining Venus appears to be admiring herself, assisted by her winged son, Cupid. But Venus cannot be looking at herself in the mirror, because the viewer can see her face reflected in it—upon closer reflection (pun intended) we come to recognize that she is instead looking at us. There’s a timeless comfort in the way she lounges, at ease in herself.
When we think of the female nude now, maybe pornography is the first thing that comes to mind. Bodies are more accessible than ever today. I could fit together any number of randomly-generated words in any search engine and surely within a few seconds, a video featuring people I have never met would be spit out matching these specified parameters, costing nothing but the sanctity of my portable device and my own finite time.
Voyeurism is infinitely encouraged in this space of moneymaking content creation and ‘man on the street’ videos; we are incentivized to do nothing but look, jumping from one series of flashing, fleshy images to another with minimal engagement. To that, porn is more accessible to our generation now than in any other time; addictions begin young and are commonplace. You can’t protect your kids from everything they might see on the Internet. Recording and filming without consent becomes standard practice; views and likes justify everything, it seems, just enough to distract.
Within this space of primarily parasocial engagement with others’ bodies, being held in confined quiet with just one person to consider feels like respite. The more time passed, the more we were urged to look for in our drawings. Your eye follows, again, the slope of the model’s back; three— no, three and a half head-lengths away, there’s the hill of her palm, arch of her fingertips. There’s the crease in her belly, the tilt of her thigh.
iii. draw from life
Once, I had considered saying yes to the ad that called for volunteer models at my university’s art department— but only for all of ten seconds. The models were to be paid about nineteen dollars per hour: a fortune, compared to the eleven-dollar wages that characterise most of the on-campus jobs available to undergraduates. My weighing of the job’s pros and cons stopped once I considered the hard, immutable fact that these strangers would be peers, and that in itself was frightening.
In a class like the National Gallery’s, you see these strangers for one stretch of three days and then potentially never cross paths again; you don’t even have to learn their names, if you don’t want to. Within the campus bubble, even if the total enrolment number crosses the twenty thousands, there is every possibility of running into someone and have them blink back at you, before situational recognition kicks in and you realize you know their face from when you stood naked for an hour or two and let them see your ass for free.
The range of ages in the class was a blessing, in this respect. We know the mindsets and typical thought patterns of our peer group better than any other. We think we know exactly what they might think, what comparisons they could draw, kind or unkind. As a kid, I was self-conscious even in the locker rooms, opting to sneak-change discreetly behind my towel while the others held loud, full conversations wearing nothing.
Posing for strangers to see all of you, there’s a vulnerability and simultaneous defiance in the act. The body is not bothered with our inclinations, conflicting and underwhelming, to lie and cheat as we may think ourselves capable. Just a body, just a mass.
There are some days when I feel heavy in myself; when I feel I don’t truly know what I am doing in this body. I trace my fingertips over the inside of my forearm and notice the tickling sensation that arises. That is me. My hair feels as though it is making an effort to hang in my face. The sensation of doing things helps. I try to focus on what it feels like to sit outside, the wind chilling my ears and face, to feel the warm glint of a disappearing sun for just one second.
It’s been more than a month since this class, and I’ve drawn a lot since then. It’s also been a lot of fun observing bodies in public; the way they move, how functional they are. Modelling is far more physically demanding than one might realize. Twenty minutes of not moving, limbs postured in awkward angles, is hard to bear. When I asked the female model whether it was strenuous at all, she responded yes immediately. It’s exhausting both physically, mentally. It takes a lot out of you.
Four others were enrolled in this class at London’s National Gallery, led by portrait artist Adele Wagstaff. I was the youngest by at least two decades. On the first day, our cohort smiled uncertainly at one another, shuffling our feet and our belongings. “Blistering out there, isn’t it?” (It was 26°C; by British standards, Saharan).
In grueling HIIT session form, we stood behind our easels and did three rounds of twenty-minute sketches, or five-minute scrambles, or hour-long drawings, our incipient artistic sensibilities not yet accustomed to the tolls of looking for so long. My arms and calves ached. In these initial sketches, my light, wavering lines depicting the model’s penis reflected my inhibition; I was also anxious about doing the model any injustice via length, shape, or shade. I quickly realized that the other injustices I was inflicting on the model’s form, through proportion, space, or line, were far larger, and so capturing the exactitudes of his genitalia soon disappeared beyond my scope of worry.
The model was not overly muscular, but still, you could see the ridges of tone where light and shadow hit. He had blondish hair across his shoulders and chest, extending downwards towards his gently rounded belly. No matter what I could possibly think during the sketching process, he continued standing straight, staring fixedly at a point in the distance.
In between poses, the model made no movements to cover himself up. He was postulated just as he would have been while wearing clothes, leaning casually on the prop blocks, stretching out his quads, even manspreading a little, while chatting with the instructor about what was to come on the schedule. Any questions we directed towards him were asked demurely at first, eyes cast away. Art questions our arbitrary binaries: we were unsteadied by the constant shift from the model as the unwavering object of our focused attention, to just another human being in the shared room. But why not both?
In between sketches, we wandered within the Galleries, pressing between droves of tourists and sweating Londoners alike to see Michelangelo’s unfinished The Entombment, and attempt replicas in our sketchbooks. Throughout the course, the live models would imitate poses similar to those found in the oil-finished paintings, and through the rhythm of practice, we would get closer to capturing the full figure of the subject.
After twenty minutes of staring, and as we began to shuffle back towards the studio, the model complimented my sketchbook iteration of Christ’s pose. We got to talking. He, like the other models (I would get to learn in time), had gotten into modelling through word of a friend. According to him, he’d first been terrified of the concept, not having felt at home in his body then. I understood the feeling. He’d been referred to a gig— and on a whim, knowing nothing else, simply decided to go for it. Since then, he told me he’d written a book on how transformative the experience had been for him, and how it led to a career, ongoing for several years, of standing before knit-browed students and artists alike with their pencils and brushes. And in doing so, he found himself appreciating his own body as art itself.
ii. the female nude; social and societal permissions around voyeurism
Women’s bodies appear to me first as steamy shapes in the bathhouse. Onsens are one of Japan’s national treasures; I remember dipping in mineral-scented springs up to my shoulders, trying to keep my towel-wrapped head out of the water. Women everywhere. Sluicing away soap at the pre-onsen shower stations; murmuring as they soaked, watching their young children from a distance; shivering as they danced back inside from the snowy outdoor pools, gripping onto each other’s arms so as not to slip on the damp floors.
The bathhouse bodies of all kinds, all sizes, all ages, lounged about like housecats. There was no performance needed about the way you walked or lowered yourself into the water; nobody gave a shit. So long as you kept quiet and respectful and considerate of everyone’s space, you could soak as long as you wanted and just be, half-aware only of the heat creeping back into your limbs, inch by inch.
When we met the female model on the second day, beautiful was what I thought. The model had broad, athletic shoulders; she had soft curves, and she wasn’t a size zero. Unlike with drawing the male model, I didn’t shrink from tracing the lines of her nipple or breast, or feel awkward watching. Naturally, having faced myself all my life, these parts are familiar to me. Fluidity is the word our Day 2 instructional booklet used; the model was a dancer, and her poses held both rigor and grace.
Drawn on Day 2; comté and white pencil. One of my favorites to come out of this class.
I found myself watching with a fascination that wasn’t tied to desire or to criticism or any of the markers we typically find ourselves attached to when considering naked people. I cannot fully say I watched with absolutely nothing from the outside world reflected in my gaze, for the stool, and the pencil, and the air-conditioning, and the coffee breath were all very much real; perhaps gone unnoticed, but just as integral to the making as anything else.
There, as she blinked, looking out in profile, as I tried to follow the curve and fold of her belly, the expanse of her thigh, the shades in her back marking her scapulae, unconcealed freckles and moles, I was entranced.
In emulation of the Carracci cartoons (as shown above), charcoal was the primary medium we used on this second day; I like it because it permits mess. You start off by scraping your stick of black across the blank page, smearing it with your hand to create a grey, foglike background. Adele then got us into the practice of squinting towards the model, in order to determine the most defined areas of light and dark, before using the eraser to sculpt away in negative.
The idea is to start seeing bodies as shapes first; you don’t even have to have a fixed image in your head at all to start creating. When we look at these masterworks, the tendency might be to spring back, hesitant. How the fuck did they do that; how could I possibly do that? Look closer; it’s all just lines, play of light and shadow. That’s all it takes to start.
Female nudes have passed through periods of being marked historically taboo, we learned; one of the most famously controversial was Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus. “The portrayal of nudes was officially discouraged in 17th-century Spain. Works could be seized or repainting demanded by the Inquisition, and artists who painted licentious or immoral works were often excommunicated, fined, or banished from Spain for a year.” (Wikipedia)
The critic Natasha Wallace discerns ‘The Rokeby Venus’ as “an image of self-absorbed beauty”; at first glance, the reclining Venus appears to be admiring herself, assisted by her winged son, Cupid. But Venus cannot be looking at herself in the mirror, because the viewer can see her face reflected in it—upon closer reflection (pun intended) we come to recognize that she is instead looking at us. There’s a timeless comfort in the way she lounges, at ease in herself.
When we think of the female nude now, maybe pornography is the first thing that comes to mind. Bodies are more accessible than ever today. I could fit together any number of randomly-generated words in any search engine and surely within a few seconds, a video featuring people I have never met would be spit out matching these specified parameters, costing nothing but the sanctity of my portable device and my own finite time.
Voyeurism is infinitely encouraged in this space of moneymaking content creation and ‘man on the street’ videos; we are incentivized to do nothing but look, jumping from one series of flashing, fleshy images to another with minimal engagement. To that, porn is more accessible to our generation now than in any other time; addictions begin young and are commonplace. You can’t protect your kids from everything they might see on the Internet. Recording and filming without consent becomes standard practice; views and likes justify everything, it seems, just enough to distract.
Within this space of primarily parasocial engagement with others’ bodies, being held in confined quiet with just one person to consider feels like respite. The more time passed, the more we were urged to look for in our drawings. Your eye follows, again, the slope of the model’s back; three— no, three and a half head-lengths away, there’s the hill of her palm, arch of her fingertips. There’s the crease in her belly, the tilt of her thigh.
iii. draw from life
Once, I had considered saying yes to the ad that called for volunteer models at my university’s art department— but only for all of ten seconds. The models were to be paid about nineteen dollars per hour: a fortune, compared to the eleven-dollar wages that characterise most of the on-campus jobs available to undergraduates. My weighing of the job’s pros and cons stopped once I considered the hard, immutable fact that these strangers would be peers, and that in itself was frightening.
In a class like the National Gallery’s, you see these strangers for one stretch of three days and then potentially never cross paths again; you don’t even have to learn their names, if you don’t want to. Within the campus bubble, even if the total enrolment number crosses the twenty thousands, there is every possibility of running into someone and have them blink back at you, before situational recognition kicks in and you realize you know their face from when you stood naked for an hour or two and let them see your ass for free.
The range of ages in the class was a blessing, in this respect. We know the mindsets and typical thought patterns of our peer group better than any other. We think we know exactly what they might think, what comparisons they could draw, kind or unkind. As a kid, I was self-conscious even in the locker rooms, opting to sneak-change discreetly behind my towel while the others held loud, full conversations wearing nothing.
Posing for strangers to see all of you, there’s a vulnerability and simultaneous defiance in the act. The body is not bothered with our inclinations, conflicting and underwhelming, to lie and cheat as we may think ourselves capable. Just a body, just a mass.
There are some days when I feel heavy in myself; when I feel I don’t truly know what I am doing in this body. I trace my fingertips over the inside of my forearm and notice the tickling sensation that arises. That is me. My hair feels as though it is making an effort to hang in my face. The sensation of doing things helps. I try to focus on what it feels like to sit outside, the wind chilling my ears and face, to feel the warm glint of a disappearing sun for just one second.
It’s been more than a month since this class, and I’ve drawn a lot since then. It’s also been a lot of fun observing bodies in public; the way they move, how functional they are. Modelling is far more physically demanding than one might realize. Twenty minutes of not moving, limbs postured in awkward angles, is hard to bear. When I asked the female model whether it was strenuous at all, she responded yes immediately. It’s exhausting both physically, mentally. It takes a lot out of you.
'On Coventry': An Introduction
“Her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.” (‘On Natalia Ginzburg’ 242). Cusk wrote this of Natalia Ginzburg in 2018, yet her words apply aptly to her own writing. She lays down the narrative through which we wander, as if through the “coastal paths” that “wind amongst…the sensual and unearthly [trees]...like headless bodies held in curious, balletic poses” (‘Coventry’ 32). We pause to admire these frozen structures, the well-crafted sentences, the stark, bony metaphors, illuminated by Cusk’s consistently matter-of-fact tone. The path stretches on; Cusk moves aside the brambles in this new territory. Yet in our tour of Coventry, we have but one thing in our subconscious. What we most often covet, as readers and as humans, is the innate search for understanding: the thoughts of another suddenly clicking into place to form a new, glimmering reality.
Coventry spins its own narrative through ruminative personal essays, meta-writing on the nature of creation, and literary analyses of ‘Classics and Bestsellers’. Each piece reveals another critical aspect about the author who ties them all together. I have been an avid follower of Cusk’s work from her debut novel, Saving Agnes (1993), to her critically acclaimed Outline trilogy (2014), which “reinvents the novel” (Thurman). But Cusk is no stranger to resistance: her memoir, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), sparked intense discourse among modern-day feminists, from which a hot and simmering backlash emerged. Regardless of whether one agrees with her ideas, Cusk should never be underestimated. Coventry challenges and provokes, delving into the nuances of topics such as family, feminism, and social scripts. Cusk juxtaposes personal anecdotes with literary allusions to reach insightful conclusions about the human experience, creating a new form of narrative. Enriching her argument with unconventional figurative language, Cusk maintains the dedicated, relentless pursuit of her own truth.
Throughout this collection, Cusk dips in and out of story snippets, whose exposed carcass she spreads out for dissection, belly-up, on the surgical table. ‘Driving as Metaphor’ details the different driver personalities as a naturalist may list the species of butterfly in the Amazonian jungle, from “the slow drivers [who] often fail effectively to communicate their intentions and aims” to those who “drive as it were sanctimoniously, as though to teach the rest of us a lesson.” (4). Cusk writes with an irreverent but focused conversationality that soon becomes characteristic of her prose. She does not shy away from everyday idioms (“teach the rest of us a lesson”), further lending her writing style a disinhibited, intellectual stream-of-consciousness quality. She ponders the logic behind the personas she describes; in the case of the slow driver, she hazards, “A person who slows down at every junction or side road, for example, can be guessed to be looking for a turning but unsure of where it is.” (4). She showcases the acuity of her perception even for the most mundane of daily actions, both impressing us and prompting our further thought on our often skimmed-over habituations.
These ‘universal experiences’ are then neatly summarized in a concise, pithy remark whose humor is rooted, as most humor is, in its stark relatability: “Equally, a person traveling by bicycle feels an antipathy towards cars, yet once inside a car can immediately become irritated by cyclists, and as a pedestrian could dislike them both, sometimes all in the course of a single day” (Cusk, ‘Driving as Metaphor’ 9). We consider ourselves to be the highway’s uniquely blameless operator; Cusk lays our obvious fallacy bare, but the vague sense of shame that arises dissolves in the face of mutual wrongdoing. Skilfully, Cusk manipulates us into following her line of reasoning in this opening essay. Her almost scientific observations command respect; this precise language entices us. One may even feel certain unease mingled with this admiration for having our internal thought-bearings shifted so momentously. However, we do not complain; instead, we assume credibility. Cusk continues to follow this logical structure of presenting a micro-experience for analysis, before passing her critiques to more open interpretation. “...the responsibility of driving, its visual and mental burden, is passed to those outside it” (6). Cusk reminds us that the passers-by, the other people in their own vehicles, must be wary of each other. One must follow the imperative of the road, possessing that sensitive attunement to the unintended trajectories of other drivers, and swerve to avoid. We are dependent on the virtue of others. The depth of another person— how liminal a concept! —- often eclipses us, yet our lives may be impacted most seriously by a stranger’s decisions. Cusk balances finely on the curb between her recounts, dissections, and realizations.
Foremost, however, it is our actions that may lead to our peril, whether they are written out for us or not. Cusk explores the similarities between fiction and reality in her discussions of other notable authors and their works. With the depth of her analysis, her literary allusions may be treated as a type of anecdote. In ‘On Françoise Sagan’, Cusk tells the tragic tale of Sagan’s death: “Bonjour Tristesse concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving invariably forms part of the legend of her life, received severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed” (209). Wryly, Cusk adds in the following sentence, “The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny is palpable” (210). We are left stunned by the terrible, gravitational pull of this statement, delivered with a sliver of casual gallows humor from Cusk as she portrays Sagan as both creator and subject of this self-fulfilling prophecy.
What Cusk trades in are metaphors: here, she contrasts Sagan against her created heroine, Céline, to signify Sagan’s entanglement in her own plot. “It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can sometimes become fate…Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters… [writers], with their mortal grasp on the faculty of imagination, have crushed our illusions about human destiny” (209). According to Cusk, the writer merges with the reader’s schematic interpretation of the novel, yet the narrative is broken with a sudden interjection from reality: a news article, a hurried obituary. We infer that attempting to take on some transient role as the deity of their fictional world is perhaps the writer’s ultimate goal. As Judith Thurman, staff writer at The New Yorker, remarks, “an old core principle of the writer’s vocation [is] to presume authority” (Thurman). The craft allows one to leave their flawed human legacy behind for an ephemeral moment, to be worshipped as something other, a product of imagination blotting out imperfections. As a prolific writer herself, Cusk is sympathetic to the misfortunes the profession entails, paying tribute to the circumstances of Sagan’s tragic death. Now that Sagan’s temporary evasion of mortality has long concluded, it is ‘safe’ to identify her as human and indicate that respects are due. Cusk leaves it a mystery whether it is truly the author who follows their simultaneous “fetter” and “fate” (209), or vice versa, perhaps for the sake of poetic justice.
The obscurity of the female identity is another topic Cusk moves to dispel with her fresh take on women’s writing and feminism, her attempt to shift the type of narrative that has been spun to death. Her essay ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ defines women’s writing as “not simply a literature made by women but one that arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions. A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man” (164). The fact that Cusk defines ‘women’s writing’ by what it cannot be speaks volumes about the plight of the 21st-century woman: shackled by the constraints set upon her, she must only push harder to set herself apart. With her heavy reference to Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf’s ideas on the ‘woman writer’, Cusk demonstrates her stability as a creator by basing her analyses on the theories of her forbears. She proves the need for the ‘woman writer’ to “cling onto what representation there is” (170) in the male-dominated literary sphere, to avoid losing her writing identity in favor of avoiding confrontation.
If the ‘woman writer’ chooses to conform, she “loses her integrity – and her chance of greatness – in the attempt to join male literary culture” (166). Cusk follows, citing Woolf, that “the woman writer might have to break everything – the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself – to create her own literature” (qtd. in ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ 172). As seen throughout, the scrap-cut technique that Cusk employs, jumping back and forth between anecdotes and scenes from her life, might emulate the tumbling em-dashes and transient metaphors so prevalent in Woolf’s own writing. They both attempt to break “the sentence, the sequence” of their words. Furthermore, underlying Coventry as a whole is the dissonance between Cusk’s matter-of-fact tone and the close nature of her anecdotes and revelations. We know intimacies of Cusk’s life that may usually be divulged to a devoted confidante; the grievances of her childhood and present, but otherwise have little understanding of her identity, whose facets seem as various as the topics she writes on. Historically, the trope of women writing records of supposedly private thought has thrived on marketing the writer’s mental sequestration. Through exposing ‘“the feelings of women in a drawing-room’” (qtd. in Cusk 167), we tend to feel deliciously singled out as a reader for being privy to the honeyed secrets of another.
While Coventry does not follow exactly the structure of the epistolary or diary-writing woman, the reclamation of this narrative tool, portrayed as ‘weak’ in the literary circle, again points to the purpose of empowering the ‘woman writer’. Clearly, Cusk subjects herself to what she preaches: she “gut-renovates” (Thurman) the novel, fighting towards “a new template for the female voice” (‘On Natalia Ginzburg’, 242) that she may help create.
Coventry’s unlikely but strangely tangible metaphors are a powerful force in its rally against the typical, adding further depth to her analyses and lodging themselves persistently in the reader’s memory. “…One might wake from family life as from a bacchanal into the cold light of day” (‘Coventry’ 32). It is not an analogy traditionally suited to the idea of suburban, calming family existence, prompting us to think deeply about the congruence between the two. Whether or not we do recall hangovers worthy of rowdy Roman parties, one can imagine the shameful morning after: a morning of headaches, snappiness, and people who seem alien from their screaming counterparts mere hours before. Perhaps therein lies the resemblance— a stagnant path of regrets in Cusk’s somewhat tragic depiction of a torn family. The ambiguity of “bacchanal” is perhaps a fun nod to the enigmatic analogies one might find rife in works of ‘classic’ authors. The subjectivity of interpretation leaves these tales an entertaining, personalized fill-in-the-blank, dependent on personal experience.
The separate dimensions in which one can interpret Cusk’s metaphors can be felt similarly in ‘Making Home’, where Cusk remarks, “Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her than by anyone else” (76). We may interpret this “entering a woman’s body” to mean penetration or intercourse, a jarring metaphor that clashes with the childhood comfort of home. Alternatively, the allusion to the female form may refer to home as a realm of domesticity, historically associated with the diligent housewife. Moving through the house, Cusk feels more attached to the living space. Considering her role as a mother of two daughters, home represents a narrative Cusk is capable of constructing for herself, a visual representation of her character. “At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed: the numberless private decisions I had made…were exhibited for all to see.” (70). Cusk’s home is an extension of herself; her intimacies are divulged—her personification of the house as both a sentient, breathing organism and a personality indicator also reflects on the far-reaching, flexible roles of those who maintain it. Rather like the visual trick of Rubin’s Vase, it is a struggle to keep both the maternal house-being and the more visceral image in mind, creating a fascinating, hooking conflict. Coventry is all the more memorable for its provocative duality and the discomfort it brings us to linger upon.
“All my life I have been terrified of Coventry, of its vastness and bleakness and loneliness, and of what it represents, which is ejection from the story” (‘Coventry’ 37). It is clear that Cusk’s fraught, rocky relationship with her parents and her past experiences with ostracism have influenced her perspective as a writer. Yet Cusk concludes ‘Coventry’ by claiming how she will gladly sink into its grasp after years of attempted evasion, turning it into a comfort of her own. “I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve decided to stay.” Whether she truly believes this statement is irrelevant, save for the narrative's continuation. Keeping in Coventry may seem like foolhardiness or ego to others’ eyes, though Cusk exemplifies what she says about women’s writing: she wishes to take control of her own path. She explains this desire for personal authority best in her New Yorker interview: ‘“Being in control of my own destruction…has always seemed like a solution for it.”’ (Thurman)
Coventry is a poignant, pensive work that transcends its era; Cusk’s push to take charge and subvert expectations while aiming to incite similar free thought in us. Imagination and analysis, fiction and reality clash in her combination of the personal and the literary, with dichotomous metaphors masterfully interwoven throughout. With that, I urge you, the reader, to parse this collection carefully and ruminate upon its subtleties. As with one’s first-ever shot of whiskey, one may come to enjoy its bitter notes, the searing sensation it evokes, or spit it out in disgust. “The sheer energy and wilful, self-constructing logic of narrative, which at first made one cringe and protest every time the truth was dented, came over time to seem preferable to elusive, chaotic reality” (‘Coventry’ 30). Reeling from the concluding words of one of Cusk’s essays, one comes to prefer the story she crafts to the world we must face outside. The second thing the reader desires, after the first of capturing crucial understanding, is an escape. It is far easier to succumb to a narrative already spun than to create our own. Yet our “ejection from the story” need not be so painful; won’t we learn in time to embrace it properly? For now, bleary-eyed and head pounding, we must step out from Coventry into the cold, harsh daylight of reality, and learn to be conductors of our own lives again.
Works Cited:
Cusk, Rachel. ‘On Natalia Ginzburg.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, p. 242.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Coventry.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 30-2.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Driving as Metaphor.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 4-9.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘On Françoise Sagan.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 209-10.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 164-72.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Making Home.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 70-6.
Thurman, Judith. “Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 31 July 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel. Accessed 28 Jan, 2022.
Coventry spins its own narrative through ruminative personal essays, meta-writing on the nature of creation, and literary analyses of ‘Classics and Bestsellers’. Each piece reveals another critical aspect about the author who ties them all together. I have been an avid follower of Cusk’s work from her debut novel, Saving Agnes (1993), to her critically acclaimed Outline trilogy (2014), which “reinvents the novel” (Thurman). But Cusk is no stranger to resistance: her memoir, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), sparked intense discourse among modern-day feminists, from which a hot and simmering backlash emerged. Regardless of whether one agrees with her ideas, Cusk should never be underestimated. Coventry challenges and provokes, delving into the nuances of topics such as family, feminism, and social scripts. Cusk juxtaposes personal anecdotes with literary allusions to reach insightful conclusions about the human experience, creating a new form of narrative. Enriching her argument with unconventional figurative language, Cusk maintains the dedicated, relentless pursuit of her own truth.
Throughout this collection, Cusk dips in and out of story snippets, whose exposed carcass she spreads out for dissection, belly-up, on the surgical table. ‘Driving as Metaphor’ details the different driver personalities as a naturalist may list the species of butterfly in the Amazonian jungle, from “the slow drivers [who] often fail effectively to communicate their intentions and aims” to those who “drive as it were sanctimoniously, as though to teach the rest of us a lesson.” (4). Cusk writes with an irreverent but focused conversationality that soon becomes characteristic of her prose. She does not shy away from everyday idioms (“teach the rest of us a lesson”), further lending her writing style a disinhibited, intellectual stream-of-consciousness quality. She ponders the logic behind the personas she describes; in the case of the slow driver, she hazards, “A person who slows down at every junction or side road, for example, can be guessed to be looking for a turning but unsure of where it is.” (4). She showcases the acuity of her perception even for the most mundane of daily actions, both impressing us and prompting our further thought on our often skimmed-over habituations.
These ‘universal experiences’ are then neatly summarized in a concise, pithy remark whose humor is rooted, as most humor is, in its stark relatability: “Equally, a person traveling by bicycle feels an antipathy towards cars, yet once inside a car can immediately become irritated by cyclists, and as a pedestrian could dislike them both, sometimes all in the course of a single day” (Cusk, ‘Driving as Metaphor’ 9). We consider ourselves to be the highway’s uniquely blameless operator; Cusk lays our obvious fallacy bare, but the vague sense of shame that arises dissolves in the face of mutual wrongdoing. Skilfully, Cusk manipulates us into following her line of reasoning in this opening essay. Her almost scientific observations command respect; this precise language entices us. One may even feel certain unease mingled with this admiration for having our internal thought-bearings shifted so momentously. However, we do not complain; instead, we assume credibility. Cusk continues to follow this logical structure of presenting a micro-experience for analysis, before passing her critiques to more open interpretation. “...the responsibility of driving, its visual and mental burden, is passed to those outside it” (6). Cusk reminds us that the passers-by, the other people in their own vehicles, must be wary of each other. One must follow the imperative of the road, possessing that sensitive attunement to the unintended trajectories of other drivers, and swerve to avoid. We are dependent on the virtue of others. The depth of another person— how liminal a concept! —- often eclipses us, yet our lives may be impacted most seriously by a stranger’s decisions. Cusk balances finely on the curb between her recounts, dissections, and realizations.
Foremost, however, it is our actions that may lead to our peril, whether they are written out for us or not. Cusk explores the similarities between fiction and reality in her discussions of other notable authors and their works. With the depth of her analysis, her literary allusions may be treated as a type of anecdote. In ‘On Françoise Sagan’, Cusk tells the tragic tale of Sagan’s death: “Bonjour Tristesse concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving invariably forms part of the legend of her life, received severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed” (209). Wryly, Cusk adds in the following sentence, “The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny is palpable” (210). We are left stunned by the terrible, gravitational pull of this statement, delivered with a sliver of casual gallows humor from Cusk as she portrays Sagan as both creator and subject of this self-fulfilling prophecy.
What Cusk trades in are metaphors: here, she contrasts Sagan against her created heroine, Céline, to signify Sagan’s entanglement in her own plot. “It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can sometimes become fate…Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters… [writers], with their mortal grasp on the faculty of imagination, have crushed our illusions about human destiny” (209). According to Cusk, the writer merges with the reader’s schematic interpretation of the novel, yet the narrative is broken with a sudden interjection from reality: a news article, a hurried obituary. We infer that attempting to take on some transient role as the deity of their fictional world is perhaps the writer’s ultimate goal. As Judith Thurman, staff writer at The New Yorker, remarks, “an old core principle of the writer’s vocation [is] to presume authority” (Thurman). The craft allows one to leave their flawed human legacy behind for an ephemeral moment, to be worshipped as something other, a product of imagination blotting out imperfections. As a prolific writer herself, Cusk is sympathetic to the misfortunes the profession entails, paying tribute to the circumstances of Sagan’s tragic death. Now that Sagan’s temporary evasion of mortality has long concluded, it is ‘safe’ to identify her as human and indicate that respects are due. Cusk leaves it a mystery whether it is truly the author who follows their simultaneous “fetter” and “fate” (209), or vice versa, perhaps for the sake of poetic justice.
The obscurity of the female identity is another topic Cusk moves to dispel with her fresh take on women’s writing and feminism, her attempt to shift the type of narrative that has been spun to death. Her essay ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ defines women’s writing as “not simply a literature made by women but one that arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions. A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man” (164). The fact that Cusk defines ‘women’s writing’ by what it cannot be speaks volumes about the plight of the 21st-century woman: shackled by the constraints set upon her, she must only push harder to set herself apart. With her heavy reference to Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf’s ideas on the ‘woman writer’, Cusk demonstrates her stability as a creator by basing her analyses on the theories of her forbears. She proves the need for the ‘woman writer’ to “cling onto what representation there is” (170) in the male-dominated literary sphere, to avoid losing her writing identity in favor of avoiding confrontation.
If the ‘woman writer’ chooses to conform, she “loses her integrity – and her chance of greatness – in the attempt to join male literary culture” (166). Cusk follows, citing Woolf, that “the woman writer might have to break everything – the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself – to create her own literature” (qtd. in ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ 172). As seen throughout, the scrap-cut technique that Cusk employs, jumping back and forth between anecdotes and scenes from her life, might emulate the tumbling em-dashes and transient metaphors so prevalent in Woolf’s own writing. They both attempt to break “the sentence, the sequence” of their words. Furthermore, underlying Coventry as a whole is the dissonance between Cusk’s matter-of-fact tone and the close nature of her anecdotes and revelations. We know intimacies of Cusk’s life that may usually be divulged to a devoted confidante; the grievances of her childhood and present, but otherwise have little understanding of her identity, whose facets seem as various as the topics she writes on. Historically, the trope of women writing records of supposedly private thought has thrived on marketing the writer’s mental sequestration. Through exposing ‘“the feelings of women in a drawing-room’” (qtd. in Cusk 167), we tend to feel deliciously singled out as a reader for being privy to the honeyed secrets of another.
While Coventry does not follow exactly the structure of the epistolary or diary-writing woman, the reclamation of this narrative tool, portrayed as ‘weak’ in the literary circle, again points to the purpose of empowering the ‘woman writer’. Clearly, Cusk subjects herself to what she preaches: she “gut-renovates” (Thurman) the novel, fighting towards “a new template for the female voice” (‘On Natalia Ginzburg’, 242) that she may help create.
Coventry’s unlikely but strangely tangible metaphors are a powerful force in its rally against the typical, adding further depth to her analyses and lodging themselves persistently in the reader’s memory. “…One might wake from family life as from a bacchanal into the cold light of day” (‘Coventry’ 32). It is not an analogy traditionally suited to the idea of suburban, calming family existence, prompting us to think deeply about the congruence between the two. Whether or not we do recall hangovers worthy of rowdy Roman parties, one can imagine the shameful morning after: a morning of headaches, snappiness, and people who seem alien from their screaming counterparts mere hours before. Perhaps therein lies the resemblance— a stagnant path of regrets in Cusk’s somewhat tragic depiction of a torn family. The ambiguity of “bacchanal” is perhaps a fun nod to the enigmatic analogies one might find rife in works of ‘classic’ authors. The subjectivity of interpretation leaves these tales an entertaining, personalized fill-in-the-blank, dependent on personal experience.
The separate dimensions in which one can interpret Cusk’s metaphors can be felt similarly in ‘Making Home’, where Cusk remarks, “Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her than by anyone else” (76). We may interpret this “entering a woman’s body” to mean penetration or intercourse, a jarring metaphor that clashes with the childhood comfort of home. Alternatively, the allusion to the female form may refer to home as a realm of domesticity, historically associated with the diligent housewife. Moving through the house, Cusk feels more attached to the living space. Considering her role as a mother of two daughters, home represents a narrative Cusk is capable of constructing for herself, a visual representation of her character. “At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed: the numberless private decisions I had made…were exhibited for all to see.” (70). Cusk’s home is an extension of herself; her intimacies are divulged—her personification of the house as both a sentient, breathing organism and a personality indicator also reflects on the far-reaching, flexible roles of those who maintain it. Rather like the visual trick of Rubin’s Vase, it is a struggle to keep both the maternal house-being and the more visceral image in mind, creating a fascinating, hooking conflict. Coventry is all the more memorable for its provocative duality and the discomfort it brings us to linger upon.
“All my life I have been terrified of Coventry, of its vastness and bleakness and loneliness, and of what it represents, which is ejection from the story” (‘Coventry’ 37). It is clear that Cusk’s fraught, rocky relationship with her parents and her past experiences with ostracism have influenced her perspective as a writer. Yet Cusk concludes ‘Coventry’ by claiming how she will gladly sink into its grasp after years of attempted evasion, turning it into a comfort of her own. “I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve decided to stay.” Whether she truly believes this statement is irrelevant, save for the narrative's continuation. Keeping in Coventry may seem like foolhardiness or ego to others’ eyes, though Cusk exemplifies what she says about women’s writing: she wishes to take control of her own path. She explains this desire for personal authority best in her New Yorker interview: ‘“Being in control of my own destruction…has always seemed like a solution for it.”’ (Thurman)
Coventry is a poignant, pensive work that transcends its era; Cusk’s push to take charge and subvert expectations while aiming to incite similar free thought in us. Imagination and analysis, fiction and reality clash in her combination of the personal and the literary, with dichotomous metaphors masterfully interwoven throughout. With that, I urge you, the reader, to parse this collection carefully and ruminate upon its subtleties. As with one’s first-ever shot of whiskey, one may come to enjoy its bitter notes, the searing sensation it evokes, or spit it out in disgust. “The sheer energy and wilful, self-constructing logic of narrative, which at first made one cringe and protest every time the truth was dented, came over time to seem preferable to elusive, chaotic reality” (‘Coventry’ 30). Reeling from the concluding words of one of Cusk’s essays, one comes to prefer the story she crafts to the world we must face outside. The second thing the reader desires, after the first of capturing crucial understanding, is an escape. It is far easier to succumb to a narrative already spun than to create our own. Yet our “ejection from the story” need not be so painful; won’t we learn in time to embrace it properly? For now, bleary-eyed and head pounding, we must step out from Coventry into the cold, harsh daylight of reality, and learn to be conductors of our own lives again.
Works Cited:
Cusk, Rachel. ‘On Natalia Ginzburg.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, p. 242.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Coventry.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 30-2.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Driving as Metaphor.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 4-9.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘On Françoise Sagan.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 209-10.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 164-72.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Making Home.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 70-6.
Thurman, Judith. “Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 31 July 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel. Accessed 28 Jan, 2022.
'everything and nothing: college life in a nutshell'
Parties. First loves. Drunken makeouts. Nights out with the girls. Morning classes. Last-minute assignment crams. O-week. Small talk with strangers. What’s your major? What classes are you taking? Office hours. Free movies. Game evenings. Applications. Mock interviews. Weekends away.
And then in between— solitude. So much of it.
College life is interesting. Your schedule’s crammed-in, like a tortilla fighting to contain everything within itself, filled with assignments on the to-do list and appointments to make and résumés to update. Classmates talk quick, everyone quick to laugh, and so you accustom yourself to the way everything moves, pachinko, kuk-kuk-kuk, bouncing back and forth between invisible pins, between classes, between deadlines that are only arbitrary in the end.
I’m sitting in a café, facing the street. On the opposite side, the last of the sun for today lingers on the end corner of the older-style brownstones, making a corner that glows a transformative orange. The sky is cloudless and of that blue that resembles the place you were when you first heard music that made your whole body shiver gloriously (for me, Mozart). Snow from the winter storm that merited an email advisory last week lingers in patches on the pavement, clumping to itself, small mountains of matter.
This is my second year of being in university; my third semester, technically, and still I’m adjusting myself to the amount of time you truly have to yourself. Everyone knows the campus is a bubble. You still get to play the student, lucky, that test was fucked up, I’m so cooked, scramble for that assignment before midnight, complain those terms of endearment to academia you have repeated for the last decade or so. At the same time— away from your parents’ eyes, from your hometown or your home country, if you’re especially fortunate, you reinvent yourself. Galatea and Pygmalion; you, lovely you, get to make yourself as you want, no ground rules. Get to fuck around with who you want, skive classes, land yourself in a job you’re under- or over-qualified for, still young and strong enough to lend everything to energy drinks and caffeine and the seat of your pants.
It’s foolish to tie yourself down, you hear from beer halls and dating apps and from your friends, because this is the place for change. Get out there and try everything. And so you do. You go skydiving, you join clubs, you do stupid things, you draw looks from strangers, you offer up parts of yourself you never have before. You become someone your sweet self two years ago would stare a little blankly at, blinking in half-recognition.
And in between all that flitting, like a rock dropping, you find yourself sitting in silence, your tongue at rest. These stretches of time— they seem so precious, so slipping, and you are struck with the almost infinite possibilities of what you could be doing. Here is the age where you are supposed to be doing everything. You wonder if you should be catching up with your piling to-do list, glide your fingers over the refresh buttons of your innumerable screens. You could go several days— several weeks— without ever having to speak to anyone, if you so chose.
So, you’re like— Well, what do I do now?
Sitting with yourself makes tenfold apparent the groupings and pairings, or singularities, of everyone else passing by.
A mother and daughter walked by the window where I sit, sipping hot chocolate from small turquoise tin cups. A man with a marvellous Russian-style brown fur coat walks by with immeasurable swagger; my gaydar sounds. The child seated beside me says Boom, right on as she sets down her plastic spoon with all the vigor she can muster in her young fist. The dad says This is sugar. This is full sugar. You’re adding more sugar, and he lets his daughter have the hot chocolate and monster cookie and answers her questions on how handcuffs work, patiently and thoroughly. People are so good. We try to be. It’s a big undertaking, being a human. How does anyone do it?
I’ve not got the foggiest. The beauty of a college town — everyone’s learning. A bearded guy dances by, pumping his arms and singing a tune I can almost discern through the glass. He smiles wider, showing his beautiful teeth as I smile for him— isn’t it wonderful how some people are born performers? Two boys ride in parallel on the main rode, keeping on the right side; one on a skateboard, the other on a OneWheel; feats of extraordinary balance. What artistes!
Last night I finished Ross Gay’s second iteration of his project The Book of Delights; The Book of (More) Delights. I wonder what he will name the third, and more. The Book of (More and More) Delights? I had the good fortune of going to his reading in my first year here and his writing reminds me so much of what a joy it is to be able to experience the small, teensy, pleasures of living. To find remarkableness in the snow on the pavement, the overkill, exuberant hats on the heads of passersby, the two-hand wave. It’s so easy to look past it sometimes.
Solitude is what we are born with. You’ve heard it before, born alone, die alone, and you’ve seen that graph: as we grow older, the person we spend the most time with is ourselves.
I’ve never been one to fear being alone. In trying to make the most, take the most of best four years of your life! and surrounding myself with folks however I can, in whatever capacity, there have been moments where I feel as though I’ve forgotten how I used to be just me. But these moments of solitude aren’t gaps— they’re life. People will pass in and out of the café like squalls in jazz, having their conversations, some will touch you on the shoulder, some you will smile at, some will hold your gaze for seconds more than anticipated, and then you’ll never see each other again.
You are the constant.
Caught with stark independence, you are thrust into daylight. It’s a little bright; the wind is brisk. The air is fresh and cold, the sound of your footsteps something that has followed you from the beginning. You keep moving, eyes open.
I’m going to have a meal with myself now. I’ll extend the invite to you, too; you eating a separate meal, in a separate place, enjoying yourself and what is in front of you. Take yourself on dates. I say thank you, but thank yourself also, please, for being here.
And then in between— solitude. So much of it.
College life is interesting. Your schedule’s crammed-in, like a tortilla fighting to contain everything within itself, filled with assignments on the to-do list and appointments to make and résumés to update. Classmates talk quick, everyone quick to laugh, and so you accustom yourself to the way everything moves, pachinko, kuk-kuk-kuk, bouncing back and forth between invisible pins, between classes, between deadlines that are only arbitrary in the end.
I’m sitting in a café, facing the street. On the opposite side, the last of the sun for today lingers on the end corner of the older-style brownstones, making a corner that glows a transformative orange. The sky is cloudless and of that blue that resembles the place you were when you first heard music that made your whole body shiver gloriously (for me, Mozart). Snow from the winter storm that merited an email advisory last week lingers in patches on the pavement, clumping to itself, small mountains of matter.
This is my second year of being in university; my third semester, technically, and still I’m adjusting myself to the amount of time you truly have to yourself. Everyone knows the campus is a bubble. You still get to play the student, lucky, that test was fucked up, I’m so cooked, scramble for that assignment before midnight, complain those terms of endearment to academia you have repeated for the last decade or so. At the same time— away from your parents’ eyes, from your hometown or your home country, if you’re especially fortunate, you reinvent yourself. Galatea and Pygmalion; you, lovely you, get to make yourself as you want, no ground rules. Get to fuck around with who you want, skive classes, land yourself in a job you’re under- or over-qualified for, still young and strong enough to lend everything to energy drinks and caffeine and the seat of your pants.
It’s foolish to tie yourself down, you hear from beer halls and dating apps and from your friends, because this is the place for change. Get out there and try everything. And so you do. You go skydiving, you join clubs, you do stupid things, you draw looks from strangers, you offer up parts of yourself you never have before. You become someone your sweet self two years ago would stare a little blankly at, blinking in half-recognition.
And in between all that flitting, like a rock dropping, you find yourself sitting in silence, your tongue at rest. These stretches of time— they seem so precious, so slipping, and you are struck with the almost infinite possibilities of what you could be doing. Here is the age where you are supposed to be doing everything. You wonder if you should be catching up with your piling to-do list, glide your fingers over the refresh buttons of your innumerable screens. You could go several days— several weeks— without ever having to speak to anyone, if you so chose.
So, you’re like— Well, what do I do now?
Sitting with yourself makes tenfold apparent the groupings and pairings, or singularities, of everyone else passing by.
A mother and daughter walked by the window where I sit, sipping hot chocolate from small turquoise tin cups. A man with a marvellous Russian-style brown fur coat walks by with immeasurable swagger; my gaydar sounds. The child seated beside me says Boom, right on as she sets down her plastic spoon with all the vigor she can muster in her young fist. The dad says This is sugar. This is full sugar. You’re adding more sugar, and he lets his daughter have the hot chocolate and monster cookie and answers her questions on how handcuffs work, patiently and thoroughly. People are so good. We try to be. It’s a big undertaking, being a human. How does anyone do it?
I’ve not got the foggiest. The beauty of a college town — everyone’s learning. A bearded guy dances by, pumping his arms and singing a tune I can almost discern through the glass. He smiles wider, showing his beautiful teeth as I smile for him— isn’t it wonderful how some people are born performers? Two boys ride in parallel on the main rode, keeping on the right side; one on a skateboard, the other on a OneWheel; feats of extraordinary balance. What artistes!
Last night I finished Ross Gay’s second iteration of his project The Book of Delights; The Book of (More) Delights. I wonder what he will name the third, and more. The Book of (More and More) Delights? I had the good fortune of going to his reading in my first year here and his writing reminds me so much of what a joy it is to be able to experience the small, teensy, pleasures of living. To find remarkableness in the snow on the pavement, the overkill, exuberant hats on the heads of passersby, the two-hand wave. It’s so easy to look past it sometimes.
Solitude is what we are born with. You’ve heard it before, born alone, die alone, and you’ve seen that graph: as we grow older, the person we spend the most time with is ourselves.
I’ve never been one to fear being alone. In trying to make the most, take the most of best four years of your life! and surrounding myself with folks however I can, in whatever capacity, there have been moments where I feel as though I’ve forgotten how I used to be just me. But these moments of solitude aren’t gaps— they’re life. People will pass in and out of the café like squalls in jazz, having their conversations, some will touch you on the shoulder, some you will smile at, some will hold your gaze for seconds more than anticipated, and then you’ll never see each other again.
You are the constant.
Caught with stark independence, you are thrust into daylight. It’s a little bright; the wind is brisk. The air is fresh and cold, the sound of your footsteps something that has followed you from the beginning. You keep moving, eyes open.
I’m going to have a meal with myself now. I’ll extend the invite to you, too; you eating a separate meal, in a separate place, enjoying yourself and what is in front of you. Take yourself on dates. I say thank you, but thank yourself also, please, for being here.
'open letter to the universe'
Hello,
I don’t know what else to say. I look back at old photos and can hardly recognize me sometimes. It is like I have continually left the house without my keys. In the distance there are voices screaming. Every act of goodness seems to have a witness to it, and if our want for attention is this overbearing I have no idea where we can put it. I have about three thousand (eight) drafts in my scratchpaddy-dashboard-launchpad area that have not yet been cast out into the world. Nothing will ever be fully formed; there will always be half of a baby toe missing, hairs too bleached, an almost-erased tooth. Or I could go on adding wrinkles and dimes everywhere until the end of time but then all the negative space would cease to be negative and all the scribbles too loud and I don’t know if I like art that messy. Art is allowed to be messy but I don’t have to like it. Oh why all the noise, why all the pulling of me from one end to another? I did not sign up for or purchase a ticket to this carnival. Is the point of writing to judge? Faint distastefulness for myself, now that I am being angsty. There are so many smart people on the Internet and so many stupid people on the Internet and maybe I am one or the other and always always the need to prove oneself. Where is my Walden. I now know where Sierra Leone is on a map and maybe that changes things just a little. I don’t know all the people in the world. What tragedy! Thank fuck. Somewhere between the oceans it is bedtime. Yellow ochre, grey sky. What must it be like to be successful. What must it be like to be so sure. Maybe the aim is to never know the latter.
I don’t know what else to say. I look back at old photos and can hardly recognize me sometimes. It is like I have continually left the house without my keys. In the distance there are voices screaming. Every act of goodness seems to have a witness to it, and if our want for attention is this overbearing I have no idea where we can put it. I have about three thousand (eight) drafts in my scratchpaddy-dashboard-launchpad area that have not yet been cast out into the world. Nothing will ever be fully formed; there will always be half of a baby toe missing, hairs too bleached, an almost-erased tooth. Or I could go on adding wrinkles and dimes everywhere until the end of time but then all the negative space would cease to be negative and all the scribbles too loud and I don’t know if I like art that messy. Art is allowed to be messy but I don’t have to like it. Oh why all the noise, why all the pulling of me from one end to another? I did not sign up for or purchase a ticket to this carnival. Is the point of writing to judge? Faint distastefulness for myself, now that I am being angsty. There are so many smart people on the Internet and so many stupid people on the Internet and maybe I am one or the other and always always the need to prove oneself. Where is my Walden. I now know where Sierra Leone is on a map and maybe that changes things just a little. I don’t know all the people in the world. What tragedy! Thank fuck. Somewhere between the oceans it is bedtime. Yellow ochre, grey sky. What must it be like to be successful. What must it be like to be so sure. Maybe the aim is to never know the latter.
How I Write, and What I Write For
In MA 2, my experiment focused on trying out the writing routines of authors Lee Min Jin and R.F. Kuang over the course of three days– their processes focusing primarily on reading and taking inspiration from others’ work while writing— and found it to be helpful to my own practice. I encouraged my reader to try out this practice for themselves and integrate it into their own lives and writing, expanding the reach of their knowledge and letting themselves be influenced by other great writers and works.
Henry David Thoreau’s essay Where I Lived, and What I Lived For highly praises the importance of immediate observance and being attuned to the surroundings in the present moment in the pursuit of finding and representing the truth in life; “to say what that thing really is before a true gaze” (1321), rather than distracting ourselves with banal mundanities of life undeserving of our attention. I will bring these ideas in conversation with Lee’s and Kuang’s ideals about “[choosing] the important over the urgent” (Frock) and “[using] fiction to process things”; in delving into texts and remaining present in them, we can better focus on what is worth saying. All three authors take writing in stride as a means of self-discovery, though through separate roads; as Thoreau writes in one of his journals, “There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.” Thoreau’s primary philosophy on writing differs from Lee and Kuang’s central writing practices of letting oneself be influenced and absorbed by – while absorbing – other texts and other minds. Thoreau would ultimately disagree with this, preferring to look at and reach toward the self in his writing rather than directly toward others. However, all are still human, and share their pursuit, as do I, through everything that separates them otherwise, of the eventual and immutable truth in life.
Thoreau’s 1854 essay was inspired by his time living at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he focused on living a more ‘intentional’ life in seclusion by removing himself from the external distractions of the rapidly developing industrial world, spending his time thinking and existing in nature. Thoreau was a central figure of the transcendentalist philosophical movement that was a core aspect of the American Romantic period in the late 19th century. This movement focused on the individual gaining a higher sense of purpose and the meaning of life through distanced introspection away from the rush of everyday life, and reflecting on “the essential facts of life” (1317) and self-independence. Transcendentalists took progressive stands on issues such as women’s rights, abolition, reform, and education, arguing overall that humankind should look inward individually to come to the truth, away from the distraction that was centered in the rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. Thoreau wrote and published Walden, from which his essay is excerpted, in order to share with the public his time living at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, for a period of two years, two months, and two days. Thoreau condensed this into the space of a singular calendar year in his writing in order to better convey this to his audience of “fellow men”, who he wished to free from their prisons of ‘conventional thinking’ that supported the industrial grind; the same that reaches deep into the roots of modern life now.
Many of the themes Thoreau expressed speak to me still, despite almost two centuries separating us; especially relating to being grounded in the present moment. I tend to integrate scenes I see or experience in real life into my writing. Although I consider fiction to be my primary playground, the stories I write usually come from seeds of curious small things that unfurl into pieces stretching across the white expanses of several pages. The slope of someone’s back down the main street; rain dotting the window; the grey hairs on the inner parts of that man’s tragus; scat-spotted signs I pass when driving. There has to be some grounding for my writing in reality; in her essay Writing Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor writes, “Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real— whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy…we always begin with what is or what has an eminent possibility of truth about it” (96). For my project, my ‘present’ was the other texts I was absorbing as I wrote; when I wanted a break from my own prose, I looked to those of others, drawing inspiration and motivation for my own writing. In looking closer at these words and close reading, I learned to be more attuned to what was working in my writing and what wasn’t; how to, as Thoreau put it in his August 1851 journal entry, write something “kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting” (“Thoreau - Ideas - on Writing”). But I want to digest. Past holding the words in my mouth, I want to swallow, and let the meaning filter through gradually from what was only text before; let it seep into the bloodstream through the stomach lining; welcome the flow of the new, fueled by each heartbeat, and perhaps again downwards and up once more through the esophagus in a kind of reverse peristalsis, spilling a little into the voice-box; thus, in all this convolution, allow myself to speak, with all intention, to the audience I desire to reach.
Using a wider lens, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For is Thoreau’s appeal for all to slow down and take account of reality as it truly is, and not be superficial in our perception of what is before us, but really look and appreciate reality to its fullest. Thoreau writes, “I perceive that we…live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be” (1321). With “mean” signifying the paltry or lacking feeling that we may feel, during mid- or quarter-life crises or otherwise, Thoreau labels our propensity for distraction as the primary cause of our unhappiness. Thoreau further elaborates, “Look at the meetinghouse, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them…In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here” (1321). By listing all these features of the mundane, that most would take for granted, Thoreau condemns the limited attention span of his fellows, claiming that these physical structures of concreteness that line the consciousnesses of our everyday lives, which we live in, are beyond our reach of true comprehension, and it is embarrassing that we would not know how to capture their essences if we were asked. In the lines following, he characterizes the present as the only way we can experience eternity, not as the grandiose, abstract concept we might conceive it as. All “times and places and occasions” are so “true and sublime”; therefore, Thoreau implies that this is what we should truly be focusing our limited time on and properly living in.
Over the three days of my experiment at the head of November, I tried, with varying levels of success and productivity, to write, incorporating reading the work of others during my writing time. In summary; on the first day, I struggled to get started and spark momentum; the given treacherousness of sitting down at the desk in front of a keyboard. The first batch of word slush came out in the form of two hundred or so unsatisfactory words over a couple hours. It felt unfavorable, though it was progress, I later acknowledge, in unclogging the mental detritus of disuse. (Imagine the sound of a vacuum seal being broken, the garbage disposal used for the first time in a month.) The second day was my most productive, perhaps fueled by a revitalizing order of matcha bubble tea, as I read through a good section of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War while making notes on components of her writing that worked for her narrative and for me, while experimenting with my own prose. Finally, on the third day, I tried Lee’s method of longhand writing some excerpted segments from The Bible, a classic. The scribbling out of moments from Genesis helped me with some generative work and character building, as I considered more of the foundational themes that underscore so much of Western literature, and got to thinking about how my own work might fit into the canon itself.
The writers whose routines I tried out were Lee Min Jin and R.F. Kuang, both incredibly prolific contemporary Asian female writers who I see as academic and writerly role models. Lee, a Korean-American author and journalist based in Harlem, writes primarily about Korean diaspora; she is primarily known for her lauded work Pachinko (2017). Meanwhile, Rebecca F. Kuang (R.F. Kuang) is a Chinese-American born in Guangzhou, China, who has published five books already at the age of 28, her most notable works including Babel (2022) and Yellowface (2023).
Both Lee and Kuang are heavy believers in taking inspiration from other writers while working on drafts, reading other works before they start writing themselves. Neither of them has a very concrete work schedule time-wise; Lee says, “I write whenever I can” (Frock), which suits my schedule better as a college student with other commitments. Lee starts her writing practice with “reading a chapter of the Bible. After I read it and study the annotations, I jot down a verse or two I find interesting in a notebook. After this, I write” (Frock). Lee is Christian and grew up going to church, and is “deeply interested in God as the creator and God as an active force in the world, or inactive force” (Luo).
Meanwhile, Kuang’s “usual routine is to read a couple hundred pages in one session, and then jot down two or three things that work for me, or don’t, to see how I can make my writing emulate that…My one failsafe way to jumpstart the creative engine is to read 200 pages of really good writing. Then my brain starts thinking about how to imitate those sentence structures” (“Distortions”).
In her writing, Lee demonstrates the intensive, incredibly thorough research that goes into crafting each of her novels about the Korean diaspora, indicating how much attention she pays to the present that others have experienced and are still living the ramifications of in real time. “I read secondary material. I read academic material. I read scholarship. And then I also do numerous interviews of experts and the subjects…I have been interviewing undocumented Koreans” (Luo, The New Yorker). There are ten-year pauses between the two novels that Lee has put out so far during her career, and she has acknowledged that her “painful effort to listen for things that have timeless value” (Frock) has also affected her output. However, Lee maintains that the most important piece of writer’s advice she has received is to “choose the important over the urgent”, and “focus on the things that matter most to [her]” (Frock), which aligns with Thoreau’s philosophy of humankind not truly having “work…of any consequence” (1319) and that the things we should spend our precious little time on should be what matters most. For Lee, this seems to be communicating raw, honest human stories that are often overshadowed by history. She dedicates her present to picking apart the past, giving new light to things previously buried. The writing process technique I borrowed from Lee was one that she in turn borrowed from Willa Cather: “I will read let’s say—like, today was Psalm 113. So I’ll read the entire thing. And then I will read all of the commentaries twice, and then I’ll read it again. It’s really weird” (Luo). In dissecting and plucking from the Bible, Lee remains grounded in interacting with this immortal text, before adding its teachings to her own present.
Similarly, Kuang also treats writing as a method of processing, letting herself be influenced while immersing herself fully in the various genres she experiments with. As a longtime scholar of Chinese literature, Kuang roots her fiction in the “many story forms, myths, character types, anecdotes, and episodes in Chinese literature and wartime history that have not been repeated a thousand times in English yet…[presenting her] own variations on them…building on thousands of years of tradition” (“Distortions”). Kuang describes her writing as also a somewhat introspective, self-exploratory venture; “a natural way to process both personal trauma and family trauma, and a lot of stories that I’d been hearing from my grandparents about their experiences during WWII in China…that impulse to represent things through a distorted mirror” (Distortions). As such, the cores of her stories retain that spirit of pushing for discovery while playing within and without the boundaries of existing lore. Kuang herself reports, “I try really hard to be like a chameleon every time I fall in love with reading a new genre; I just try to become as like that genre as I can” (“EpicReads, Tiktok”).
Thoreau, in his own writing process, was notably more focused on a longer, continuous revision process over time instead; conversations with different aspects and ‘versions’ of himself, rather than with other writers; he was actively against keeping updated with the news in today’s obsessive style, but not necessarily fully opposed to referencing other writers. The Walden Woods Project characterizes Thoreau’s journals as “a more deliberate creation”, the seeds from which his finalized, immortal texts sprouted. From a journal entry to part of a lecture to an essay to a segment of a book, Thoreau held on to the part of himself in that moment, then reworked it; interacting with his past physically and intellectually. “With each new draft he cut and pasted sections from the previous one and added more writing” (“Thoreau’s Writing | The Walden Woods Project”). Thoreau interacted with the reality he knew to be true at that given moment; and then seeked to generate from these realities a collective truth. In a February 1859 entry in his journal, Thoreau writes, “The writer must to some extent inspire himself…only when many observations of different periods have been brought together…he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation…The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands” (“Thoreau - Ideas - On Writing”). We can conclude that Thoreau prefers to be mostly self-inspired, preferring to let his ideas circulate within the individual until they are fully formed, and allowed to be released into the wild.
All three writers, eventually, want to capture reality in their writing; they are all dedicated to and have a great respect for the craft, using their writing to communicate about the important things in life. However, Lee and Kuang’s methodologies, as opposed to Thoreau’s, push to capture reality through manifold lenses; these writers imbibe themselves deeply in research, in the genre, in order to learn what the world wants to speak to them, before reforming it into narratives that seek to uncover and spark incisive discussion. Thoreau, meanwhile, believes in writing that is far more self-involved and introspective, following suit with transcendentalists in looking inwards and turning within oneself to find out the truth, instead of looking and reaching outwards. All want to get to the truth; “...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world” (1317). Thoreau finds himself in the looking-glass of Walden Pond, reaching towards his reflection as an 18th-century Narcissus; Lee and Kuang both seek to find themselves mirrored in the dark pupils of others, of generations, pulling something out from their aching gazes that color the eventual word-portraits they form.
Everyone seeks only in the end to reach and convey their own truth, whatever it may be.
Between these unique approaches to writing and thinking, my MA 2 experiment in living deliberately has led me to discover that there can be a balance struck between both; frankly, that Lee and Kuang and Thoreau are not completely at odds; there is and can be an overlap in the Venn diagram connecting all three. There is value in self-consideration and looking inwards, as well as in seeking to understand the lives of others and discover the truth that they, too, may know. For who are we without the eyes who watch over us?
“Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (1322), Thoreau writes, and especially today, what with all the additional noise floating around us, I find that to be strikingly true. Through conducting this experiment, I discovered the sense of freedom and lightness that comes from allowing yourself to be influenced and inspired by other great minds of one’s choosing. I write for myself, certainly, and I write for those to whom I am indebted. I write for my family, my teachers, and for those who came before me; who did not have access to the same opportunities I am now so lucky to experience. Eventually, I hope to write for those who can find a voice in me; strangers whose faces I may not recognize but whose souls I may know, in innumerable and treasured shards.
Works Cited:
Frock, Elizabeth. ““Choose the Important over the Urgent,” and More Writing Advice from Min Jin Lee.” PBS News, 6 July 2018, www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/choose-the-important-over-the-urgent-and-more-writing-advice-from-min-jin-lee.
Luo, Michael. “What Min Jin Lee Wants Us to See.” The New Yorker, 17 Feb. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-min-jin-lee-wants-us-to-see.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Writing Short Stories.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose,
edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1957, p. 96.
Segal, Stephen H. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions.” Locus Online, 15 July 2019, locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions/.
Thoreau, Henry David. "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." Walden, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 8th ed., 2020, https://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/webpub/english/bedguide8e/Public%20Domain%20Readings/Thoreau%20Where%20I%20Lived%20and%20What%20I%20Lived%20For.pdf.
“Thoreau’s Writing | the Walden Woods Project.” The Walden Woods Project, 2024, www.walden.org/education/for-students/thoreaus-writing/.
“Thoreau - Ideas - on Writing.” Vcu.edu, 2024, archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/hdt-art.html.
Henry David Thoreau’s essay Where I Lived, and What I Lived For highly praises the importance of immediate observance and being attuned to the surroundings in the present moment in the pursuit of finding and representing the truth in life; “to say what that thing really is before a true gaze” (1321), rather than distracting ourselves with banal mundanities of life undeserving of our attention. I will bring these ideas in conversation with Lee’s and Kuang’s ideals about “[choosing] the important over the urgent” (Frock) and “[using] fiction to process things”; in delving into texts and remaining present in them, we can better focus on what is worth saying. All three authors take writing in stride as a means of self-discovery, though through separate roads; as Thoreau writes in one of his journals, “There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.” Thoreau’s primary philosophy on writing differs from Lee and Kuang’s central writing practices of letting oneself be influenced and absorbed by – while absorbing – other texts and other minds. Thoreau would ultimately disagree with this, preferring to look at and reach toward the self in his writing rather than directly toward others. However, all are still human, and share their pursuit, as do I, through everything that separates them otherwise, of the eventual and immutable truth in life.
Thoreau’s 1854 essay was inspired by his time living at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he focused on living a more ‘intentional’ life in seclusion by removing himself from the external distractions of the rapidly developing industrial world, spending his time thinking and existing in nature. Thoreau was a central figure of the transcendentalist philosophical movement that was a core aspect of the American Romantic period in the late 19th century. This movement focused on the individual gaining a higher sense of purpose and the meaning of life through distanced introspection away from the rush of everyday life, and reflecting on “the essential facts of life” (1317) and self-independence. Transcendentalists took progressive stands on issues such as women’s rights, abolition, reform, and education, arguing overall that humankind should look inward individually to come to the truth, away from the distraction that was centered in the rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. Thoreau wrote and published Walden, from which his essay is excerpted, in order to share with the public his time living at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, for a period of two years, two months, and two days. Thoreau condensed this into the space of a singular calendar year in his writing in order to better convey this to his audience of “fellow men”, who he wished to free from their prisons of ‘conventional thinking’ that supported the industrial grind; the same that reaches deep into the roots of modern life now.
Many of the themes Thoreau expressed speak to me still, despite almost two centuries separating us; especially relating to being grounded in the present moment. I tend to integrate scenes I see or experience in real life into my writing. Although I consider fiction to be my primary playground, the stories I write usually come from seeds of curious small things that unfurl into pieces stretching across the white expanses of several pages. The slope of someone’s back down the main street; rain dotting the window; the grey hairs on the inner parts of that man’s tragus; scat-spotted signs I pass when driving. There has to be some grounding for my writing in reality; in her essay Writing Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor writes, “Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real— whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy…we always begin with what is or what has an eminent possibility of truth about it” (96). For my project, my ‘present’ was the other texts I was absorbing as I wrote; when I wanted a break from my own prose, I looked to those of others, drawing inspiration and motivation for my own writing. In looking closer at these words and close reading, I learned to be more attuned to what was working in my writing and what wasn’t; how to, as Thoreau put it in his August 1851 journal entry, write something “kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting” (“Thoreau - Ideas - on Writing”). But I want to digest. Past holding the words in my mouth, I want to swallow, and let the meaning filter through gradually from what was only text before; let it seep into the bloodstream through the stomach lining; welcome the flow of the new, fueled by each heartbeat, and perhaps again downwards and up once more through the esophagus in a kind of reverse peristalsis, spilling a little into the voice-box; thus, in all this convolution, allow myself to speak, with all intention, to the audience I desire to reach.
Using a wider lens, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For is Thoreau’s appeal for all to slow down and take account of reality as it truly is, and not be superficial in our perception of what is before us, but really look and appreciate reality to its fullest. Thoreau writes, “I perceive that we…live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be” (1321). With “mean” signifying the paltry or lacking feeling that we may feel, during mid- or quarter-life crises or otherwise, Thoreau labels our propensity for distraction as the primary cause of our unhappiness. Thoreau further elaborates, “Look at the meetinghouse, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them…In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here” (1321). By listing all these features of the mundane, that most would take for granted, Thoreau condemns the limited attention span of his fellows, claiming that these physical structures of concreteness that line the consciousnesses of our everyday lives, which we live in, are beyond our reach of true comprehension, and it is embarrassing that we would not know how to capture their essences if we were asked. In the lines following, he characterizes the present as the only way we can experience eternity, not as the grandiose, abstract concept we might conceive it as. All “times and places and occasions” are so “true and sublime”; therefore, Thoreau implies that this is what we should truly be focusing our limited time on and properly living in.
Over the three days of my experiment at the head of November, I tried, with varying levels of success and productivity, to write, incorporating reading the work of others during my writing time. In summary; on the first day, I struggled to get started and spark momentum; the given treacherousness of sitting down at the desk in front of a keyboard. The first batch of word slush came out in the form of two hundred or so unsatisfactory words over a couple hours. It felt unfavorable, though it was progress, I later acknowledge, in unclogging the mental detritus of disuse. (Imagine the sound of a vacuum seal being broken, the garbage disposal used for the first time in a month.) The second day was my most productive, perhaps fueled by a revitalizing order of matcha bubble tea, as I read through a good section of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War while making notes on components of her writing that worked for her narrative and for me, while experimenting with my own prose. Finally, on the third day, I tried Lee’s method of longhand writing some excerpted segments from The Bible, a classic. The scribbling out of moments from Genesis helped me with some generative work and character building, as I considered more of the foundational themes that underscore so much of Western literature, and got to thinking about how my own work might fit into the canon itself.
The writers whose routines I tried out were Lee Min Jin and R.F. Kuang, both incredibly prolific contemporary Asian female writers who I see as academic and writerly role models. Lee, a Korean-American author and journalist based in Harlem, writes primarily about Korean diaspora; she is primarily known for her lauded work Pachinko (2017). Meanwhile, Rebecca F. Kuang (R.F. Kuang) is a Chinese-American born in Guangzhou, China, who has published five books already at the age of 28, her most notable works including Babel (2022) and Yellowface (2023).
Both Lee and Kuang are heavy believers in taking inspiration from other writers while working on drafts, reading other works before they start writing themselves. Neither of them has a very concrete work schedule time-wise; Lee says, “I write whenever I can” (Frock), which suits my schedule better as a college student with other commitments. Lee starts her writing practice with “reading a chapter of the Bible. After I read it and study the annotations, I jot down a verse or two I find interesting in a notebook. After this, I write” (Frock). Lee is Christian and grew up going to church, and is “deeply interested in God as the creator and God as an active force in the world, or inactive force” (Luo).
Meanwhile, Kuang’s “usual routine is to read a couple hundred pages in one session, and then jot down two or three things that work for me, or don’t, to see how I can make my writing emulate that…My one failsafe way to jumpstart the creative engine is to read 200 pages of really good writing. Then my brain starts thinking about how to imitate those sentence structures” (“Distortions”).
In her writing, Lee demonstrates the intensive, incredibly thorough research that goes into crafting each of her novels about the Korean diaspora, indicating how much attention she pays to the present that others have experienced and are still living the ramifications of in real time. “I read secondary material. I read academic material. I read scholarship. And then I also do numerous interviews of experts and the subjects…I have been interviewing undocumented Koreans” (Luo, The New Yorker). There are ten-year pauses between the two novels that Lee has put out so far during her career, and she has acknowledged that her “painful effort to listen for things that have timeless value” (Frock) has also affected her output. However, Lee maintains that the most important piece of writer’s advice she has received is to “choose the important over the urgent”, and “focus on the things that matter most to [her]” (Frock), which aligns with Thoreau’s philosophy of humankind not truly having “work…of any consequence” (1319) and that the things we should spend our precious little time on should be what matters most. For Lee, this seems to be communicating raw, honest human stories that are often overshadowed by history. She dedicates her present to picking apart the past, giving new light to things previously buried. The writing process technique I borrowed from Lee was one that she in turn borrowed from Willa Cather: “I will read let’s say—like, today was Psalm 113. So I’ll read the entire thing. And then I will read all of the commentaries twice, and then I’ll read it again. It’s really weird” (Luo). In dissecting and plucking from the Bible, Lee remains grounded in interacting with this immortal text, before adding its teachings to her own present.
Similarly, Kuang also treats writing as a method of processing, letting herself be influenced while immersing herself fully in the various genres she experiments with. As a longtime scholar of Chinese literature, Kuang roots her fiction in the “many story forms, myths, character types, anecdotes, and episodes in Chinese literature and wartime history that have not been repeated a thousand times in English yet…[presenting her] own variations on them…building on thousands of years of tradition” (“Distortions”). Kuang describes her writing as also a somewhat introspective, self-exploratory venture; “a natural way to process both personal trauma and family trauma, and a lot of stories that I’d been hearing from my grandparents about their experiences during WWII in China…that impulse to represent things through a distorted mirror” (Distortions). As such, the cores of her stories retain that spirit of pushing for discovery while playing within and without the boundaries of existing lore. Kuang herself reports, “I try really hard to be like a chameleon every time I fall in love with reading a new genre; I just try to become as like that genre as I can” (“EpicReads, Tiktok”).
Thoreau, in his own writing process, was notably more focused on a longer, continuous revision process over time instead; conversations with different aspects and ‘versions’ of himself, rather than with other writers; he was actively against keeping updated with the news in today’s obsessive style, but not necessarily fully opposed to referencing other writers. The Walden Woods Project characterizes Thoreau’s journals as “a more deliberate creation”, the seeds from which his finalized, immortal texts sprouted. From a journal entry to part of a lecture to an essay to a segment of a book, Thoreau held on to the part of himself in that moment, then reworked it; interacting with his past physically and intellectually. “With each new draft he cut and pasted sections from the previous one and added more writing” (“Thoreau’s Writing | The Walden Woods Project”). Thoreau interacted with the reality he knew to be true at that given moment; and then seeked to generate from these realities a collective truth. In a February 1859 entry in his journal, Thoreau writes, “The writer must to some extent inspire himself…only when many observations of different periods have been brought together…he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation…The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands” (“Thoreau - Ideas - On Writing”). We can conclude that Thoreau prefers to be mostly self-inspired, preferring to let his ideas circulate within the individual until they are fully formed, and allowed to be released into the wild.
All three writers, eventually, want to capture reality in their writing; they are all dedicated to and have a great respect for the craft, using their writing to communicate about the important things in life. However, Lee and Kuang’s methodologies, as opposed to Thoreau’s, push to capture reality through manifold lenses; these writers imbibe themselves deeply in research, in the genre, in order to learn what the world wants to speak to them, before reforming it into narratives that seek to uncover and spark incisive discussion. Thoreau, meanwhile, believes in writing that is far more self-involved and introspective, following suit with transcendentalists in looking inwards and turning within oneself to find out the truth, instead of looking and reaching outwards. All want to get to the truth; “...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world” (1317). Thoreau finds himself in the looking-glass of Walden Pond, reaching towards his reflection as an 18th-century Narcissus; Lee and Kuang both seek to find themselves mirrored in the dark pupils of others, of generations, pulling something out from their aching gazes that color the eventual word-portraits they form.
Everyone seeks only in the end to reach and convey their own truth, whatever it may be.
Between these unique approaches to writing and thinking, my MA 2 experiment in living deliberately has led me to discover that there can be a balance struck between both; frankly, that Lee and Kuang and Thoreau are not completely at odds; there is and can be an overlap in the Venn diagram connecting all three. There is value in self-consideration and looking inwards, as well as in seeking to understand the lives of others and discover the truth that they, too, may know. For who are we without the eyes who watch over us?
“Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (1322), Thoreau writes, and especially today, what with all the additional noise floating around us, I find that to be strikingly true. Through conducting this experiment, I discovered the sense of freedom and lightness that comes from allowing yourself to be influenced and inspired by other great minds of one’s choosing. I write for myself, certainly, and I write for those to whom I am indebted. I write for my family, my teachers, and for those who came before me; who did not have access to the same opportunities I am now so lucky to experience. Eventually, I hope to write for those who can find a voice in me; strangers whose faces I may not recognize but whose souls I may know, in innumerable and treasured shards.
Works Cited:
Frock, Elizabeth. ““Choose the Important over the Urgent,” and More Writing Advice from Min Jin Lee.” PBS News, 6 July 2018, www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/choose-the-important-over-the-urgent-and-more-writing-advice-from-min-jin-lee.
Luo, Michael. “What Min Jin Lee Wants Us to See.” The New Yorker, 17 Feb. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-min-jin-lee-wants-us-to-see.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Writing Short Stories.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose,
edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1957, p. 96.
Segal, Stephen H. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions.” Locus Online, 15 July 2019, locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions/.
Thoreau, Henry David. "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." Walden, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 8th ed., 2020, https://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/webpub/english/bedguide8e/Public%20Domain%20Readings/Thoreau%20Where%20I%20Lived%20and%20What%20I%20Lived%20For.pdf.
“Thoreau’s Writing | the Walden Woods Project.” The Walden Woods Project, 2024, www.walden.org/education/for-students/thoreaus-writing/.
“Thoreau - Ideas - on Writing.” Vcu.edu, 2024, archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/hdt-art.html.
project 06
This is where the project description goes. Give an overview or go in depth - what it's all about, what inspired you, how you created it, or anything else you'd like visitors to know. To add Project descriptions, go to Manage Projects.
bottom of page