Quick heads up about content: There is a brief mention of restrictive eating in the 2nd paragraph
One of the mandatory literary theory classes I took in grad school was appropriated (thankfully) by its professor Ben Doller as an exploration of everyday life. Instead of trudging through hundreds of pages of dense text each week, we read maybe dozens of pages and kept notebooks for daily writing, framing the everyday as worthy of theoretical consideration and observation. We also did research in the Archive for New Poetry, one of the coolest things about the UCSD campus. Housed inside the gleaming sci-fi tower of the Geisel library, the archive is treasure trove of papers once in the possession of writers like Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian. Their living bodies had touched the pages we’d turn with gloved hands and I think that was the point—to think about writing practices in the broader context of daily life, evidence of which is more readily found in a writer’s personal artifacts than their published books. At our first trip to the archive, Nina, its curator, pushed cart after cart of clean archival boxes (all a serious shade of light gray or maybe it was pea green) full of notebooks, letters, scraps of paper, manuscripts, and various creative flotsam. (In one famous writer’s papers, one of my classmates found a letter penned by one of our own professors a couple decades earlier, requesting a letter of rec for grad school.) There was a touch of high school about this, how we had to pick a writer from the list and do projects about them with another student, and also how nosy it was, fishing around in someone else’s stuff. I loved it.
The writer whose stuff I was academically snooping was Hannah Weiner, a poet who was an influential member of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement and an active participant of a New York City experimental art/poetry scene. My friend Adriana and I were research partners for this school project, and Weiner was a natural fit for us. We were both writing and thinking a lot about mental illness, including the fuzzy line that separate mysticism from psychosis. While Weiner did not identify as mentally ill, she heard voices and saw words, which she engaged with as mystical phenomena. Her composition notebooks in the archive (and a lot of her published work) explore or narrate Weiner’s experiences with them and the questions they provoke. One of the most striking things about those notebooks was that many of them had been filled in the course of a single day. In those records of a day’s inner life and quotidian activities, I was especially struck by an occasional tone of urgency and what felt to me (an interloper) like tense but mystically-inflected deliberation about what she should or shouldn’t do, like what food to eat (or not). On the first page of one notebook (#55 in the archive’s catalog), from November 25th of 1972, Weiner wrote, “NO THIS COFFEE / NO CORN MUFFIN.” This entry and ones like it reminded me of times when my own daily choices felt high-stakes and inflected with spiritual gravity. It was jarringly familiar to encounter that kind of deliberation expressed so frankly and in real time. The drama of this familiarity was heightened by the durational quality of its recording.
I don’t mean to frame Weiner’s notebooks as the ultimate reflection of her work or creative legacy (because they aren’t), but they still haunt me. I am troubled, inspired, and fascinated by their illustration of a possible relationship between writing and living through a day, where the two aspire to cohere. There’s a lot to say about the emotional or psychic states which might explain that merge—how writing can fulfill a need to externalize an otherwise unbearable inner experience, if not stemming from a commitment to fervently and studiously tend to the mundane details of life. And I’m also glossing over the nuances (and skipping the full scope) of Weiner’s work and its animating concerns. But I’ve been thinking about those notebooks again not because of what might drive or be expressed through this mode of daily writing, but because I’m lately drawn to the freeness of a literary form defined by a given length of time—writing through an hour or a day (or even through weeks or months) as a kind of narrative, or a procedure for creating one. I’m thinking about the quotidian excess that fill my days, about the casualness of that everyday abundance, and what it feels like to inhabit literary forms that roomy. I want to inhabit forms spacious enough for the excess, contradiction, and complexity of the experiences or ideas I’m writing about.
The formula for finding or creating this spaciousness feels mysterious: part craft and part magic, and surely part other things. When something feels impossible to hold/express in its excess and complexity, I tend to get sucked into an obsessive game of strategy, trying to engineer the “right” form. But that game can be devoid of the playfulness that it needs. Plus, hunting for the correct narrative structure feels besides the point when what I want is to reflect a mess or assemble a menagerie—something that isn’t singular in its aim. But it’s not just a matter of changing my attitude or dropping the game, because form does matter. I’m just realizing that a very smart, strategic form can also be obvious, imperfect, mundane, simple, or all of the above. It’s smart to embrace any form that allows me to express something I want to express (or explore something I need to explore).
I recently started working on an essay about, frankly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what. It has to do with fairy tales, herb school, adolescence, anarchists, family, despair, and the Mississippi River. I also want it to help set up the central questions of the book I’ve been working on. Mucking about in this excess, I could feel myself beginning to zig-zag between different schemes to tie these things together, without ever feeling like I’d really started actually writing. I do this a lot. After a while of this interminable “planning,” I wind up feeling utter doubt in my capacity as a writer, like I’m stuck in a maze of my own making. Relief usually arrives in the form of seemingly spontaneous clarity, waltzing in from somewhere beyond my stormy, pensive troubleshooting. Sometimes this clarity leads me to the next roadblock, and I do this dance again. I don’t think this pathway through a project is wrong. It’s hard to figure things out in the abstract, and any way I can get into actually writing is a win for me, even if that once-shiny scheme turns out to have been a bit of a mirage. But with this fairy tale/herb school/anarchists/river/etc essay, an elegant solution to my problem with form snapped into place this week, one that taught me something about spaciousness.
Essentially, this solution is just a theme: a loose category having to do with buildings/places. Working within this theme feels more horizontal than vertical—like the writing can spread out while I draft it without tumbling down under its own weight. Too easily, I wind up focusing on the relationships between the units I’m working with, like I have to figure out how they fit together in order to move forward. Tracing these rules of cause and effect, or the particular pathway of one idea to the next, probably works for some people as they draft—and it might have worked for me in the past—but I don’t seem to be that guy these days. It feels exhilarating to realize (or remember) I can generate form through a series of explorations that are loosely connected, following the pathway of whatever curiosity is active or what feels intuitive the moment I’m writing.
Operating within the “now” of my writing process may not always yield a fully-formed, final piece of writing, so one might look at this approach as a kind of super rough drafting, generating raw material to reconfigure in revision. For me, though, regardless of revision’s role in the process, there’s a fundamental shift in looking at form as something I inhabit rather than perfect. The fact that a simple structure affords spaciousness feels like the most obvious thing I’ve lately been overlooking. It gets me off the hook from engineering elaborate logical frameworks to square up many disparate things, a complex scheme requiring airtight junctures, and instead offers a simple container (a basic common denominator) in which they can all hang out together.
There’s also the element of constraint as it relates to my own daily life and the kinds of creative work I have the capacity to finish. I don’t have a kind of lifestyle right now that affords time and energy I need to engineer complicated narrative schemes. I write for short periods of time—a few minutes before work, during my lunch break, or for a rare window of energy after work. Because I am not working with a real deadline, it would be possible to slowly and endlessly pick at these essays in the name of squaring up all of their inconsistencies or jagged edges. But it feels freeing to instead allow myself to create the version of the essays and book I am capable of creating during this time of my life—to constrain the time I’ll spend on something as another element of its form: explore a certain theme or question for however many week or months I have available, and see what I can say during that time.
In addition to forcing my hand to actually finish something, this time-based constraint also feels like a boundaries thing. Learning how to operate within my capacity has been a years-long, ongoing affair. As much as I love throwing myself in creative projects, I have also depleted myself on behalf of a future creation and allowed them to sprawl into time and space I would otherwise use to take care of myself or connect with people. I think I will be a little bit obsessed with whatever creative thing I’m working on, but I really like the idea of more clearly defining the place it occupies in my day-to-day life and giving it an end-point. Part of why I haven’t planned trips or vacations for years is that I always want to earmark any available time for “my project,” which doesn’t feel like a very life-affirming or fulfilling stance!
Beyond finding open form for—and giving boundaries to—creative projects, respecting the everyday as a site of casual and worthwhile creative expression feels good in and of itself. I see that posture not only in Hannah Weiner’s notebooks, but her performances and events, in her open houses in NYC which turned home spaces into literary events. I’m also thinking about the voice memos I recently exchanged with my friend Klara (who also happened to be in that class!), describing the daily rituals and artifacts that are anchoring us, her in London and me in Shelton: walks, meditation, creative outlets we weave into our workdays, making food, flowers, dog time, bed time. Maybe it is curiosity about how other people live or structure their days, but hearing about the hyper-specificity of my friends’ daily lives is absorbing. I follow their minutiae like a plot-line.
There’s something here about immediacy—the immediate surface-level details of life--and the ways that writing engages with the unknown and unseen, with building something that I can’t see yet. There is strain and pleasure in that engagement, and I think there’s something to notions of endurance and faith when it feels like nothing is happening. But I also think there’s also something to letting the details and realities of immediate, everyday life bleed into creative work or process, where they can generate creative momentum, stoke curiosity, catalyze form, or even just kind of hang out in the mix of it all. It’s like turning the tables on a relationship to art which asks me set aside my daily needs and wants on behalf of it. Because this “now” really is the only place where I ever get to be, and I’d like to be awake for its vital excess, to tend to and articulate the everyday details that may not serve a narrative purpose but do mean something, if only just that I am here and life is happening.
Episode #2 of Experimental Practice is here!
I had the best time talking with Selah Saterstrom about literary form, divination, and cross-pollination of different parts of her self/practice for episode #2 of Experimental Practice. (And as a matter of fact, things I’ve learned from Selah over the past year through Four Queens events/offerings sparkle throughout this letter.) It’s a joy to share this conversation! You can find it on Spotify or Apple podcasts (etc), or listen online.
P.S.
Curious about Hannah Weiner?
Some of Hannah Weiner’s work can be accessed online through the UCSD Digital Collections
Even more can be found on her UPenn author profile
This short essay by Charles Bernstein honors Weiner’s work (and articulates those animating concerns I glossed over)
Patrick Durgin’s introduction to The Clairvoyant Journals offers a more extended exploration
Hannah Weiner’s Open House is a small anthology of her work (in print)
Now list
In honor of this letter, some everyday, “now” curiosities, experiences, and observations
Being a neighbor
Sheet mulching, herb spiral, and topsoil
Litany of random rusty trash unearthed in my backyard
Balance of spleen and liver, things I’ve learned from an acupuncturist and want to learn more about
The delightful honesty of anti-work aesthetics and positions (too often absent from lefty politics); I was reminded of it by watching Office Space at my therapist’s recommendation(!)
Job dissatisfaction
The weirdly collaborative between my creative process, things I write about, and therapy
A messy nest some birds are building above my kitchen window, and the straw dangling into its line of sight
Two identical pairs of expensive sweatpants purchased at a fancy yard sale, and feeling weird/excited about that cross-genre garment (and about being someone who seriously benefits from duplicates of the same pair of pants)
Fake frog voices
10 of Wands, The Magician, The Sun
Comfort with typos
For your consideration
My website — Learn more about my writing and opportunities to work with me.
Writing in Unknown Shapes — A course for ambitious writers working in ambiguous forms.
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice
Practice Space — Drop-in guided writing sessions — On hiatus while I sort out my health/energy, but I look forward to writing with you again soon!
Follow me on Instagram — I’m there sometimes!
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters