As I get further into writing and blogging as a regular commitment again, I’ve been finding more books that have been helping me return to the practice. In my last post I wrote about Written and The Now Habit, and this week I want to write about two more books that I’ve been dipping into. Plus, some thoughts about this blog at the end.
Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something. by Susan Griffin.
When I saw this book on the library shelf, I was attracted to it by the title alone. By coincidence, I had already started writing an essay exploring the idea of silence. Or perhaps it was no coincidence. Silence is the heart of music (I would argue), so it’s a subject that has always intrigued me. More than that, the idea of writing about silence has fascinated me for years. To write about silence is to engage with a complex paradox: not only are you trying to get to the heart of a topic by means of something rather opposed to it, that is, the noise of discursive thought, but in a further paradox, this internal noise is typically experienced in external silence.
Perhaps that gives you an idea what I’ve been writing in that essay. But as far as this new book goes, my initial hopes were not disappointed. In its earliest pages, Griffin makes a startling observation that is all the more startling for being so obvious that I’d never once stopped to think about it:
Consider this: at one time, all the stories we know so well, every line we may have memorized from a poem or a play, all the literature that has shaped our collective imagination, did not exist… Where today there is the sound of words, once there was silence.
That is the first in a series of about 100 short, unconnected meditations about writing and the creative process. Though I’m reading from the beginning, I’m simultaneously using the book in a more free and random way, dipping in and out and frequently re-reading passages that say something important to me. I’ll start a writing session but keep the book to one side, and when I need a little break I’ll open it up, read a while and reflect upon what I find there, and then carry on with my writing. Sometimes what I have read directly informs my work. Usually it does not. But it’s been consistently inspiring and helpful.
As an example, let me take the meditation titled “Wings”. Here Griffin summarizes and quotes from a scene in Zorba the Greek, which caught my attention because that was a novel that had a deep resonance for me in my late teens and early twenties. In this scene, Zorba finds a butterfly hatching from its cocoon, but he impatiently hastens the process along, and the butterfly dies in his hand as he watches in chagrin. Griffin uses this scene to make vivid a particular hard-to-learn lesson: allow things to take their time, or you risk destroying them.
This is a reminder I often need to hear, so I’ve read this page several times. And because of my existing relationship with the novel, this brief contact with the actual (translated) words of Nikos Kazantzakis always sends some part of me back to Santa Cruz in the late 1990s, listening to George Guidall’s amazing reading for Recorded Books, and being rather disappointed by the film. All this is pleasant for me, and it’s useful in its own way for a certain memoir project that I began and set aside several years ago, and have been thinking about returning to soon, an essay about a novel I was writing around that time.
Handling the Truth by Beth Kephart
Speaking of which. This second book is specifically about memoir writing, and I found it somewhat by chance on the same library trip. I had a quick glance, saw it might be worth some time, and checked it out to investigate at leisure. After a couple of days working with the pair, I purchased my own copies of each title.
This book has a similar form to the first one, but its short chapters are not quite so independent, and in this case it has seemed to make the most sense to work through them in the order given. It’s not a book of writing exercises, as such, but rather of passages that seem to invite and encourage a certain response with your own writing.
Take the chapter called “Great Expectations”. Here Kephart describes a fundamental exercise that she gives her students: In 750 words, respond to the questions “What do you expect of others as you read, and what do you expect of yourself as a writer?” What follows that is about 10 extracts from the responses of her students, all of which are thought-provoking and interesting. The book stops short of literally assigning the reader the same exercise, and I appreciate very much that the publisher allowed her to do that — allowed her to respect the reader’s intelligence, and let me draw the obvious conclusion that I might derive a benefit from working the same exercise myself. All of the chapters are like this, and so far the only outright “assignment” is a list of exemplary memoirs to read.
some plans for this blog
While I was still working on my first recent post I decided that I would try to make a blog post like this every other Friday. I have kept that plan to myself until now because I first wanted to see if this rhythm would work for me alongside my long-form writing and my many other activities. So far so good, so I’m going to try and maintain this schedule indefinitely.
I’ve also decided to try out publishing on Substack, after considering many alternatives. Therefore this is my first post on Substack, just to see how it goes. But for the time being, I will continue to post here on my website too, as a kind of semi-permanent archive.
As to the subjects I expect to cover, that’s still in flux, and I imagine it always will be. I’m deeply interested in music, art, technology and literature, and at all times I am creatively involved with all four. They usually mix in interesting ways. The cover art for this post is a drawing I made on my iPad while traveling in southern Oregon a couple weeks ago, during an hour when my wife was driving and we were listening to Bruce Springsteen read his memoir. That particular example hits all four areas.
The main reason I was in southern Oregon was so that I could attend this year’s conference of the Oregon Music Teacher’s Association. I’m a music teacher by profession and remain fully committed to that career, so it’s likely that thoughts about teaching and learning music will appear here at some point. And I’m also fluent enough in French to start saying as much in public, which in effect means I spend a significant portion of each day in that language, and will soon be telling you about that part of my life. I’m really looking forward to writing about William Réjault, who has become one of my favorite mild-mannered misfits, a man whose books have given me so much to contemplate and potentially write about, that you’ll be hearing about him soon.
Also: my wife and I are going to Paris in about a month, for our honeymoon! I promise you photos from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
To sum up, it seems most likely that I will write about whatever has my attention at the moment, and try to keep it interesting. A classic approach to blogging that suits me, and which I hope will wear well here.