Tag: creative process

Neuroindulgence

Suzanne Biro

Quick preview: this is a long post, steering (dragging?) you, dear reader, through personal memories and thoughts related to books I’ve read, coupled with an embarrassing but brief writing draft, followed by tottering, slipshod connections toward a conclusion I’ve reached before. I can’t promise return on investment. But there’s repeating reference to naked breasts. Female ones, even. So.  

Home now after two weeks away. One week in BC moving daughter number one from Victoria to Vancouver for a summer internship, followed by a week working in Toronto, staying with daughter number two. A delightful day in the middle where I hugged one daughter in the morning and the other in the evening. Trees fluffy with spring blossom. Out west, the sweet scent of budding Black Cottonwood mingled with brine. In Toronto, Eastern Red Buds branched hot pink; spent and ragged-edged magnolias flowered the sidewalks.  Despite the beauty, spending time with the girls, the relief it’s finally spring, travel disrupted my writing routine, making me edgy and irritable. This morning I’m up at 5, determined to recoup the energy and time necessary for the task[1].

And though I didn’t write while away, I read. I’m mid-way through deep reading an essay I’ve intended to analyse for years, The Fourth State of Matter by Jo Ann Beard. It’s one of several pieces of writing I pulled for the trip, selecting a diversity of works to understand their structural elements and track emotional movements therein[2]. I’m trying to slow my reading sufficiently to understand where and why and how my water works turn on, where sentences spark to fan the embers of my humour, igniting laughter[3]. I thought I’d start with pieces that elicited obvious emotional reaction for me when I first read them.  As always, I underestimated the time such close reading requires, hence my half-way point through the analysis of Beard’s essay. The folder of works I carried across the country and back remained unopened, mostly. And as always, I picked up books along the way…

An interesting observation: I had completely forgotten Beard’s essay is about a school shooting. Like, completely forgotten!!! Instead, the lingering images and feelings I retained from the essay were how the narrator loves and cares for her dying dog. I remembered she carries the aged collie up and down stairs and endlessly washes soiled blankets to place fresh, dried ones beneath the incontinent animal. It’s the love and devotion and grief and longing captured in those images that I remembered[4].

And that got me thinking about the selective and specific memories of book length works my brain holds onto. Is there a pattern to them? Are they all images?  Are they predominantly feelings? What makes them memorable for me?

This brief sample list is poor representation of my rapacious yet superficial reading habit; I read widely but not deeply[5]. I’m working to improve deeper reading. Now, I always read with a pencil in hand, underlining passages, scribbling notes in the margins, extracting sentences, passages, into various notebooks, feathering pages with coloured post-it flags.  And, if I’m honest, it’s only when I write through analysis, i.e., not think through it, that I really get a sense of the mechanics and the magic, hence the indulgent footnote #4 (it’s more for me than for you ha ha).  

This list is the “top of mind” list …I’ve limited myself here deliberately. See? this is me not going to my bookshelf to divine more of my memories conjured off their spines.  The clumsy imprecise rendering here is also deliberate…these are the fuzzy bits retained. Sometimes the only bits. Maybe this betrays a sieve-like brain …or worse, a brain-like sieve.  

  • Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel – scene at the dinner table where the protagonist, forbade by her mother to declare her love to a young man who we know loves her back but is betrothed to her eldest sister, cooks her unrequited passion into a spectacular dinner of dishes, including rose petals (!), the whole family share. But it’s the middle sister who “eats” the cooked in love, becoming so consumed with heat and lust and passion, she rushes from the dining room, somehow loses all her clothes in the process, runs across a field in the dark and her naked body, hair streaming wildly, is hoisted by welcoming arms onto a horse ridden by a passing _______ …can’t remember this detail …soldier? Bandit?  Some kind of handsome outlaw anyway. He happens to be riding by with his gang. This scene makes me feel…envy.
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – the protagonist (though, maybe this is a side character?) goes out of his way to eat asparagus every day so that he may smell its telltale odorous byproducts every time he pees. Oh, and a pet parrot that blurts out inappropriate phrases (swearing?) and lives half in and half outside the house[6].
  • The World According to Garp by John Irving – Garp frying onions, building the mirepoix, to make spaghetti sauce which attracts a woman neighbour to his door, inside his house and eventually into an extra-marital affair[7].  Sigh. It always starts with an onion.
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz – the mother’s sly smile, her wig askew after she fakes a fall and injury, a smile like a tiger’s smile (I likely have this detail wrong) after successfully tricking and luring her teen daughter back to her on a boardwalk in a very public place.
  • The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje – when the beautiful Sikh bomb diffuser shows the nurse a wall mural in an ancient church. Lots of candles[8].
  • All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – spectacular book! I loved it. But I mostly retain an image of seashells sparkling on the walls of a seashore cave that is fast filling with the tide? Good grief.  
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – Vasilly scything the wheat fields alongside the peasants. Amazed I remember the character’s name. I love this scene…the movement of all the people, men and women, working together as they harvest their way up the hill of wheat (or is it down?). Vasilly’s satisfaction with working his body this way. Seem to recall he’s depressed a lot, how his physical exertion is a balm.
  • For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway – a side character’s name, Pilar, and characters hiding out in arid, treeless, boulder strewn mountainside cliffs….waiting….waiting …waiting.
  • Industry of Souls by Martin Booth – this is my favourite novel…I’ve read it several times…I don’t know why it endures as a favourite…perhaps it’s the structure, a gentle moving back and forth in time as the protagonist, a man in his eighties, must decide whether to stay or leave Russia, whether to return to England. I love how the character moves around the small village he lives in, saying goodbye to all the friends he has made (for some reason, an image of golden light and lazy bees rises in my mind’s eye here). The visits tip the protagonist’s memories and readers follow his thoughts back in time to when he is a prisoner in the gulag, Siberian labour camps.  A few scenes stick out in memory: one where the male prisoners are found by female prisoners and they pair off in various semi-private mine shafts to make love; another when the prisoners dig a mammoth from the permafrost and eat it; and the most enduring clear image of a man who decides to take his own life by stripping down and sitting down in a snowbank to freeze to death (this happens at a train station).  
  • The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy – the scene where the mother character takes her children to a clothing store and they’re crammed in one of the back change room stalls where they overhear the storekeeper women making fun of the mother with nasty comments about the beautiful magnolia (?) flower she wears in her hair…it’s the bit where the mother’s face falls, she’s humiliated but endures this in silence…it’s an image, I feel, connecting to the fall from innocence…this scene always makes me cry.
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – travelling in cattle cars across great deserted and desert-like fields, tumble weed bumbling by yes, but the scene I remember is the one where the young woman (who lost a newborn?) unbuttons her blouse to breastfeed an old man who lays on a roadside, slowly dying[9].
  • The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck – the scene where the wife of the landowner/farmer pauses the hard work of crop raising to breastfeed between rows of plants, her milk gushing forth and spilling all over the soil …weirdly, this memory is retained because I felt the author had no clue about breastfeeding, describing the milk letdown as happening from one breast at a time.

Okay. I remember others but I’ll resist (more) self-indulgence and stop here.

Reviewing the list I didn’t really see a pattern, in any technical sense. Sure, could boil these down to “imagery” but they don’t quite slot into that category (asparagus pee?). But yesterday, thinking about Beard’s essay and the dog who can’t help but pee inside, I suddenly connected it to a short piece of writing I drafted earlier this week in response to a writing prompt. Perhaps reading Beard’s essay was a subconscious nudge to write this response, drafted during a12 minute timed write. I’ve transcribed it here, resisting the incredible urge to edit it. The writing prompt was, “write about shame”:

Probably most of us walk around with shame ballooning inside our bodies…a water balloon weighing us down, threatening to burst and make a horrible puddled mess, one shame bursting on the next. And I don’t want to talk about my big shames tonight so maybe a simple story about a little one. I used to wet the bed when I was little. But not so little this might be acceptable. I was well into my grade two year and still failing to rise from deep sleep to get to the toilet in time. The shame would wake me though, wet and warm, gathering at the back of my thighs and knees, pooling beneath my buttocks. My mother trained me not to wake her so I changed the sheets on my bed in the dark, remembering to layer a thick bath towel folded in case it might happen again.

I went to my first sleep over in grade two. It was spring because my friend and I were allowed to sleep in the camper pop up in her driveway. Of course my mother had phoned my friend’s mother before I arrived because I could read the curiosity and the pity on my friend’s face. I’d chosen to wear my favourite pajamas, Little Dollies I think they were called, a pair of short bloomer-like shorts with an A-line tank top, frilly bits round the hem. My mother had instructed me to wear a diaper. Cloth in those days. She’d pinned it to fit me before I’d left home then folded it in my bag till I’d need it at night time. At night time I changed in the bathroom, dragging the thick diaper cloth up the length of my legs to rest at the hips. The safety pins were capped in pink and they jutted visible beneath my pajama bottoms. When I met my friend in the hallway she looked me up and down. No words passed between us but it was pity I read, again, on her face. My shame coloured my cheeks red.

The next week, when we played barbies, she and her sister stole my red barbie boots, knowing I would never argue for my rights to them, the shame a lever they now knew how to pull.   

Soooo…reviewing my remembered novel scenes after connecting my writing response with scenes from Beard’s essay, closer scrutiny does reveal a pattern…but a pattern unique to me[10]. The scenes in the list evoke an emotion (or series of emotions in relation to one another) that ties in with my own emotional experiences …and they are less literal connection, more emotional resonance, pinging off in ways also unique to me.

The process of identifying the emotional resonance between these remembered scenes and my own experiences, is analogous to reading through my own draft writings to gather fragments where I detect emotional vibration/heat, and learning to thread them together, piecing them in a way that leads a reader through the repetitive rise and cascade of my personal emotional experience.  I have come to this conclusion before, but writing through these scene memories in this post, I’ve progressed a key learning: how and what a reader connects to and remembers is as unique as a fingerprint. Before now, I’ve understood this theoretically; now I understand it practically. My job, as a writer, then, is to infuse my writing with as much emotional authenticity as I can, knowing it will touch every reader differently and never knowing, or ever being able to truly predict or guide, how or why. This eases my anxiety about connection. Somewhat.

Thank you for reading.

[1] I’m trying to make peace with my energy levels declining with age …or is it that day job work siphons too much from me?  I don’t know.  I haven’t risen for 5 am writing practice for over a year, slipping my wake up to 6, then 6:30 am, believing I’ll get to what I need to in the quiet evenings. But I don’t. I’m knackered by then and/or I continue trying to fit it all in, experiences I mean, by attending webinars, learning a language, volunteering and meeting friends…all essential to living a good life, yes, but leaving too little room for creative work. So, 5 am wake up begins again. Creative work is priority.

[2] Writing I carried across Canada and back, in addition to Beard’s essay: Report from the Bahamas by June Jordan (have done a deep dive on this one in the past, warrants another); Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (I was delighted to discover his judicious-footnote-use – a compadre); The Race Goes to the Swiftest by Barry Lopez (in my packing haste I thought this was his essay about sexual abuse, but no, that essay is Sliver of Sky; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick; Two Hearts by Brian Doyle; Onion Heart by Rupert Dastur; Triangle by Larry Brown; A Story About The Body by Robert Hass; a Substack post, American Letters 5: Swim to Shore by Alexander Chee; pages 14-18 of Midnight’s Chicken by Ella Risbridger. Listing these here, I realise my idiocy, believing I might bend time to accommodate such deep study in only a week of vacation while moving Lillian between apartments, visiting my sister and her partner in Squamish, and my uncle in long term care, not to mention the time change and travel days. Still, carrying writing around…there’s a comfort in it, a sense of optimism, of potential, the eternal hope it will just absorb through my skin.

[3] I always return to Douglas Glover’s rubrics for structural analysis, as well as his emotion writing exercise. Really, DG’s words are never far from my mind.

[4] The essay is an exploration, and I would go so far as to say “an artifact”, of the experience and impact of trauma. An essay composed of fragments, culling moments from across a swath of time, laid out non-linearly with subtle-to-the-extreme time stamps—accomplished technically using brief switches in point of view and super brief tense changes. The use of mostly present tense despite different time points, creates the sense of disorientation and disconnection for the reader. The form mimics the experience of what it feels like when life as you know it is blown to pieces. Trauma is ever-present even when it happened long ago. It’s a stunning work of art.

I burst into tears with this scene: when the narrator, post-shooting event, directs a stranger to the classroom where the chalk writing of one of the dead remains on the chalkboard. The stranger loses her composure seeing the chalkboard, but that’s not where I cry…I cry reading the subsequent scene (accomplished simply with a new sentence) when the narrator returns to the empty classroom, “an hour later”, the stranger gone, and notices the smudge of palm prints on the chalkboard, “I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.”. Again, the form (this time the use of an image) delivers the meaningful impact: an image of loss …a body and soul once present has been erased…the image depicts the intimacy of the relationship the stranger shared with the person who wrote on the chalkboard before being killed, now reduced to a word, “ghostly” …there was connection through touch, through relationship, and the smudge is the image of the stranger’s hands attempting to re-touch, to re-connect with the body and the relationship now disappeared. Life, joy, love: fragile, vulnerable and ephemeral as a prof’s chalk writing. An image of deadline in its most literal sense.  Devastating. Also, spectacularly beautiful and precise. When I read writing like this, I suppress the wailing urge to toss the pages to the air, collapse in a foetal position and give up. But here I am, still writing.

[5] I ought confess that for the first year and a bit after leaving…a partner of 27 years, the home we built together, a garden I loved… I had trouble reading…concentrating, focusing, was very difficult…of course I read, but in snippets…and shorter works…it’s only in the last few months I’m regaining my reading stamina.     

[6] I also remember part of the first line of this book, a handy phrase to trot out when literary types play that game at dinner parties where they test whether you are sufficiently read if you dare to suggest you might also be a creative writer.  Bitter almonds seem to satisfy them. Oh, and unrequited love. A pervasive literary (and life) theme it seems. A secret password of sorts. That parrot technique is a great idea.

[7] I first read Garp as a teenager and this scene of him cooking spaghetti sauce—my absolute and enduring favorite food, despite all the wonderful things I’ve had the opportunity to taste—fixed a desire to love a man who would cook for me and love me back the same way (but without the affairs). I’m still hoping for such a man. Like Garp, he will also have to be a writer I think, as well as a spectacular lover. An aside: last week I pilfered my copy of The World According to Garp from Willa’s bookshelf and delighted reading a good chunk of it on the train home to Kingston.  And I hadn’t appreciated at all when I first read the book way back when, how much of it is about writing and becoming a writer. Reading it again is a delight. There’s a line comparing writing a novel to long distance running which particularly resonates (like Garp, I also ran cross country in high school; it’s endurance).

[8] I adore Ondaatje’s writing …but I admit, for this specific scene, I think the movie version scores higher for the romance factor.

[9] Remembering this scene, I wonder if it also imprinted on Irving’s mind, serving as the model of a similar, though far more sexualised scene, in The World According to Garp. I think so.

[10] Thank you, Captain Obvious (eye roll). My ex-husband always complained I was slow…perhaps this is what he meant.

Get’n Fun Back in Funktional

Suzanne Biro

Woman riding a Narwhal. She arrived in my mind seven years ago through the invitational creative exercise of active imagination1. Swimming and flipping and delighting in a dark indigo sea dotted with chunks of luminous ice, while the “I” of me observed, the narwhal appeared. In my dreamy inner-mind dialogue with the image, the narwhal chided me (yes, less criticism, it was delivered more softly, with humour) for how I’ve forgotten how to swim and encouraged me to explore the depths. Then, some truly frightening images floated from the ink-blue dark, half rotted faces of people I love and other shadows swirled, threatening to reveal themselves. I was instantly frightened. Then, up popped the narwhal, splashing through the shadows to explain I needn’t be afraid, the water will catch me, they (?) will not let me fall2. I started to cry. Not pretendingly. In reality. Tears rolled my cheeks but I remained suspended in active imagination so I asked, can I learn to swim again? The narwhal laughed, and said, of course! The water is in you always! The water is in you! Yes, the narwal was emphatic. How? How do I learn? The narwhal flipped and turned amidst the sea ice, one coordinated muscle arcing. It’s words echoed over and over as I surfaced from dream to consciousness: Let go! Let go! It’s fun to let go!

A few days later3, the narwhal appeared again and I asked the image why it had come. It answered: To navigate the depths, to help me go deeper. The narwhal dove fast then, it’s dapple grey skin deepening to a green glowy sheen. The image shifted to show a girl riding the narwhal, holding tight as it dragged her fast and swift beneath the surface. The narwhal’s horn pierced the depths effortlessly. What else do you have to tell me? The narwhal replied, It’s fun, it’s fun to pierce the depths, don’t be afraid! I wondered if I’d be able to breathe and the narwhal actually laughed, almost scoffed and, voice deadpan, Of course you’ll be able to breathe.

I wanted to capture the image, but I didn’t feel I’d be able to render it well enough drawing or painting. Instead, I opted to model it using beeswax, investing a tiny fortune in different colours4. And when the beeswax arrived, I stuck the little packets in a box with a bunch of other art supplies where they waited, patiently, for my creative hands. Turns out, the time for that was last month, seven years (!) after the narwhal and the rider arrived in my mind’s eye. In Jung’s approach, creating a tangible representation of image–out of the subconscious dream world and into this one–is an essential part of the process5. Reflecting on the little model I created, (a little more cartoony than I’d like, also, in the original image, the rider was a young girl in a red dress, in the hand modelling she became a woman nude), it kinda aligns with last month’s post about fishing the subconscious for emotion and feelings…I think, no, I feel (that’s better), I’m finally ready to explore those depths with the curiosity and joy and play required for the task6.

Another creative practice serendipity: a friend from bookclub asked me to guest instruct her grade twelve creative writing class. She explained they were covering a unit about creating characters. She warned they were a quiet and shy bunch, a cohort having suffered crucial social development years in pandemic isolation. My goal was to get the students reading their own writing aloud–even it it was just a favourite word–by the end of the class. And to have fun.

And it was fun! We co-created characters, listing various gestures and personality quirks, super powers and pet peeves, desires and obsessions as they were called out. We wrote the list on blank sheets of paper, passing the papers round the classroom after each prompt so that no character “belonged” to any one writer. Instead, iterative dimensions of character layered upon what had been written on each paper offered to hand. We shared some of the character creations aloud. Then, lists of descriptions completed, we crumpled the papers into balls and threw them round the room, followed by a mad dash to pick one up as “an assigned character” to write about. The final writing prompt was: what does this character’s best (or) worst day look like? (Or, if a writer felt inspired to write something else, that was encouraged too.) We wrote together for ten minutes while instrumental music played7. Afterwards, we went round the room and everyone shared their favourite line they wrote, then, several students volunteered to read their drafts entire. The pieces were lovely…full of energy and humour and sensory details. We laughed a lot.

Last month I wrote a poem about being a Canadian tourist in Mexico. I visited Mexico two years ago. That poem’s been cooking since then. I’ve tucked it aside for now, to let it breathe on its own for a bit before I go back and fiddle with it. I read it to a friend who said, Just. Don’t touch it!

Turning again towards long project writing I realized I’ve spent time practicing at the sentence level with shorter pieces … and I have no idea where to begin at the story level for a longer work. I was reminded of Nina Schuyler‘s descriptive analogy of writing process. How, at the sentence level, you’re working at ground level, but then you have to climb a mountain to get a better bird’s eye view of the paragraph level, then the chapter level, then the whole story level. And in writing any creative work, you run up and down that mountain, tweaking and refining over and over and over again, until there is a synergy of sounds and symbols and patterns energizing a wholistic work of art. I feel like I just laced up a stiff new pair of hiking boots on badly blistered heels in the base camp parking lot.

Last month I received three rejections from literary magazines. Two for a short creative nonfiction piece and one for the introductory chapter/essay to the long form project. I know I’m not supposed to say so–that it’s all a part of writing practice, that I “need a thicker shell”–but the rejection breaks my heart8.

When I’m sad I always turn to reading. Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others, as well as any essay written by Ursula K. Le Guin, always offer a grounding, resetting perspective about what really matters: love of creative work. The process. Running up and down the mountain. For fun. By way of Pat Schneider, I’m introduced to this wisdom, a consolation, about submitting creative writing for publication from Marge Piercy, “Never say ‘submit’! Say offer.” Yes, absolutely right. So, let’s end here with one of her poems:

For the young who want to

By Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

That line about a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting, makes me laugh. And though I agree with the final line, I feel you have to love the work AND you have to infuse the work with your love. This is the way love swims the Möbius loop to pierce the heart of a reader.

  1. I try to practice active imagination semi-regularly. Here’s a quick guide to explain the Jungian technique for fishing the subconscious. A few years ago, exercising my mind this way, I found it relatively easy to descend into a floaty state, meditating somewhere between dream and wakefulness. The images, most often animals (a bluebird, a spider, like Charlotte in E. B. White’s classic, a bee, a butterfly, a tortoise, the narwhal, etc.) surfaced and I was able to dialogue with them. It has been more challenging to succeed with the exercise lately (the last year or two?). Often I fall asleep. A sure sign rest is needed. More worrying is that I can’t get past the chatter brain of thoughts being expressed in words…I can’t seem to summon the images as easily. ↩︎
  2. I know it seems like I’ve rather lost my mind, conversing with the images therein…but, ha ha, isn’t that kind of the point? My own mind, carved and chiseled by culture, by categorization in language form, so easily manipulates, obfuscates …these exercises are meant to transcend those boundaries and restrictions as a gateway to creativity. Besides, it’s kinda fun. Except for the scary rotting face images…a risk I’m willing to take in the comfort of my home. ↩︎
  3. 10 days – I checked my dream/active imagination journal. The narwhal images appeared in June 2018. ↩︎
  4. Beeswax is really wonderful to work with on a small scale. The wax warms in your hand to become malleable and releases a honey scent with a hint of camphor. As the wax cools to room temperature, it hardens again. ↩︎
  5. And really, isn’t this what creative writing is too? ↩︎
  6. She wrote pleadingly. ↩︎
  7. The character I had was a horse thief able to communicate telepathically with horses, but alas, addicted to maple syrup and always had sticky hands. ↩︎
  8. This, on top of continuing violence and injustice and ecological destruction…and this f’ing winter that drags on ….and that living in the city I won’t hear the spring peepers calling from the flooded fields…threatens a dark funk I won’t be able to pull myself from…finding and sharing beauty and joy and love and a fantastic funk song and love of writing in community is the only antidote. ↩︎

Missing Your Missives

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I’m learning to work with my subconscious[1] for creative writing. My ability to do this…no, that’s not quite right, I mean my ability to control this—with attention and technique and love—is a recent accomplishment[2]. Gonna use this post to unpack and articulate my two-phase process (and celebrate my progress to a nascent phase two, because man oh man, it’s been a long time coming. Years!).

Phase One: Fish into the subconscious to dredge its messages to consciousness

The most interesting writing** I generate arises four ways. Sometimes these methods overlap with one another. Note a couple of these approaches apply some sort of restriction/constraint to the writing process[3]:

  1. Swiftly written stream of consciousness writing in response to a prompt (i.e., write to the line blah blah… or, write an answer to blah blah question…or, write the scene between character A and B when…). Swiftly written means timed (short, < 15 minutes, though I have stretched drafting to < 30 minutes)
  2. Using another piece of writing, a sentence’s or a poem’s, syntax or rhetorical device or structural form, as a template with which to slot in my own words, images and thoughts.
  3. A line or an image that floats to me when I’m relaxed and engaged in another task (e.g., walking (exercising in general actually), showering, washing dishes, staring out the window, lying in bed[4]).
  4. From dreams[5].

For me, applying a restriction when writing provokes my brain to think sideways. By this I mean punts me off my comfortable (well-trodden) neural pathways and avoid my default “thinking/meaning making” mode. The restriction stimulates “dreaming/imagining” mode (which is the natural state for #3 and #4 in the above list[6]).

**What do I mean by interesting writing? Here are some recent examples:

TypeGenerative methodExample pulled from breezy drafts written in the last month
Image< 12 minute response to a writing promptA woman dragging her carcass of a body on the back of a smile, marionette strings with which her dead weights were held up
ImageDreamA massive black bear sitting on a stony shore, calm grey lake water, catching shiny silver fish. Then it’s holding an infant, and I hear rather than watch the bear’s jaws crunch through the baby’s neck and my thought is, ‘Ah well, I guess that’s done.’
Thought or IdeaFloater while exercisingPeople often use water words and imagery when they talk about the subconscious (e.g., stream, flow, ocean of awareness, diving deeper, swimming below the surface)
Comparison< 15 minute response to a writing promptWe’re taught to read…26 letters in the English alphabet and the millions of words they generate…but we’re never taught to read each other …and though we’re never taught, we do read these betweens (facial expressions, gestures, vocal tone, etc.), read them better than words sometimes.
MetaphorUsing a sentence by Peter Orner as a templateWe started up, as you do lying to yourself: in the net of a valid excuse.[7]
Analogy (ish)Stream of consciousness journaling when too tired before bed (not in the list above, but also, kind of a restriction …or imposed handicap)I am a broken heart. It’s just sometimes I believe you can mend it. It’s the belief that destroys me.
Surprising wordUsing a sentence by Jonathon Keats as a templateTympanic   (I know! I swear this word dropped from the universe onto the page…I wasn’t even sure it was a real word. I looked it up later. It is.)

Now, ideally, I should be able to write this way for longer periods with practice and without the necessary restrictions to provoke the interesting writing. But the truth is, I’m really challenged with this. Many writers can access the subconscious more easily …it’s a state that seems more natural for them.

A thought: the challenge accessing the subconscious might be the reason many artists and writers use alcohol or drugs—the inhibition substances enable—to create art. Substances lower the socio-cultural pressure gates, sanctioning a more permeable membrane between consciousness and subconsciousness. It’s a delicate balance to manage and risk of addiction is…high (no pun intended), so not an ideal pathway.

Substance use also alleviates deep emotional pain, a pain all humans endure to some degree…I’ll come back to this shortly.

So, there’s phase one. And I can confidently claim creating writing drafts that surface magical subconscious gifts. What I’ve been stumped by, until recently, is how to work with the gifted images to integrate them into a completed piece (story or poem).

Here’s my default strategy in a nutshell. The other week I was walking with a writer friend, discussing writing. Not for the first time, she said, “I have to tell you, I noticed it in your writing way back then, and you continue to do it: you overthink your writing,” we were wading a substantial snowbank and it interrupted her train of thought, “You need to….”  here her voice trailed off to silence. Cliffhanger!!! Trying to keep my desperation in check, cough cough, swiping the snow from my legs, I asked, “More emotion? More feeling?”  Yes, she said.

Truth is, I was flummoxed. Wasn’t I doing this already? Actually, no.[8]

Now, I’ve read enough craft essays at this point to understand there’s a chasm wide difference between applying a technical move to integrate emotion and the sublime skill of layering emotion in a piece to create a work of art. This is the same difference I can taste in dishes and desserts that are technically proficient but nevertheless lack a quality I swear to gawd I can sense on my tongue: dishes cooked without love. What does this taste like? Flat.

Here are fragments I’ve cherry picked  and pasted together to serve my own understanding and purpose (is this allowed? probably not) from Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant essay, The Semiotics of Sex, from her collection, Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery:

“…it is worth remembering that the conventional mind is its own prison…Literature…packs in it supplies of energy and emotion that all of us need…Learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of body and mind…I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being…The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealized world. Art is the realisation of complex emotion.”  

I won’t go into it here, and I’m loathe to kind of even talk about it, but I must for the sake of Phase Two. Much of the work with my therapist involves me learning to feel emotion in my body. Those deep emotions mentioned earlier that many people resort to drugs or alcohol to suppress or annihilate? Turns out I use high level thinking and analysis as a (socially acceptable) way to bypass feeling anything too deeply. Joy is acceptable and, no doubt, I’m exuberant, especially after a martini. But pain?  Oh, I’ll cognitize the fuck out of it.  Once I understood this, I asked my therapist, failing to mute a whiney earnest wretchedness, am I disabled?

Here’s a drawing of my own creative writing issue process I figured out with my therapist[9]:

Phase Two: Switch from horizontal to vertical symbol translation and FEEL it goddamnit

This is less…concrete…than Phase One because I’m only just beginning to understand and practice writing this way. Here’s how I worked it out.

A few months ago, I posted a creative writing piece in progress, Measures, and used orange text inserts denoting my analysis and thinking about the images and surprising words that came through the breezy drafting bits (but, I note, not the ‘idea’ driven bits).

Originally, the piece was generated as a response to a writing prompt—but not timed—leaving me ample opportunity to twist a narrative around an idea. Which I did. That draft, despite the lack of constraints, held a few scarce subconscious breadcrumbs that I didn’t recognise at the time. I have many many drafts like this (soft whimper).

When I was preparing to read Measures at a public reading, I collaged the original draft together with other fragments of writing I’d done using constraints. I was rushing the edits (a self-imposed constraint). As I collaged, I could sense parts of the text vibrating some energy. I know, weird, but that’s the best way I can explain it.  Those vibrating bits, I recognise now, signal subconscious missives. Maybe other people feel this differently, perhaps it’s simply noticing or a feeling of curiosity. However they’re identified, they’re the bits I have to attend to with care and devotion…a kind of nurturing love.

Phase 2 A

So, what does this look like in practice? It’s leaning into the feelings and emotions arising from the vibrating images and surprising words or metaphors. Instead of staying with surface logic, descend into the body, slow down, notice, INVITE the complex emotions swimming around my insides[10]. Name them – here’s a handy emotion wheel as reference. Map them (i.e., in the body – gut? heart? lungs? heat? cold? tension?).  

For me this requires undisturbed focus best achieved comfortably propped up with pillows in bed. Because this is deeply discomforting work. Feeling sorrow, fear, shame, pain, anything deeply conflictual…it’s only with intentional effort that I sink into these feelings and pinpoint which ones adhere to the piece of creative writing I’m working with. The initial emotion identification process is much less writing and far more, well, active attention to feeling[11].  

Once complex emotions are recognised, named and mapped, the task becomes layering the cascade of emotion into the piece. Because it isn’t just one emotion, it’s the movement from one (or several) emotion to the next. Emotion doesn’t just arise out of nowhere, it’s a relational reaction; it’s the energy of the between (often between people, but can also be between perception, say, a scent, and memory, or between animals and humans, or between landscape and humans…the list goes on…the important bit is that the emotion arises out of relationship).  This is the experience, the relationship energy, I want my reader to feel. I’m creating an experience of complex emotion and I’m communicating, to borrow Winterson’s line, with text as I would another human being. It’s an intimacy.

Phase 2 B

How to do that? Here’s where it gets interesting. As a kid, I used to love those puzzles of what appeared to be hundreds of coloured dots on a page but when concentrated on a certain way and intentionally altering the angle of focus, the two-dimensional field of dots coalesced and popped what appeared as a three-dimensional image. Suddenly a 3D stag was running at me from the page[12]. The optical illusion puzzles are called  Autostereograms (yes, I had to look this up).

The 3D puzzle is analogous to the process I used to layer complex emotional change into my working draft. Here’s an attempt to clarify my process (I’m still working on this….in a few months I might completely change my thinking, but for now, this works):

  1. the effect of the movement of feelings in the piece is like seeing/feeling the 3D image
  2. the subconscious missives in the form of images, metaphors, surprising words etc. are the dots
  3. The intellectual meaning or the question the draft might be revolving around is like the 2D field of dots   
  4. the success of the story is proportional to the elegance with which a writer can layer all these aspects together, the coalescing of components – that movement from 2D to 3D….which, I suspect, is sensed and felt by the reader as opposed to through the mechanism of critical analysis.
  5. How is this done? By blending technical aspects (don’t let them take over!) with subconscious/dream aspects (the signposts of emotional energy)
  6. achieving the elegance of coalescing is the practice

So, this was how I approached the rewrite of Measures, a 905-word creative nonfiction piece. It’s my first intentional emotion blending attempt. When I was puzzling to layer the emotional movements in the piece, a specific line surfaced from the depths as I wrote and fiddled with the syntax (a subconscious gift!) and I burst into tears. A couple of friendly readers, though not all, experienced the same at the same paragraph in the piece. I’ve submitted the story to a few places for publication, waiting for submission windows to open at others…but really, reader reaction means, for me, the writing sings.

[1] I noticed I use the word subconscious as opposed to unconscious. I use subconscious to refer to information just below conscious awareness. But unconscious kind of means that too, though I think of unconscious information as deeper, more inaccessible. Like, my body doesn’t need to think about breathing or my heart beating to keep it upright (most of the time…falling in love or stubbing my bare toe on a concrete parking block changes all that, at least for a short moment). I admit, I took another deep dive into the differences and theories of mind conceptualizing unconscious and subconscious. Short synopsis: originally, the two words were used interchangeably as part of psychological theory. At some point, “unconscious” became synonymous with scientific rigour, while “subconscious” was significantly downgraded (ha ha, no pun intended) to parlance related to woo woo pseudoscientific pursuits, like, you know, tarot cards and ouija boards. So, there’s a classist-type interpretation of the two words. But, in other contexts, subconscious and unconscious refer to different levels of information below our conscious awareness, the former being slightly more accessible than the latter.   Accessibility is thought to be achieved through intentional reflection practices, talk therapies, etc.  [Here’s two whole paragraphs on this subject deleted. You’re welcome.]

[2] Okay, control is probably too strong a word here because the process of working this way, working with a subconscious (and yes, with the switch to using the indefinite article I’m proposing the subconscious is not mine alone, but rather a collective and fluid energy we all swim in…who’s woo woo now? ha ha ha) retains a high degree of mystery and hangs in dreamlike suspension (hang and suspension redundant? no, here dreamlike suspension is a thing, a state of being, maybe even a place).

[3] Though a word count cap is, technically, a restriction, I’ve found this insufficient for accessing the subconscious.  Fewer words in a piece forces grammatical and syntactical discipline. Also, an efficiency of imparting information. But I can still think my way to a finished piece without layering in emotional heat (this is explored in Phase Two). This might also be why fragments written in emails and texts can sometimes fish out unexpected images, words….certainly humour bits I wouldn’t have thought of intentionally except for the challenge to provide a witty reply.  

[4] Best, for me anyway, if not listening to a podcast or distracted by any visual media. Music seems to be okay, though floaty lines are heavily influenced by lyrics so this is a risk…it’s best if I’m not distracted at all. For the last year and a half or so, I’ve eschewed most media, including film, shows, news, in order to nurture and invite….access?…subconscious messaging.  Also, ‘cause I just need the quiet.

[5] I keep a dream journal. I have since 2018 and kicking myself for not starting earlier. BUT – this is hard for me…I rarely remember my dreams …must apply intentional effort to remember them. When I wake, they’re dissolving very very fast. And if I wake in the night, too often I think, oh, I’ll write that down in the morning. Of course, by then, it’s long gone. Despite the dream journal an arm’s length from my pillow, I fail to reach my hand out in the dark. I remember my dreams better when I’m on vacation (I take this to mean that it’s only when I’m relaxed and rested that I’m really able to dialogue with dreams…work-life is too energy taxing. It’s a frustration for sure).

[6] Dreaming may not be “a restriction” per se – but could argue “not being awake” is.

[7] I love this line – it’s got two people in it, a narrator who is lying to themselves and colluding with the reader on this (reader senses the inclusion and also wants to know why), plus the metaphor “net” surfaces connotations of “caught in a trap” of a valid excuse. The reader senses the push-me pull-you tension of an excuse that is likely not valid or at the very least is a trap….but see? Here I have veered off into super analytical mode, ultra meaning making….I run the risk of using my usual approach and creating a “thought up” story as opposed to a “dreamed up” one.  I feel the sentence would be a great first line of a story….ripe for using the timed write method to see what else will surface in a more dream-like way…get more text from the subconscious to the page before meddling with it.

[8] This blog is, I know, ultra thought concept driven. I don’t count the posts I write here as my “creative writing” work. Here, I’m exercising (exorcising?) my analytical tendencies …with the faint hope this will make space in my brain (and body) to allow the dreamwork to happen.

[9] Another friend, when I showed her this drawing explaining my thinking behind it, said, “wait, you drew a model of your analysis of your overthinking?” I erupted gales. A sense of humour is also an acceptable coping strategy for managing deep emotional pain. Subject for another post, this one is too long. Hopefully you’re still with me.

[10] You have no idea how difficult this is. I’m working on it.

[11] Am I also researching epigenetic biological embedding of experiences, relational neurobiology and the ontogenesis of shame, internalised oppression and morality? You betcha. [my gawd, she really is f-ing nutty nut bar]. Don’t worry, I do all of this half-assed.

[12] An AI generated overview of how to “see” the stag –  Parallel (or wall-eyed) method: Focus your eyes as if looking at a point behind the image, not directly at the image itself; Cross-eyed method: Try to cross your eyes slightly to focus on a point beyond the image. Not gonna touch the AI grenade here…except to opine that feelings and emotions are often beyond words and language (why we need dreams and art as translation mechanisms) and I don’t believe AI will learn to fish the subconscious the way humans can hone their ability to.

A Collaboration

Suzanne Biro

“I like the way we make our dreams happen.” Lori Richards

I’m delighting in the astonishing culmination of a collaborative art venture with my friend, artist, Lori Richards. Our creative works—Lori’s paintings  and my writing—are exhibiting together for a short time at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. She generously invited me to write prose poem (like) pieces towards her paintings and I leapt at the opportunity[1].

The vernissage (new word for me, it means a preview of an art exhibition) was last weekend but we dreamed the idea—a wish—to combine and show our art works many many years ago. The exhibit is called Seedbed.

Lori and I walk together almost every week.  As our feet pound the leaf and petalled paths, the sidewalks, the pavement or the snow, we recount, gesturing to the winds, drawing models in the air with our fingers, the celebrations, the frustrations, the lamentations and the longings of creative process. Despite working in different mediums, our practices are very much aligned. Lori is a professional artist. She has been, and continues to be, a steady champion of my creative writing as I squeeze it in as best I can round my day job[2].

Leaping is the right description for the approach I used for Seedbed. I’ve written ad nauseum (emphasis on nausea) about how crippled I am when it comes to pushing my creative writing out into the world (submitting for publication). I didn’t have this issue in the past…it developed over the last few years …I don’t really know what it’s about, but I feel like I’m about to break through my own barriers[3]. I think I’ve been saying that for a year or so. Sigh.

For this project, writing prose poem-ish pieces for each of Lori’s seventeen different paintings, I wanted to practice less preciousness with my writing. And I wanted to experience (force myself) to let go of them as is. I created a few rules for myself to keep the creativity light and fun:

  • Gaze at the painting, but only for a short time
  • Use stream of consciousness writing (I wrote freehand for most of these in my notebook, and the pieces, as they were being written, often included arrows and connecting lines)
  • Adhere to first instincts (as in, whatever words or images pop up, write them down and don’t tinker very much or at all)
  • As soon as a piece feels finished, send it to Lori as “done”

This phase of development and creation worked relatively well, though I was surprised by the writing emerging. The pieces are whimsical and, in several cases, nonsensical. But, adhering to my own rules, I let them be.

Do look at the paintings at the gallery website – my reproduction here fails (dreadfully) to capture the vibrancy of colours.

There was only one pairing of works where the process was reversed, where my writing inspired Lori’s painting. Interestingly, (or maybe the better word is fortuitously), this became the title pairing in the exhibition: Lori’s seedbed painting and a breathy paragraph of my own that floated to me the week I made the decision to leave my marriage. Though Lori thinks of the Seedbed series as beginning January 2024, I feel it began closer to the creation of that garden focused paragraph in the fall of 2023. It was then Lori created her first “bed painting” (several paintings in Seedbed include an image of a bed). This first painting felt (feels) emblematic for me, for what I was/am moving through. That painting now hangs in my bedroom.

It has been wonderful experiencing the generative iterations of the series since. There have been additional bed paintings created beyond the exhibition submissions…they continue.  I feel magically connected—in a way I can’t articulate—with each painting as they appear. The closest I can come to explaining my feelings is with the word blossoming.

And I wasn’t nervous in the days or hours leading up to the vernissage. The gallery’s curator displayed the works beautifully. She and the staff also produced a lovely brochure of a selection of paintings with their ekphrastic accompaniments. Both Lori and I were expected to speak briefly about our process and collaboration, and I planned to read two very short pieces[4]. But when I arrived at the gallery a cold panic sloshed in my stomach[5]. The gallery space filled quickly, bodies tumbling inside from the frozen February afternoon. I’m told there were 80 people but they all sort of blurred together blobbing round while I smiled and nodded and prayed the wine I was drinking would kick in. It didn’t.

When it was my turn to speak, I accepted the microphone with grace. I stumbled on the word ekphrastic (it is very hard to say)….garbled gravel in my mouth…my heart thrashed against my rib cage and leapt the base of my throat, but then, deep breath, pause. Reading my own words, my body calmed and settled from the very first sentence. My voice steadied and held. I’m told I was poised. I wish I could say I recovered soon after the short performance, but I felt rather sick with the adrenalin hangover for the remainder of the day and into the evening.

Still, it has been an accomplishment. And a progression. In the days since, I’ve felt delighted with the experience. And (perhaps?) even a little awe for the courage it took to leap.  

[1] Ekphrasis is a written description, real or imagined, of a work of art. Another dear friend, Barbara Ponomareff, who I met years ago when I offered to carpool us to a wonderful (and remote) writer’s retreat, has published several exquisite ekphrastic works in The Ekphrastic Review.

[2] I’m blessed with continuing encouragement from so many people; you know who you are, I sing your adorations for sticking around, thank you.

[3] Intend to write about “next level writing” in the March blog post, so, stay tuned. Also, I promise to curtail the whining and actually get some pieces submitted.

[4] Another dear friend, also a weekly creative-conversation-while-walking companion, Carolyn Smart, very kindly suggested which work to read. And I’m tickled to learn that painting, Pink Room with Moon, sold to another Canadian poet on the strength of an Instagram promotional post even before the show was launched. So many collaborators throughout the whole process… why do we ever believe we work in isolation?

[5] Threatened a colonic…wholly inelegant I know. Vomiting might have  been preferable. But the body chooses its own exit strategies. I managed to keep uh everything intact (emphasis on in).

Seedbed introduction (Lori in the background and Tiffany, gallery curator, to the let).
Seedbed reading
Pink Room with Moon reading

Loving Attention

Suzanne Biro
Pencil crayon, 6×8″

This fear of the blank page, this fear of not having the skill to translate one’s communications between inner world to outward presentation, this fear of lacking creative ability to express beauty, this fear, this paralyzing fear of inadequacy, does it ever go away?  

It doesn’t. At least for me.

I was going to erase that first sentence/paragraph…it wasn’t what I intended to write about today. The whining, it’s tiresome, no? But I would be leaving out one of the more difficult aspects of my writing practice if I did. And here, with these posts, I’ve promised authenticity.

So, my writing process becomes a matter of forcing myself through the exercises of creativity, forcing myself to the habit. The routine feels the same way one feels dressing for the gym: snapping spandex to the waist (a paradox of constriction and freedom of movement), flattening my breasts with a sports bar (not giving in to the inevitable rise of claustrophobia), rooting round for a sweat wicking tank (a clean one), short socks slipped over the toes, the heel, to hug the ankles, bending, crouching, gathering then looping the laces on my sneakers, and finally, the deep (resigned) inhale, then exhale, stepping onto the gym’s rubberized floor, heading toward the weights beneath the coach’s patient gaze. And after the workout? Euphoria.

All that to say, it takes a lot of energy (and time fiddling round “getting dressed”) to do creative work. I think this is why I dance round so many different creative projects…to keep my head in the creative game. When one project seems insurmountable, another can feel feasible. The dangling addiction to euphoria (in writing, it’s when things—words, metaphors, ideas, images, sounds, etc.—come together, surprise me; in drawing or painting or sculpting, it’s when forms, colours, lights, shadows, etc., come together, create something beautiful)[1].

But there’s also an issue of commitment…it seems I have one[2]. Fear of inadequacy is one thing; fear of sharing my creative work with the wider world is something different. (Though, I suspect, related.) I know I’m resisting. I know I’m avoiding. I haven’t been sending my work out for publication[3]. What I don’t understand (yet) is why[4].

So, I’m studying my fear. Not just to understand its origins but to understand how the development of belief systems shade behaviours to come[5]. I suppose we could call belief systems the stories we tell ourselves. I’m studying how those belief systems move, crossing space and time, forming our lives.

I know it’s my own thinking holding me back. Knowing the issue doesn’t solve the issue. I’m working on it. Working through it is going to take more than spandex. Love helps. Love, really, is the answer to all of it. Loving attention and a devotion to loving attention. Love bends belief systems to become better, beautiful. I’m not being trite here…love is what shapes…art, yes, but also, us. Love shapes humans. And, I imagine, the more than human world too[6]. The betweenness, the relationality, the reciprocity, is important.  

                  And this put to mind a thought I had recently, a floaty thought, connecting the actions of drawing/colouring with recent paragraph development work with Nina Schuyler.  One of the things (of many) that I love about Nina’s breakdown and discussion of sentences is her systematic illumination of how the techniques achieve emotional impact for the reader. I realized the layering approach of sentence structures, both within a sentence, and sentences in relation to one another in a paragraph, is akin to the layering of colours, light and shade, when painting or drawing. The idea brought home for me how a paragraph creates an emotional resonance …a translation of complex emotion(s) layered and transferred to the page. Words, as symbols, representations of “things”, are inadequate in and of themselves to render the emotion… “joy” for example, is too abstract, too far removed from the body-mind sensations and experiences, disconnected from the cascade of memories, desires, wishes, instincts associated with the word, but the sentences and the paragraphs build in tandem to create that wonderful harmonious effect and impact with text.

This is the same way a song is layered with longing or love and attained through tempo, melody, harmony, lyrics, tone, volume, instrument variety etc. Art, including literary art with its intentional, architecturally constructed intercourse, I’m only now appreciating, enables exploration and expression of interiority and exteriority when language might so easily lead us astray.  The foundation of such architecture is loving attention to the heart’s desires, the heart’s revelations…whether that be focusing the beauty of a pomegranate or a pear, or a surprising word, metaphor, or image generated using stream of consciousness writing. Some thoughts anyway…

[1] Cooking, while also creative, follows a shorter, more predictably satisfying arc. At least I get to savour the efforts. Also, sharing them with others remains, despite years of practice and repetition, a magical joy.

[2] A little about me [and married]; I will never allow myself to be owned again.

[3] I have one piece, the introduction section of my longer project, submitted at one literary magazine…I am working to WILL an acceptance there.

[4] I read today, an inspirational maxim (normally I’d eschew), attributed to William Ward (though, chasing these quotes from social media proves an erratic, enigmatic, time swallowing quest), “To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss” …is this what I’m afraid of, losing my dream?  No longer having a dream? An interesting thought…

[5] This study, which, thankfully, dovetails day job research, integrates stunning intersections across disciplines: epigenetics, early childhood development, neurochemistry, physics, philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, biology, sociology…

[6] This time last year I read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. It had been part of my sister’s Indigenous Studies curriculum, and I stumbled across it while packing up my own books preparing to move. An interesting read as a window into the sociocultural attitudes re: women and First Nations peoples in the 1980s, an aspect which, unfortunately, may prevent a contemporary reader diving in…I think, all the more reason to read it, but that’s not what I want to highlight.  What sticks with me is the belief system described in the book, how Aboriginal Australians maintain songlines, pathways of knowledge crisscrossing Australia, the sky and the water, also called dreaming tracks, that link stories with features in the environment, by continuing to sing the world into existence through loving attention. (I am paraphrasing a super complex and fascinating world view.)  Here’s a short video describing songlines and the links on the subject beneath the video are excellent.

Pencil crayon, 9×12″

Mapping the Missing (Or, Italy: Reflections on Beauty, Part 2)

Suzanne Biro2 Comments

I didn’t quite get this post to come together the way I thought it might. I’m interested how my subconscious thoughts—thoughts that take my conscious mind so long to catch on, catch up—drive my writing[1] ….I’m learning to relax enough to draw it out, I’m learning to “see” it, and somehow, in my mind, this process puzzles together with world views…

When I visited Venice last month, top of my list was to stand in front of the Fra Mauro version of the Mappa Mundi at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. This world map, completed in 1460, created using a southern orientation requiring me to flip and stretch my own perceptions of the world, is considered one of the most visionary cosmographical works of all time. I love that word, cosmographical…like, drawings guided by the stars. It’s a large hand-drawn map, almost 2 meters in diameter, of what was believed the world looked like in 1460. Belief is what I’m interested in…how it changes and shapes our thinking. What fascinates me about the Mappa Mundi, in addition to its gorgeously detailed hand-drawn beauty[2], is that Fra Mauro created his world view without ever moving beyond the shores of his Venetian island[3]. There’s heaps of fantastic information about the Mappa Mundi I won’t synthesize here, but well worth checking out; the AI project associated with the map is, in a word, dazzling[4].  

A recent Saturday I woke, galvanized myself, and emailed a friend[5] in the writing community to request one of the two open mic spots at a public reading at the library in Picton. I left volunteering almost to the last minute to decide, yes, today (today!), I have the courage to read one of my creative works. 

Then, I spent a quick hour editing the piece, changing the title and furnishing it with a deeper history. I ran out of time (is it ridiculous to think I would have that time?) and I knew the piece wasn’t “finished”. But I’m discovering no creative conversation seems to end…the writing continues to communicate beyond whenever I assume “I’m done”.

In my mind, I imagined the public library reading might attract 8 to 10 people. In my mind, they’d be milling about the stacks listening half-heartedly to the readings while they pulled random books from the shelves, splitting them open by their spines. So, imagine my surprise when I showed up, just as the event began, and discovered a far more formal arrangement: perhaps fifty people seated in rows and rows of chairs (none empty…when my daughter, Willa, and her partner, Nadine, arrived slightly after me, having parked the car, they sat on the floor against the wall), a podium, a mic, speakers and a video set up, aimed and recording.  

I have not read my work publicly in many years[6]. Certainly, it was pre-pandemic. When I moved to the podium, the adrenalin kicked up from my stomach and pummelled my heart.  The first paragraph was breathy. I lacked air to project my words. So thankful for the mic.  In my mind, I kept repeating just read what’s in front of you Suzanne, it’s right there.  Take a breath at the next period, you have time. Good. Next period, take a breath, take a deeper breath. By the time I reached the second paragraph, my breathing evened, and I managed to settle into the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling with the sentences.

And I edited on the go. I decided to drop a whole paragraph, suddenly seeing there was no need for it. I started to look up at the audience, interpreting their expressions (in my mind, this seemed like…confusion?). Three quarters of the way through, I realised I was enjoying myself, sharing my work aloud. The piece is dark, I know, but it turns toward the light by the end. But I felt when I’d finished, the audience hadn’t followed me through the turn. Ah well.

In the spirit of blind map making a la Fra Mauro style…I’m tracing the contours of subconscious thought, surfacing new meaning from those watery shorelines…this seems a translation made possible only by passing words through the chambers of the heart as opposed to catching in the net of the mind.

Here is the recording of the event. My reading begins at the 54-minute mark. Following the video, I’ve pasted the work in progress with some of my thoughts, marked using orange coloured text, that have arisen since (also during ha ha) the reading.

Measures (the original title of the piece was Just Math and the original draft focused on the mathematical aspects or logic that we [mis]apply to situations that are …less mechanical, more human…’Measures’ as a title got slapped on the piece the morning of the reading …I was thinking it might be a riff on the math aspects, but didn’t think too deeply…but now I’m discovering subconscious intentions, what this piece might be trying to communicate, exploring the choice to end one’s life, perhaps the most weighty decision one might make …so will likely keep this title)

I visit my father in hospital every Saturday. It’s not a real hospital, it’s a step-down unit, a retirement home repurposed to ease the burden of bodies (during the reading – why not before? I don’t know – I noticed how frequently the reference to “bodies” comes up in this piece…6 times…considering this because it signals some sort of corporeal versus what? spiritual? maybe…there’s a nod to religion in the piece…but no, it’s my subconscious circling the deeper meaning I am only seeing now: when is it time to depart a body, a body at odds with an ability to negotiate this world?) competing for limited hospital bed space. The patients here patiently await death. Or they wait to pass a test called Activities of Daily Living so they might score a return to former lives. It’s all about patient to nurse ratios and patient proximity to death.  Just math. 

In the lobby, plastic plants droop. A young woman sits behind a reception desk, her face blue with the glow of the computer screen. She says hello, but only when I say hello first. (during the reading, I dropped this paragraph thinking it didn’t add anything to the piece….now I’m wondering about the reference to blue here (the word shimmers for me), its multi-dimensional reference to depression…hopelessness…but also its vastness, its possibilities (open sky, open water, universe etc.).

The room my father is in, 316, is a small, one bedroom apartment designed to shelter a couple who really get along, or a solo senior citizen. Now it holds three aged men in three hospital beds and no chairs to sit on when visiting. 

A man named Victor has the bedroom. He is tiny and more and more yellow each time I visit. He is skeletal, though his stomach balloons from his body. His belly button is definitely an outie.  It probably wasn’t always.

My father smiles, caged in his hospital bed. A welcome. (when I wrote this, I intended to describe my father’s smile as a welcome one…except that word “caged” practically leaps from the sentence and grabs my throat so I notice there’s more going on ….the syntax here, laid down completely unintentionally, even an error if I compare it to what I had actually thought I had written, introduces sly ambiguity attached to the word “welcome” – do I mean his smile is welcome, or that he is [safely] caged (connotations of threat)? And the ambiguity provides a subtle warning for readers (and me ha ha) that there’s something not quite right between the narrator and the father…and shunts the transition from this paragraph to the next, where, their relationship, as well as the deeper history that shapes their relationship, is revealed.)

As a kid, his smile was a peculiar twisting of his lips, holding, like a cup, cruelty and condescension about to spill forth. We distanced ourselves from the inevitable poison, his words arrowing the air to the gut. We learned to excuse his smile. He, a refugee after all. A Canadian through revolution. His 13-year-old body a witness to other bodies strung up along the boulevards of the old city. Tanks rolling in. Molotov cocktails and body parts made kites. (‘kites’ in this sentence shimmers for me….it is only now that I am seeing any link between this word and perhaps the deeper exploration of this piece….is my brain getting too involved in meaning making here? Maybe. I wonder about the associated movement in relation to the violence depicted here, an upward flying movement….could it be departure of the spirit once a life is gone?) His smile, back then, did not seem a part of him, as it does now.  Still, conversation’s an effort raised beneath such rain, beneath an umbrella of pain.  (readers of earlier drafts of this piece were confused by the relationship between the narrator and the father: why is the narrator so interested in the Vic character, why are the narrator and the father not talking to each other? So I added this in…this paragraph was originally drafted as a breezy response to a writing prompt about remembering a smile.)

In room 316 of this not hospital, a glass door opens to a fake balcony. From there, looking down on the statue of Jesus I feel benevolence drain. I can only look out the window if the man my father calls “Lump of Lard” isn’t in the hospital bed beside it. A prosthetic leg furnishes the corner beneath a TV screen angled from the wall. 

My father’s railed bed is in the kitchenette. (this was interesting, editing that morning, I did catch that several of my tweaks included variations on the word “railed”, a strange, if apt, description here…looking it up now, I discover its multiple meanings. In addition to “enclosure”, it also means “protest strongly”, “blame in violent language”, “object about something”…is this my subconscious wrestling with the idea of taking one’s life? I don’t know. Maybe.) If he wants a glass of water, he rolls to his right. Blue fabric curtains suspend from railings mounted to the ceiling. The fabric separates everything: Lump of Lard from my father’s radio tuned too loudly to the opera station, the angles of sunlight from reaching my father’s bed, the sorrows and longings of three different men.

Every week I visit there is less and less of Victor.  His yellow skin droops from the sticks of his bones. His brown pupils bulge from sunken sockets shadowing his forehead. He often cries out in pain. “I know Vic!  We’re here. We hear you!” my dad says, explaining it’s important to cheer him on. Vic is proud. He was given 4 months to live and that was 7 months ago. In my mind I wrestle with Victor’s decision to forego MAID, medical assistance in dying. His yellow death is inevitable; why wait? (this is the heart of the question this piece is exploring….I even phrased it in the form of a question…but it is only now, after the reading, that I start to piece this together...and realise the contours of this exploration need to be mapped into the piece to better guide the reader (including me!) through this question.)

Today, when I exit the stair well and enter the third floor, Vic sits in a wheelchair in the centre of the hallway. There is so little of his body. He seems only a distended stomach with a yellow head thrown back and a mouth agape at the ceiling. I’m frightened he’s dead. Closer inspection reveals his yolk-coloured bird cage chest expands and contracts round a fluttering heart.

Today, my father’s welcome smile from behind the rails. Today the opera is La Traviata conducted by Toscanini. An orderly wheels Vic past into the bedroom.  Eventually, Vic shuffles by me to the microwave. “Is that your sister’s soup?” my father asks him. It is. While it heats, my father and Vic argue over the green leaves in the soup. Vic calls it by its Portuguese name; my father insists it’s kale. Toscanini chimes in. I imagine the Maple keys on the trees outside shiver-whisper and lean against a kitchen cabinet not interjecting. I understand—now–it’s joy arguing a position.

Vic lifts the bowl of soup from the microwave then raises it to his face, closes his eyes to concentrate inhaling the steam, the spice swirls of Portuguese sausage. I hear his eyelids when they snap open. A light dances in his eyes. He raises the bowl, wafts the steam towards my face. Its gloriousness travels from the tips of his yellow fingers to grace my nostrils. I smell chicken stock and chilies, the green of leaves, the orange of coriander seeds. (here, I think, a missed opportunity, but must be executed (oohhh bad word choice in this context, ha ha), delicately – the food description here with colours, orange, green, needs to be enhanced better, after all, it is this pleasure that is highlighted here, a pleasure that keeps one tethered to a life in this world, even when the body disintegrates…so it deserves special attention, this sentence….but not go over the top. I have a habit of going over the top…so, Suzanne, don’t rush this). I think anyone would give a life to taste such cooked-in love. (a strange sentence…and only now I’m seeing it differently, changing my view of meaning …it’s a reference to the relationship between the narrator and the father ….how “cooked in love” contains multiplicities, and how sometimes, it takes one’s lifetime to learn compassion and forgive. Or maybe I have now gone far too meta here…does it matter? No. But I find this analysis fun, so continue.) Suddenly, I understand not only the pleasure of choice, but how infinity might be measured.   I pull the blue curtain (note repetition of blue curtain, not sure what it means, if anything) to the wall. Sun splashes in. My father is up and walking with the aid of a walker. His test score improves.  I reconsider MAID, its balance. I instruct my father to stand by the window. (these two sentences, “reconsidering MAID” and “instruct my father to stand by the window” come too close in proximity so their meanings get hooked together when they shouldn’t be. As they are placed now, it leads a reader to think that maybe the narrator is going to push the father out the window, save his decision to take his own life and do the deed quick….so, this needs fixing). The fake balcony door opens easily. Sunlit wind rushes in. Below, seed keys on a Maple tree twirl the grey twiggy ends of all its branches. It sparkles. It winks. Alive. So beautiful it can only be a miracle. Sweet air of outside too. Toscanini’s violins.

So, the trick to writing that connects—offering one’s hand in the dark—is to catch oneself in the act of sharing an open heart …the subconscious is not so shy of dialogue there …surprising  words (or vibrating ones…a shimmering…this is often how I experience it) or phrases, or images, offer clues of deeper emotion, deeper intelligences of the body, an energy moving through. Somehow, authenticity must be rendered on the page without a cage of words but through a window of words instead. The techniques of syntax and rhetoric …they are ways to lead a reader through a writer’s thoughts so they follow the pathway the writer has mapped to communicate…they are clever ways to amplify meaning and entertain. But, fundamentally, a writer must be authentic to themselves and express that authenticity through love, gifting one’s deepest self to the world. So, I continue this eternal pursuit for the song of myself, to quote Whitman, and share a voice that sings.

This peace making with my slow subconscious writing process, waves away all my jagged edges, the way the sea softens stone shores, crest after crest after crushing crest, until I rise, battered, sopping wet, but smiling.

[1] Subconscious thought…unquestionably the most essential tool in my own writer’s toolbox …but I wield it with juvenile dexterity, a lazy magician with performance anxiety.

[2] The ocean, lake and river waves are drawn using ultramarine ink created from crushed lapis lazuli, one of the most expensive semi-precious stones before a synthetic version was invented. Because of its value, the pigment was often reserved for painting the Virgin Mary’s robes….I love this kind of information. Colour, by Victoria Finlay, provides a comprehensive overview of pigments…it’s a dense read, but fascinating. On the Mappa Mundi, there are little drawings of fish and sea monsters and castles and dome topped turrets. The calligraphy is neat and tight. There are drawings of the heavens and the garden of Eden.

[3] He consulted ancient and contemporary sources and triangulated the information to create his own…but it still fascinates me how he mastered translating three dimensional navigational and topographical  information into a two dimensional work of art from behind a desk.

[4] This AI project mirrors the methods originally used to create the map in that it collates historical and contemporary interpretations of information to write new ones…it’s also worrying, the ease and speed new stories, gathered by machines, supplant old ones (the website name is ‘engineering historical memory’).  But then I think, isn’t this what we all do? Even the act of remembering shifts and changes an event; the actual experience is never fully recovered…I guess we try to repeat and create experiences of beauty and love and eschew painful ones…and those interpretations shape the contours of our choices…and ultimately, our own story.    

[5] Thank you, Nora-Lynn, your smile provided warmth and encouragement when most needed. I also appreciate you put my name to the task that day, thank you to both you and Jane for hosting a lovely event.

[6] I have read in virtual settings, always with smaller groups. Currently facilitating virtual writing sessions with the Writer’s Collective of Canada and we share our reading as part of each session. It has been wonderfully inspiring to listen to others’ voices. It’s also good practice for speaking my own.

Sidelines

Suzanne Biro

For a few years, I wrote food columns for community newspapers. Pique Newsmagazine, when we lived in Whistler; the Napanee Guide and Kingston This Week when we moved back to Ontario.  A handful of one-off Canadian publications. Never for the money[i]. Food writing was a lifeline tethering me to taste and flavour and scent and colour and texture, life’s glorious pleasures, at a time when I struggled so deeply with postpartum …was it depression? Certainly severe sleep deprivation, but also the punishing suddenness and baffling inflexibility of a body assuming the mechanistic form of lactation on demand[ii].

In Whistler, Food Columnist came with some perks. A paid pass into restaurants I would never have been able to afford, then, or now. A few foodie special events. And because the food column was really just filler between real estate ads, the editor gave me carte blanche on content and word count[iii].

Once, I got a call on a drizzly weekday afternoon to cover a foie gras tasting. When I arrived, I was stunned to discover the corner of the elegant French-styled dining room was transformed into a buffet (a buffet!!!) of foie gras prepared every way imaginable (pate, parfait, terrine, torchon, melted into risotto, layered atop quince cheese, whipped into mousse and even frozen into ice cream).

At that time, a pound (think the size of a pound—four sticks—of butter) of such richly diseased (forced large) Moulard[iv] duck liver cost a hundred dollars. The table, accented with crystal glasses of honey-coloured Sauternes and goblets of amber Armagnac, groaned beneath the weight of thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of duck liver. When I think of the word obscene, this is the image that pops in my mind every time. Lifting a glass of Sauternes from the table, I swung my focus to the chef, a classically trained, tall, slim man, transplanted from France, and whispered my fascination-horror. He bowed to me, his expression bursting into a grin of absolute delight, his elegant hands arcing the air above the buffet in the style of Vanna White, and said, “I know! And I didn’t have to pay for any of it!”   I spent the afternoon exercising my French with the farmer couple from Quebec who raised the ducks (and fed their livers) to perfection. Apparently, the ducks will eat whatever you place in front of them, in this case a special diet to imbue the livers with the buttery texture and a golden hue, so it’s not really torturing their livers into a diseased state? And yeah, I sampled as much of the stuff, prepared with textbook precision, I could cram into my mouth.

Another time, another top restaurant, wine pairing dinner. It was the first time I’d left the house solo following baby number two (five months old). I still think I deserve a prize for negotiation skills getting their dad to babysit that evening, but I digress.  There were many other food writers twittering the patio when I arrived.  I knew none of them (such a bumpkin). I did snag a flute of champagne when a silver tray walked by. I was trying to quell the screaming anxiety I felt entering a social situation after months of babied isolation, the fast-descending realisation, like a burning 747, I’d just entered a scene waaaaayyyy out of my league.

While attempting to hold my purse, a clutch (stupid choice, they make purses with straps for a reason), balance my glass of bubbly, ignore the crushing sensation of my toes in heels long neglected, snap my too tight bra into a comfortable position (impossible), a man, quite good looking, gorgeous pale linen oxford button-down, sauntered over and introduced himself. He shook my hand with dry confidence. I always pay attention to handshakes – you can glean a tremendous amount of information about a person from their handshake[v].  He detected my ignorance instantly when he explained he was the editor of Nuvo Magazine. (When one pronounces the word nuvo, one has to draw out the vowels and the finishing ‘w’, layering a hint of upper-class pretention, Neeeeeewwwwww Vooooooowwwww.)

Flustered, I snatched an oyster on the half shell from a silver tray heavied with shaved ice and pearl glistening mollusks. Only then did I perceive I was holding too many things in my hands to parley: champagne, purse, notebook, pen, and now, oyster. Keep in mind, we’re still standing on a patio, glorious soft pink sunset reflecting the mountains’ glaciers. I quickly placed the opalescent shell to my lips and tipped my head back[vi] to deliver the gourmet tid bit to my mouth. Unfortunately, (most unfortunately), the oyster had been shucked improperly and did not release.  The long moment that saw the oyster dangling the air like a blob of snot, my tongue diddling its flesh obscenely, lewdly, before it loosened its shell, was sufficient time for the Nuvo Editor to melt and disappear into the crowd.  

Again, unfortunately, this was not the worst of the evening’s events. Between course five and six (spectacular food btw), I turned to the woman at my left, laughed, and explained how normally, at that exact time, I’d be breastfeeding. This signalled an immediate let down and my milk pooled the front of the exquisite baby blue silk blouse I’d chosen to wear without the foresight to insert protective breast pads.  My editor gave me shit for leaving the dinner early.

 A fond memory. On assignment to interview an organic potato farmer, I drove the flat, fertile, Pemberton valley towards his fields.  Jagged walls of granite, rough new mountains, rose dramatically from the valley floor, their snow-capped peaks spearing a cerulean sky.  Both babies were with me (a detail I felt my editor needn’t know). Willa, a few months old in her bucket seat, and Lillian two and a half, strapped in a car seat. Lillian pointed her pudgy toddler finger out the window and said, “Boootiful mumma.”  

I will never be able to adequately articulate the sensation of gratitude that washed over me at that moment, hearing her words, understanding, witnessing the wonder such a little person recognises and delights in the encompassing beauties of the world. 

And when I sat at the long pine harvest table in the potato farmer’s kitchen, my left arm cradling Willa to breastfeed while my right transcribed notes, Lillian, her little shoulders level with the table top, fisting crayons to paper beside me, the farmer looking rather annoyed I’d brought children with me. I understood then how often the story one is assigned to write is not the story that ought be written. His own young children screamed and giggled, running in and out of the kitchen. His wife hovered in a dark corner and listened attentively to our interview, a toddler hitched to her hips. I was struck by her. She had grey shadows beneath her eyes and her exhaustion stretched her skin shiny at her cheekbones. She looked haunted. And her expression, I knew, matched my own. The farmer’s transition to organic production had come at her urging. It was clear the strain of a circular, balanced agricultural practice and environmental stewardship significantly decreased the economic productivity of their business. One of their children had been diagnosed with autism. The farmer’s wife believed their son’s behaviour far more manageable on a diet free of pesticides. I wanted to interview her, pursue the revealed vein of story, follow it to where it bled, delve deep into the sorrows I detected so clearly, translucent beneath her skin. But I didn’t.  I didn’t follow my heart.

Why these memories today? I’ve been working with a dear friend, helping him to realise his own passion project by exercising my food writing muscles to support the production of his cookbook. Another sideline project I’ve taken on these last months, working as part of a small team (two photographers, a designer, a handful of recipe testers). I’ve discovered my food writing muscles are a little soft …what I had thought would be simple exercise is not. It’s work. I’m struggling to grasp the tone, the angle, my friend, a professional chef and restauranteur six times over, seeks to impart the book. I’m supposed to be ghost writing. I’m supposed to be imbuing the writing with his voice, through his eyes, his sensory experiences. So far, I’m failing. 

Necessary to stop and appreciate the joy of spontaneous street art.

Tuesday last, I interviewed him again and delighted listening to him speak about food preparation, watching his hands fly and finger the air as he gestured the creation of invisible dishes before him at my own dining table. I wondered, aloud, whether it might be easier if I wrote the content as a witness, imparting my own thoughts regarding his process, his approach. We discussed how my voice would, inevitably, infuse and change the work. It remains undecided. I worry. Next month we all travel to Italy together. To cook.  To drink wine. To see great works of art and architecture.  To move in the rosemary and bonfire scented mellow gold air and splendour of Tuscan autumn. I must believe the writing will come to me.

Writing this post, I realise what always tugged the edges of all my food writing:  it’s less about the food; it’s all about the experience.  The experience of sensual pleasures, but also the joy sharing deliciousness with others. It’s about relationships. Relationships between the land and the weather and the hands that nurture, tend, harvest, wash, prepare, and cook the food. Most importantly, it’s about the relationships between people.  This is what matters. This is what is most beautiful.   

A final side observation for today: I am so sad when peach season ends. Their fuzzy, sunset-blushed fade from market stalls signals the season’s shifting light. But I’ll no longer deny any potent persuasion to sink into the sublime sensual pleasures this world has to offer. Here. Now. Follow where my heart leads. Write it down. Embody my dreams.

[i] I was paid 80 bucks for the weekly column in Whistler, and $25 for the Guide, and nothing for the Kingston This Week because both papers used the same publisher, and I signed print syndication.  

[ii] I breastfed each child 18 months. Have to say, I wasn’t ready to wean Willa when I did but succumbed to social pressures and necessity when I returned to part time work. She wasn’t ready either and toddled around with a baby bottle upended at the corner of her lips, looking like a drunken one-handed sailor with everything she did.

[iii] The editor did insist titling my pieces…headlines I would have chosen differently, but not worth a battle. Or apparently a phone call?  I never asked him to change them (eye roll).

[iv] A cross between Muscovy and Pekin ducks.

[v] I taught the skill of hand shaking to my girls very early on. By eight years of age, they were pros. 

[vi] Orgasm style.  I know oysters themselves are supposed to be an aphrodisiac, but on writing this little vignette here, I think instead it must be witnessing the gestures with which they are eaten that becomes the real turn on. A thought anyway….a delightful one.

I lifted these dinner plate dahlias from the soil last summer. Boxed them up and stored them in a dark cellar through the winter. In the spring, I planted them on the beautiful terrace garden at my new place and battled the squirrels all summer who continued to believe the tubers would be most delicious each time they dug them up, sampled a tiny bite and spat it out. It’s a small miracle they survived and a massive miracle they live and bloom again. The blossoms are delicate and compact compared with last summer’s riotous overtaking, but retain all their soft, pink petalled beauty. I love them so.

Noughts & Crosses

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

My mum, a New Zealander, always referred to the game of tic-tac-toe as noughts and crosses. She allowed (encouraged) us kids to draw the 3×3 grids with a blue ball point pen on the soles of her bare feet (size 9, ample space). An aside: the ubiquitous Bic pens of North America are called biros in NZ and the UK (No relation on my Hungarian side, unfortunately. Though my relatives had owned vineyards in Hungary and vacation homes in Trieste, all was lost in WWII. I digress…I’ve been reading Nabokov’s glorious memoir Speak Memory—its White Russian émigrée-ness, a crude comparison to my own father’s flight to freedom following the Hungarian uprising, I know, but I make it anyway, romantic that I am—is rubbing off on me, chalk powder lifted from the pale wing of a lambent moth).  

Our ball point pen plays afforded mum a relatively undisturbed, albeit tickly toed, mug of tea (tankard shaped, insides furred with tannin scales the way she preferred, “don’t wash my cup!”), with a cigarette we eyed as the orange embered ring sucked ever closer toward its filter, horizontal ash cylinder elongating and sagging before she flicked it, a moment before gravity might claim it, into a dusky glass ashtray. Likely she was reading the latest library copy of a true crime book. Not aloud. Though I longed for her to read to us, she rarely did. Once I learned to read—late, I admit to my mortification (my maternal grandmother berated my incompetence, publicly)—I read all sorts of picture books and novels to my younger siblings, delighting how my affected accents, particularly the ‘v’ pronunciation of any ‘w’ (mimicking our Hungarian Nana’s voice) in Roald Dahl’s Witches, transfixed them.  Through the dining room’s picture window, we listened to the lake waves heaving ice sheets to hills along the limestone shore, the scrapes and wind moans as the water worked its way, churning through its six-year replenishment cycle.  (There is an explanatory purpose to this dendritic pathway of recollections, I promise.) Inside, we vied to place our O and X marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row on the pink spongey under pads of mum’s feet and be crowned ‘the winner’ (an additive aspiration as opposed to elimination rounds: three strikes and you’re out[1]).

It often happens the book I most need to read winds its way to me at exactly the right moment. And so it has been with Speak Memory. I had (again) tied myself in knots and was very cross indeed, attempting to force my long project (book length work) into a structure that just wasn’t working. Maybe I’ve posted the disconnected threads of this creative work here already, too lazy to check, so here it is again: a series of pop culture refences used to hang two different story lines on, weaved (somehow? this part was really screwing with my head), periodically interjected with commentary from a cast of [internal] characters (who seem to keep growing in number). The first storyline, a recollection of past events relayed chronologically, wasn’t working at all – how the hell do I narrow down which scenes to relay? The second storyline, recent events relayed with reverse chronology (and totally taking over the narrative) also wasn’t working because the cinematic renderings felt puerile. Mountains of frustration and angst. Flip flop to working on other things. Flip flop. Flip flop.

Reading grounds me. And I read this elegant passage from Chapter One of Speak Memory that must be transcribed here—lengthy, I know, but any attempted summary would cheapen it. I’ve highlighted the last sentence because it was this line that launched an epiphany regarding my own project and what I’ll try to convey with the remainder of this post:

“But let me see. I had an even earlier association with that war. One afternoon at the beginning of the same year, in our St. Petersburg house, I was led down from the nursery into my father’s study to say how-do-you-do to a friend of the family, General Kuropatkin. His thickset, uniform-encased body creaking slightly, he spread out to amuse me a handful of matches, on the divan where he was sitting, placed ten of them end to end to make a horizontal line, and said, “This is the sea in calm weather.” Then he tipped up each pair so as to turn the straight line into a zigzag—and that was “a stormy sea.” He scrambled the matches and was about to do, I hoped, a better trick when we were interrupted. His aide-de-camp was shown in and said something to him. With a Russian, flustered grunt, Kuropatkin heavily rose from his seat, the loose matches jumping off the divan as his weight left it. That day, he had been ordered to assume supreme command of the Russian Army in the Far East.

                  This incident had a special sequel fifteen years later, when at a certain point of my father’s flight from Bolshevik-held St. Petersburg to southern Russia he was accosted while crossing a bridge, by an old man who looked like a gray-bearded peasant in a sheepskin coat. He asked my father for a light. The next moment each recognized the other. I hope old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point. What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through, like my toy trains that, in the winter of 1904-05, in Wiesbaden, I tried to run over frozen puddles in the grounds of the Hotel Oranien. The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”

Reading the two scenes at two points of time hinged (beautifully balanced) on a matchstick …how do I explain this? It gave me permission (and a concrete example) to think about my own family stories in a completely different way, approaching the writing through connections and associations without a need to be nailed to chronology (more cosmology).

Then I went for a walk with a friend, windmilling my arms ecstatically as I explained (she’s very patient) my intention to (re)enter my writings with this Nabokovian lens to search for thematic emblems or symbols connecting my memories across space and time. She stopped walking, turned toward me with trance-like calm, placed her palms on my shoulders, and with uncanny clairvoyance, suggested the theme I might be chasing[2]. Of course. Yes! Of course. I felt the knowing satisfaction one gets having accomplished a particularly tricky play in a game or solving a riddle or a math equation or when an errant puzzle piece clicks into place[3].

With a deeper understanding of what I’m exploring and using an associative approach I re-wrote the introduction of the long-form project (the 12th time? more?). And it unfolded easily.  The writing slipped into place[4]. Naturally.  Organically. The “story” skips across space and time, mimicking, I imagine, connections between neurons and the way sensory information shunts emotional layers in and out of memory. It’s a natural shape—neuronal axon connections between dendrites in the brain—the same shape as tree branches or root systems, the same shape as alveoli and bronchioles in the lungs, the same shape of tributaries and rivers, the same shape the wind carves rock into canyons.  

And then, writing the introduction by following associations and matching up different thoughts and experiences across time and space (match!), I felt the appearance and associated meaning of the (yet to be written) closing section. And voila, a “frame’, two goal posts materialising from the mind’s mists with a great wide-open field of play ripe for exploration and elucidation between.  

The writing of the intro also handed, like the passing of a baton to the next runner in a relay, an associative anchor to serve for the next section. Then a second anchor followed that…the blossoming orientation reveals itself faster than my writing can keep up. And I’m suddenly cautious, mindful I don’t want to trip into the trap of crushing ideas to shape what I think might be the meaning (I too often do). I want to relax into the magic of associative process…which is almost all feeling…a pleasurable groping in the dark.   Instead of checking boxes in a tic-tac-toe line, it’s necessary to transcend the grid and attend to the curvy swervy intersections as they sift loose the matrix and settle into place.  A long game to be sure, more adventure I’d say.  But a deep pleasure chasing after nebulous meanings and satisfaction when they unite, wet inked, pen in hand.  

I note, writing…the actual act of writing, is the only way to journey there[5].

Here’s a diagram of the structure I’m feeling my way through (it looks more complicated than it is).

It’s like a spiral of discrete associative sections, circling a central axis of a theme. I think of it as less of a spiral though, more like a spring (coiled in tension…it’s the emotional tensions that will pull a reader through…at least, that’s my thought process at the moment).

The thing is, there are so many ways one moves back through the coffers of memory. Teasing experiences from the mind…the events shimmer and change, scuttling light and shadow through the prism (prison?) of one’s mood.  The whole adventure requires slow and curious study to progress the writing with a cool (and open) (and loving) mind.

I would have written it’s serendipitous Nick Cave’s missive today hits a parallel mark, but I suspect there’s less coincidence[6] in these things than we believe: “To write a song requires a reckoning. We roll up our sleeves and through rigorous application encounter the disastrous and mortifying condition of our interior selves. We exert poetic order upon the turmoil and chaos. We hew and hone and bring structure to the stricken heart; we codify our weary souls, giving form to the blues.”[7]

I’ll close by plucking my own curated associations from Nabokov’s closing paragraphs and lines in Speak Memory, found poem-like, manipulating his words into a malleable sculpture to meet my mind’s own bends[8]:

“Laid out on the last limit of the past and on the verge of the present, it remains in my memory merely as a geometrical design…what I really remember about this neutrally blooming design, is its clever thematic connection…it was most satisfying to make out…something in a scrambled picture…that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.”

It’s hard to believe in magic. No, that’s not quite right. It’s hard to maintain faith in magic. But it’s there. It requires a practiced (and constantly practicing) eye (and the writing hand(s)) to feel it, coax it forth, recognise it. And though I trip often, injure myself repeatedly in the never-to-be-won plays of this writing game, it’s no fun sulking on the bench. Put me in coach, it’s all fun and games, until I lose an eye. Play on.

[1] An empty threat; I’ll never extend a third feeler.

[2] She’s done this before on at least one other crisis occasion, becoming a human divining rod to deliver the universe’s elegant solution when I’ve missed its crystal clear, often repeating, simple message.

[3] Carolyn, you’re right, I do tend to write the same things three or more times in a row. But I can’t cut them. I just can’t. Sigh.

[4] I can’t help but relay the observation that when I’m writing this way, I completely fall outside time (disastrously sometimes, arriving to work late and later, and, more recently, as I’m transitioning into writing more at nighttime to avoid this, discovering hours have slipped me by. Hours!)

[5] Filtering, almost entirely it seems, through the subconscious.  

[6] I mean, the word coincidence alone hints at the associative pattern with the nuance of a ball-peen hammer striking one’s thumb numb.

[7] Nick Cave Red Hand Files Issue #297

[8] Sorry Nabokov, hope you’re not rolling in your grave.

Diagramming process, here’s a drawing of the dendritic (associative) pathway of this blog post. Importantly, I drew this AFTER I wrote this post, not before. For writing this post, I came up with the title first (this is often the case….a single line to begin the writing) and wrote from there, the images and memories and my recent readings all being pulled into place around the vague theme of “games”. This was, no doubt, spurred on by another quote of Nabokov’s I’ve been wrestling with (having trouble with his word deception) about his observation related to the way insects use mimicry to avoid detection and how this relates to art: “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

Feedback Balancing Act

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I’ve been working on a particular short story for a little over a year[1]. The generative draft, written last June, was in response to a prompt to create a flash work[2] centered around a haunting without mentioning the haunting itself. The haunting was not to be an entity but a manifestation of a pain.

My first draft was 449 words. I was delighted with it, despite a threatening tension, a shadow I could feel but not quite understand. The story was, and continues to be, set on a cold beach point where a stranger died by suicide (the haunting, a driver who launched his car into the winter lake), and where, two days later, a couple stand. It’s the couple’s anniversary yet the wife decides it’s the time and place to end their strained marriage. The story’s initial title was Eagle-Eyed[3].

Before I launch into the exploration of the most recent feedback for this evolving short story, I thought it might be interesting to provide a breakdown of the various iterations it has moved through since[4].  This, I hope, will provide readers (and remind myself!)  a sense of how a story might be shaped and reshaped towards a state where it may enter the world of publications[5].  It also serves as a pathway I’m following into self-confidence with my own writing. I won’t share the actual work in progress here because it negates publication elsewhere…hopefully this won’t stultify this post; I’d loath to be thought of as boring.

I know, the chart is tiny tiny. Formatting is an issue. I’ve reposted the same chart below with the ugly formatting at the very end of this post for easier reading if clicking on this pic doesn’t enlarge the text sufficiently.

The most recent draft of this story was completed earlier this month, July 2nd. It has lengthened to 741-words. I felt good about the piece. What I mean when I say this is that I felt my way through understanding what the story was trying to tell me it was about, waiting for meaning to reveal itself instead of shoehorning it into “an idea”.  I also worked (and played) to apply technical devices to illuminate the layers of meaning as I came to understand them. More often than not, the writing already held these hints, I just hadn’t “seen” it…it really has been a process of feeling my way as opposed to knowing or thinking my way through the crafting. I’m following instinct more than anything else.

I shared the story with a dear writer friend of mine, B, requesting she let me know what feelings came up for her when she read the piece. Also, whether there were any points in the story she found confusing or made her lift out of reading. The same morning, I submitted the story for formal post-workshop feedback with a writer/editor, Matt, in the UK.   

I received generous feedback from both writers. Both indulged line by line attention and considerations. Both suggested places to cut (B, always sharp, pinpoints my rococo tendencies and gently asks whether they are needed). Both were encouraging. But here’s the thing…each interpreted the story differently: B understood the story as I had intended, reading the layered resonance in the piece, and most importantly, feeling it (she described the story as a bomb about to go off); Matt responded to the surface level of the piece.

A few observations upon receiving discordant feedback. Instead of descending into the pits of despair and not knowing what steps to take next (a year ago, I would have crumpled), I received the feedback with genuine curiosity. This alone is massive progress in my own creative development. I’m confident in this particular story and I’m comfortable knowing it isn’t quite there yet[6]. Also, I’m better at accepting the idea that I don’t have control about how others read my work. It’s likely a good thing there are multiple interpretations. It keeps it interesting. I know my writing won’t appeal to everybody. Nor should it. It’s enough to know it succeeds touching even just one person.

All feedback is helpful for stretching the brain and provoking multiplicities. It’s probably best to remove my pretension: words like inveiglement, my grammar gaffs, my chicken-livered metaphors[7].

I respect honesty above all else. Even when it confirms one’s greatest fears about character (or any other aspects of story: dialogue, silent spaces, conflict, emotional resonance, imagery, setting, sensory elements…the list is endless. Magical-fantasy-surrealistic-dream. Endless!). And, you know, for one who reads me so deeply, intimately, I’d jump into the burning lava throat of a volcano[8]. I’ll take what I can get.

[1] I’m sure these posts confirm my shambolic writing practice, but in case they don’t, I admit I’m usually working on several pieces in parallel, flip flopping between them the way a hook landed fish jumps to stay alive.

[2] A fiction or nonfiction narrative under 1000 words.

[3] Sometimes I feel like marching up to my past self, gripping her by the shoulders and shaking her violently to wake up!  For the benefit of readers who don’t know details of my personal life, I left my own marriage last October, the week of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary (note: this story was written 4-5 months before then). Instead of being angry with my past self, I’m learning to be kinder, gentler. Learning takes so many forms, and I don’t know how to read them all. All I can be is committed to learning, operating from the point I am, in any moment, with the limited toolbox I carry and an open heart. I’m stunned to discover my body’s prescient talents …and how long it takes my mind to catch up…this is only one instance of many.  I think about this a lot…

[4] May 2023-May 2024 I participated in the SmokeLong community workshop, generating 64 unique flash pieces. I’ve attempted to revise only a few of the pieces due to lack of time and yes, personal resistance-to-revision issues I continue to wrestle with.  I made the difficult decision to withdraw from the community because I need to focus time on the writings I’ve already created, the works awaiting my attention (and devotion).

[5] And the state of publication is simply one point in time, catching a flying fluttering work and nailing the specimen to a velvety spot to keep it still (or dead)…I’m beginning to sense that all works continue in dynamic states and might be changed or altered or built upon over and over and over again…interpretation alone splinters the smashed glass casing of any publication and the work travels on and on through the hearts and minds of others…wow, a little too artsy Biro, reel it in.

[6] In answer to my request for points of confusion, B was curious about this question and hadn’t considered it before, but once posed she entered the work with this lens.  And yes, she pointed out the story was quite confusing with time, shifting back and forth (through 5 shifts in time!). In a 750-word work this demands (taxes?) a lot of cognitive effort for the reader. So, the questions I’m now working through: is this expectation for the reader to follow the complex time shifts worth it? Does the time shift add another level of meaning to the story? If yes, what is that meaning? I don’t know…still thinking. If no, I need to rework the piece and remove some time shifts and support a smoother reading.

[7] Almost resisted the urge to write chicken liveried, but, alas, there it is, coddled in a footnote because the image of chickens dressed up in royal red and gold uniforms makes me laugh. I’m a cheap thrill.

[8] As long as I have a Mai Tai in my hand.

In drawing this series of maple seeds, I coloured in from top to bottom and the same process of moving from thinking to feeling can be seen here. The colouring of the top seed is more clunky, more self-conscious…by the time I got to colouring the bottom seed, I’d moved through the (somewhat ineffective) attempt to copy what I was looking at and instead coloured in the way I was feeling, with the result that the final seed looks (to me) to be more relaxed and natural. And representative of its subject. Maybe I’m overthinking this. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Date and a few detailsNumber of reviewers providing feedback with flavour of feedbackMy own thoughts and feelings  at the timeFocus of revision as a result
June 25, 2023 449 words Title: Eagle-Eyed• 5 reviewers •Consensus on excellent use of dialogue to depict tension-filled relationship between husband and wife characters.
•Confusion about the setting and story as a crime scene – readers interpret the story as a wife preparing  to murder her husband by the lake		 I actually thought the piece was pretty clever and then when I got the feedback I realised I had almost completely buried the suicide so  the story was confusing to readers. Readers are picking up on some buried  anger which is…interesting.Need to layer the suicide  aspects in with less subtlety. Need to layer in the wife character’s contemplation about marital relationship with more clarity.
August 8, 2023 495 words Title changed to Point of Departure – this remains the working title in subsequent iterations• 2 reviewers •Unsubstantial feedback (i.e., it’s great!) huh – send it out and see what happens, crapshoot but whatevs Submitted to two publications: Vestal Review and Had Most writers in the flash community carpet bomb submissions, sending a single work to thirty or even fifty publications at once, praying for a hit and fluffing their bylines along the way…for me, this defeats the purpose and makes me feel like the whole publication enterprise is a waste of time (I mean, are these writers reading all those literary publications? Not possible).  Feeling demoralised.  And yet, when I read others’ works in publications I respect, I’m inspired and awed in a way I would love my work to be counted among them.Submissions rejected – not at publishing level (that matters to me). Yet. Shelved. Then, in the ensuing months, thinking about the story tucked  safely in the back of my mind, I come to realise what it was trying to tell me.  The blunt life events I’m moving through illuminate this of course. I start to piece the concepts of suicide and marriage together…but nascent, vague, shadowy and disorganised thoughts… I don’t get it. Revisions attempt to tease these thoughts apart and layer them in the story somehow.
January 16, 2024 587 words•7 reviewers
•Consensus on beauty of language, along with the need to rearrange sentence structures (shorten them).
•Readers agree about the reason for tension in relationship (this was added in this revision), they interpret this as valid and feels real •Readers understand the wife character intends to end her marriage, but reviewers concerned it is too  subtle and might be mistaken for her character contemplating her own suicide…lots of suggestions for how to fix this. •Suggestion to remove a jarring image of car sex between husband and wife •		I’m really committed to keeping the subtlety in the piece ….I like its feeling of ambiguity…I’m pleased most reviewers (6 of the 7) “get” what I’m trying to communicate: the wife decides to leave the marriage (as opposed to thinking about taking her own life). I have to think more about this…I’m also really attached to the last line that I feel resonates: ”a good place to end a life.” Agree about removing the sex image. Makes me contemplate what deeper aspect the story is trying to tell me …I don’t know.Came back to revising this piece in June 2024…thinking more deliberately about the “ending a life” pattern in the story. Redrafted with intention to submit for formal feedback from Matt Kendrick following a workshop with him. Worked at the sentence level to play with tempo and insert rhythmic variation.

A Kiss of Life

Suzanne Biro

Poems float to me again. This hasn’t happened in a number of years. I’ve had phrases arrive but then it’s like the valve shuts off and word flow stops. If I force a phrase toward a poem, I butcher it. Poems feel ethereal, fragile. I choose the word float intentionally…it’s as if the words butterfly by, out the corner of my eye, or rather, my ear. I think I hear them instead of see them. Perhaps this varies because sometimes I visualize an image. I’ll have to pay closer attention to this experience to describe the process accurately here. Regardless, if not caught and written to the page the poem keeps moving and leaves me behind. 

So, three poems in the last two weeks or so. The relief accompanying them, that they float to me at all, is palpable; I hadn’t realised how much I miss them. These latest poems arrived when I felt most depleted, when I was most physically and emotionally exhausted…not so much in a state that I’d given up, more that I’d given in…surrendered. I worry about this. How to invite the conditions of open receiving without the physical and emotional exhaustion[1]? I don’t know.

The following poem arrived during a lunch break last week…the first lines always feel the strongest, the most tangible, then I wrote the lines spooling from there until I could tell I was twisting my own meaning into them.  Instead of forcing my own thoughts into the piece, and because I needed to return to the office, I left it alone. A couple of days later, an image, tangentially related, kept entering my mind when I thought about the piece. I interpreted this as a sign the two aspects/concepts wanted to be woven together in the one poem.  I completed the following draft over the weekend[2].

Here’s where it gets interesting. This poem, I discovered, also communicates information about my long form writing project (and process) I hadn’t quite understood prior to writing the poem. I’ll try to explain.  Last month I printed out the long form project (a book length work, very much in progress) and promised myself I’d read it. I haven’t. Instead, energized by the idea of working physically with pen and highlighters and paper instead of messing around in digital files on my computer, I used index cards to list different scenes associated with different characters. One side of each card listed scenes from the distant past, the other side listed scenes from a recent past. The long form project is, for the most part, creative nonfiction with several people. Sitting there, looking at all the characters on the desk in front in me, I realised I don’t have a card for myself[3]. One could (I have) dismiss this discovery, subsume the idea I’m the persona, the narrator, in this work, so, naturally, I’ll find my way into each of the scenes…somehow.  But I’m fooling myself. Sitting there with all the cards on the desk I realised (duh) two things. One, this project is more about my own experiences and thoughts and reflections, and these aspects aren’t integrated (much) in the current draft[4].  Two, the voice I wish to narrate this project requires what I refer to as my audacious voice …and that voice my friends has taken a fucking vacation.  And despair, despondency, desperation—all the dis- words of negation—set in fast. I put the project aside. Again.

Then this poem floated to the page with its battle cry of a title and emphatic last line to confirm, with a flood of relief, my audacious self will revive.

[1] I’ve also received poems in states of extreme emotion.

[2] It’s important to express my gratitude here. In my last blog post I’d lamented missing the spring chorus of frogs I don’t hear living in the city. A few days after publishing that post, a friend messaged to offer me his cottage for the weekend. Serendipity. I spent the glorious gift of a solo weekend in the woods reading (The Forty Rules of Love by Eilf Shafak, a romance toggling back and forth between Rumi, a chorus of characters, multiple POVs, in the 1200s, and a current day woman who falls in love with a writer (who is writing about the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, also Sufism) then leaves her “perfect” marriage of twenty years for true love.) It rained most of the weekend which was also a gift because it provided the excuse to lounge in the screened in porch (which felt like a treehouse) and just read (and sleep) instead of canoeing my way round the lake. Unfortunately, I only heard a single peeper and a bullfrog; mating season suspended at this point of spring becoming summer. Instead, I endured the chainsaw to the eardrum that is the “song” Waterloo by ABBA blasting from a cottage across the lake. The universe does have a sense of humour. I prefer this song. I did enjoy the loons and the whip-poor-will night calls and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s day song. I did not manage to see those birds (I really wanted to see the rose-breasted grosbeak as I haven’t before) but did trace the phoebes and vireos amidst the wet leaves.  

[3] When I first wrote this sentence I inadvertently wrote “cared” instead of “card”.  

[4] The crazy thing is, I know I’ve discovered this before and even written about it here…and here…and then, I guess, I just…forget?  Frustrating …and embarrassing…but also, human. Process is not linear and, apparently, the learning doesn’t build upwards from any previous achieved foundation….the whole thing seems more like dancing across quicksand.