The other day, Richard and I got our own Zoom account in order to host gatherings for subscribers to the stack. Saturday afternoon was the first conversation, and we were Planet of the Apes at the controls.
Thanks to all who were there! It was tender to see your faces lined up, and the questions people asked about the craft of creative writing came together to form a stream. Here are some of the questions:
Sophie:
Laurie’s nonfiction reads like fiction in how vivid and specific the details get. So when you’re not writing, are you constantly note-taking or journaling? How do you remember, for example, the way someone shifted their body when they said something? I have trouble remembering little things like that from years ago, but I want to write those stories like they were yesterday. Any tips?
Chin-sun:
Sometimes, when I’m trying to tie up a long-form piece, I have too many ideas all over the place. My method is usually to print out those pages of messy ideas, then physically cut and rearrange them like puzzle pieces, until they’re organized in more cohesive themes. Can you think of another way to create order from chaos? How do you organize your literary collages? Do you first try to identify the through-line?
Jerry:
How, if at all, do you set boundaries in your writing when talking about your life without losing your authentic voice?
Eric:
If there is no plot, how do you achieve a sense of coherence in writing?
Going forward, we will be planning regular gatherings for paid subscribers. Some will be for smaller groups, so we can practice together. When I started the stack, I wanted it to be purely a literary publication and for the craft elements to be visible to readers who wanted to think about them. I’m happy talking about craft with you in the gatherings and being explicit about how I work. If I say anything that’s of use to your own projects, that’s great. There are a zillion ways to work, and many other writers have super intelligent and practical ideas.
I thought about some things I’d said in the gathering in preparing today’s post. How for me “taking away” does more work in writing than adding stuff. How to trust the reader to “fill in” what’s left out in a “jump cut” from one time frame to another or from one story element to another. I didn’t mention this on Saturday, but the most thrilling example of a jump cut I can think of occurs in the opening sequence of 2001, A Space Odyssey, when the murderous apey guy tosses a femur bone into the air, having used it as a weapon and thereby inventing the first tool, and the next image is a space ship floating in a dark sky. Two images. Seven or so million years spanned.
For today, I decided to arrange four flash pieces and see what patterns they made. I’ve done this before here in “Seven Locations” and “Six Scars.” Each of those pieces has a theme. Today’s post is just “see what happens.” The “see what happens” approach is what I use more than any other. You may notice bits and sentences lifted from other stuff I’ve posted earlier. In my case, so much coheres—if it does—because of the directness of the narrative voice. I think you could figure out pretty much my whole life from these four tiny pieces. That’s what I mean when I say, the homo sapiens brain fills in what’s left out and the homo sapiens brain will construct a narrative arc from things that are simply lined up in a series.
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Both Sides
On my 60th birthday, my friend Vanessa drove from Massachusetts to Saratoga Springs, where I was staying at an artist colony. We had been friends since college. She had a daughter, Maya, who was in college herself, a gorgeous vegan spawn of the women’s movement.
Vanessa, with her sleepy eyes and mop of blond curls, had been a cool, slouchy girl I looked up to. In Saratoga, we went to a bar, and Joni Mitchell was singing about looking at life from both sides now. I listened to the words. She was saying she could fall in love again, even though love dies, and I told Vanessa I had met a man at the colony. His name was Richard, and he was English, and I smiled. She pulled her fingers through her curls and said, “Your life is still defined by men.”
Her marriage had unraveled. It wasn’t the reason she was saying this to me. I liked her freedom to say whatever she felt, and this freedom was the way we understood our intimacy. This freedom and this intimacy were maybe the way women of our time, who had invented new ways to be women in the world, remade friendship as something passionate and reckless.
I heard what she was saying. She was the kind of girl I would have jumped out of a window to impress, but there was no window. She said, “Maya’s generation, the girls don’t operate that way.” I thought, If that’s true, we made it possible for them.
And I remembered a night when I was 25, and the phone rang and I got out of bed to meet a famous-ish writer at the White Horse Tavern. He was twice my age, and I was flattered by the call. What did I want from him? To learn from writers how to be a writer, maybe, but my interest took the form of encouraging sexual attention. As if a kiss could awaken my mind. The thing is, some kisses have awakened my mind.
Summer Camp
When my sister is 70 and I am 64, she says, “I wanted a sister until you came along, and then I wanted you gone.” She’s laughing, my idol.
There’s no approaching the tan of her neck, or the swing of her ponytail, or the fuzziness of her sweaters, or her heart-shaped face and sparkling eyes. She’s in her bunk at summer camp, reading about girls gone wrong in True Confessions magazine. The pictures are grainy and smeared. The girls have tattoos and teased hair, and they are sorry. They are sorry about getting on the motorcycle or believing in Johnny with the ducktail and chipped tooth. They are paying with a black eye or a baby, and whatever else they are, they are sex.
I’m five my first summer at camp. Ellen is eleven. We’re away for two months, and our parents visit twice. I miss them. I forget them. My hair is pulled into pigtails on either side of my head, and bangs hang to my brows.
One night each summer, a horse-drawn wagon comes for us. The wagon is mounded with hay, and we lean against each other, rocking slowly over dark roads. Crickets whir. Stars streak the black sky. I would rather be here than anywhere. We sing, “Blue Moon” and “Singing in the Rain.” The Gene Kelly movie is screened every summer. Every summer Debbie Reynolds wins handsome Gene Kelly by not asking him for anything. We’re supposed to want to be thin, coltish things like Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron. The horse boys live at the boys’ camp. They walk with a swagger, and even the way they click their tongues at the horses is flirty.
First impressions are a lover you don’t resist. Camp is strangers you can disappear into. Then I would feel a tug I have not forgotten, and I would look over my shoulder to see my sister beckoning to me.
England
Richard speaks about front rooms and back rooms in museums. He means the official version of a place versus the life lived behind the velvet ropes. When we visited Hampton Court, the summer palace of Henry the 8th, I thought about the severed head of Anne Boleyn. When we found an abandoned garden in a courtyard, it seemed more fitting of the castle’s melancholy than the pomp and heraldry all around.
A flower bed was bare. A white rose bush was studded with dead blossoms, the severe brown of old death. The dead flowers reminded me of the dead flies we’d recently seen in a Damien Hirst show. It was a ghoulish, flashy exhibit at Tate Modern that included another severed head—this one belonging to a cow. Inside a large, Plexiglass box, maggots were feeding on the cow’s head. In another part of the box, flies that had hatched from maggots were being electrocuted by one of those insect-zapping machines. You could see the bodies of the flies glow before they dropped to the floor, leaving behind a black leg here and there along the red wire. You had to feel for your own place on the line, and that, Richard said, was where the art was.
In the courtyard garden, two women were rubbing yellow sap on their hands. They were gardeners with little lines on their faces from working outside in the sun. We were all about the same age. They said the sap cured warts. I didn’t see any warts. One of the women broke open a pod and seeds rolled around her palm. She said, “They look like tiny eyeballs, don’t they?” She laughed and tossed them away, but the eyes followed us, and I realized I had stopped resenting my mother. Toby had been dead for three years, and the ornery part of my heart was a room without furniture.
It was like finding a back room in myself, and the garden looked beautiful with its mix of dead and alive. The sun swept past a curtain of clouds, rushing from the shower to meet a lover. Wild strawberries grew along a border. I picked a few and ate them. They were sweet, and sweeter stolen.
Murray Stone
Whenever I describe my father, he loves me. That’s the way I feel him inside me. It’s not true in the sense he always loved me. I sometimes made him angry. I make everyone angry. According to my father, I spoke in complete sentences when I began speaking. My first sentence was, “Let me do it myself.”
This is a man who leaves school after the ninth grade, goes on the road as a traveling salesman, selling ladies dresses in New England, is too young to get a driver’s license and has to hire a man to drive him around. This is a man who played handball as a kid on the Lower East Side. He swims in the ocean parallel to the shore. Where did he learn to swim? The Y, probably. My mother didn’t learn to swim. In Long Beach, when she’s afraid for my sister and me in the ocean, my father tells me to lie to her and swim, anyway.
This morning in bed, I said to Richard, “He smiled at me the way you smile at me. He felt about me the way you feel about me.” Richard said, “He did?” I said, “Yes, except for the sex, but you know, actually, that kind of love gets turned into sex as you get older and meet boys and men.” I meant the thing with my father where the man is a boat in a harbor I smell out in other boys and men. The thing with me and men who are a motorcycle I see the back of, they are my mother, Toby, my first love, my failure.
My father saves money for me to go to private school, college, graduate school. During my childhood, he puts me to bed with songs and stories, wakes me up with back rubs. He kisses me, holds me, shows me off at work. He says I'm pretty and smart. He thinks I can do anything. He says, “A woman with brains and a good figure can have anything she wants in the world.”
He takes care of his body, wears custom-made suits, dabs cologne on his neck and handkerchiefs. In restaurants, he says, “Order anything.” In life he says, “You can fight your own battles.” In the hospital when he has only a few days to live, he says, “Be nice to your mother.” Or maybe he says, “Make peace with your mother.” Or maybe he says, “Take care of your mother.” Maybe he says, “Don’t fight with your mother.” Maybe he says, “She doesn’t mean what she says.” Maybe he says, “What she says is not what she feels.” Maybe he says, “Understand her the way I understand her.” I wish I had.
My mother is a lemur with a broken tail. When she tells me in Yiddish and English to go get killed, I’m the one who comes back looking for her. These days, 40 years after my father’s death, and 15 years after my mother’s death, and 7 years after my sister’s death, I try to see myself the way my mother saw me, because I think she was onto something other people could see as well. The thing I regret is not being able to see myself through her eyes. She loved to laugh. Her favorite story was about arriving at her dentist's office, just as he arrived, saying hello to him and watching the bridge that had come loose in her mouth fly out and land on his shoe.
Your writing makes me feel excited for life. All of it, even the hard things. ✨
Your writing is the smell of beach tar and the feel of the hot vinyl of the car seat against my thigh. I was traveling so could not attend your zoom but I'll look out for the next one. Will you do some "in-zoom" quick flash pieces? That would be fun.