If you would like to attend a Zoom conversation on starting and sustaining a Substack publication, I have scheduled one for Saturday November 25 at 3pm EST. If you are a writer and have been wondering how you can again be paid for your work and how you can attract new readers, this may be of interest to you. I will answer questions and guide you through the steps I've taken. Please email me if you would like to be placed on the list: lauriestone@substack.com. This is a benefit for PAID subscribers to the stack, either on a monthly or annual basis.
The next Zoom clinic on creative writing will take place on Saturday October 28 at 3pm EST. This session is filled. If you’d like to attend a future clinic, please RSVP here: lauriestone@substack.com and I will put you on a list. I will also be scheduling more Zoom conversations that add tools to your writer’s toolkit and your reader’s toolkit. For example on the question of reflecting the way an emotion works rather than writing from inside pain, fear, arousal, etc.
Recently, a generous reader thanked me for being vulnerable on the page. In as courteous a way as I could summon, I said that if I had ever really felt vulnerable while writing a piece, it would have been impossible for the reader to enter the story. The narrator had created the illusion of vulnerability, the way you can in a monologue form. It's part of the trick of using the first person pronoun.
The reason I'm mentioning this is I get comments like this a lot—and maybe you do, too—meaning I’m thanked for something I have not put on the page rather than thanked for prompting that emotion in the reader. It's often hard for people who don't write to see the distinction, but if you do write, you know how long you have to wait to write something so the story you tell isn't really about you--it reflects a state of being.
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” I love your remarks. They feed ideas for future pieces and Zoom conversations. We’re creating a gathering of writers and readers who have fun together. Who knew? Also, you are attracting new subscribers and in this way helping to fund the project.
The Ohio Experiment
During my first weeks in Columbus, Ohio, I was invited to see a film by several professors at the university. The movie was at the Wexner Center, famed showcase of avant-garde cinema and art. I said great, and I told myself I had to stay no matter what.
Ned, a famous mathematician, was excited before the lights went down. He was a fan of the filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer, a Czech who blended animation and live action. The movie, Little Otik, was about a woman who couldn’t have a child and out of desperation turned a vaguely human-shaped tree stump into a baby that eventually came to life and ate people. It was a cautionary tale, maybe about the dangers of loving inanimate things or the hazards of tampering with nature. I like inanimate things, and I like tampering with nature.
For a good hour or so, as the tree stump grew enormous and left bloody carcasses and piles of gnawed bones in its wake, it wasn’t that much of a strain to sit there. But the movie wouldn’t quit. A 30-minute short had preceded Little Otik that ran for over two and a half hours. It hammered its points, and I got to feel the movie was the tree stump, bent on badgering the audience to death. Twenty minutes before the end, I whispered to Ned I had to pee.
No one believed I had to pee, although I did actually pee and look at myself in the mirror. I’ve had two kinds of love in my life: the kind where I forget who I am because I feel accepted, and the kind where I see myself because the person I love is ambivalent about me. (Really, I think it’s only one kind of love, the kind where the person is ambivalent, but in the first case I don’t see it.)
In a café after the film, my companions wanted to know why I’d left. Ned, especially, wanted me to speak freely. He was a British Jew, living in the polite Midwest, and he wanted a hit of the tummling aggression he considered hardwired into urban Jews. I told my new friends I wasn’t being critical in Ohio.
Ned looked horrified. Anarchic tendrils snaked around his disapproving face. He was wearing purple granny glasses and an Iggy Pop t-shirt. He leaned in and said, “You mustn’t let Ohio get to you.” I said, “It’s not Ohio. On my drive here, I got to thinking about how I make all these claims to be multi this and internally complex that. I talk about emergent systems that develop without a dominating pacemaker. I have this rap about how nothing is a binary, maleness is a part of femaleness, on and on. But the truth is, complexity scares me. I want to be the dominating pacemaker. I say things like, ‘I see the issue this way, not that way’. I’m a breeding ground for either-or thinking, so I thought I’d come here and try to change.”
Ned said, “That’s ridiculous. Differentiating yourself isn’t the same as creating a binary.” I said, “On the streets in Columbus, the first thing people do is smile at you. It feels good. The other day on campus I saw a squirrel eating a corn on the cob under a tree, a whole corn on the cob in its paws, and I pointed it out to a student, and she stopped to watch it with me for a long time.” He said, “She was probably afraid to object or disappoint you, but it depresses people when they swallow their feelings.”
I didn’t want to see kindness as a deficit. I didn’t want to feel things as they were weren’t good enough. There was no traffic in Columbus, no noise. Gigantic parking lots yawned outside space station supermarkets, and inside were unattended bins of candy you could dip into. The local yoga center was an airy loft instead of a packed A-train. The touchpad on my laptop died while I was writing a talk, so I called a fixit place, and a guy told me to come right over. Hank was his name, a fuzzy-haired hipster, and not only did he clear his decks to help me, he invited me to watch him fiddle with the wires, and he repaired the computer by that afternoon.
Sure, Columbus lacked street life, and everything closed around midnight except for a bar my new friend Angeles knew about. She’d grown up in a border town in southern Texas, and Spanish was her first language. She was an actor, and her body became animated when she talked. One day, after working out together, we were cruising a granola-and-Birkenstock type market, talking a mile a minute, when a fellow came out from behind the deli counter and asked if we needed help. He thought we were deaf because we were using our hands so much when we talked. “What,” I said, “there’s no movement above the waist in Ohio?” He said, “Not unless you’re reporting a death.”
Ned said, “Enough with the Ohio Stone, we want the New York Stone.”
What do people want? They want only for you to love them and accept them. Why is the desire to give them what they want so hard to sustain?
I began to speak about the film, and I could see the faces of my new friends fall. I carved up the philosophy behind the film, the acting, the lighting, the directing, the writing, until all that was left was a splintery little heap. No one defended the movie. No one felt as strongly about it as I did. Then we moved on to another topic, and I had the familiar feeling I had missed something—and maybe everything important—in what people were asking of me.
Looking back twenty years at this Laurie of fifty-five, I find her tender because she seems so off to me now. She thinks you can get inside something that has gone wrong between you and another person. You can get inside it by thinking about your part and by listening carefully to what the other person has to say, and after that you can bear the consequences of whatever happens, no matter how sad. The thing I feel today is this approach to understanding our relationships with other people is a form of magical thinking. It’s one of those flashes people get while they are stumbling around and their vision funnels to a bright, narrow corridor, and in that corridor they think they have located something true that will help them with their lives when, I am experienced enough to tell you, they have located nothing real. What to do instead? Throw better parties and tell funnier jokes.
PS. Ned and I saw each other often while I was in Ohio, and I was happy the four months I spent there. I stayed an extra week to hang out longer with Angeles, and she and I are friends for life—so far. I loved the students I taught for two hours twice a week. I’m still in touch with several of them! They started writing the way they talked. Even some fervidly religious students began to look for ambivalence in themselves. Everyone got shaggier and more questioning. They felt good about being uncertain. I looked forward to our classes, and of course I miss everyone I’ve loved.
Thank you for this, Laurie: "if you do write, you know how long you have to wait to write something so the story you tell isn't really about you--it reflects a state of being."
i had never heard about this film! i wonder if they were inspired by the log lady in twin peaks? totally guffawed at this line: "It hammered its points, and I got to feel the movie was the tree stump, bent on badgering the audience to death." and not moving above the waist in ohio!—lol. i feel a little wistful at the idea we can't get inside something between ourselves and another person when in conflict, tho at the same time, it makes sense to me. i'm all for great parties and funnier jokes, tho, so if that's the consolation, there could be worse.