ON WRITING ABOUT WRITING, SPACE BETWEEN PEOPLE, AND THE MANY SIDES OF WORDS
Sunday September 6 – Thursday September 10 2020
Dear Sarah,
It was funny to see you just now here in Grand Ledge. It was delightful, and at the same time I find that I want more! I’m greedy for regular human relationships, not just snippets here and there. I’m thinking about your reminiscences of my visit to Iowa earlier in the year, when I was snowed in with you and your family, and we played games and watched movies and just spent time together. Thinking about this made me understand another of the impacts of pandemic living — the coronavirus has taken away not just our time with our friends and family, but also the spontaneity of our relations, the simplicity of moving from outside to inside with ease, spending time together, and then a little more time. It was nice to see you in real life and to feel your presence even as the sun went down and we existed as voices around the fire in the dark.
I puzzled over what I was writing last week about space and distance while I was writing it, and I hadn’t entirely fleshed out my thoughts as I put them into words for my letter to you. Over the past week I’ve been thinking on it further. One needs distance in order to observe, but to be “distant” (this was where my mind went, not what you said in your letter) sounds negative — to be separate, far enough away to observe, instead of being right there in the situation. Our letters are a positive form of space, of distance. We put down our words to each other each week but in our responses we can be choosy; every word does not demand an immediate response; we can each respond to the elements that strike our fancy or branch out in other directions. It is important for closeness to be balanced with space; to allow space between people does not mean only space, it means some space. A balance is required in all things.
I’m still mulling this over, the two sides of every coin, or the balances or imbalances on either side of every pivot point. For every one side of a coin there is its flip side; for every fulcrum point there is a weight on one side and a lift on the other (barring the occasional moment of perfect balance). When I think about space and distance in my own life, growing up, I think about how a sort of "unconventional" childhood without certain kinds of attention and expectation can be a boon to a child becoming an adult, at the same time as it can be confusing to navigate in its lack of structure. I am often grateful for the fact that my childhood was not shaped or weighted in certain ways; for example, there was no distinctive education in religion even though both of my parents came from Catholic families. There were no particular pressures to enter a certain kind of profession, as I know there can be in other families; the absence of that kind of pressure along the way has felt both freeing and confounding — at times I wished someone would have more clearly told me what to do, pointed to a path to tread. If someone else points you down a path, you can either walk that path or push against the person who led you there; I find that since I have largely directed my own path I am mostly pushing against myself along the way.
I am intrigued by the fact that when you and I see each other in person (granted, a rarity these days!) we don’t necessarily talk about the letters. The letters are like a walk and talk, voices and words exchanged back and forth without needing to look each other in the eyes; like a talk in the dark.
I brought a backpack full of books on this trip with me, a form of insurance, readiness for any possible interest, any moment of quiet that might want to be filled. I’ve been focused on John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, which I find to be soothing in the evenings as I read before bed. What is such a comfort about it? I like writer’s books about writing (as I know you do, too!); they are some of the texts in which I feel most comfortable, feel like I am finding, have found, my people. It’s hard in this world to find one’s people, and sometimes when you think you’ve gotten close, you can feel that finding your way into a group of people defined by some common interest still doesn’t mean that you will feel like you belong. And yet, when I read writer’s books on writing they resonate, even through different voices and at different times in my life. It is a comfort to feel at home with the particular difficulties of writing, and the other people who confront those difficulties every day. I have gone to writer's gatherings and not always felt that writers were my people, but writers writing about writing do feel like my people!
I am reading back over your letter of last week and I am excited about your words: Slowly but surely, I am working to build my muscle for working incrementally, especially when it comes to thinking and writing. The more we write these letters, the more weeks we move through, the more I understand the power of incremental work and how it is an integral part of the writing process. I have thought about the fact that work (our jobs, our paid work) is not so often incremental in itself, built of incremental moves that add up over time; skill in one’s work is incremental and built over time, but individual projects often roll out on shorter timelines, deadlines push work through and out the door; the phrase perfect is the enemy of done has made its way into our work lives, urging us to complete ever more things, getting them done to some acceptable standard so we can clear the desktop for the next thing that we’ll finish acceptably and move on from. It’s fine in a certain kind of work, and also in certain kinds of writing, but it can be a kind of luxury to spend as much time as one wants and needs to spend on projects, and this is where the muscle for working incrementally comes into play, the long stretching and contracting of the muscle, the gentle push and pull of it like the beating of a heart, the in and out of breathing.
I wrote in week 36 of our letters, Over the last handful of years I’ve been growing and rebuilding my writing muscles, the writing habit. It just takes time. I feel that I am a different me now than when I first wrote those words, because of our letters and because of the time that has passed. It just takes time.
In Draft No. 4 John McPhee writes of his relationship with William Shawn, who was the editor of The New Yorker for many years. He writes:
Mr. Shawn understood the disjunct kinship of creative work — every kind of creative work — and time. The most concise summation of it I’ve ever encountered was his response to a question I asked him just before we closed my first New Yorker profile and he sent it off to press. After all those one-on-one sessions discussing back-door plays and the role of the left-handed comma in the architectonics of basketball — while The New Yorker magazine hurtled toward its deadlines — I finally said in wonderment, “How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?”
He said, “It takes as long as it takes.”
What a relief and a satisfaction to see those words on the page, to hear their echoes reverberate in my head.
I'm still on vacation and my head is here and there, so I'm going to close on that note, and look forward to reading your words! After seeing you this week, I hope I'll see you again soon!
Your friend,
Eva
September 10-11, 2020,
Dear Eva,
Last night I woke up from my slumber with a dry mouth and sniffly nose, and I spent a bit of time laying in a fitful half-awake state fretting that I might be getting sick. Coming off of our road trip to Michigan and then Simon starting back to in-person preschool, I have had a mild but steady undercurrent of dread/fear that one of us will come down with covid-19. The mild undercurrent turned moderate to high in the middle of the night, and I suddenly was acutely aware of how lucky I had been hours earlier when I felt healthy and happy and had spent my evening thinking and writing. The good news is I woke up this morning feeling completely fine; I think the whole ordeal may have been more of a dream about being sick. Anxiety aside, it was a good reminder to fully appreciate the days when the body feels strong and healthy.
We had such a nice time in Michigan. Everyone seemed so relaxed and so pleased to be enjoying some time together at long last. Though it was brief, it was lovely to see you and sit by the raging campfire for a chat. I will note that I found it fascinating to be with you with M, and me with Bill. Nearly all of our regular interactions are one-on-one, or at least partner-less. It was fun and interesting to be around you in a different context, with the ones we love. It appears, for example, that both of our partners are more chatty than we are in group settings. Context-shifting changes everything, including ourselves!
It was delightful to sit in a new context for a long weekend, and it is delightful now to be back at home, settling into our new routine with school in full force for both kids. One of Jonah’s small assignments this week in this first week of online third grade was to write out his list of favorite things. For “favorite place” he wrote, home. Seeing this made me feel warm inside. I love that we all got excited to journey off to visit family and friends, and I love that we still view our cozy home as the most special place of all.
I was looking back at your letter from last week, and then pondering your thoughts on framing. It occurs to me that there is a way in which the act of framing something is an act of calling a thing a thing, marking its edges. The establishment of contours is a version of saying what something is about. Like you, I am a bit resistant to people like my dermatologist asking what these letters are about, but I wonder if it is best to try my hand at putting a frame over the letters? It is always painful to try to wrap significant somethings into flimsy old words, but I am trying to do better at giving it a go. Here is my belated attempt, dear dermatologist: these letters are a written manifestation of our particularly reflective, philosophical friendship. They are about whatever is on our minds and in our lives every week when the time comes to put proverbial pen to paper. This does not do our poor letters justice, but it is just one frame among an infinite array!
A few weeks ago we went back and forth about the merits of synthesis—a heated debate here at rogshinch.com. (Sidenote: have you ever tried saying RogShinch out loud? I mentioned it to some coworkers recently and I realized just how fun it is for the mouth to pronounce!) I have been thinking a lot about distillation and synthesis lately as I embark on my new project at work around our organizational strategy. I have been tasked to co-lead the process of gathering input from stakeholders, distilling all of the contributions, and then eventually penning the new strategy. I am only a couple of weeks into this project, but I have already been captivated by the process of taking the words of others and extracting the essence. I am so intrigued by what is lost when we put ideas into different words, and what is gained by seeing ideas take on new forms. Your reaction to my description of you as someone who leaves space feels like a good example. On the one hand, you took it somewhere I did not intend to go (i.e. as being distant), but on the other, your interpretation illuminates a truth that comes from looking at the same thing from a different angle (as you said, space is distance by another name). The space between and around words is full, even when we do not see it, even when we couldn’t see it because what fills it comes from the biases, experiences, and feelings of others. It makes me wonder how much going through any distillation and synthesis process makes us realize what we really meant versus how much it pushes us into corners we did not mean to go. Human communication is ever-complicated!
I think I’ll end on that dizzying note, as this Friday winds down. (I failed to wrap up this letter on Thursday evening. That’s a shocker!) I am hoping you have had a lovely week in Michigan and are embarking on a safe trip home tomorrow. Or perhaps you left today? I cannot recall the exact timing. In any case, safe travels to you and enjoy your weekend, wherever you spend it!
I look forward to hearing what is on your mind. Your letter awaits in my inbox. Wait no more, little letter, I’m coming for you!
Your friend,
Sarah