Day 22

Day 22 – In one of the Magic Lesson’s podcasts, Elizabeth Gilbert has a conversation with a woman who wants to tell a story, through photos paired with text, about her brother. The woman has been taking photos of her brother for a while, documenting his struggle with PTSD and drug addiction. The bigger project of organizing the raw materials daunts her. She can’t get started.

There is a moment when Gilbert asks her why she started this project, how has it changed her life.

The woman takes a minute to compose herself and, in a deeper tone of equal amounts shame and relief, she says, “it helped me stop judging him.”

I had paused the podcast for a minute. The question prompted me to consider this about my own creative project, a collection of stories/personal essays. More than two years ago I started writing them, but over that time, they’ve changed. Their texture is different. Earlier ones don’t have the empathy and strength of voice more recent ones do.Of course, the more I write, the writing itself improves, but there is something else at work. Every new day informs the past. Until recently, I didn’t quite understand what they meant.

Their function has changed. I want to see something within my experience that will serve others, the way others do for me. When I decided to move, it was so clear that the stuckness my essays were effected by, my inability or the slow-going it took to get them up the hill to their peak, is because the were being written from a place in the past. Literally, I was writing them in the office that had been by husband’s. My story had come full circle, but not transcendent. In other words, in order for my stories to have that kind of movement, my own story needed to actually move.

In the interview Hemingway gave the Paris Review (Spring, 1958 issue),  I think he puts it best:

INTERVIEWER

Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

HEMINGWAY

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Also, this, my essays did begin to be true until I stopped judging the events and the self (the various iterations of the selves I’ve been) that appeared in them. It cannot be “truer than anything true and alive” if you wish it dead, if you wish parts of yourself were not what they are.

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