Outside, Looking In
Hi, friends.
I hope you are well. There are some weeks, like this one, where it doesn’t feel as though I have any profound advice to give. It’s not because anything intense or difficult has transpired. Quite the opposite. Life is just ticking on pleasantly. Spring is springing. The weather is conjuring up different shapes of possibility. It’s a way of life you hope for as a person. A kind of life that makes writing possible, just getting those words down unceremoniously, making decisions you’ve put off for a while. But it’s not the kind of life to write about. In our work, things need to happen to throw our characters off balance. Sometimes that happens to us. Sometimes it doesn’t. There is an ebb and flow to all things.
Story.
I’ve got two pieces today that I think pair nicely with one another. Samantha Hunt’s new essay Ghosts at the Liquor Store and Kim Magowan’s flash piece Three Sprigs.
Craft tidbits.
There are so many good books out in the world and so many writers to become enamored with. Samantha Hunt has become one of those for me. I read two of her books in the last year and was sorry that I had not read them sooner. If you’ve spent time around here, you know that I love a good haunting and her writing is full of ghosts - literal and figurative. Here she’s using drawing parallels between ghosts and her father’s alcoholism. Her daughter mistakenly believes the “Spirit Shoppe” is a place to buy ghosts.
Ghosts are exactly what we are buying at the liquor store.
She is haunted by different events in her childhood. And supposes her father is haunted himself.
Maybe he was drinking his way back to Chuckie, who died at eight years old, leaving my dad an only child in a quiet and controlled household.
It’s a pretty straightforward essay but she weaves deftly between the imagery of the earth (beginning with the ditch outside her house that ate the cars of so many drunken guests) and the sea. The sea is both a literal and threatening force, the night they get stuck miles for shore, unable to even discern which direction land was.
And it’s metaphorical.
my dad was swimming in the spirits because he was looking for sunken treasure, or at least looking for something buoyant enough to hold on to, a word or sentence in the sea of his many dead.
And then she connects the idea of ghosts to the land, to the threat of a changing climate.
If we lived closer to our dead, if we imagined our planet populated by our dearly departed, we would take care of the land… [because] everywhere we walk is a cemetery. Everywhere is sacred.
How does this work? Some insight from Sequoia Nagamatsu via an AWP panel on ghost stories:
Ghosts are a lens to unpack matters of the living. A vehicle for unpacking questions of mortality, memory, anxieties that keep us up at night in our every day lives. Ghost stories are possibility spaces.
I was first introduced to Magowan’s piece in a Hermit Crab class. The form is the focus here. The three sections operate on three different levels. In the first, we get instructions on how to keep certain evasive plants from wrecking havoc in the garden. We don’t yet know the reason for these instructions. Keep your eye on the mint. It’s important here.
In the second section, we get the first person account from thirteen year old girl telling us about the summer her life changed:
Even at age thirteen, I was puzzled why my mother did not perceive Margaret as a threat.
That summer, 2006, I didn’t get along with my mother, who was trying to transform me into a daughter who would reflect well upon her.
The daughter is able to see things that the mother does not. Or perhaps the mother sees everything very clearly. Perhaps this is the root of the friction between mother and daughter. An attempt to control what she can, who she can.
The daughter watches Margaret and her father while the mother tries to keep the mint contained.
Section three becomes more distant. Cocktail recipes, including the Homewrecker, Bitter Tears, and The Stepmother. Useful, if in fact your garden is also overrun with mint.
Both of these pieces include the point of view of children looking at the messy lives of their parents. The way their actions ripple out and affect those around them. And in both cases, the threat, the enemy is viewed from outside the family.
Sparks.
Imagine you could buy a ghost at the spirit shoppe. What kind do they stock? What kind would you buy?
Or write a little flash with three sections. Let there be one connector (like the mint) above as an extended metaphor.
Revision. Are your characters sufficiently haunted? Sure they can be haunted by literal ghosts. Or ghosts from their past. But they should also be haunted by things of their own doing - choices they’ve made, things they’ve said or done.
Other tidbits.
If you, like me, kind of forgot that movies were a thing. Lit Hub has a roundup of Oscar nominated films to get you caught up. (I hereby promise to do better next year.)
I meant to share this essay by Rebecca Makkai last time pondering the question of how to make art while the world is on fire. (Published originally in 2018, unfortunately, still relevant for the foreseeable future.)
That’s all I have for now scribblers. Wishing you a blissful writing day. Pencils up~
Marsha