Daily Nourishment for November 28, 2024: Writerly Desires and More with Guidance from Lauren Winner
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 60 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
A Note from Lauren: This week's invitations will each consider a writer or visual artist with a late November birthday. Today is the birthday of Rita Mae Brown (1944), poet, novelist. Her books include pathbreaking examinations of lesbian love; memoir; cozy mystery novels featuring a variety of cats, horses, corgis; and historical fiction about, e.g., Dolley Madison.
Pause.
On the page (I’ve no idea what she’s like in the flesh), Brown is brassy and spiky and bold; direct. She isn’t contemplative, but something about her directness also suggests a quietness at her core - there’s no dissipation of energy, no distraction.
Here’s a short reflection about Brown’s writerly ambitions. Read it and let it energize you.
“Time had not teased me. I thought eternity was mine in which to live and in which to write. Thinking myself amazingly intelligent, I saw no reason to hide my light under a bushel basket. My youthful poetry paraded my stuff. I imitated Horace shamelessly; he still remains one of my favorite poets in the original Latin but I have grown up enough not to imitate him. Who could?….Anyway, as I learned more and more about language and literature I also learned more and more about my own limitations. I wanted to write a perfect poem. I was soon humbled and wanted to write a great poem. I eventually became realistic: I wanted to write a good poem.”
What writerly desire of your own do you find quickened by Brown’s reflection on her literary ambitions? Has learning about a limitation ever usefully clarified and focused your desire?
Prompt.
The first book I ever read about the craft and the writing life was Brown’s Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual (1988).
One topic Brown addresses is embodiment. Writing is an embodied act, so part of writing well is caring for your body: “You need to eat properly and great enough sleep. If you’re working at an outside job to support yourself while writing, something’s got to give. Don’t let it be sleep.” (It’s your social life you’ll probably need to sacrifice, she goes on to say.) “The beginning of all literature,” she writes, is “…your body.”
Brown also addresses politics. “Some writers maintain that they are apolitical. A worm is apolitical; human beings are not. If you live in a political system and do not seek to make it better you are still a product of that system. Your lack of involvement is a political statement. All Art reason a political foundation but it need not concern itself with politics.” She then teases out the political basis of The Iliad and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. People read those books still today with deep pleasure, she writes, because literature “lives…if it is morally true.”
If you wish, pause to think for a moment about either the ways your writing life is embodied, or the political foundations of your writing.
Practice.
An exercise from Starting from Scratch:
How many words can you come up with for death? Write them down, and don’t read on til you’ve exhausted your stock.
Now, how many words can you come up with for love? Again, write them down, and don’t read on til you’ve exhausted your stock.
Brown reflects on the exercise thus: “Passed away, crossed over, bit the dust…gave up the ghost….[In turn, love:] Admiration, adoration, attachment, devotion, infatuation, passion, tenderness, yearning….While there are many love terms none of them quite seems as powerful or as pure as the word love [and] none of the euphemisms for death are as powerful as the word death. If anything, these counter terms rob the event of its shattering power. Perhaps we are trying to slide away from love and death. What does this tell you? How deeply engrained in our language is the fear of emotional life.”
How deeply engrained in our language is the fear of emotional life! This is quite a claim; and one worth pondering.
Brown continues: “A Russian speaker can indicate to a listener the nature of his/her relationship with, say, Mary. By altering Mary to Marushka or Marushkaya or Marushinka, or whatever, he tells you if he is a friend, a family member, a lover, and so on….[By contrast,] English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships.”
(If you wish, take that last declaration as a challenge: write for another seven or eight minutes, trying to describe “emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships” as well as you possibly can.)
Want More?
Brown’s poem “Sappho’s Reply” (usefully contextualized by a short piece in Ms.)
Thirteen writers and artists on how Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle influenced them
Especially wonderful is art historian Jonathan Katz’s recollection: “Amid the tortured coming out novels, the earnest LGBT political allegories and the semi-erotic, semi-closeted bildungsroman of my youth, Rubyfruit Jungle was much more than a breath of fresh air — it was an eminently queer tornado of a book. Ribald, joyous, and bawdy, the protagonist Molly didn’t wrestle with her sexuality, never apologized, and gleefully rejected anything that didn’t please her. Her story, for all the struggles it contained, was about something we hadn’t yet even named: queer joy.”
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Lauren Winner. Lauren Winner is a writer, professor, Episcopal Priest, & spiritual director.
Read Lauren’s full bio here.
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