Hopwood Lecture, delivered April 6, 2022 at the University of Michigan.
Here’s what I remember from my time in Ann Arbor. An apartment on the second floor of a pale blue house that shook from the noise during every football game, a Japanese maple that ruffled gently in Technicolor outside the window next to my desk. Two bedrooms, a feat I have only been able to match in subsequent years as recently as last September. Giant sour beers, and so much time to drink them; forgetting to drive out to the farm to pick up my CSA box and spending entire weeks subsisting on proudly mediocre burgers at the bar. The fireflies on the lawns in the summer, the glinting onslaught of dog walks in the polar vortex, the enervating sensation of walking to class in the darkness at 5 p.m. I remember that when I arrived I did not feel comfortable calling myself a writer. I remember the stunned sense that we were getting away with something that few people in the world ever get to experience, a freedom that I was aware I might not access again for years, or ever: we were being paid—more than that, actively encouraged—to write whatever we most deeply desired to write. The Helen Zell Writers’ Program provided such an abundance of time and space, along with a more-or-less total equality of financial and logistic support, that the air was filled with a blissful, borderline stultifying sense of equanimity. In workshop, everything was worthy of possible expansion, even and maybe especially when it was bad. The Hopwood Awards would come around once a year as a reminder of the looming presence of something like a market, a little taste of actual competition; we’d put our fake names on our packets, cover our eyes and ears until we heard who got lucky, and then go on gassing each other up about stories we would generally never revisit for a moment after graduation, an event I cannot remember because I was too hungover to attend.
More than anything I remember marinating in a sort of constant, low-level, anxious pleasure that came from being all potential and no actuality, from the total uncertainty about whether writing was a viable prospect at all. To write seriously, let alone write seriously for a living, was not the kind of thing that I’d known anyone—or even known of anyone—to be able to do, growing up. I had reached the point in my own life where I’d solidified a working instinct of what was worthwhile to me as a reader, but I was profoundly unsure about whether I would ever be able to pass that bar myself, to put something on the page that would reach through it. I was here to find that out. And what I learned was that it was possible but also that writing wasn’t a skill that more or less stuck once you’d gained it; it wasn’t like playing the drums or cooking spaghetti carbonara without a recipe. On the rare occasions that I was able to pin something satisfactory down in writing, what I took away was just a whisper of additional faith that doing this was possible, a faint muscle memory that made it easier to waste less time before trying again.
Ten years have passed since I came to Ann Arbor, and my life has been marked by such extraordinary good fortune that I have been brought back here to tell you something useful about writing. And still—as I am reminded on a daily basis—the actual practice is no less a mystery to me. When it comes to that baseline feeling of inadequacy, the sense that you don’t really know how to do the thing you want to do, or that you’re not even sure that the thing you’re trying for is the right thing at all—the sense that you’re dissatisfied, unrealized, fumbling forward on instinct in the dark—nothing has changed for me at all since 2012, and I don’t expect it to. What I dream of now is not mastery but simply the chance to keep trying, which seems like all that is worth hoping for, both in writing and in life.
**
Something worth mentioning is that I was in this program for fiction and that I have published almost no fiction and don’t have any clear intentions to try to do so anytime soon. I’ve mostly worked as an editor and a writer, in journalism and nonfiction, and in these fields, the value and transmissibility of a craft education in fiction has been obvious: you learn how to be vivid, how to underpin a piece with an emotional structure, how to be less unbearably dull. But aside from that, my attempts at writing fiction have—through two incidents you might squarely classify as loss and failure—taught me the most important things I know about what it is to write.
The first incident occurred in 2010, a year after I graduated from college. I was in the Peace Corps. I had considered applying to MFA programs right away, but when I asked one of my undergrad professors, the novelist Christopher Tilghman, about whether I should apply to MFAs to see if I could write anything interesting, he suggested that I should just try to write something interesting first. He was right, and I subsequently lowered my expectations even further: forget being interesting, I would simply try to write something that I could actually complete. I came up with a project: a novel that would take place over the course of a single summer day in Manhattan, about the complicated friendships between four girls in their early twenties. The working title of this novel was, no kidding, Girls. I spent lots of time in the Peace Corps working on this novel, on the laptop that provided ninety percent of my entertainment and company, while I failed, mostly, at the imperialist-feeling English teaching I had been sent there to do. For mostly unrelated reasons—specifically that we were not supposed to go anywhere without permission, due to a wave of genocidal conflict around the country—I was also increasingly in trouble with the administration, forbidden to even ask permission to leave the tiny mountainous settlement where I lived. One weekend I decided to disguise myself in the uniform of one of my high school students and head to the capital city to hang out with my friends. There, I went to an internet café, these being the only places that allowed for technology such as video chatting, and I Skyped my boyfriend, who lived in Texas and whose face I hadn’t seen in months. While I was talking to him, absorbed and giddy, wearing a white apron over a black dress and puffy bows on my ponytail, someone stole my laptop out of my bag, taking with them a solid one hundred twenty pages of the manuscript of my future masterpiece Girls.
This I, of course, experienced as total devastation, a signal from the world that the novel wasn’t worth completing—in hindsight this is correct—and also possibly a sign that I should stop writing altogether. I flopped around tearfully for a few days, mute and despondent. And then my friend Akash, in what I still think of as the greatest act of love I have ever been party to, offered to lend me his laptop, sending his own sole source of entertainment, work, and communication indefinitely to a village that was a fifteen-hour series of bus rides away. I tried to refuse the gift, telling him that it was no use, I’d already lost the novel. But he told me, you’re only happy when you’re writing, and you’ll be sad until you start writing again, because that’s what you really want to do. This was a true statement that I would not have arrived at on my own, and it changed my understanding of both my own relationship to writing and the larger sense of possibility that a clearly perceived narrative could offer to the person whom it was for.
The second incident took place in 2016 but was rooted in Ann Arbor. I had a particular book I was trying to write here, which fell in that dreaded category, the “novel-in-stories.” The working title was The Earth Is a Small Place for Fugitives, a proverb, floridly translated for my own ends, from Kyrgyzstan, the country where I had been in the Peace Corps and where most of the novel was set. I’d gotten an agent, who’s still my agent, during my time here, off a partial draft of it, and I finished the program determined—as most people are, at some point—to publish the thing I’d spent so much time on in the MFA. I kept working on the manuscript for another two years, around my day job as an editor in online media—a path that I had stumbled into during my second year here, in part because I was temperamentally unable to bear the luxury of having free time. I went through dozens of drafts, and then finally, after five years of working on the book, I gave it up. All the earnest, fervent plot diagrams, the nights staying up late, the hundreds of thousands of words, all discarded, never to be looked at again. The book just wasn’t good enough; there were serious problems with it, one of which being the basic premise of the entire project and another that I was unable to transcend the hurdle of serious appropriation with the necessary level of extraordinary skill.
I was sad about this but not as sad as I’d expected to be, and as time has passed, I now understand the time I spent on that novel as the most truly valuable writing experience of my life. It was where I learned that the only real reward of writing is that of construction. That you can never guarantee that anyone will read your work, or that they will like it. All you have is your ability to move yourself from one place to another, to surprise yourself, to translate an image or thought or possibility that before existed only in your mind. The work is not a means to publication. The work is the end. I began to see that the primary pleasure in writing would always be internal and self-generated. Many things about this avocation will fail and disappoint you, but that fundamental ability—to seek something alone, and sometimes find it—will be there, possible, waiting for you every time.
**
I can feel a version of myself in the audience right now, thinking, “What’s the point of listening to what anyone says about writing?” I’m unable to argue with her; I essentially agree. Anything worthwhile that any of us is capable of will be by definition singular. The fact teeters on some variable syntax between blessing and curse: on a good day, only you are capable of writing the things you can write; on a bad day, you are only capable of writing the things you can write.
What makes this more daunting is that anything worth doing is almost necessarily beyond your current understanding of what you’re able to do. Writing is predicated, I think, on the cultivation of negative capability, as it was defined by John Keats: the capacity, as he put it, to dwell in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” Getting anywhere involves sustained engagement with the unknown and unarticulated—it involves seeing the blank page and all its attendant emotions of inadequacy not as things to be eradicated as pleasingly, purposefully, and efficiently as possible, but rather as the place where we make our daily home.
This is fine enough in theory; it’s harder when you have, say, a deadline, when you have to turn in twelve to fifteen pages for workshop on Tuesday, when you engage at all with the fact that we live in a world of brute-force instrumentalization, where our attention, our desires, our interests, our relationships, our curiosity, our bodies, our time, our abilities are all converted into maximum economic value by companies more powerful than any nation-state. The work we want to do often does not feel possible in the moment in front of us; what we have to do, then, is locate and remain in the place that will allow us to understand when that work does become possible and how it will be done. We have to continually try our best to not let the depth and force of our instincts be dulled off by the steady procession of calamity or sanded away by pleasureless stimulation; we have to read the things that wreck us, and seek the places that feel terrifying and unwieldy, and make ourselves at home in dissatisfaction, and stay as long as we can.
I’m confronting here, again, the fact that all of my thoughts about the profoundly internal act of writing are, essentially, my thoughts about the necessarily external act of living. I do believe that we always end up writing as the people we are. In fact, I think the avoidance of this more-or-less reality is the source of a lot of mistaken effort in our writing lives; even subconsciously, we try to be a kind of writer that we already recognize as worthy or successful, instead of trying to be the only writer we can be. Often, of course, we might wish that latter person was different. I wish that I could really write fiction; I wish I had some sort of pure, glaring intellect; I wish I had ways of perceiving things other than physically experiencing them; I wish that I didn’t need to write about something to be able to think about it at all. But there is no hiding, in writing, from the essential core of who you are.
At the same time, through writing, we access a kind of precious malleability. Through putting ourselves in constant dialogue with whatever we can’t yet see, we practice resisting fixity, remaining open and hopeful. Writing helps me model for myself a way of being that I can then catch up to; it’s taught me to live within a dialectical process, where what is always is in tension with what is desired, what could be. If I can see, in front of me, what it looks like when I am devoted, or perceptive, or sharper, or forgiving, or truly honest, then I know it’s possible, and I can try to do it again. If I can stay open to uncertainty in my work, amid continual disappointment, then I can do that in life, too, with regard to the things that really matter, the structures that contain everything else we could ever think or talk about: climate, racism, misogyny, capitalism, violence. Writing has taught me how to inhabit dissatisfaction while moving closer to the unseen and longed for, one moment, one letter, one hour at a time.
This is above all what’s incumbent on us as writers and as people: to know that there is more in us and the people around us than what has been recognized or suggested. To carve out possibility by denying the inevitability of what’s given. To be aware of and attuned to what might be considered marginal, irrelevant, inconvenient, or impossible, in our environments and our communities and work structures as well as our minds. For one, this is necessary in order to create conditions in which people are able to contribute to the world in the ways they’re meant to—in which writing, or any other economically undervalued endeavor, could be sustainable and possible and dignified work; in which the character of a person’s life would not be dependent on its economic value on an unjust and exclusionary market; in which the jaws of precarity would not be poised to clamp down on any attempt to create what does not already exist.
I fail constantly in my attempts to live in accordance with negative capability, but the attempts have changed me, and in writing and otherwise, they have led somewhere imperfect but worthwhile, and they continue to. So back to what I was saying at the beginning. If any of you are living in that sense of discontent and frustration, of your inability to transcend the given, to get right to the thing you’re after, to conjure it, to slash into it, to invent it from the void, don’t try to escape that conflict. This continual reevaluation—this combination of generosity and relentlessness, or, as Gramsci famously put it, the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will—is required of us if we’re ever going to achieve newness, brilliance, justice, restoration in any form. Advice for writing is really advice about making space for this.
**
I’m going to conclude, despite everything I’ve been saying, with an attempt to dispense some advice—not about writing itself, because we are all on our own in that regard, but around it.
First, most obviously, but it bears reiterating: read as closely, widely, generously, and hungrily as you can, forever. This gets harder after you leave a community where constant reading is a standard practice and where you are often required to go past your immediate interests in terms of genre, discipline, nationality, and style. Dissatisfaction with your output is often stagnation with your input; when I’m trying to think about something, for instance, I try to read about it across as many disciplines and historical periods as I can, and it always helps.
In a more practical sense: in the spirit of everything being potential material, get an accountant and write off everything you possibly can. Protect some completely uninterrupted writing time, even if it’s just a weekend a month, a week twice a year. In the absence of rare and precious gifts like a few years in a fully funded MFA program, or six weeks at a cushy writers’ retreat in New England, see if you can fabricate similar conditions for yourself in miniature, on the cheap: I wrote most of Trick Mirror on solo weekend trips I took to upstate New York, via a Metro-North ticket and a rented Airbnb above a stranger’s garage. Speaking of New York, you absolutely don’t have to live there, and it is so expensive that I would actively advise against it if your primary goal is to make as much space in your day as possible to write.
Never forget to consider, when you’re feeling unfortunate for any reason, the basically limitless number of jobs that are harder than writing and much more important to the running of this world: loading warehouse pallets or cleaning bathrooms or taking care of screaming toddlers. Then also never forget the writing that you personally have found shatteringly important—that it was written around day jobs and night jobs and childcare and family emergencies and loads of laundry and dishes too. Don’t be disappointed in yourself when you need to do work you don’t like in order to pay for your writing time—there are almost no writers in the world who are able to avoid this, and you glean specific, useful existential knowledge in every kind of work. There will never be a perfect time to write anything, which means you might as well start trying, but also the timeline of your ego is not the timeline of your actual possibility. God willing, you have longer than you think, you have longer than this month, or year, or decade to get it right.
Don’t be afraid either to give up on projects or to persist with them, when either choice goes against inertia. Try to park downhill—to leave yourself in a better spot every day than you started, even if you’ve only moved half an inch, and maybe backward. Read when you can’t write; go out and do something when you can’t do either. You learn more about the world and people’s interior lives by doing almost anything else than sitting in a room by yourself—however, sitting in a room by yourself is the only way you will actually get words on a page. Understand that the relationships you form with your peers—people at similar stages in their writing life, with similar outlooks on their work—are the only ones that really matter. In other words, don’t look for someone with more power to confer some of that power on you; look for friends whom you can support. Generally, when you’re looking to receive something from the writing world, the most rewarding thing to do is figure out if and how you can give that thing to someone else.
It’s extraordinary that all of us have ended up here at this particular moment. It is such a gift that in a time of constantly escalating crisis we have been given the instruction to do the things that the world so often forecloses, to connect, to imagine, to see beyond, to see clearly. I hope you all continue to do so for as long as possible, with the knowledge that even if the results are delayed or unexpected or intangible, the project is profoundly worth your while.
To read the rest of the issue, you can purchase the Winter 2023 issue here.
