Deeper Into the Woods
Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping, which is more often these nights, I think back to the woods behind my family’s farm in Wisconsin and retrace the steps I took a thousand times when I was a kid in search of the unknown. I knew every path through those woods, and nearly every tree, certainly every tree that was good for climbing—one with a nook or a notch where I could sit in silence and watch the wildlife carry on around me. That was in the halcyon days, before the internet, when there were only four channels of television, and all of it paled in comparison to pretty much anything that could be found in what my brother and I called the back forty. (I’m not sure whether it was truly forty acres of wooded land or if that was just what we called it because we’d heard an old-timer at the feed store use the term.) Later, when I was a bit older and wanted a little more mystery, when I felt like testing my fear, I would set out at night and walk those same paths under a suddenly pitch-black canopy, my senses heightened, attuned to every sound. I walked as slowly as I could, reveling in the idea that the nocturnal creatures up ahead were turning their heads, straining their eyes to catch a glimpse of what was creeping through the woods behind them. To them, I hoped, I was just another animal, albeit a biped, going about my business. But for me the act of walking through the woods at night flipped a switch in my mind: I was a shadowy character in a new story unfolding in front of me, and I did not know the ending. (It was much later that I realized sometimes there is no excitement in the fear of the unknown; sometimes there are only questions in desperate need of answers—and that’s an entirely different kind of story.) So, yes, I was a weird little kid. But those nighttime walks gave me a sharpened sense of mystery, and discovery, rendering the familiar just a little unusual, strange. On those nights I saw what I knew through fresh eyes.
In this issue we explore how far outside our comfort zone we are willing to venture in search of new perspectives, new lessons for our craft, and new techniques, as we say at the start of our special section, “Monstrous & Thrilling & Passionate & Wild,” for our literary tool kit. In her whip-smart take on lessons to be learned from fairy tales, Aimee Bender writes about “a way to go deeper into the woods of the story.” Maybe that’s what that weird little kid was doing. If so, the path up ahead is still dark, quiet, shrouded in uncertainty. And so we write.
