Think of it in sheltered hours: the ones in a seminar room, where maybe you’re eating small, sweet clementines around a table, and then the woman to your left says something about the sound of kitchen that wakes you up instantly, like the suddenness of refrigerator light in a dark room very late at night. The ones finishing a piece for workshop alone at your desk, or in the wobbling fluorescence of a diner, or sprawling on the rug in the front room of your apartment, when you pause, just for a second, and think: “God, it’s my job to get the music of this sentence right.” Also, the ones spent in hushed, grateful conversation with someone you’d otherwise never have met, whose particular shape in the passenger seat of your car is now among the most familiar, comforting sights in the world.
Think of it in early readers accumulated: The one you’ll e-mail for the next thirty years with your earliest drafts and subject headings like “This may be very bad.” The one you won’t speak to much after you graduate but whose manner of scanning the last sentences of stories to discern their rhythms you’ll copy for the rest of your life. Also, the one who, after some suffering, you learn to ignore entirely, who believes love poems can’t be political and thinks any line mentioning a bird, or outer space, is trite. He teaches you as much as anyone.
Think of it in books read: the ones you might not have found your way to on your own; the collection with the image of the goat’s head singing in a tree, which you’ll return to every winter for decades; even, and maybe especially, the books you didn’t love at first, the ones that kept you awake at night turning over frustrating passages in your head until they yielded meaning all at once, the way a door finally gives way. The ones that taught you a love poem can be political, and maybe even just is, always, inherently.
Think of it in questions practiced. Not just What’s this line break doing? Or Do we have enough interior access to this character? But also, Is a porch light audible when it clicks on at 5 AM? And How do I read generously and usefully beyond the limits of my own experience? What don’t I know? What do you need from me? And How can I tell you this so that you really hear it?
Think of it in gestures practiced, too: quickly finding the right page in a book you haven’t opened in months; uncurling your fists and slowing down when you don’t understand; doubling back when you think a room is empty, to find the thing you overlooked. Coming back again and again to the task you’re most afraid of, learning both the discipline and the solace of returning in the face of fear.
Think of it as an accumulation of beginnings: twelve sets of the first twenty pages, 271 first lines, the scaffolding of one first manuscript, the innumerable times you started to speak and then thought better of it, or times you were going to stay silent and then spoke up.
Think of it is as both where you are starting from and where you have arrived.
Molly Mccully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020) and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017). With Susannah Nevison, she is the coauthor of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). She directs the creative writing program at the University of Wyoming, and is the editor in chief of Image Journal.
