This week I am attending the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Cleveland, Ohio. I was honored to be included on a sponsored panel by the Creative Writing Standing Group called Making Creative Writing Visible Through Our Work, Artist Statements, and Our Conversations, which, according to our abstract:
celebrates the dynamic life of creative writing within our field. Speakers will share artist statements and excerpts of their creative writing through what Felicia Rose Chavez describes as writing anyway. We make creative work visible, and create a space to talk about creative writing in our practices as writers, teachers, scholars, advocates, community members, and global citizens.
I thought it might be fun to share what I shared on this panel in the podcast feed. I’ll include the text below. Hope you enjoy!
Fifteen years ago, my favorite band broke up. It was during the semester of my first ever creative writing class as a student. This semester I am teaching Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town in my own introduction to creative writing class. Let me get sentimental: revisiting this text has been surprisingly emotional as I recall the formative wisdom of my poetry professor, Terry Hermsen, who assigned this book. “If you are not risking sentimentality,” Hugo tells us, “you are not close to your inner self.” The central conceit of the book is that in order to effectively write poetry, one must seek inspiration, not wait for it, which he illustrates using the metaphor of a “triggering town.” For me, that town is my inner self.
“The road has a memory and creases its perfections,” Hermsen writes in his poem “Credo.” One imagines traveling down the roads of their inner self to the triggering towns of their own writing lives.
Fifteen years ago, I would have been halted by another line from “Credo”: “the pen is a substitute / the page a conspirator.” I might have read Hermsen to be commenting on the recursive relationship between inspiration and craft, that we fight the blank page, waiting for our muses to guide our pens to write, like Hugo’s idea that “all truth must conform to music.” The tension comes from that triggering spark and bending reality to sound it out. The problem is, I’m not sure I agree with Hugo. I like the truth, to a fault, sometimes. In my M.F.A. program in California, I was two “bad” things proudly: a Midwesterner and a “confessional poet.” This doesn’t mean I make all music conform to truth; there’s a way to capture the music and the truth. To write honestly, or to write sentimentally, while letting the sonics of the poem take precedent over its reporting. Let me show you what I mean in a poem I wrote in 2021:
Assembling the stroller while listening to The White Stripes’
Get Behind Me Satan – an album that came out when I was a baby,
barely walking, brushing sweaty hair from my anxious forehead
now – marred with lines of worry and furrowed, glistening still
underneath a hat with an old logo for a new university, “this is it,”
I say to the dog, maybe to my wife in the other room, the glass
of bourbon shimmering in rhythm with the spinning fan, the record
spinning thirty-three and one third rotations. It rolls like a wheel,
I think, affixing four of them into the base of the bassinet praying
the “satisfying click” these frustrating instructions promise me
will keep my son secure while we are outside. My god, out
side is everything. I can paint and dust and wet-Swiffer
your room, little man, but I can do none of those things out there.
“Get behind me, Satan,” I might yell at some demon lurking
behind a shrub in the cul-de-sac you’ll inherit when you’re finally
born. “Get behind me, Dad,” you might murmur in the songs
you sing in coos and cries, while I push the two of us circling
the sun until something new, thrilling, really music to your ears
becomes old to you, building something of your own like I am now.
What changed? The shift from a wide-eyed creative writing major to tired-eyed creative writing professor? There are the practical matters of my continued training as a poet, the discipline that comes with having to write on the side of teaching. I started to realize writing isn’t the thing I do around the work, but rather, the work itself. Of the work, Hugo teaches: “think small. If you have a big mind, that will show itself … if the triggering subject is big (love, death, faith) rather than localized and finite, the mind tends to shrink.” “Assembling the stroller while listening to The White Stripes” is nakedly about what it is about and fixated on the smallness of the task and not the terror of becoming a parent, big minded in its smallness.
That’s the rule I write by: honesty in smallness. Of course, that’s not true at all, I don’t write by any rules. Hermsen emphasized this in class, pointing out Hugo by his own omission called his rules “arbitrary,” that the mission of Triggering Town is not “to teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write.” A constant and necessary reminder: “you have to be silly to write poems at all.”
The inherent silliness of rules and limitations appears in the creative ethos of The White Stripes, as described by guitar and frontman Jack White:
I would just work in the same box and think ‘god you know,’ one part of my brain says ‘I’m tired of trying to come up with things in this box,’ but I force myself to do it because I know something that can come out of it if I really work inside of it. Inspiration and work ethic. They ride right next to each other.
… Not every day in your life you’re gonna wake up and the clouds are going to part and the rays from heaven are gonna come down and you’re gonna write a song from it. Sometimes you just get in there and just force yourself to work and maybe something good will come out.
He goes on to describe the old equipment the band uses, the lack of rehearsal and set lists for their live performances, the distance between guitars and Meg White’s peppermint drum kit; Jack says “I always push it a little bit farther away so that I have to work harder … I’m constantly fighting all these tiny little things because all of those things build tension … to force ourselves to create.”
It isn’t magic. It is work. I try to teach my students this. I try to remind myself this on days I’m not so inspired that I have to go find it. Hugo recalls an anecdote about a professional golfer being lauded for landing a lucky shot out of the sand trap. The golfer replies, “I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.” Hugo expands:
If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck … Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.
I’ve come now to better understand that couplet of Hermsen’s: “The pen is a substitute / the page a conspirator.” We are co-conspirators with our blank pages, the pens are a substitute for the tension created in the life of living and writing and noticing and risking, maybe even plunging into sentimentality. Maybe, like Hugo, I make my own binary for writing: his is that truth must conform to music and never the other way around. Mine is this: it isn’t the magic that makes the work. It is the work that makes the magic.
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