The Foundation: 014
Between belief and faith
My time in Arkansas is ending. I went to a Razorbacks basketball game Friday night, and tailgated before the football game against Auburn on Saturday. I sat alone for two hours Sunday and watched the sunset from the top of Mount Sequoyah, and again on Tuesday. This last week, two classes and two writing workshops and an event tonight then the drive home tomorrow. I’m starting a new job Monday. A little worried about reentry, and back to journalism, but excited.
I’ve been writing the last couple months, while I’m here. I wrote one essay I wanted to share but I think that window of vulnerability closed. It feels done though. I wrote another after a vigil for a homicide victim and I’m not sure there’s a home for that either. Both are true to me but they don’t slot well into geography-based magazines or journals with niche interests. I’m not sure I could find a place to publish either, and I haven’t figured out the literary landscape though I’ve learned that some publications can take months, or more, to evaluate writing. It makes me uneasy to wait that long for an answer. The trade-off is that publishing is good politics and good business if your business is writing. So, I’m lost on this point. I haven’t figured this out yet.
In the writing workshop we read “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion. I first encountered this essay in a workshop five years ago. I made friends writing and sharing in that group. We were all on break from life and a few of us were stuck on violence. I remember not appreciating this essay the way our instructor did, and I’ve reread it a few times since and each feels a discovery. Melancholic and weightless at the same time.
If the students go further into a writing career they’re likely to encounter this essay again, and a couple already read Didion in high school or found her because artists cite her as inspiration. The essay is fun to dissect on craft alone, but I like this because the 18- and 20- year-olds who chanced this workshop, who arrived knowing of some call to write but not sure yet of its place in their life, can see a young person working through early adult stress, see her find precise on place, on direction, on career, on love. Themes that don’t change over time even if the shape over generations does.
I was fortunate for the workshop five years ago, for the introduction to essays and having my hand held through the process. The writing prompts from that class turned into other essays never published but that I’m better for. Settling on a draft felt like settling on an understanding of what felt traumatic to me, that still feels so, and that now helps me articulate the importance of violence coverage.
We talked about this idea in class: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
I realized, being taught this essay and then by others reading my work, that writing is a how I manage stress. I write to to understand what I can’t avoid, and at that point clear in its meaning or certain of its ambiguity at least, whatever challenges or consumes is no longer something to fear, and that’s progress, so sharing isn’t an act of being vulnerable as much as it would be sharing with a partner, a relative, or a friend before I could fully understand. (How’s your day? How’s work? How’re the kids?) And I knew that on some level, from writing essays about work. But each time I write it reinforces itself as a coping mechanism, as a crutch, or something more necessary. It’s protective.
When I started covering violence I had already settled into this: I wrote what I saw, and I thought that exactly what I should be doing, to describe plainly. So when I happened into things that scared me, or hurt, and even before I knew I felt anything and I just stood there taking it all in, I could write.
I did a version of that all my life, what I did during the Tribune years. I was quiet and introverted and hid from everything before I learned how to write more than one sentence at a time in high school. I was failing then, and my English teacher said I would pass if I wrote, so. I wrote about home, family, about jobs, about things that upset me, about music because I lived in headphones. About a photo of a man steering the skeleton of his bus with blood spattered across the inside, result of a bombing. Then writing became a coping mechanism, an outlet for sustained attention to surroundings. A way of letting things go, who knows what anything meant.
This was my means of escape as a 17-year-old. Some of it was childish, but I didn’t know that then. And some of it was real; I know that now. Some I’m still trying to figure out, the chaotic first fifteen, twenty years. In all cases, I couldn’t assess until later. I know this isn’t unique. Life settled some when I left college, and then I didn’t have to think about the years I wrote about when I was learning to write. But it became habit, and I wasn’t correct as a person if I wasn’t writing. The Tribune years were just an extension of learning to deal with the stress of violence and chaos elsewhere before; new but not different.
The writing assignments for the students are simple and only meant to produce effort: describe a holiday gathering, describe a person, describe a childhood obsession. The goal is to think, to explore. And in the workshops, as a student and now as an instructor: nobody describes the uneventful holiday, nobody describes a stranger. The students have used these as an opportunity to describe difficult circumstances they’re trying to settle. I’m proud of them trusting each other enough to reveal a little of themselves through their work. (“Let me tell you what I mean.”)
Violence work, for me, remains disorienting and isolating. The more I cover the more vexing it feels, and I think that’s part of how I know it’s what I should be doing. Writing is how I manage that. It’s movement toward understanding. It’s my first way of thinking through anything difficult. This feels a good summary, and probably why so many revere the Didion essays:
“By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”
“This Photograph Demands an Answer”
“This photograph has not been published by a mainstream news organization, so far as I can tell. Because of its graphic nature, The Times has decided not to publish it in full; this column is accompanied by a cropped version of the image. The full image can be seen here. It is a rare thing for mainstream news organizations to publish graphic images of dead or wounded children. Rightly so. There is nothing quite so devastating as the image of a child whose life has been snuffed out by senseless violence. The longstanding norms are to show such images sparingly, if at all.”
The forever issue, of whether to publish. I believe in covering the consequences of violence, maybe more than any other journalistic instinct. On this photo I’m not sure, but I appreciate of this author’s reflection here:
“And in a long reporting career that has taken me to many war zones, I have seen more than my share of death in real life. I’ve gone to these places because I believe deeply in bearing witness to all facets of the human experience, including war and suffering. One of the hardest parts of journalism is witnessing horror and then trying, in words, sound and image, to convey that pain to the wider world. Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen.”
Reading:
The Shining
Listening: