Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at 13 aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. The first dispatch is below.
Dear Lore,
Fourth Monday of March, and I sit down to write you with comforts close. Bon Iver between my ears, fresh coffee at hand. And even here the imposter syndrome shows its face.
It greets me coming and going. On the front end, it questions my worthiness to correspond with a favorite writer—even one who is a dear friend, who accepts me as I am.
No doubt, when I add my name to the end of this letter, it will have me second-guessing. Did I really mean all those words? Can I possibly live up to them?
When doubts settle, I fight to remember what 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson said: “A man writes much better than he lives.” Much like God keeps me in his love, Samuel Johnson keeps me writing.
There’s a negative way to read Johnson’s little proverb. It resembles the way we talk about virtue signaling like it’s always a bad thing. We sigh in defeat, resigned to the gap between what we write and how we live. Perhaps every writer is reckless, scratching out promises they can’t possibly keep, a little too comfortable with creating images of themselves that barely resemble the real thing.
But I read Johnson and breathe easy. He reminds me all good writing is aspirational. It can’t help it; it can’t be anything else.
We know the gap exists. (How could we not?) And that’s why we keep writing. We write better than we live precisely because we’re not content—with only what we spy outside our windows, with what stares back from the mirror.
I want to be different. Not fitter, happier, more productive, like the words of that Radiohead song. But more merciful, faithful, consistent. And so I write ahead of myself. I write out what that version of me—as best as I can imagine him—believes, what he longs for, how he sees himself and God and others.
I crave a world with softer edges. One in which beauty dictates more than pragmatism. One in which mercy and justice kiss each other so hard we all get weak in the knees. A world where my son feels free to turn his face away from competing lies about manhood. A world where we stop wounding the soul and killing the body in the name of God.
And so I write the contours of this world into every sentence—the world as I want it to be. I write like somebody who isn’t sure he’ll ever arrive there; but he sees the destination off in the distance and wells up with longing for his true home.
I’ve been reading a collection of interviews with the late David Foster Wallace; it’s clear he viewed great fiction as a salve for loneliness. He aspired to keep people from feeling lonely, and to belong to something himself.
Some days this is all my writing aspires to. It certainly aspires to nothing less. I believe we belong to each other. That we aren’t created to be strangers. That your flourishing is mine, and vice versa. And so I keep flying my paper airplane into the void, praying someone sends it back with a few more words written across the wings.
Writing, for me, is the ultimate expression of identity with the worried father in Mark 9: “I believe; help my unbelief!” If I believe something better exists, even with mustard-seed faith, I have to write it down. And if I write it down, my belief will grow and not be stunted.
A piece of that vision scratches something in my brain. It sticks to my soul and I carry it with me, more capable of living it out—or at least not giving up on it.
We damn the virtue-signalers. But if my writing is anything, it’s a huge, flashing signal for all the virtues I long to manifest. This world isn’t graceful or tender enough. I’m too impatient, too selfish; in so many ways an impostor.
But if I keep holding the true and good before my own eyes—and anyone else who wishes to read and bear witness—maybe there’s hope I’ll round into my created form. Or at least come close.
This recognition—that all writing is aspirational—is one I think we share. It’s one of the reasons I love you, and am excited to trade letters with you. I have little interest in the company of writers who have it all figured out, who have nothing left to aspire to. They prescribe the world with shoulds, rather than describing the world with coulds. I don’t see myself in their words.
But I am forever loyal to writers who place their vision on paper as an act of faith, a bit of holy aspiration. You write like that. You see a truer version of yourself and write towards it. You make out the shape of another world, then fill in the details. Thank you for that. Keep writing better than you live, Lore. Your words are the evidence of things unseen.
I can’t wait to hear from you soon, to see what resonates. Let’s make these words to one another reflections of our present-tense hearts, but also gifts of hope and trust in what’s still coming.
Take care of yourself,
AD