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 fifth dispatch is below.
Lore,
By now we’ve established that I bear the blame for your last letter. I can’t remember if I’ve told you this, but the name of my Fathom column—The (Dis)content—is born of serious discomfort with the term “content creator.”
As someone who has worked as a writer and editor for more than a decade, I shudder at the sound those two words make together. It’s as if we just churn out a product, as if we follow a manual—insert Sentence A into Paragraph B. If “content” misses the heart and craft of writing, let me be discontent.
Also I want to create from a place of holy restlessness, writing like a kid on his tiptoes, trying to pluck the best fruit from a high branch. I’m unsurprised that, in one letter, you described discontent better than I have in dozens of columns. The pitfalls and possibilities came through in your letter, and it clarified my own purposes. Thank you for that.
The longer we write to each other, the more I see how all these aims of writing connect. I can’t write about self-awareness today without touching observation and discontent and aspiration. Each deserves its due, but one cannot be without the other.
Some days I feel painfully self-aware, an exposed nerve; on others, I am confronted by unfamiliarity with my own head and heart. Over the past half-decade, two pursuits have encouraged my greatest gains in self-knowledge: writing and therapy.
In both venues, I voice what’s rattling around inside, what has gone unspoken. When those words meet air, they are exposed for what they are—true or false. I carry on a little lighter, able to discard the weight of lies and self-loathing; able to chase truths about myself and God.
Perhaps other people experience the same phenomenon through prayer. It helps me to voice these matters in another context, knowing deep down that everything I say and do is coram deo—that is, before the face of God.
Writers go on endlessly about their voice; all I really know is, if you write long enough, at some point you can’t shake the sound that emerges.
You can borrow from other writers, apply all manner of affectation, but who you are comes out in the wash of the work. You learn to hear yourself and speak for yourself on the page. I remember, shortly after starting my Fathom column, Brooke saying to me, “You really sound like yourself when you write there.” This remains the greatest affirmation I can imagine.
We hate hearing our own voices on tape, and we fear sounding like ourselves on the page. How can I possibly be consoled if I sound out my authentic voice and am met with silence? I’m learning that the comfort lies in coming home to yourself, in letting the self settle before God.
I’m still learning what self-awareness means; I’m also learning what it’s not. We tend to equate self-awareness with spilling everything onto the page, baring all we know and feel. I think the best writing happens when we balance self-awareness and mystery. Ripples and revelations come through the work, but the painful, intimate details—the how and why I arrived there—are saved for the secret places, for the people I love best.
Self-awareness isn’t constant confession either. Readers don’t need a regular accounting of my sins. Yes, as I write, I encounter my shortcomings, the gaps between faith and embodiment. But I also catch sideways glimpses of my best self, of the person I can be when the Spirit has the last word. As we’ve talked about, I believe our most self-aware writing moves in this direction, toward this place.
I fail to understand or see myself in writers who work from unassailable confidence. Who treat words as brick and mortar, walling off their positions and perspectives. Who write because the best defense is a good offense. All my words are chisels, chipping away stone to reveal my heart of flesh, the heart designed for me before apples and serpents and fig leaves changed the world.
When the writing is as it should be, I not only see my truer self—I find myself properly situated within the world. Brennan Manning said following God leads us to a place where “no human flesh is strange to us ... to the extent that for us there are no ‘others.’ ”
When I write, as aware of myself as I can be, this blessedness occurs. Everything that keeps other flesh strange, every line that divides me from other children of God, dissipates.
Writing ultimately grounds me in the reality of Psalm 8 (“What is man that you are mindful of him?”). As I see myself in words, I know who I am in light of who he is. Significant yet small; a wonder yet wandering; prodigal yet held firm.
Miracle and gift that it is, every bit of good writing opens us up to ourselves. Your writing makes me more myself; I hope, every now and again, my writing does the same for you. What a grace to slowly be coming into our own—not for the sake of pride, but for the beauty of knowing and being known.
Take care of yourself and talk soon,
AD