A week or a lifetime?

My calendar says I last posted two weeks ago. The newscycle says time is no longer linear (if it ever was).

I sat glued to the TV last week in a way I have not since Sept. 11, 2001. I think I (and every American) was catapulted back in time about two hundred years. I find myself saying (perhaps naively), “We survived 1968” far too often of late. It’s a way for me to speak life into my hope that the sun will come out Jan. 21, and I’ll feel the ship, although still wobbly, straighten and stop taking on water. In short, for me, it’s a way of moving beyond.

All of this leads to the writing topic at the forefront of my mind: Deciding whether or not to discuss contemporary politics in a crime novel. Ezra Pound famously said artists are the antennae of the race. That speaks to a writer’s responsibility. I love reading novels and poems that tackle weighty societal issues. However, this week, I’m reading Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me and enjoying the absolute escape of the whodunit before falling asleep. I tell students in my Advanced Studies in Rhetoric class on day one that “fiction is universal; non-fiction rarely is.” Can fiction be universal, if it dives deeply but truly into one society’s political issue? Perhaps going deep enough and honestly enough will allow the issue to resonate for readers. And perhaps some readers wish to experience a mystery through a historical or societal lens. I have few answers but many more questions.

The events of this past week –– watching the United States Capital be overrun, seeing a presidency (further) implode; knowing 68 arrests (as of this writing) were made but that had the domestic terrorists been people of color there would have been mass carnage; and worrying about what might play out Jan. 20 –– has me wondering how much my characters should be impacted by (or aware of) the political landscape when they meet on the page. How much social commentary is too much?

I know this: If a decade ago I’d have proposed a political novel with a plot ending with the events taking place last week at the United States Capital, you wouldn’t have bought it.

My trusty notebook

Fifteen years ago, in a used bookstore in Portland, Maine, I stumbled upon a copy of The Wasteland: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, for the glorious price of $7. The book was published by Harvest in 1971. I’ve never seen another copy anywhere, and, believe me, with tape holding it together, I’ve looked.

I’m fascinated by Pound’s annotations –– cross-outs, notations, and comments like “often used” in the margins. Yes, I’m witnessing genius in action, reading Pound’s marginalia, but moreover, I’m intrigued by the inner workings, the mind processing, the pen gliding.

Joan Didion said somewhere, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” There’s some of that in Pound’s cursive, in his declarative commentary. We’re seeing Pound experience the great text before the rest of us, processing, thinking on paper, responding as a first reader.

I, too, like to think on paper. I think I always have. As a dyslexic, I stuttered as a kid. Writing things down alleviated that. I didn’t stutter when I wrote. And the page is a place where I go to think. Tom’s great post this week about reading with a critical eye, got me thinking about my journal, the place where I go to ramble (mentally) about plots and characters and generally figure things out before setting hands to keyboard. That’s not to say I outline or prewrite. No, I’m not that organized. And, frankly, my mind just doesn’t work that way. I journal to solve problems, as the photo I’ve shared here might indicate. If you can read my henscratch, you may see question marks. I’m asking questions and thinking through answers to a plot problem. I’m writing dialogue in what might be a scene.

Just, as Didion said, writing things down to learn what I think in my trusty notebook.

Everyone should have one.