Context > < Community
Writing, Simplicity & Practice
I was recently talking with a friend and writer who had just finished her first novel. She had just heard back from an agent she’d sent an email to that morning. She has published several books of poetry. As we were talking something occurred.
She and I live in a community. Sure, we all do now. Or, we are lumped into affinities that ebb and flow… But, she and I live on an island with about 16,000 other people. It’s smallish, removed enough from the mainland that in winter imagination pulls at your insides. The isolation distinguishes fascia from muscle— that person I wonder myself to be from that who is confirmed by others when I’m out getting food or gas.
When spring arrives things resettle, or they escape. We can sit on a porch and eat an asparagus melt and talk about ideas together. The scope of life and a levity to encounters return to social connections, community— become vital.
She and I both imagine a lot for the work we do. Many people do here. As a publisher I animate these imaginings, help others see and read and connect. I articulate how social and artistic connections ebb and flow in our world.As a writer, she has simplified her life. Doesn’t drive. Takes a bike to work. Has one job — writing — plus part-time work. She’s a good writer.
She said something important in the hour we had.“I allowed the book to be simple. If I had an idea I might go to the library,” where she works “and ask, ‘what’s the most remote place on the island?’ I wouldn’t write that particular place into the story but would the social understanding of it. The people I work with would give me cues.” Her’s was an open, simple way of permitting context to provide the evidence for writing.
We didn’t talk about plot, or character. That wasn’t the point. The point that emerged was more a question: “what things do we surface out of our practice that give life to evidence?” Writing asks this question of writers.
Thinking abstractly about it, as I do, writing positions two cones tip to tip — one context, one community. Writers are those tips between and life is the pattern or ridges (or island) moving around us, emitting data, information, meaning. Context and memory are the things moving into one cone, and art (another name for the communication of mutable context) and community move out the other.
More importantly, this entire process of staying between fascia and muscle, between context and community, is a commitment to engage in a social practice — as simply as possible. Simplicity is just a word standing in for true. I don’t always know when things are simple. We all know when things are true.
Just before she and I parted we discussed the poetry selections for next month. I wrote her a check for postage she’d paid, and she began her short walk home. As I pulled out of the parking lot I briefly felt I was speeding and let off the gas. That was the true out of sync with the machine beneath me.
