Letters From Kelly

Happy NaNoWriMo everyone! I always think NaNoWriMo month is a good time to talk about what to do when you’ve got a big messy bunch of words and you’re wondering, what’s next?
 
Here’s an idea: Doodle.
 
Don’t @ me about your drawing ability! You don’t have to be Amy Sherald or John Singer Sargent to doodle. You just need a pencil.
 
“Drawing can enrich your writing life, regardless of its visual appeal,” writes Rebecca Fish Ewan in her very fun book Doodling for Writers (Hippocampus Books). “If your drawings help thoughts form and emerge from your mind, they are useful drawings.”
 
Where to start? Fish Ewan suggests making lists —your chapters, your scenes, or the paragraphs of your short story. Then create a doodle for each one.
 
When writing her forthcoming book The Truth About Unringing Phones (Unsolicited Press), author Lara Lillibridge first listed all the flash essays she’d written so far, and color-coded them.
 
Then she created a notecard with a unique doodle for each one. She laid the cards out on her floor, shuffling them until a structure emerged.
 
“I never write in order. I write what is most pressing emotionally in the moment,” she said. “It is much faster to see the doodle and remember what that segment was about than to read a written description.”
 
Doodling can help you notice themes or see the outline of a plot. It can also surprise you, because it sometimes leads to what graphic novelist Lynda Barry calls “deep play”— when your doodles talk back.
 
“There is a reciprocity … that is a lot like a very good conversation,” Barry said. “The relationship between me and my drawing depended on that state of deep play, a certain state of mind that is not planning, not thinking, it’s some other thing.”
 
Exciting things can happen in that other state. Once, for an essay, I struggled to describe the idiosyncratic layout of my childhood attic bedroom. So I sketched it. But then I kept going, doodling my dolls and the funky built-in drawers in the walls. And I remembered a long-forgotten incident when I discovered my grandfather’s World War I pistol stashed in the closet. That memory helped me move the essay forward.
 
Getting unstuck is one reason Erin Entrada Kelly doodles while writing, but it’s not the only one.
 
“I doodle all the time. They ultimately don’t have any value to what I’m working on, but they help me focus and keep me creative,” Erin says. “When we grow up, we sometimes forget to be creative. I seize every opportunity to flex my creative muscles so they don’t atrophy.”
 
If you’d like to see a recent doodle by Erin, or how Lara Lillibridge used doodles to organize one of her essays, click here. Then close your computer and pick up your drawing pencil, and play. You’ll be surprised at what happens next.

In a keynote she gave recently (that I wrote about last month) author Carmen Maria Machado talked about what it’s like to be haunted.

“Hauntings aren’t just about ghosts,” she said. “Haunting is about what used to be, what is invoked, the way in which one thing means another.

“Whose ghost are you?”

She got me thinking, how ghost stories are popular, perennial, pervasive. They’ve been around since long before we wrote our stories down, and every culture has at least one ghost: Revenants, Yūrei, Banshees, Pontianaks, Jumbies, Tunche, and on and on.

As many and as varied as they are, ghost stories do share some elements. One, a ghost is the spirit of a person who used to be alive. That might seem obvious, but it’s important to differentiate ghosts from other spirits, like demons and fairies and river monsters, who are supernatural in some way but were never human.

Another defining characteristic is, a ghost needs someone or something to haunt.

In some ghost stories, people see someone eerie, only realizing later that they were a ghost. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Or, (in horror movies mostly) someone dies angry, and then spends the rest of the story terrorizing the living, who may or may not deserve it.

For me, those are the least satisfying of ghost stories. I prefer ones where the ghost asks something of the living. Hamlet’s father, demanding his murder be avenged; Sethe’s daughter Beloved driving all the love and joy out of her home so she can have her guilt-ridden mother to herself.

This Halloween season, treat yourself and write a ghost story, just for the fun of it. As you do, ask yourself a few questions:

1. What does your ghost ask from the living?
2. What do the living want from their ghost? This is a way of excavating how and why they are haunted.
3. What happens to the ghost if they get what they’ve asked? Will they stick around to aid and protect the living? Or once satisfied will they, like Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, take off to dimensions unknown?
4. What is your living character holding onto through their haunting? What should they maintain, and what should they let go?

At heart, ghost stories are relationship stories. The best ones know that the haunting goes both ways. 

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley is enduring a punishing, exhausting afterlife. When he returns to haunt his only friend Ebeneezer Scrooge, he asks Scrooge to listen and to change, that he might be spared the same fate. In so doing, Marley rescues Scrooge from the miserable, lonely life he’d been living. Surely, knowing that made it easier for Marley to drag around his heavy chains.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Writers, last month, I got to hear Carmen Maria Machado, author of the short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the memoir In the Dream House, deliver the keynote at the Hippocamp Conference on Creative Nonfiction.

She called her talk “I Hate My Book,” and before you ask, yes. Yes, it absolutely lived up to its title.

I can’t send you back in time to sit with me in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to hear the whole thing, so instead, I’ll just share a few of my favorite highlights with you.

While writing In the Dream House, Machado kept a quote from Khalil Gibran on her desk that said, “If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?”

Until, after a long day of reading about domestic abuse and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and writing about her own experiences with abuse and bigotry, she threw it out.

“Because he was wrong. The fact is people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place, their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.”

On writing her second book:

“When you are writing your first book, it is so hard to think of what comes next. You spend your whole life saving up a book inside of you, and you write it, and if you’re lucky it gets published, … but then what? You have to then have, god help me, new ideas?! What kind of freaking scam is that?”

On why she hates her book In the Dream House:

“It’s gross to have a book like that inside of you, a knot of pain that’s constantly pulling your skeleton out of alignment.

“I resent the fact that I had to write it because it didn’t exist yet.

“I’m angry that it happened to me, and angry that I revisit these events during writing…and I’m mad that I had to become someone different to understand what happened to me, because to have remained the same would have been a certain death.”

On how talking to teenagers about ghosts pointed her in the right direction:

“I’d often wondered if my ex’s former house’s current tenants ever passed over a space where I’d been crying, and felt it, a cold spot, a twinge of inexplicable sadness.

“I thought about how the Gothic can be conducive to suppressed voices emerging, like in a haunted house. And how at its core the Gothic drama is fundamentally about voiceless things—the dead, the past, the marginalized—gaining voices that cannot be ignored.

This is the way that writing is haunted — the past aggressively asserts itself against the present, grappling for control.”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty