At Caesar’s Head in South Carolina a few days ago
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Notes on the Living Archive
I’m nearing the end of a two-week road trip that began in Brooklyn, took me down the coasts of North and South Carolina, and has now landed me in Asheville for a few days. A much-needed escape from the city to spend time in nature and get some perspective, the trip has also been an opportunity for me to think about new ideas and materials to bring to The Remembered Life Writers’ Lab.
The Writers’ Lab was born out of a 10-week course I taught through The Center for Fiction called The Remembered Life: Keeping a Writer’s Notebook. In designing that course, I drew upon diaries, journals, notebooks, and similarly informal documents of artistic, reflective, and observational processes. We also looked at works of more polished artifice that made use of the diary or notes form as an organizing principle in one way or another—short stories in diary form like Amparo Dávila’s “Fragment of a Diary” or experimental novels like Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.
This interest in notes, diaries, journals, etc., has stayed with me as a spur to the creative process and as a way to continually refresh my own working methods. I started The Remembered Life Writers’ Lab with the intention of continuing to explore this approach while connecting with other writers and curious people during the pandemic (and beyond), offering regular readings, exercises, and reflections for a small fee through my Substack newsletter; I think of it as a kind of rolling, improvisatory, self-guided creative writing class in which I share discoveries I’m making as I study and write and live my life, encouraging others to honor and tend to their own ongoing writing processes.
At some point, I’d like to create a book out of these materials and craft essays. In the meantime, however, I wanted to share with you some thoughts and encounters from my road trip that speak to these working methods and creative preoccupations. I offer up a few exercises for your own writer’s notebook at the end.
I’m always on the lookout for diaries, notebooks, fragments, and scraps: to me, they’re not only a way to connect with the continuum art history and with the historical record, but a reminder that those things are living, continuously evolving processes made up of intrepid human endeavor carried out in the face, always, of the great unknown. That may sound lofty, but I often feel it when encountering evidence, against all odds, of these efforts made in the darkness and uncertainty of the past.
For instance, last week I was wandering around Wilmington, North Carolina as I made my way down the coast. Wilmington wasn’t a place I knew much about or had ever thought to visit, but after reading about it in the travel guide to the coastal Carolinas I was relying on to chart my course, I decided to spend a day there. I found a quiet port city rich in history and atmosphere. (Wilmington was the setting for novelist Charles W. Chestnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition—even though he fictionalized it under the name “Wellington”—in which he wrote about the 1898 Wilmington Uprising. I’ve only recently learned about the book and am now interested in reading it.) Because I’ve been listening to various audiobooks about the Civil War as I drive, that history has been particularly on my mind. And so, I was intrigued when, walking through the historical district near downtown Wilmington, I saw this plaque about William B. Gould:
William B. Gould
1837-1923
Was enslaved Bellamy plasterer. Escaped 1862 and joined Union navy. Kept detailed war diary. Lived 2 blocks north.
I’ve since spent a little time looking at some of the resources about William B. Gould available online, and I’m eager to get my hands on a copy of Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor. One of the exciting things to me about diaries and notebooks is the basic fact of their survival over time and the way in which, through that survival, their meaning continues to change. Of course, they are like art in this way: at the time of their creation, their fate is fundamentally uncertain. William B. Gould, in his detailed Civil War diary, did not even know what the outcome of the Civil War would be, much less that I would be wandering the streets of Wilmington over a century later, learn about it, and write about it for anyone to read online. History appears fixed in retrospect, but we never really know what lies ahead. Diarists on the eve of the Civil War couldn’t even be sure there was going to be a Civil War at all. And because we can never know the full meaning of our lives and times as they’ll be received and examined by future generations, our own efforts to record and express these things take on the charge of mystery: what meaning might they have for someone encountering them a hundred years from now (or more)?
I’m curious about how this ongoing metamorphosis and reevaluation of the historical record pertains to both our sense of what life is and our involvement in the life of art.
Read more about William B. Gould’s life here:
https://www.masshist.org/database/681
http://goulddiary.law.stanford.edu/
Look at the digital images of his elegant script—here is a document that becomes more significant over time, one created in fundamental uncertainty that has survived into our day, taking on new and different meanings along the way as the world continues to change.
I went to see if I could, by chance, find a copy of the book about Gould’s diary at a great used bookstore in Wilmington, McAllister & Solomon. They didn’t, but they had a wonderful treasure trove of other books, including a large section devoted to the region (as well one dedicated as to the Civil War, naturally; by some estimation there are already over 60,000 books about the Civil War, with more being published all the time). The shop’s proprietor was friendly and full of stories about local writers (among the stack I bought were a couple of volumes of Lowcountry tales by a writer of regional renown) and thoughts about the North and the South. He had gone to graduate school in New York before returning to the South, and we talked about the prejudicial attitudes particular to each place, among other things. He also recommended a good Greek restaurant where I could grab a bite on my way out of town. When I travel, I always visit bookstores and talk to booksellers, because they tend to be knowledgeable, curious, and open-minded. Their advice has often led me in new directions that enriched my travels.
I also always go looking for books of local interest when I travel. This, as well as an enduring love for second-hand bookstores, has opened the way for many discoveries that I might not make at independent bookstores that only sell new titles. I’ve been a bookseller at three major independent bookstores, and as much as they matter to me, the used bookstore has a special place in my heart. A good independent bookstore that sells new titles will stock titles by small presses that enlarge the possibilities of the contemporary publishing landscape; at a used bookstore, though, you can make discoveries even further beyond those encouraged by the forces of the profit-driven marketplace or by cultural fashion. Along this road trip, I’ve picked up books about the art of sweetgrass basket weaving among the Gullah people, a Geechee memoir (God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia), the Civil War diary of Sarah Morgan, who was all of twenty years old when the war broke out (I’m planning, in the coming weeks, to write a Writers’ Lab post about this as well as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War diary—a work that began as a rough diary and that the author later transformed into a polished work of nonfiction, retaining the diary format), and books of tall tales by local authors published by super-local regional presses. These are all books that I’ve never laid eyes on or heard of before.
One volume I picked up at McAllister & Solomon was called North Carolina Nature Writing, a collection of essays and documents about the natural world of North Carolina written by early naturalists and botanists, compiled and edited by Richard Rankin. Time in nature has been one of the more restorative parts of my road trip, beginning with two nights of camping on Assateague National Seashore and proceeding with a quiet hike around the “Lost Colony” on Roanoke Island (subject of a book I picked up in Manteo—gateway, hopefully, to other diaries and notebooks and primary source documents), visits to the landscapes of dunes and salt marsh and barrier islands down the Carolina coasts, with their bounty of beautiful state parks. One way into the creative process that I encourage in my students and through the Writers’ Lab is to keep finding new ways to connect with what is in front of you and around you; the natural world as it is made manifest in our immediate surrounding and home regions can be a grounding and meaningful creative influence, something that, the more we pay attention to it and cultivate a responsive presence to it, the more it may give back to us.
I’m including a few selections here from North Carolina Nature Writing: the first is from “Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, 1765” by John Bartram, “a pioneering American botanist.” I find it interesting as a document of one man observing nature—a document that still feels immediate, alive, and suitably awed. Something else I like about it is, as the editor writes, “Bartram read widely, was essentially self-taught, and acquired a remarkable knowledge of nature. Spelling and consistent or correct capitalization were not his strengths. Capitalization has been corrected and made regular to make reading easier.” This little side note appeals to me because, in my own experience as a teacher, I’ve worked with many people, young and old, who, while they may not necessarily have perfected standard spelling, grammar, etc., have a desire to observe, record, reflect, express, and tell stories on the page. Many I’ve worked with have felt self-conscious about this; I always do what I can to encourage them to do their work anyway, not worrying about these things for the time being (I’ve read that no less a writer than Anatole France struggled with spelling throughout his life). This is something else that can be creatively productive about notes, diaries, etc.: it’s easier to let go of the pressure to get it “right” and to simply get on with getting your material down. (I forget who it was, but I read an interview with a well-known writer once who said that he used to write novels by tricking himself into thinking he was just writing notes for them.) And once that process is set in motion, who knows what might become of it over time?
In gathering materials to share through the Writers’ Lab, I like to include things in different stages of the process, from notes and drafts and ideas (Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, used to keep a notebook of ideas for stories and books, which we looked at in earlier weeks). In that spirit, I offer up two other documents from this collection: essays by Jan DeBlieu, a writer born in 1955 who grew up in Wilmington. The first, “Loggerhead Rites,” from her book Hatteras Journal, is a fascinating essay about sea turtles that she wrote while living on Roanoke Island. (Note, also, the word “journal” in the book title--though these are more polished works, the title of the collection announces their origins as a kind of journal of observation.) The second, “Into the Dragon’s Mouth,” is about the wind on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I loved happening upon this while traveling there, since I quickly discovered that what the wind was doing from day to day was of supreme importance to locals and cause for regular comment.
Jan DeBlieu
In Wilmington, I also paid a visit to the Cameron Art Museum, which turned out to be an experience that nourished my spirit and fed some of my deepest-held convictions about art.
There were two exhibitions of particular interest to me on display at CAM. As it happens, they both also happened to be by artists whose work directly engaged with the natural world of the Carolinas. One was Safe Places: Robert Johnson. The other was A House of One Room: Elizabeth Bradford. Both are living artists, and each exhibition included video of the artist discussing their process. The Robert Johnson exhibition also included preparatory sketches, pages from his notebooks, and so forth.
As you can imagine, I love art exhibitions that include these kinds of windows into the art-making process. I happened to connect with the works on display in these galleries, too, which made me all the more curious to access the process behind their creation. Johnson also turned to nature to collect the raw material, observations, and feeling of these imaginative paintings.
You can watch a video from the exhibition, “Robert Johnson on Painting with Nature,” here:
The other show I saw at the Cameron was a group of nature paintings by Elizabeth Bradford. Born from a practice of close observation of and even reverence for the natural world, the works hummed with presence and life. I was moved by the curious spirit evident in their creation and by the care and interest the artist showed in her surroundings; also, by the idea of “a house of one room,” a title that Bradford found in the journals of the great naturalist John Muir. It’s included in the description of the show:
How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the mountain top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make – leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents and piled stones – we all dwell in a house of one room – the world with the firmament for its roof – and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track. John Muir (Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938, p. 321)
Elizabeth Bradford’s masterful paintings originate from an intimate observation and profound reverence for the natural environment. These selections offer an invitation to share Bradford’s journey as she explores the wonder of the natural world. The reverence she has for the environment and all of its inhabitants, can inspire a deeper awareness of our interconnectedness and responsibility for its preservation and survival.
You can watch a video from the exhibition here:
I was deeply affected by both these exhibitions and by the windows they opened onto the artists’ processes. To read about Robert Johnson’s own sense of where he was working within the continuum of art history, for instance, and to see exploratory, preparatory pages from his sketchbooks alongside the finished works they led to, filled me with excitement and hope. Of course, living in Brooklyn, I have countless avenues of access to art, but I believe that I was feeling an important difference while standing in CAM. These exhibitions were attuned to the everyday, all-too-human work of the creative process; neither of them engaged in any kind of mythologizing about the artists in question—a sometimes tiresome aspect of the star-making, politicking, power mongering of the New York art world.
This isn’t to say that I haven’t had similarly inspiring experiences in galleries in New York or that smaller museums and art scenes around the country and the world aren’t shaped by their own local politics. Maybe I was just feeling particularly starved for art and for evidence of its creation after this long pandemic year. Whatever the case, I found myself brought back to this truth: Art is made by people. Not by stars, not by gods or celebrities or national treasures, but by people.
This is surprisingly easy to forget, because the things people create soon harden into symbol and myth; vulnerable to the reality-shaping dictates of cultural institutions that decide what is artistically legitimate or important and what is not, we absorb received ideas about the creative process and the mythic figure of the artist. We forget how alive the process of making art can be, how fresh and unusual new work born out of experimentation and discovery. Furthermore, on the subject of culture industry star-making, it is not at all clear that the successes of the anointed few at any given moment are, in fact, to their advantage as artists invested in creative process over the long haul. Staying in touch with and dedicated to a living, evolving practice over time is paramount, in any event.
This is part of my reason for guiding our attention back to these documents of life captured as it’s being lived, art as it’s being contemplated and shaped, of expression in process and without certainty of outcome. We never really know what the fate will be of the things we create, but we do know this: art is created in the midst of life by living people, and it often begins with a note, a sketch, an attempt to jot down some impressions or observations of the hour or the day. Where these humble beginnings may lead is anybody’s guess, though it is safe to say that, historically speaking, it has a way of surprising us again and again and again. Is that not reason enough to proceed with some sense of wonder? Some sense that a great deal might just be possible if we would only begin and, having begun, kept going? Some faith that there is great value in trying—in trying, and trying, and seeing what happens?
Exercises
As always, use what feels interesting or meaningful to you from these exercises or find ways to adapt them that may serve you and your process. The exercises can be ends in themselves, though one also never knows when a note or an observation or a diary entry may serve as the seed for a bigger idea or grow into a piece of fiction, an essay, a poem.
Spend some time in the coming weeks filling your notebook with observations about your own natural surroundings, no matter where you live. This could mean going to a local park and really looking at what flora and fauna are there; it could mean reflecting on recent changes in the natural world around you or perusing a field guide to your local environment. What is where you live known for, when it comes to nature?
Indulge in some speculative fiction freewriting about your life and your work: allow yourself to imagine them being received and examined by someone 100 year from now. How do you imagine the meaning and significance of your life, your situation, and your creative practice could change over that period of time? You might even play with turning this into an extended fictional sketch, imagining the character who, 100 years from now, comes into contact, somehow, with what you’ve left behind. Who are they? What is their situation? What might what you’ve left behind mean to them?
Reconnect with the local, with what’s near to you: visit and write about art exhibitions in your city or town (or a nearby one); research local and regional history; pay attention to what is immediately at hand and see what you can learn about it by observation or by other means. Take notes in your notebook, write diary entries, capture stray notions and ideas and material somehow: let this take on what life it may, whether as an end in itself or as something that may inform new creative work or work already in progress.
Make a list, in your notebook, of ten works that you love and that feed your own sense of creative possibilities. They could be works of fiction, poems, essays, films, songs, albums--you get the idea. You might then do a little writing about what, if anything, unites these works, to see if any common methods or topics or creative obsessions emerge. At the very least, make the list as a way of reaffirming your connection to the life-giving power of art.
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