Truth Ascending
This weekend, we were getting ready to dance around the fire circle when my friend Karina said something about the moon in Scorpio ascending and The Uprooting and the revelations and whatever all that means, I’m sure I don’t know but if it has anything to do with this colossal shift I’m feeling (are you feeling it too?) and the sensation of floating between spaces, then, yeah, it’s a thing. You can bet your ascension.
In grad school days, we all knew so very little about the world, we used to make a game of it. We’d sit at the bar and order the wings and the beers and talk about all manner of things, and the only rule was, you had to make it up. The minute conversation drifted into anything any one of us actually had prior knowledge of, we’d change the subject. We got away with spouting the obnoxious BS that grad students are so adept at spouting, only because our self-mockery and -derision made us slightly less precocious than the less self-aware. It was good fun, and I kinda miss those long-gone days, not only because then, I could eat a plate of wings and drink three or four beers and not have the hellish bloating and gluttony hang-over I’d suffer from now, but also because nowadays there seems to be some sort of pall hanging over polite society that dictates that you’re actually supposed to have a clue wtf you’re talking about before you open your mouth. Not that everyone got that memo or follows the guidelines, but the guidelines are out there, and they’re pretty clear.
For writers, when it comes to being crooked, the rules are only slightly bent.* (That’s a Colson Whitehead line which I stole from the opening of his Harlem Shuffle published by the fine people at Doubleday in 2021; isn’t it marvelous?)
First they told us to Write what you know.
Then they said, Write what you know about what you don’t know.
Now, I’m saying, Write what you DON’T know about what you don’t know.
In other words, Make. It. Up.
Before I left home for the Wide Open Writing Tuscan writers retreat last September, my heart was heavy with news of the situation in Afghanistan. I had an idea for a way to resettle the agonizing numbers of refugees in the upstairs, unused bedrooms of my house and of all the houses on my block, in my village, in my township. Alas. It wouldn’t work in real life, so I decided to try to make it work in a novel.
Alas, a coupla catches. Let me outline it for you.
As a poet, I didn’t know how to write a novel.
I didn’t have enough knowledge — facts — data about Afghanistan to even attempt to begin to write a book about it.
Our Tuscan paradise was made even more utopian by the fact that it didn’t have Internet.
What is a creative writer to do??? (Insert innocent, blinky-eyed maiden here, clutching her pearls.)
The Universe thunked me on the head and had a good laugh when I brought Her my excuses. She cocked Her head to the side, asked, “Have you met you? When has ‘not knowing how’ (She made really big air bunnies with her universal-sized fingers) ever stopped you before?”
Now apparently, I’m both a poet and a novelist.
I have a WACKerjack imagination, a pretty good handle on how to tell a story, and some working knowledge of poetic prose.
I’m a slut for a turn of phrase, whether or not it’s grammatically correct, advances the plot, reveals a contradiction or originally belonged to a previous poem of mine. I mine my material. I mine my mind. I don’t sleep much but I dream deep. I dream of turning this article into an entire class on the Wide Open Writing First Sunday in December. Wanna know more about that? Check it.
Things happen in Tuscany. Alchemical things. Revelatory things. Things involving red wine and groga (that’s Olive Grove Yoga) and what gets lost in translation and what gets found along the way.
SUMMARY
I love words and make-believe. Put them together and that’s called FICTION.
I had no access to research tools.
However, I had a fabulous idea for a book.
CONCLUSION
I made it up.
I created a language, customs, religions, names, geographical features, in essence, a whole world. I made a world.
If you are a writer, you know this is no big deal. This is what we do. We create worlds. We make shit up.
I’m not talking about fact-checking, credible sources, journalistic integrity here. I’m talking about Ken and Nicole and Conan and Emily sitting over at the pool hall, a pitcher of cheap beer and two large mushroom and black olive pizzas between us, shooting the shit and playing our game, talking about all the things we knew nothing about. That was a whole hell of a lot of things.
I may know nothing about the Muslim faith or much else that makes Afghanistan the complicated country that it is. As news does in a world like ours, by the time I was 60-70 pages in, the eyes of the globe had panned over to Haiti. Now as I close in on the second half of NaNoWriMo, the current crisis is in Bellarusse and Poland, with migrants sleeping in snow, used as pawns on a real world Risk board.
Everything I studied about Papa Doc Duvalier and his Haitian dictatorship, I’ve forgotten. I can't even spell Bellarusse Belarus. What I do know is what trauma looks like and how to hold space for it. I do know that when women connect over story, there is healing. I do know that the world has been and can be changed by little more than a good idea and a pencil.
So try this with me. It’s kind of hilarious. First, you start with something like,
“You see that game this weekend?”
Then say,
“That guy’s arm is incredible.”
Throw out,
“20 points in six minutes. Wow. That’s gotta be a record.”
and end with,
“They oughtta fire that coach, though, amIright.”
See what I mean? You were with me, right? You never for a second suspected that I know jack-all-fuckdoodle about sports. This weekend, I happened to be yoga-ing and fire-circle-dancing, and frankly I would rather express my dog’s anal glands than sit around and watch overpaid ‘roided-up dudes squabble like toddlers over a ball rolling around in the grass. But you don’t need to know that I don’t know. I am a writer. And because I am a writer, I never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. I believe Mark Twain said that. Actually, I don’t know who said that.
I made it up.
Here, look, I’ll do it again:
Your horoscope says that Scorpio is ascending. The moons are entering transverse abdominis and the time is ripe for sowing, planting, round-offing and cart-wheeling. You must place the roots of your sugar bush in warm honey-soaked ragamuffin raffia wrappers if you want fruition in the coming season. Transition becomes you. Your countenance finds comeuppance in the tupperware hufflepuff and hossenfeffer of the horsefeather house of the waxing, waning Spirit. All is good. Well, all is pretty good. All could be better, if you wanna know the truth, but whadduru gonna do. Can’t complain. All’s, well, I mean, except, well, no, I mean, actually, yeah. All is good. Really good.
I made that up too. Except for the All’s pretty good part. That part is true.
I just wrote this. I just wrote this in my backyard while sipping on una tazza di acqua calda con il succo di mezzo limone and the birds are symphonying my morning and I’m grateful and thankful for words and imagination and November and silliness and comfortable shoes and my dad’s clear cancer scans and my fierce fire circle sisters and a community of people out there, writers, dare I call them friends, who understand the simple joys in making stuff up and saying it pretty and finding some Truth in it all.
In my story of the Bone People who survive their passage, their oceanic escape from oppression, who come from faraway and not so faraway at all, and make it to the shores of a new land called The East Coast, there is make believe. There is conjuring and magical realism, more magical than realist, and there are hearty doses of That Which Cannot Be Reasoned or Explained and there is human pain and love and fragility and sex and doughnuts and bowling, and there are dogs, and in the midst of everything I made up, and everything fictional and fantastical, there is, at least I like to believe, Truth.
That Which Cannot Be Reasoned or Explained; a playlist*
(A Real playlist, available on Spotify)
Holy Country — Trevor Hall
Mysterious Ways — U2
Purple — Hollow Coves
Complicated Creation — Cloud Cult
Adulthood — Jukebox the Ghost
Don’t Drink the Water — Dave Matthews Band
✨ — Coldplay
Music for Psychedelic Therapy — Jon Hopkins
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town — Pearl Jam
When You’re Falling — Astro Celt Sound System
Rain King — Counting Crows
Woman — Mumford & Sons
Seed — Carbon Leaf
What Do It Mean — Lord Huron
Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane — Gang of Youths
Galacticana — Strand of Oaks
* My good friend Dulcie says, Life is nothing if not unexplainable. And yet, we try. We like to put boxes around life. Tie it up in packages with bows on top. We want labels and order and apps for everything. We want our essays to be complete with round-number word counts and we want to capture the feels in a perfect, post-able moment and post it. And somewhere along the way to the final countdown and the eyes behind the camera lens instead of chucking the camera into the lake and skinny-dipping with Life, we lose the magic.
You’ve made it this far and you’re still reading and I’ve said all I came to say, so now the rest is up to you. Go out into the woods, my fierce, fire-circle sister, my writer-friend. Go out into the woods and unbox yourSELF. Free your soul. Dance around to these songs I put together or to the songs you grew up with or the songs you’ll die to. Oh! Delta Rae’s “Dance in the Graveyard” would be an excellent addition to the list. Add it to your own. And then try this little exercise: close your eyes and ask yourself what you want, then write the answer with your non-dominant hand. Sky write it if you have no paper or write it in the sand and let the tide wash it away. Make sure you phrase the question to yourself in the second person You, and make sure you answer the question without any editing of your handwriting or your gutwriting. Once you have the answer, add 17. Multiply it by a horse and an orange and divide by a secret handshake. Make sense? Good. It shouldn’t. Just write that formula down and keep writing. Turn your music up a little louder and dance a little harder or lie down on the floor of the forest and listen to the quaking music of the orb that makes itself your pillow. Take a sip of water. Keep writing. Make something up then make up another something, then look how the two somethings are related or not related and then make something up about that and Keep. Writing.
Dulcie has a recipe for scones that she keeps wanting to give out. I make my scones from a box. Why is the combination of flour and butter and sugar so good? It’s unexplainable.
Wide Open Writing
“We believe that getting away and connecting to nature and ourselves is central to the creative process. In this place of respite, we find our deeper truths. We purposely choose evocative settings where your adventurous spirit can come out to play with curiosity and wonder. Whether it’s desert or mountains, tropics or tundra, there’s always something sparkly to be discovered.”
WOW First Sunday
WHEN: The first Sunday of every month (unless otherwise stated on Our Calendar)
NEXT MEETING: December 5, 2021
TIME: 2pm — 4 pm EST
GUEST HOST: Emily Shearer will be coming at us with a whole new workshop about Making It Up. We’re all writers. For us, making it up is no big deal. It’s what we do. We create worlds on the page. So, what’s different about this WOW Writes Together afternoon? Emily will give you prompts and tricks for getting into that imaginative space. Sign up below. You don’t want to miss this!
WHERE/Eventbrite: Click Emily Shearer to register for this FREE event.
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