I have come to believe that we can change the world this way, through writing deeply and openly—I mean, with this and other practices of discovering and living ourselves into the vast elemental of our creativity. “Art, in its living and working out, is not about accomplishment. It is about energy and time and discipline and self-criticism and pursuit and letting go. Art is not about being. It is about becoming,” wrote philosopher Ladelle McWhorter. Don’t ever think that our work, the very practice of writing—the very fact of taking the time to sit down with one’s own thoughts and commit them to paper—is not revolutionary. We undermine the old teachings. We take the old language and turn it inside out. We name our hidden truths. We true our hidden names. We crack the surface of the advertised world and take hold of the reins of our lives. As long as we keep on writing and knowing each other as constantly changing peers in this process, as long as we are free to tell ourselves and our stories however we choose, as long as we play in the memory and myth of the thickness of poetic language, we will walk ourselves, together, into freedom.
Use your pen to thread the needle
Give yourself ten minutes. Find somewhere you’ll be comfortable writing, whether that’s at a quiet kitchen table or noisy cafe. Open your notebook, turn to a new page, and, at the top of the page, write, “This is what I want my words to do…” Complete the sentence with whatever comes up for you, whatever wants to be written. Then write the phrase again, and complete it again. Begin again as many times as it takes, until you find yourself in a flow, and follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go. If you get stuck, you can always begin again.
writing that changes its writer
Freewriting is the one practice (well, besides really good dancing) that most consistently drops me into a transformative experience—that is, a sense of being different somehow, on the other side of writing, than I was at the beginning. When I am able to let the writing flow, get the editor out of the way and write without stopping for at least fifteen or twenty minutes, I often find that something in me has shifted, loosened (as though I’ve done some psychic stretching); many times I write something I hadn’t known I wanted or needed to say.
Transformative writing is writing that changes the writer in the process of its creation. A transformation is a thorough or significant change—one dictionary I consult gives a definition of transform as “to change completely for the better” (emphasis mine). I think of writing that’s transformative as writing that surprises the writer as it’s emerging, either with respect to form, content, structure, or some other factor. It’s writing through which the writer may learn something about themselves (even—sometimes especially—if the writing is fiction).
So, when I talk about a transformative writing practice, I mean a regular and consistent freewriting routine that, intentionally or not, enacts a transformation or series of slow, deep changes in the writer. I mean a practice of deep communion with the page, which is also both a deep communion with self and not-self.
I describe this as a writing practice, rooted in the body, that engages the fullness of our creative power. When I am at the page and the words are flowing, when I let the words come exactly as they arise in me, when I’m not worried about control or how I look or whether I’m writing right but rather have the sense that something is writing through me, that I am a vehicle for the words that needed to get written, then I say I am doing transformative writing practice.
This writing, right now, is not about craft—absolutely not about grammar or punctuation or the other parts of the editing process. This is learning to release and reclaim all the words, every one: all the language of and for these selves that we are. We who learned to talk in code and split tongues, who learned to communicate through gesture and glance and dyed hair and torn clothing, through the size of our bellies, through thin scarring on our wrists or thighs, we who were not allowed to say our lives or experiences directly—we now have the opportunity for a new articulation. Through a transformative writing practice, we can realign with our instincts, our intuitions, our values, our wishes; we can learn how our true inside self/selves look and feel and sounds.
Here is an example of one of my workshop writes, sparked after listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s “Ella’s Song”:
This is what I want to say: It won’t end. You won’t get fixed. You won’t reach a place where your name is only Healed and incest doesn’t ever feed you breakfast anymore. The people who tell you You’ll get over it don’t know what they’re talking about, because they live in their own closed cage of denial. You have been transformed. You are not the same as you were Before. And you will never not also be who you were Before—but it may be some years before these layerings of yourselves can sit in the same room with you and have coffee in the morning. There is no such thing as getting over it. There is the business of living through and with. There is learning to breathe again, there is learning you are worthy of the air you breathe, there is having to breathe when you know you are not worthy. There is you, just breathing. You will have years called Night and years called Drunk and years called Weep and years called Frozen and years called Broken and Fuck. You look at this and think you can’t bear so many years of pain—but what’s true is that all those years are also called Freedom.
You will not always be in pain. Your heart will harden and soften at the same time. You will forget all the names you ever had, you will climb into a skin so different from the one you were fucked into that not even your mother—especially not your mother—will be able to recognize you. This may or may not be a cocoon. It might just be the true face of your new eyes. Every stage is a phase, like this breath you are taking is a phase, like this heartbeat is a phase, like a single kiss is a phase is an instant an instantiation of your personhood. Phase means nothing except you are still alive. Ignore them when they tell you that whatever you’re experiencing now is just a phase. Ignore their relief, if it comes, when you enter a different phase. They do not sing with all the tendons of your body and they can’t speak the truth of your soul. Sit with the people who can hold your surfaces and your undersides, both.
One day you will say yes to your skin, yes to sex, yes to the feel of your body alive and inhabitable. The next day you will wrench up with No again. There will be years like this. There will be two yes hours in a row. There will be days when you don’t say his name. There will be come a night when, in your dreamtime, you will take the knife brandished against you and turn it on the ones you’ve been running from. That will be a good day.
Know that this place you’re in right now will transform. Be with people who can hold the shimmer of insurrection that is the space between who you were raped to be and who you are becoming. Be with those who can open their hands out to rage, who are imperfect in their holding, who want to fix it, and who understand that there is nothing to fix. Understand that you will emerge from broken, that broken is a necessity, that no human passes through life whole and that none of us are anything other than whole. Believe that broken is necessary if one wants to see all sides of a thing. Know that you are because of and in spite of, you are of and not of, you are welcome in this human family, you have never been outside its true skin. We live among people who have forgotten how to open their hands to those who need receiving, people who deserve explicit welcome, and, yes, deserve apology. Know that the platitudes people offer you exist so that you can climb inside something together, that they are a doorway that you can see each other through when the words don’t work anymore. Know that words will sometimes fail you but you will keep trying to unwrap them to find what lives inside because for all the pain there you will never stop wanting to know and to share what lives truly inside yourself. (2013)
I began this freewrite with a desire to offer something hopeful