Fire escapes

The outstretched hand of words

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A song I’m loving:

Floral blur, 35mm film

“And I think we’ve built shame into vulnerability, and we’ve sealed it off in our culture — Not at the table, not at the dinner table, don’t say this here, don’t say that there, don’t talk about this, this is not cocktail conversation, what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet still not know who they are. Our “how are you” has failed us. And we have to find something else.”

Ocean Vuong, one of the most brilliant writers of our time, spoke these words in a conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being. He spoke about the power of language, the power of words and writing, the power of creating what he calls “fire escapes” through his work — places people can go to be honest, to say what’s true, to be with what’s real.

That’s part of what I love about writing — about being here in this space, slowly learning how to write what I don’t yet know how to say out loud, even as it takes practice to unfold. It’s through writing that I get to know what I think, what I hold, what I know and don’t know, what I long for. Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” To write is to move toward knowing oneself more fully. And knowing oneself more fully is the place from which fire escapes for others are constructed.

Sometimes, I wonder what the point of all this is — writing this little newsletter, working on a new book idea, spending so much time sharing these words and thoughts and questions as if it matters. To sit down and write in a world that usually feels as though it’s about to combust often feels like a silly task, like a pointless effort. So much so that it breaks my heart again and again, thinking about how easily the things we love can feel pointless because they’re so small, so insignificant in the grand picture, even though they are also so important, so necessary, so vital, a lifeline.

And then I remember what it felt like to read All About Love by bell hooks for the first time — the sensations that rise in me every time I read a Mary Oliver poem — the goosebumps that stretch themselves across my skin when I read something that feels impossibly true, achingly beautiful, scarily resonant, uncomfortably honest, and I feel less alone, less afraid, less wobbly and more human by having done so, by doing something as simple and complex as reading someone’s words on a page.

I think about the books I had with me in the hospital as a teenager — books that opened worlds, that softened the razor’s edge I repeatedly found myself on during that time in my life. I think about the stacks of books I haven’t yet read but somehow felt the need to buy, often just for the feeling of being in a bookshop, of having them near me, of knowing they’re there when I’m ready for them. I think about libraries and the absolutely radical idea of offering free books for the public to borrow, to bury our heads in before returning them for someone else to do the same, all of us finding something we needed between someone else’s pages.

I think about how powerful I felt when I wrote my first book, The Mouse That Went to Mars, in second grade — a cloth cover and illustrations and an About The Author page and all — the energy of creating something to share with someone else. The offering in that. The love in that. The act of creating something out of nothing in that.

My first About the Author page. The precision.

I think about the postcard my sister sent my newborn daughter a week after she was born. The letter I wrote to my birth mother before ever knowing I would find her. The admissions application essay for graduate school. The card given to me by a new friend made during my recent stay at Salmon Creek Farm. The email I wrote to my now-husband during a time we weren’t together but I still loved him and wanted to know if he still loved me. The book I wrote at café tables and finished in my living room during the pandemic. The first Instagram post I shared on my public account in 2017. The Post-It Notes I’d leave my elementary school clients on their desks after dropping them back off in their classrooms post-session. The reminders I now leave on my office walls from versions of myself that don’t want future versions to forget.

I think about how words weave us together, how they stitch us back up when we feel entirely split down the middle, how they offer an outreached hand and an offering of companionship, how they sustain and support. I think about how what we might assume isn’t anything important or significant ends up being a lighthouse in someone’s day, even if only our own, and what else is more important than that? To turn on the light for one another by way of choosing to say what we have to say? To read the flicker, the glimmer, the words others choose to shine out into the world, becoming more ourselves for their having said what they have to say?

I have no interest in changing the whole world through my writing practice, or in thinking that’s my job. I only have interest in learning what it’s like to say the truth, and to share it when it feels like it could be a fire escape for someone else. I only have interest in being devoted to the things that make me feel more alive, knowing it isn’t hard to slip into feeling the opposite. I only have interest in asking the questions I’ve long been desperate to ask through writing. I only have interest in holding the willingness to look, deeply, at myself and the world, noticing with open eyes what I find. In naming what many of us may feel the pulse of but haven’t yet found words for. In reaching the people I’m able to reach in my tiny corner of the planet and letting that be plenty, letting that be the work I’m here to do, letting that be my task, even if the person I reach ends up only being my own pulsing heart. I’m only interested in respecting my daughter’s privacy as she grows up by never laying a single finger on her journals, on the pages she is learning to tell the truth to herself in. I am only interested in trusting, as Margaret Atwood says, that a word after a word after a word is power. I am only interested in writing because I have to, because I long to, because I know what words can do — for ourselves, for each other, for the world.

A quiet space, 35mm film

May we stay rooted to why even our smallest of tasks matter — to how they weave us into one another when the world wants us to feel separate, apart, alone — to how they keep us moving forward, even when everything around us seems to be falling. May we notice the fire escapes set out for us by others when we find them, and may we gather there, huddled together, saying what’s real.

Thank you, as always, for being here.

△ Finally reading this book and I don’t want it to end

△ Boredom matters

△ On rereading our teenage diaries

△ We Should Be Ambitious About Our Friendships

△ The Transgender Family Handbook

△ The country version of Silk Chiffon

△ This complete takedown of Atomic Habits is hilarious and insightful

△ The Orange by Wendy Cope, over and over

With care,
Lisa