Once a month, I run a writers’ meet-up for two hours. I love leading the workshop, but you should know it is also self-serving. Every time I give a prompt and the writers grow quiet as they put pen to paper, I do the same. We are all accountable that way.
Last time we met, we read from Judith Kitchen’s “The Art of Digression” (from the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction). Sometimes in writing, we approach the page hard-headed and get stuck on one idea, one image, one prompt, refusing to wander.
Kitchen suggests that digressing from our original starting point serves more purpose than we imagine:
To digress: to stray from the subject, to turn aside, to move away from.
The concept of moving away, turning aside, is an important one. This is not quite the same thing as changing the subject, or moving toward something else. Instead it is a natural outflow of association, an aside that grows directly out of the material and builds until it has a life of its own—it is getting a bit lost on the way out in order to make discoveries on the way back.
My advice is to court digression. To court those places in the mind that we usually shut out because they would appear to lead us astray. Let your conversation get away from you; let a new story take over; follow a mental argument to where it begins to eddy in the current of its confusion. If something creeps in unnoticed or else pops instantly into your mind, don’t put it aside in favor of where you already sense you are going. No, follow it up by—to use an expression common to those who work with horses—giving it its head. Something may happen along the way, something to alert you to its relevance. And then trust yourself to find the connective tissue….
After we read the essay, we had two prompts to choose from–The water is rising and My mother’s voice. We wrote one story and then we wrote another, each veering off from the same opening paragraph of our making. Or, if you were me, you wrote two different stories that veered from the same opening sentence….
My Mother is Waiting
My mother is waiting. She sits beside me on a bench in a hospital hallway outside a room marked X-Ray. My legs are swinging below me; her hands are in her lap; she is very quiet. I am four years old, have repeat stomach aches, and am constantly underweight. You’ll have to drink all the medicine, she says finally. You won’t like it but drink it all. She’s right, I don’t like it. They lied when they said it tasted like bubble gum. But I take in as much as I can and she pats my knee. We wait for a while longer. In that next stretch, her voice is soothing and suddenly I ask her what it means to be saved. We are avid church goers, but she is not the one who prays in tongues or dances in the aisles. Still, she is the person I ask. She’s surprised, wonders what made me think of such a thing now. I shrug. She calls me an old soul. But who can really understand the workings of a four-year-old mind? Keeping her voice low, she tells me it’s simple; you just ask and there you are. So I did, and there we were: her standing off to the side in the X-Ray room and me under the light.
. . . .
My mother is waiting. She stands behind me, one hand on my shoulder and the other on my arm. When the pastor nods, she presses me forward. I am seven years old and nervous, though this was my idea. First you get saved, then you get baptized. The rest was still unknown to me. The steps are tall and the water is rising and when I look back she says she will meet me on the other side. As I move down into the water, I lose my balance, fall into the pastor’s arms. The water is frigid. Immediately, I shake and shiver and am glad the baptism seems short: a few words, a dip under water, my long hair wet and dripping down the back of my soaked clothes. And there she is, her hand out, grasping mine and pulling me up, wrapping me in a towel. We skip the rest of church that night, sit together in the dressing room, me warming in fresh clothes, her combing my hair in gentle sweeps. Her voice washing over me in just the same way.
Stories unfold as they will in the beginning: scratchy and messy and flat at times. But even if you digress, if you let your mind wander, no writing is wasted. Discoveries are made. Trust the process.
Or as Kitchen says:
Trust me, the brain struggles to make sense of whatever is put in front of it. So how could you doubt that your brain will find ways to connect what you’re thinking about now with what you were thinking about just a few minutes ago? Your brain will find some connection. Or, if not your brain, then your heart. There may be an emotional connection that defies logic.
Join us next month for Study Hall: #AmWriting on Sunday, August 12th, 3-5pm CST. We meet in person or online.
Christi, both of your essays are lovely and tender; I think my favorite is the first one.
Thank you, Beth. My heart leans toward my mother in that one too.
Oh Christi…you touch me deep in my heart.