A beginning

On opening a door.

So I finally jumped in. That makes it sound more sudden than it actually was. Really it took much deliberation, some gentle prodding and the realisation of having been stuck for too long in the big meanwhile. Nevertheless here I am, at a beginning of sorts.

Lake Ōkāreka, sunrise burns off the early morning mist

Most of the deliberation was whether I should be doing it at all. I mean, what is the point of it? I’m still not exactly sure in truth. Certainly I wanted to move away from the persistent sense of hyper-curation that social media invites and both write more freely and longer. Though probably when you write you’re curating yourself to strangers in one way or another anyway, even when you’re not telling your own story.

And the story I do want to tell? Also not sure. I can’t sell it to you in a marketable form. What I want to write about is what concerns me of this world and what concerns me of this world is so broad and messy that I could not possibly magic up a neat container for it, though I can show you fragments. I also say this because at year’s end I’m deeply tired of the hustling that comprises the bulk of modern living. Perhaps you are too.

Why write

For a long time I thought would end up writing about science, specifically my home turf of biology, but at some point in the pandemic I realised that our biologies are as much a result of our history and politics as they are of any scientific principles. So what I wrote was not exactly what I imagined I would write. (And should you want examples then see here).

Like most everyone else, I’m also an ordinary citizen of the world - trying, mainly failing, to make sense of this continual snowstorm we find ourselves in. And concurrently being taught the sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful lessons that parenthood holds, though that particular journey never feels like it is very far from the starting line. The more I catch up with with my children, the faster they seem to race ahead. I feel anxious about how this world will look when they stop.

Which is all a long way of saying that what you might find here will be all of the above: concern and curiosity; the flotsam and jetsam of living an ordinary life in extra-ordinary times; the gossamer thread of memories between the first time you carry your children on your shoulders and the last.

I’ve found that writing in the open is an uneasy truce with self-doubt. There are many pieces about why you should write ( this is one I’ve read recently by essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert) and a myriad more about why writers aren’t writing. I don’t have any useful advice to give on that subject but there are plenty of great writers here and elsewhere who might. I find writing advice is often generic anyhow. Everyone writes for different reasons, which is as it should be.

But the act of writing well can also be the act of giving readers a hand up to a different viewpoint than the one they normally inhabit. Sometimes if we’re fortunate, and although we may never know it, what we’ve written is keeping someone company in the dark. In the poem “Why Bother”, Sean Thomas Dougherty, answers his own question in four lines, and it’s as good a riposte to the inertia of self-doubt as any you’ll come across:

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

 of your words.

Recently I’ve read a short quote from poet Wendell Berry in two separate places - this essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer (well worth a read in its own right and, typically for Orion, the photographs are also beautiful) and the excellent book Landmarks, by Robert MacFarlane. It stuck in my mind as a good articulation of why we should be drawn to write currently, at a time when the weight of our collective exploitation breaks the back of our world.

“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love,” Berry writes, “and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”

True. The fiercest battles we ever fight are often fought over the things we love the most. Writing is just one way of naming those particular things. But I also believe that it can reach beyond that in order to enlarge our lives back out from the day to day, out of our constant hustle and our narrow glowing screens, by way of a shared humanity. That’s why Substack seems an exciting place, in some ways fulfilling the initial promise of the Internet as a community, of opening avenues to hearing different voices and different stories to those we normally hear on the main beat.

A literature of hope

That brings me to something else I was hoping to do. I’m not a poet, barely a writer lately, but the business of becoming unstuck has meant assiduously keeping the company of other people’s words. Mainly poems initially, because my frayed attention didn’t span further than that for a while, but increasingly now essays and books again. Pieces that make you catch your breath and stop and stare at the wall for long periods. I’ll share some of those here too where I can, bring some light to navigate by. I saw poet Brian Tierney post that Tracy K. Smith had given him the advice that he should seek to end his poems by opening a door rather than closing one. That’s it right there. Opening doors.

The great environmental writer Barry Lopez, who died in late 2020, wrote in an introductory essay about his own writing that he wished to contribute to a “literature of hope”. I’ll go with that too. In the final reckoning it’s what drew me to jump - this idea of carving out a quiet contribution to the uprising, of being an at least occasional antidote to despair.

I’ll be honest and say I don’t know where this will go. But I’m in now so I may as well start swimming. The idea, after all, was to write. And besides it’s good to move again, however clumsily. I don’t promise an exact schedule but I’ve promised (myself at least) some form of regularity. If you’re here then thanks for reading this far. If it sparks your interest then I’d be glad for you to return and browse as you wish or subscribe; it will remain free for the foreseeable future.

And if it doesn’t seem quite your thing then I tip my hat, wish you well and sincerely hope that you find the words you are looking for somewhere in this many-hued place. Because we are made for words I think.

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P.S. I’ll explain the name in the next post. There’s always a backstory to a name.

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