Barbara Kingsolver begins her 2008 Duke University commencement address, “How to Be Hopeful,” with: “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”
As writers, we battle with hope everyday. We hope for publication, for an audience, to win awards. We hope to master the craft, to make new things familiar and familiar things new, to persuade, to expose the truth. We hope to preserve memories and histories and to make a difference in someone’s life.
Yet every day our ability to maintain high hope is challenged by rejection, insecurity, jealousy, finances, time constraints, and other factors. Maurice Lamm, in The Power of Hope, identifies the fear of being hopeful: “We know in our bones that hope is everything. In the back of our minds, we suspect it is nothing at all.” [i] For writers, hope has become another four-letter word that sounds nice in theory—and in fairy tales—but has little authority over our day-to-day realities.
According to best-selling author Dr. Christiane Northrup, “Hope is actually a biochemical reaction in the body.” [ii] Hope releases chemicals at each synapse, which intensify the motivation to learn and innovate solutions to complex problems. Our brains reshape themselves to accommodate through chemical reactions, which is known as plasticity. Brain strategist Dr. Ellen Weber puts it this way: “[W]henever you act hopefully on what you expect to happen – your brain responds by creating just the right neuron pathways to bring about that new reality.” [iii]
People who expect a positive outcome—such as having their books published—are more likely to see results, which explains why successful people (think Stephen King) tend to stay successful in the long run. However, achieving actual success isn’t required as the catalyst—quite the opposite, in fact.
In studying the neurochemical changes in the brain when patients were given a placebo for pain, Scott et al. (2007) found that high expectations of a result caused the brain to release more dopamine and thereby significantly reduce the sensation of pain. Additionally, having high levels of hope can help a person resist a decrease in hope after receiving negative news. [iv]
The lesson here: be hopeful, regardless of your circumstances. It won’t be easy, as Barbara Kingslover reminds us: “The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it.”
Writing Prompts for Cultivating a Hopeful Disposition:
Write a character who loses hope in something. Write about how this character then got hope.
Write an inspirational story about overcoming obstacles through hope.
Write about the strength and tenacity of your will.
Describe a person you know whose hope provided her a new path in her writing career.
Write a character who doubts her every decision.
What are your highest hopes for your writing?
How do you stay positive and engaged in your day-to-day writing?
Write about a decision you made as a result of having hope.
How have you instilled hope in a fellow writer? Was it through words (simple and straightforward communication) or actions, a belief, or through a collective vision?
Write about a situation and your realistic and unrealistic hopes.
Writing in itself is an act of hope. That is, we write to be heard and to make sense of the senseless—we write hoping a connection will be made. Now apply that mindset to the aftermath of writing—and write, hope, write, repeat. Hopefully, hope will take you a long way.
Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and
Debbie spent 30 years as a registered nurse. She became a certified applied poetry facilitator and journal-writing instructor in 2007. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Science-Medical Writing program. Her publications have appeared in Journal of Poetry Therapy, Studies in Writing: Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health, Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women, Statement CLAS Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, and Red Earth Review.
When I meet Leo Shipp (author of Pick), he is in his garret; humming, reading an atlas. “When did you read Crash, by J.G. Ballard,” I interview him. “University,” he says. “Please,” I say, “stop humming.”
He hums all the more tenaciously. I realize his atlas is missing its countries. “Why Crash,” I interview him. “Hated it,” he concludes. “I was obsessed with all things ‘postmodern’,” he continues, “at the time. I made a list of things to read. It included things like Infinite Jest, which I bought, and haven’t yet opened; for reasons I’ll soon get onto. My favourites? Donald Antrim, Hundred Brothers; Martin Amis, Money; and Smuggler’s Bible, by someone-or-other. Joseph McElroy, I think,” he thinks. “Then I read Crash,” he continues, “and it was physically, mentally disgusting. To read it was some kind of torture, y’know?”
I nod non-committally. “Please, stop humming.
“You are a very annoying boy.”
“And so,” he continues, conventionally enough, “I finished it, and thought it the worst thing I’d read. So then I read The Atrocity Exhibition, by J.G. Ballard; then Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard. Strange, no?”
“No,” I conclude. “Please,” I interview him, “do go on.” “Damn!” he exclaims, and continues, humming, “now, when I’d finished, I had Ballard inside me. Perhaps that is why the reading had revolted me: it had, in fact, been nothing less than Ballard himself — a cyborg-spirit — penetrating into my brain; slow, like some Cronenbergian device, antique, and metal, shiny, flesh. Now he was in me. I had to get him out. Decided to Pickhim out. Funny thing,” he whistles, obnoxiously, “it all came so easy, writing as Ballard. He’s a very distinctive style, which — like so many great artists (Blake, Dickinson, Hardy, Pete Townshend) — is also somewhat inept.” “Ah,” I cry, squirming excited, “and and and yes, one might — one might even — one might go so far as to say, that ALL great artists,” I continue, theorizing, caught on a wondrous notion, excited, “are great, and are loved, for having the most individual minds; those whose personality is best expressed, and most impressed upon us. From Wordsworth and Whitman to Eminem, we love the weirdos who force us to know them.”
Leo Shipp lobs the atlas at my head, where it hits me. Clobbered, I flop to the floor, clattered. I jabber and wheeze, blood. I dust myself off, interview him, “You say it was easy to write as Ballard?” “Yes and no,” he ruminates softly, “most of it came very quick, and direct. But once it was done, I decided to add more elaborate sections (in particular, the Lady Gaga passage), to satisfy the feeling, and make it more postmodern. This required a strange ordeal, of poring through certain parts of Crash, harvesting ‘typical’ words and phrases. Following this, I took an anatomy book out of the library; and made a list of every scientific word pertaining to my nose. The two lists — Ballardian words, nasal words — were then given ‘a stylized sex-act marriage; a destined, longed-for merging of the two, in which were played out the million possibilities that each had concocted in fatal dreams.’” “You’ve lost it,” I reproach, “that is pale, contrived; nothing like what you have writ in the book.” “I know,” he knows, hanging his nose, in shame, like how in the book. “Go on,” I beseech, I interview him. He sighs. “After Ballard, I read a book called Giles Goat-Boy, by John Barth. It was almost 1000 pages long, with small writing, and long blocks of text. Also, it was rubbish. The writing was good, so I was already some 100 pages in by the time that I knew it was crap. By then, I felt obliged to finish. So I did. I finished the tedious book. I’d been devising, and starting to write, my own big postmodern book at the time — Screensic, blending music, films and books — perhaps, one day, I’ll return. But for the long-time being, Goat-Boy killed it. That was the end of my postmodern love.”
He sighs, and wants to wrap up. “I never read Infinite Jest. Suffering from overwork, I was suffering much by the end of my degree (History, BA Hons, First Class). I became more earnest, more wrought in my writing. Also — conversely, for some strange reason — even as my tortured self-obsession grew, I was growing an obsession with other people; the first time in my life. (‘To know another well were to know one’s self,’ as quoteth William Hazlitt; a quote which could be pushed out into more mutual waters.) In especial, I found an obsession with speech. So I wrote a book called The Sufferer’s Home; a novel, with not much by way of plot, but very good, I still think; very fine, but uncommercial. So although some agents praised and encouraged me, none were willing to take it on. I gave up trying. Sad, sad,” he condoles. And goes on, “Now I’ve gone on to work in a school. I’ve recently finished a YA book, which, if I was being crass and not-modest — but no — I’m not-crass, and always modest.”
But I, your reporter, am crass to the max. This YA fantasy book, Genefreaks, I can tell you, is like a cross between Pokémon and Harry Potter, while remaining wholly unique. Also, it has very human interest, almost akin to a soap. “And is it true,” I fawn, I interview him, “you recently sent the book to some agents?” “They rejected it,” he says. “Keep trying,” I breathe. “Thanks,” he snorts, “I will.”
As I am leaving, and as he is humming, he goes back to work on his latest attempt: another YA fantasy book, Mythologitis, about a disease which turns people into beasts from Greek myth. It’s sublime, and is also about friendships and foes amongst teenage girls, who constitute half of the cast. I suppose it will fail — the way of all fish. I suppose he will never stop humming.
Leo Shipp, 23, is a teaching assistant at a north London secondary school. He has had a rap-style poem published in the poetry journal Magma 58, and a few of his older short stories are available to read on Wattpad under the name ‘Yodageddon.’ (http://www.wattpad.com/user/Yodageddon).
In the middle of a downtown street, a woman wearing red forms a focus — an apex — in a picture of shifting motion, a crowd moving, other buildings overlaid on the original scene. But the woman is constant, her red outfit standing out. Seeing with the camera lens has freed photographer Harry Callahan, opened him to what the human eye has been conditioned not to see — the multiplicity of life, the layers and levels of reality, from the everyday to the non-ordinary.
With a wide-angle lens (Callahan frequently uses double or even triple exposures), he expands the scene, extends its limits, and creates new relationships between objects. In a photo shot “straight” — without the collage/montage effect of super-imposed images — of a beach scene, individuals in the water and on shore take on a new vulnerability. Reduced in size and stripped of their human superiority, we now see them more as part of nature than apart, dwarfed in relationship to the ocean’s vastness and surrounding sand. They are caught in a new light, between our expectations of human importance and a world where size, power, and status mean little.
In contrast, the artist Jill Giegerich combines collage, painting, and relief in her work. She introduces objects like wooden table legs that are the things themselves, and they also become something else in relationship to the new context. The surfaces she uses are not the usual rectangles or squares. Instead, they follow the curves and angles of the contents, the shapes not just a frame but part of the art itself. Within the plane of a piece, Giegerich creates illusions of different depths and dimensions all happening simultaneously, giving a disquieting effect.
In photography, the camera lens “sees” something via the artist (or vice versa), records what it sees and frames it. The camera is the grammar, the organizing principal that allows the artist’s perceptions to be communicated to others.
In painting, the colors have meaning apart from the subject. They aren’t dependent on an image to communicate emotions, ideas. They have been freed to become, to enter the in-between world that Paul Klee refers to in the following passage, an excerpt from his writing that I saw at SFMOMA:
In our time worlds have opened up which not everybody can see into, although they too are part of nature….An in-between world…. I call it that because I feel that it exists between the worlds our senses can perceive, and I absorb it inwardly to the extent that I can project it outwardly in symbolic correspondences. Children, madmen, and savages can still, or again, look into it. And what they see and picture is for me the most precious kind of confirmation. For we all see the same things but from different angles.
The artist’s lexicon is the palate, and nothing limits the range of colors/emotions that can be produced on a canvas. How colors react to each other and make new colors when mixed are the criteria. No longer does blue represent sky or water; it can become something new. Greens, too, may leap out of their assumed connection with nature and express something different.
While we don’t let go entirely of the usual associations — and couldn’t if we wanted to because they often are archetypal (images and patterns that repeat themselves throughout history) — we can entertain other possibilities. A sky can be green instead of blue; a lake can be red; a human purple. All of these colors, then, express a different perception of the thing perceived and strike the viewer freshly — come in a side door and catch us off guard: trigger an emotional response that lifts us into a new awareness of ourselves and the environment.
By contrast, in writing, we are dependent on words and their multiple meanings to convey either a single idea or to suggest many interpretations. But words don’t come directly from the head of Zeus. Instead they travel through the entire human social body, from the beginning of time, on the way picking up nuances, cultural inflections, meanings associated with a particular era: in short, they have baggage that both enriches and restricts, enhances and confuses. And that baggage continues to resonate today, just as our ancestor’s idiosyncratic behavior and histories can plague later generations.
The word “nice” illustrates my meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and as late as 1587, nice meant wanton, loose-mannered, and lascivious. Other meanings accrued to nice during that period, including foolish, stupid, senseless, strange, rare, uncommon, slothful, and lazy. By the end of the sixteenth century, and on into the seventeenth, nice began to take on some of its current characteristics: nice meant to be coy, shy, modest, reserved, tactful, fastidious, dainty, and so on. Today — well, to be nice is not necessarily nice…it has become a bland, overly used word with an imprecise meaning.
The other difficulty (or freedom) of language are the rules that accompany it. While singular words have resonance, it takes a string of words, linked together by agreed-on syntax and grammar, to evoke larger meanings, complex thoughts. Ape gives me only a fuzzy picture of an ape, my personal image of ape. Ape loping causes me to see the animal in action. Ape loping towards me sets me in motion, too.
But for more experimental writers — ones who want to explore the “in-between world,” less satisfied with experiencing the conventional usage of words in a sentence — the opposite (or a variation) of the usual pattern prevails. Experimental writers deliberately shake up syntax, test what happens when adjectives are used as verbs, when prepositions don’t take objects, when thoughts are left incomplete. They will join together words in dense paragraphs without punctuation in order to break down our expectations of linear thought, or isolate words we normally don’t pay attention to.
Leslie Scalapino and Claude Royet Journoud are two poets who come to mind. Often they isolate a single word on a line or page, causing the word — ”that,” perhaps, or “it” — to shift its role, step out of the persona of a pronoun referring to something else, or a preposition making connections with the subject of the sentence and its object, to taking on substantiality in its own right. Isolated on a line or page, each letter in the word has weight and calls attention to itself, just as each letter in the original alphabet actually resembled something, was a thing in itself. It had a self. It selfed. It i/t. It was an I making a crossing or being crossed. The word becomes a character — its letters characters — in the theater of the page.
Not that there’s anything wrong with our usual way of perceiving through language and its rules: many complex, mysterious things can be conveyed in traditional ways. But as Orwell pointed out in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” clichés and unoriginal images prevent us from being discerning and distort rather than reveal. So, too, can our usual ways of speaking and writing prevent us from experiencing a multi-dimensional, fragmented, chaotic, bizarre, inexpressible reality, often with an organizing center that may be different from what we expect.
A poem that illustrates these dynamics and also investigates Klee’s in-between world is one by Kathleen Fraser from Something (even human voices) in the foreground, a lake.
THEY DID NOT MAKE CONVERSATION
A lake as big, the early evening wind at the bather’s neck. Something pulling (or was it rising up) green from the bottom. You could lie flat and let go of the white creases. You could indulge your fear of drowning in the arms of shallow wet miles. You did not open your mouth, yet water poured into openings, making you part. Bone in the throat. That dark blue fading, thinning at the edges . On deck chairs with bits of flowered cloth across their genitals, the guests called out in three languages and sometimes pointed, commenting on the simple beauty of bought connection. The swan-like whiteness of the day. That neck of waves. There was always a tray with small red bottles. And pin-pointed attentions, at each slung ease (2).
I can’t do a full explication of the poem within this essay, so I will discuss only enough to illustrate my point. But I do want to show that the writer accomplishes here something that she articulates in the flyleaf to her book, Notes preceding trust: “I wish, in my work, to resist habit (mine and others’), to uncover something fresh that connects with the reader in a way she or he could not have predicted. An ache, a splash of cold water, a recognition.”
In the poem’s opening, we are presented with “a lake as big.” The immediate impulse is to ask “as big as what?” But if we resist that impulse, we soon discover the comparison is more powerful by having it open-ended. Our imagination fills in the blank, forcing us into our own interiors, our own in-between worlds. Another reading would be to compare the lake to the early evening wind, extending the comparison to something invisible but tangible. This lake, then, isn’t an actual lake. It takes on mythic, magical proportions — suggesting perhaps the waters of the unconscious, unfathomable and illimitable.
In the next group of words, the speaker questions her own perceptions of “something pulling…green from the bottom.” There are various ways to read this phrase. Either we can see it as something actually pulling the color green from the bottom, bringing it into view, perhaps the bather. Or we can hear it as something green — fresh, new, living — pulling (rising up) from the bottom on its own.
Then the reader is brought in, the first complete sentence, the previous phrases like the breath that precedes a spoken thought, rising up green from the bottom. We are part of the poem’s setting. It’s now possible to let go of the “white creases,” which could be the lighter indentations left in folds of skin when we are out in the sun for a long time, those vulnerable spots hidden from glaring rays. But they also could be the crease in a page, perhaps where a book folds at its center. Maybe the “you” is a book/page — or, put another way, you are compared to a book/page — that can open up, let go, “indulge your fear of drowning in the arms of shallow wet miles.”
And we do fear drowning, especially in shallow water. What could be more humiliating than to drown in water that isn’t over our heads? Yet our fears often are just as groundless. However, the provocative part of this image is the “wet miles.” Again, we don’t know what the miles encompass, again giving the image more suggestiveness. The ambiguity causes our hidden fears of the unknown to surface, and we imagine an endless expanse of miles, wet now from the lake that the poem started with.
As the title suggests, this poem is about our inability to communicate and connect with others, except at times via “bought connection.” Fraser accomplishes what she hopes to do: she creates an ache, a splash of recognition. She takes me into that bleak landscape, the frightening dimension that’s always present in human relations but rarely alluded to.
Just as the visual artist’s purpose — one of them, at least — is to help us see beyond the accepted meanings, to shake up our perceptions, so writers, too, use their colors/words in new, unexpected ways. As Poet Elaine Equi says in Mirage #3 (The Women’s Issue),
Experimental when it refers to literature is usually connected with the idea of avant-garde and/or the act of challenging traditional forms. To be an experimental writer implies rebellion, but I prefer to give the idea of experimentation its scientific connotation which is closer to a method of discovery (75).
As with the visual artists I’ve mentioned here, innovative writing stretches our perceptions, shows us things — even turns certain words into objects — in new, unexpected relationships, causes us to stop, to look. In doing so, we have expanded our vision — discovered that “these things aren’t fancies, but facts” (Klee).
Lily Iona MacKenzie teaches writing at the University of San Francisco. Her essays, poetry, book reviews, interviews, and short fiction have found a home in numerous publications. All This, a poetry collection, was published in October 2011. Fling, one of her novels, will be published in July 2015. A recent issue of Notes Magazine featured her as the spotlight author, showcasing her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. All of the arts inspire her, and she dabbles in painting and collage when she isn’t writing. http://lilyionamackenzie.wordpress.com/
When I meet Leo Shipp (author of 
