Musings: Notebook to Essay

Alice Munro can move thirty years in a single sentence, and you will not notice it happening until you are already there. A story that begins with a woman at a kitchen table in 1955 will, by its third page, have arrived at the same woman in a hospital room in 1985, and the leap will feel less like a cut than like a breath — the way memory itself moves, not in sequence but in association, the past surfacing inside the present the way a face surfaces in a window.

I return to Munro when I have forgotten what the short story can do. She is the proof that a story does not need a plot to hold you; it needs a mind, moving. Her stories are not built on events so much as on the way a life keeps returning to the same few events, worrying them, turning them over, finding something new in them each time.

The short story is not a small novel. It is a different instrument, and Munro plays it the way it was meant to be played.

What I have learned from her, and what I try to teach, is that time in a story is not a straight line to be followed but a material to be shaped. A writer can spend three pages on a single afternoon and then cross twenty years in a paragraph, and the reader will accept both — will barely notice the second — if the compression is earned. The trick is not to summarize the years but to let them pass through a single detail: a coat that no longer fits, a name that has changed, a room that is the same but emptier.

Munro taught me that the short story's power is not in what it includes but in what it lets the reader feel pass by. The years she skips are not missing. They are present in the way the present moment is heavy with them. That is what I want my own stories to do — to make the reader feel the weight of a whole life in the space of a single scene.

I read my poems aloud before I trust them. Not to perform them — to hear them. There is a difference, and it took me years to learn it.

The eye forgives too much. On the page, a line can look right and still be dead — the rhythm off by a syllable, the ending landing where it should not. But the ear does not forgive. Read the poem aloud, slowly, and every false note announces itself. The tongue stumbles where the line is wrong. The breath runs out where the sentence has gone on too long. The voice drops where the poem has lost its music.

The poem is not finished until it has been said, not just seen.

I think this is why poems were spoken before they were written. The line break is not a typographical choice; it is a notation for the breath. A short line asks you to pause. A long line asks you to keep going, to run out of air a little, to feel the pressure of the thought before it releases. When I read a poem aloud, I am reading the poet's instructions for how to breathe.

My students resist this at first. They want to read silently, quickly, the way they read everything else. But a poem is not information to be scanned. It is a small machine made of sound, and it only runs when you turn it on with your voice. So I make them read aloud — their own poems, and the poems of others — until the ear wakes up and starts doing the work the eye has been skipping.

The test is simple, and I use it on everything I write now, not just poems. If a sentence is hard to say, it is hard to read. If it is hard to read, it is not finished. The ear knows before the mind does. Listen to it.

We use the word epiphany now to mean almost any small realization — a moment of clarity, a sudden understanding. We have Joyce to thank for that, and we have, as usual, thinned the word out in the borrowing. What Joyce meant by it was something more specific, and I think about it whenever I sit down to write.

As a young man in Dublin, Joyce kept a notebook of what he called epiphanies — short sketches, a few lines each, of moments he had witnessed or overheard: a fragment of conversation, a gesture, a look that passed across a face. He believed these moments, gathered faithfully, were the raw material of art. Not the grand events, not the plotted turning points, but the small, sudden flashes in which, as he put it, the soul of the commonest object seemed to radiate.

The ordinary moment, seen clearly enough, gives off light.

I think of this when I teach, because students arrive believing they need a big subject — a death, a betrayal, a catastrophe — in order to have something worth writing about. And I keep telling them what Joyce kept telling himself: the material is already there, in the overheard sentence, the remembered gesture, the thing you noticed and could not say why it mattered.

The discipline is not in finding the moment. It is in trusting it. An epiphany is not manufactured; it is recognized. You cannot decide to have one. You can only learn to notice, and to write the noticing down before it fades.

I keep a notebook for the same reason Joyce did. Not for ideas, exactly — for the small things that arrive already lit: the sentence overheard on the train, the way a student's face changed when she finally understood. These are not the finished work. They are the promise of it.

The word has been thinned by use, but the thing itself has not. It is still there, waiting in the ordinary, for anyone willing to look long enough.

Every writing student knows Chekhov's gun. Show a rifle on the wall in the first act, the rule goes, and it must go off by the third. The advice has been repeated so often, and so confidently, that most people who quote it have never read the letter it comes from — and would be surprised by what Chekhov actually meant.

He did not mean that every object must be used. He meant that nothing unnecessary should be there in the first place. The gun is not a promise the writer has to keep. It is a warning the writer gives themselves. If it does not belong to the story, take it down from the wall before the reader ever sees it.

I think about this constantly when I edit. The manuscripts that arrive on my desk are rarely short of material. They are short of necessity. A scene that does the work of the scene before it. A metaphor that is beautiful and also, in the end, decorative. A detail the writer loves because it is true, not because it is needed.

Cutting is not a verdict on the writer's talent. It is an act of mercy toward the story, which is trying to become itself and keeps getting interrupted.

The hardest cut is always the one the writer loves most. I know this from both sides of the desk. The sentence I am proudest of is very often the sentence that has to go, because it is proud of itself, and the reader can feel it.

Chekhov was not a cold writer. He was a writer who had learned that restraint is a form of tenderness toward the reader. Leave the wall bare. Trust the room.

When I was a boy I asked too many questions — not the ordinary kind a child asks and forgets, but the kind that circles back, chases an idea down five more corridors, and refuses to let go. Grown-ups found it tiring. I found it, mostly, embarrassing.

Carol didn't. Carol was a former nun turned psychologist who, for reasons I still don't fully understand, took an interest in a curious, chattering boy who imagined too hard. One day, worn down by my own barrage of questions, I must have looked at her the way children look when they expect to be told to quiet down. Instead she smiled and said, “Jimmy, you ask so many questions because you have permeable membranes.”

She wasn't correcting me. She was naming something in me and telling me, in the same breath, that it was all right to have it.

I carried that sentence for most of my life without knowing where it came from. Then, not long ago, I found the work of a psychiatrist named Ernest Hartmann, who spent years studying people with especially vivid dream lives and discovered something larger underneath it — a real, measurable range of temperament he called boundary thinness. At the thin end, thought rarely arrives alone; it comes trailing a feeling, the way Carol's sentence still trails a smile I remember decades later. Hartmann even found that art and music students score thinner, on average, than the general population. The trait that made me an inconvenient child at the dinner table turns out to be more common among the people who spend their lives making things.

Carol didn't need a questionnaire to see it. I no longer feel any embarrassment about my permeable membranes. I think of them now the way she seemed to — not as a defect to manage, but as an instrument, a little more finely strung than most, that picks up sounds other people miss.

I keep these two on the same shelf, though they never met and would likely have unsettled each other if they had. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are commonly named the first great American poets, and I think the label holds — not because they wrote alike, but because each, independently and almost simultaneously, broke with English precedent and invented a native way of hearing. Whitman did it by knocking down the wall between the poet and the world. Here he is at the opening of Song of Myself, already refusing the modesty English verse expected of him:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1

Dickinson broke the same wall from the opposite direction — not by enlarging the self until it held everyone, but by narrowing the aperture until a single perception could not be paraphrased away. Where Whitman's line runs long, cumulative, and breathing, hers stops, doubts itself, and starts again on a dash:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog! — Emily Dickinson, 288

Set side by side, the two techniques could hardly be more opposed. Whitman writes in long, unrhymed, incantatory lines built on anaphora and cataloguing — the famous lists of occupations, landscapes, and bodies that pour down the page until the poem feels less like a description of America than an act of ingesting it. His grammar is additive: and, and, and, one clause opening onto the next, because his premise requires that nothing be left out. Dickinson writes in the clipped meter of the hymnal — common meter and ballad meter, the very forms she heard every Sunday in an Amherst pew — but she interrupts that inherited music with slant rhyme, eccentric capitalization, and the dash that has generated a century of scholarly argument. Her grammar is subtractive: she tells the truth, as she says elsewhere, by telling it slant, withholding as much as she reveals. Whitman annexes the world line by line. Dickinson interrogates a single instant until it yields more than it wants to.

Both are among my favorite poets, and I hold them there for almost opposite reasons. I love Dickinson for her intellectuality and her enigmatic lines — the sense that every poem is a locked room with the key visible but just out of reach, and that rereading her is less a pleasure than an ongoing negotiation. I love Whitman for the opposite reason: his expansive self-presentation, his celebratory tone, the way he seems constitutionally incapable of closing a door once he has opened it. I find something quietly ironic in loving them equally, since to love both is to love a contradiction. And yet the contradiction resolves itself, I think, at a deeper level, because both poets are, at bottom, iconoclasts of versification — perseverant and entirely certain of their own craft, unwilling to write the poems their century expected of them. They simply arrived at that certainty from opposite directions. Whitman abolished the line to make room for everyone. Dickinson fractured the line to make room for the one true thing she meant. Both are, underneath the technique, evoking the same American spirit — independence, self-reliance, the conviction that the poem answers to no authority but the poet's own perception.

In today's psychological terms, I would call Dickinson an introvert and Whitman an extrovert, and I do not think the anachronism does either poet a disservice. Whitman's is a poetics of merger — he wants to absorb the crowd and be absorbed by it, to feel the "kelson of the creation" running through every body he catalogues. Dickinson's is a poetics of withdrawal — her speaker is most herself alone, at the window, cataloguing not the world but the mind's report of it. And this is where the two of them stop being merely a matched pair of nineteenth-century originals and start speaking, I think, for two permanent strands of American ideology: the pull toward community and the pull toward being left alone. Whitman is the poet of the "barbaric yawp," the crowded ferry, the "I" that dilates until it contains multitudes. Dickinson is the poet of the shut door, the letter never sent, the self that insists on its right to remain illegible. America has always wanted both things at once — the town meeting and the cabin in the woods — and it is fitting that our two foreparents of poetry embody the choice so completely that neither one alone would do.

I have a more private reason for returning to Dickinson, one that has nothing to do with prosody. I lived for five years a few blocks from her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, now a museum, and I passed it often enough that the house stopped being a historical marker and became, in my imagination, simply inhabited. I would look up at her bedroom window and imagine her at it, looking back down at me. Sometimes I glanced into her garden and wished, in the frankly impossible way one wishes for such things, that I could travel back and know her — sit with her, even briefly, in that garden. But I suspect, as the biographical criticism consistently suggests, that any approach of mine would have sent her hurrying back inside, her black dress billowing behind her like dark contrails, the wake of a speeding jet. That, too, seems fitting. The poet who wrote "I'm Nobody" and meant it would hardly have made an exception for an admirer two centuries early or two centuries late.

I did not always make that walk alone. Often my companion past the homestead was Kathy Scherpa, one of the kindest people I have ever known, and I find now that I cherish those unhurried walks even more than the poetry itself — which is a high bar, since I love the poetry a great deal. We would pass the same fence, the same hedge, the same second-floor window, and talk of nothing urgent, which is to say we talked of everything that mattered. I did not know then to call those afternoons some of the best moments of my life. I know it now, plainly, and I suspect Dickinson — who prized nothing so highly as an afternoon rescued from the ordinary and made luminous by attention — would have approved of the accounting, even if she would not have approved of the company.

Whitman, I suspect, would have done the opposite: seen me on the path, called out, and insisted I stay for supper. That, in the end, is the whole difference between them, and the whole reason American poetry needed both.

I have written the same doorway more times than I can count. In “Copacetic” it is the doorway of my father’s hospital room, and he is at the window in the blue bathrobe my sister gave him. In Give Them Unquiet Dreams it is a doorway on Winthrop Street in Braintree, and my grandmother is standing in it with the rosary in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. In the Aiden stories I am still writing, it is a doorway I have not yet described but that will arrive when it wants to.

For years I thought I was repeating myself — and worried about it, in the way writers are told to worry about it. I have begun, at sixty-three, to think of this less as repetition than as return. There may be a difference. You repeat what you have exhausted. You return to what you have not yet learned to see.

The grandmother in the doorway is the same grandmother, and she has always been the same grandmother. I am not putting her there each time. She is there, and I am learning to look.

I take it as a small consolation that this is not a new theory. Emerson might have called the doorway a “porch.” Chekhov might simply have gone on writing.

I read this passage from Gilead once a year, sometimes twice. It is the letter of an old minister to his young son, and I know few sentences in modern American fiction that carry as much weight so lightly:

“I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.” — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Five words. The last sentence of the book. What it does is refuse the summing-up that every other closing sentence in the American canon has been reaching for since Fitzgerald’s green light. Robinson trusts the reader to have understood everything. She simply names the two things her narrator is still willing to do: pray, and sleep. In that order.

I sometimes tell students that if they can end a story with two verbs and no explanation, they are already doing something most published writers never manage. Robinson can. Chekhov could. You get there by learning to trust the reader more than you trust your own summary.

People ask me, when I say I write from mercy rather than judgment, what mercy has to do with fiction. Fair question. Mercy sounds like something you extend to the deserving. In a story you have made up yourself, no one is deserving because no one is real. You could summarize a character in a sentence and be done with them. Judgment is the easier thing.

But this is what I mean. When I sit down with a character who has done something I do not admire — the father who is drinking, the mother who is failing her children, the boy who has stolen and then lied about it — I try not to have already decided what they are. I try to sit at the kitchen table with them and let them explain themselves in the way they would explain themselves to a friend at four in the morning. Not to me. To a friend. My job, if I do it well, is to have overheard what they said and set it down as accurately as I can.

Mercy in fiction is not forgiveness. It is the willingness to let a character say what they would actually say, in the words they would actually use, without the writer standing behind them with a red pencil marking them as guilty.

This is not, for the record, moral relativism. It is the opposite. It is the belief that every person, in real life, is too complicated to be reduced — and that the writer’s job is to honor that in the invented person too. If the story is good, the reader will do the judging themselves, and their judgment will be more accurate than mine could have been. I get out of the way.

I learned this, or began to learn it, from Chekhov. I try to teach it every semester. I fail at it, in my own work, all the time.

This fragment grew into the essay All We Ever Needed: The Architecture of Mercy, a full study of the short story collection built on this idea.

A passage I keep returning to — from an essay of mine called "Teaching at Fifty-Six." Written near the end of three decades of teaching inner-city kids, and never far from my desk.

It occurs to me that teaching is my salvation. There are wonderful moments, when things move so fluidly, and the pitch of our discussion seems just right — students are smiling, engaged, sharing feelings, excited. A palpable energy moves through all of us — a realness, an in-the-momentness that charges the air and electrifies our conversations. Connections are made. Questions are answered. We learn who we are. If we are fortunate, we intuit an answer to the question Why? Sometimes we discover what is really true. — From "Teaching at Fifty-Six"

People like to imagine that rare and delectable places lurk in some remote part of the universe or some distant epoch from the past, but right now, in my classroom, surrounded by students, I dwell in that delectable place, a most memorable season of any day. I feel intensely awake, most alive — renewed. This is communion, I think, and teaching will be the pond that I bathe in each morning, every new day.

I keep coming back to this passage from Trevor's "The News from Ireland." It is the kind of sentence that teaches you, every time you read it, what the short story is for:

"There is, in his clerical opinion, no part of the world more forsaken by God, no part where charity is more thinly given, kindness more rarely shown." — William Trevor, "The News from Ireland"

What strikes me is the construction. Trevor begins with a tucked-in clause — in his clerical opinion — that identifies the speaker without naming him, and then keeps the sentence moving forward in two parallel halves whose rhythm mimics the very judgment they describe. The sentence becomes the clergyman's mind on the page.

We are taught to admire writers for what they say. We should also admire them for how they hold the reader in a single breath.

I taught Dickinson for years. I am still teaching her, even now, by reading her in the morning before I write. This is the stanza I came back to this week:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise — Emily Dickinson

The instruction is to a poet, but I have come to think it is also an instruction to a novelist. The slant truth is the one the reader can bear; the head-on truth is the one the reader resists. Fiction's whole technology — point of view, scene, dialogue, metaphor, the careful arrangement of what is shown and what is withheld — is in service of telling it slant.

Dickinson knew at thirty what most of us are still working out at sixty.