As of this month, I’ve been doing this for a year and a half, and I’m trying to assess things and think about what’s next. Lately, it’s been almost all grief all the time. Sorry. Yesterday’s newsletter was a lot—even for me. I want to get back to writing about writing, teaching, MS, typewriters, and AI issues, but mainly I want to focus on fiction (though not here).

My next planned newsletter will compare the panic over the introduction of typewriters to what is happening now with AI. I’ll reference one of my favorite writers, Ted Chiang. Should be fun!

I also plan to draw out the connections between writing posts and grieving posts to talk about how writing about grief has influenced my thinking on writing issues in general (and on how that might have influenced my teaching if I were still teaching).

I’ve been rereading what I’ve written here, and these are a few of my observations:

• There’s some pretty good shit here. I’m kind of impressed.

• The grieving newsletters get the most attention by far, which I don’t really understand. It almost makes me want to take them all down. God forbid if people start thinking of me as some sort of grief influencer. I hope you’ve noticed that, though they are often intense, there are also some lols in there. Yesterday’s had a couple of lines that cracked me up. My sense of humor is a bit off, though.

• There are writing points to be made about those newsletters, however, so I’ll probably keep them up. Their relative popularity is not why I’m writing them. I write them for me. (Which accounts for the intensity.)

• Some of my best work ever is on this site, but the pieces that I think are my most significant get the least attention. Not sure what to make of that. Maybe I’m just a bad judge of my own work.

• I try not to pay attention to numbers, but that stuff draws you in, which I don’t like. I deactivated my social media because I need a break from all that, and from the sorry state of the world. This site has too many similarities to those places, and that makes me want to extend my cleanse to include Substack. So far, though, I’ve resisted the urge to shut this down. There’s still more good than bad. The truth is, I’d rather send you snail mail letters written on a typewriter or with a fountain pen.

• I decided the fiction posts don’t belong here, so I took them down. I left a couple of stories up, but maybe not for long.

• Engagement is generally low. That’s ok, I’m shy, too, but just so you know, I’m happy to hear from you, and if you ever want to discuss anything on here for any reason, feel free to contact me. Or give me your mailing address, and we can be pen pals.

• These last 18 months of writing steadily and intensely in ways I never had time to do before have been a profound experience. Despite the evidence, it has helped me. I like it, and I’ll keep writing, but I think I need to decide whether to attempt to become an actual author instead of a pretend one here on Substack. It’s either that or just keep being some random semi-anonymous dude who writes.

• To do the author thing, I’ll need to swallow hard and do a lot of stuff I hate to do. I fear I lack that kind of motivation, but I should forge ahead anyway. I’m actually well-practiced at that. Here’s what it comes down to—my life feels pointless these days. I have to address that. It’s time. Either that or just embrace it. Pick one.

• I like being read. I think I’m being read. Who can say? All I know is, a lot of those annoying emails you get from me get opened. Thank you. I’m grateful for you. I want to bake you a pie.

• One more thing. Writing is the coolest thing. You should do it.

[Previously]

Two things happened after I posted WWG 36. First, I read about Marjane Satrapi‘s death, and the article mentioned that her family says she died of grief after losing her husband recently. My first thought was—lucky her.

Sometimes, I shock even myself.

I looked it up. It’s a thing, apparently. People die of grief. I always thought that was apocryphal. Couldn't be real. It is. Grief can kill you. I had no idea.

Every time I post one of these, I think, Okay, that covers it. There isn’t much left to say about grieving. I’m always wrong. It’s bottomless.

Every week, my therapist asks me if I would ever harm myself. Of course not. It’s the wrong question, though. I wouldn’t harm myself, but, you know, if you’re looking for a volunteer to push someone out of the way of a speeding bus, I’m your man.

There’s an old blues line. “I’ve been mistreated, and I don’t mind dying.” My therapist’s question should be more like this:

Therapist: Do you want to die?

Me: I don’t mind.

Here’s the thing. It hurts to be alive. There seems to be no end to it. It’s exhausting.

Maybe grief will put me out of my misery, after all. According to Google, here is how grief could take me out:

The primary ways grief impacts physical survival include:

• Broken Heart Syndrome (Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy): Extreme emotional stress causes a sudden surge of adrenaline that stuns the heart. This triggers symptoms mimicking a heart attack, such as chest pain and shortness of breath, and can be fatal if untreated. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• Immune System Breakdown: Prolonged grief elevates cortisol and inflammatory proteins. This sustained inflammation makes the body far more vulnerable to infections, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• Behavioral Changes: Grieving individuals often neglect their own health. They may stop taking necessary medications, eat poorly, abuse substances, or isolate themselves from social support networks. [1, 2]

In my defense, I am acting in precisely the opposite way of what’s listed under Behavioral Changes. I’ve been so on top of issues related to my health that you would be astounded if I listed everything. So many visits, tests, procedures, interventions, and I’m meticulous about taking my meds. I eat healthily. So that third bullet point isn't going to strike me down. I’m well past the point where the first one, Broken Heart Syndrome, might be a threat. . . I think. Yet, that name hits the nail on the head.

The middle one gives me pause. Unfortunately, immune system breakdowns and I are well-acquainted, and I have the limp to prove it.

But, hey, I don’t mind.

The second thing that happened was hearing George Harrison sing, “What Is My Life?” today. In the chorus, he asks, Tell me, what is my life without your love?/Tell me, who am I without you by my side? I’ve used that video before, but it hit harder today. After passing the 2nd anniversary of my wife’s death not long ago, and our wedding anniversary on Wednesday, those questions are daggers. They’re cries of pain. Now I’m aware they can kill.

They are the central questions of my existence in these last two years, and whatever I do to try and answer them, I come up empty. I’m as lost and devastated as I was on the first day. I don’t really understand how this works, but I miss her more every day, not less. I don’t know what I can expect therapy to accomplish. Maybe at best, it will help me learn to live with this pain. That’s about it.

I’m doing that, though. I’m trying so hard. I’m doing so much. I’m doing everything I should. Sometimes, I amaze myself when I survey the things I’ve accomplished, considering how much I’m hurting.

See, I give myself credit occasionally. (That one was directed at my therapist.) I get shit done, but all the while, I’m screaming inside. To quote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I feel more lonely and hopeless and horrid than I know how to describe. It seems there are several things I need to learn to live with. One is the fact that this pain, loneliness, and hopelessness will never go away.

I have some experience with this. I used to have chronic pain. For decades, I had the same pounding headache. It never went away. Never. Doctors were little help. Still, I went to work, helped raise a child, played in a band, and lived an active life. I rarely used a sick day. About 9 years ago, the headache went away, maybe because of a medication I take for something else. Now, I wonder, how did I live that way? Well, what choice did I have?

The same with my MS. People tell me sometimes that they admire me for being able to go on sort of normally, doing my best to live a rich and busy life with few limitations. This always surprises me. I’ve been this way so long, it’s just life to me. So is it a case of having this knowledge in my back pocket that keeps me moving forward when I just don’t feel like it? Isn’t the answer I’m looking for right under my nose? Maybe, but George Harrison’s questions raise complications.

What is my life without your love? I’m working on it. I’m writing, reading, playing guitar, socializing regularly, keeping up with yard work, with errands, I’m always cooking, and now, even baking. My life is full, yet it’s empty. I’m banking on something sticking at some point, something that will absorb at least a little of that emptiness, but right now it’s quite echoey in here.

Who am I without you? I have no fucking idea. This is the question that eats at me the most. I’m no closer to answering it than I was two years ago. What would progress in this area mean? I mean, I’m different, for sure, so much so that I don’t recognize myself. Is it a matter of getting to know whoever I am now? How would I do that? I wish I could find a dating app equivalent for getting to know new me. I want to go over that profile with a fine-toothed comb, meet for coffee, then decide whether I need to bolt.

Yeah, likely I’d suddenly remember I left a pie in the oven, take off, and stick new me with the check.

I never had to question What is my life—at least not since I was fifteen. My partner was my life. I never had to question Who am I without you—because since 1974, I was never without her. Sometimes I wonder, is this complicated by the fact that our relationship started when I was so young, long before I had a chance to work through the identity issues and growing pains most young adults struggle with on their own? Was it because we were a team, and I never had to think about it? Because in a way, a meaningful life was kind of handed to me on a silver platter? Do I need to recreate that stage of life somehow, you know, go on bad dates and, who knows, maybe apply to colleges?

I never wondered what is my life or who am I without you because I never imagined being without her, but it seems to me now that 27-year-old George Harrison was somehow tuned in to the most essential questions of what it means to have and lose a partner. George was an old soul.

Who was I before she came along? I was a kid. Who am I now? That kid again, in a way. But there’s a big difference. His life was still ahead of him. Mine is mostly in the rearview mirror. I’m having a tough time keeping both eyes on the road.

[Previously]

Wednesday, June 3, 2026, 9:25 am, 71°, sunny

My third wedding anniversary day without you. I have no idea what to do with this day. How do I go on? How do I do this? It’s a beautiful day, warm, sunny, birds singing everywhere, the street lush with blossoms and new leaves, the air scented with perfume. Adorable little Arthur, whom you never met, is bouncing a basketball with his dad. Gouda is here with me on the front porch, which is part of our morning routine, so much so that if I’m taking too long to get organized, she waits in the hallway staring forlornly at the door. I sit out here and read or write in a journal, sipping coffee and saying hello to neighbors who pass by. Sometimes one will come up the stairs to visit for a bit.

You would be with us right now. What would you be reading? What would we talk about? Probably our wedding day. We’d laugh at our ridiculous families and that annoying wedding photographer. We both could have done without the whole thing, but I’ll give it this: How many can boast that their father shot their stepmother at their wedding reception? I’m so glad my little brother’s cap gun was loaded and that my father was unaware. Boy, did that silence the room. And then, everyone stared at my father, the gun still pointed at my stepmother. Priceless. It was worth going through the ceremony and all the preparations just for that. I only wish we had it on film!

We had to have a wedding to please your parents, but why did it have to be no alcohol and no dancing? Ridiculous. What kind of wedding is that? I think I would have wanted to dance to Wilson Pickett with you. Got to have a hundred. Yeah, we had that part down.

When I look at the photos now, which you and I never looked at, I’m struck by our smiles. Jesus, we were so happy. We were finally going to share a home.

We never had pet names for each other, no Honey, no Babe (cringe), nothing like that. I called you by name, all three syllables, never the shortened version. I learned that early on, the way some of your friends shortened your name, but you never referred to yourself that way. My name has one syllable, and you almost always referred to me by name. You used Sweetie sometimes, but not really as a pet name, more like when I hurt myself or when you needed to gently push back on something I said. The reason I’m mentioning this is because I almost wrote Honey just now, maybe prompted by mentioning sharing a home, and sharing a home with you for almost 46 years was the sweetest thing ever.

My therapist wants me to be kinder to myself. As you know, I’ve always had this problem, but you offset it. You wouldn’t let me get away with it. “Sweetie . . . .” you said. My therapist said when people lose their mother, they need to learn to mother themselves. She says I need to do the equivalent. I lack your skills in these matters, but I promise to work at it. For instance, I know you would be so pleased with what I’ve done over these last two years without you. I know what you would say to me. I try to remind myself. Sometimes, though, I just need to hear you say it.

On the anniversary of your death a couple of weeks ago, we had neighbors over, and we all told stories about you. What I loved most was how people commented on your amazing skills dealing with tense situations, whether an unruly child at story time or with adults acting all privileged and entitled. They talked about your mastery in handling these situations gracefully, skillfully, and without offending or slighting anyone. In that spirit, I read a selection from the book of remembrances of you written by various library patrons, one written by a teenage boy who said you were “always telling us not to crowd the computers after school in the best way possible.”

Perfect.

I can’t even describe how much I love that, how much it makes me love you more, which, of course, is not possible. I’m going to keep that entry in mind as I work on being kinder to myself. I know it’s what you would want. “Sweetie . . .” you would say, as you correct me in the best way possible.

During retirement, I planned to surprise you. I wanted to find a dance instructor who could work with someone gimpy like me. Then I could dance with you in style at our second wedding, a proper one this time, one with good wine and good music—No family, just friends. It would have been so much fun.

I love you. Thank you for marrying me.

We should have eloped.

• Our wedding song, June 3, 1978

[Previously]

On here, I’ve been writing fairly unfiltered, and as someone who writes, I’ve discovered how powerful that can be. But I’m not entirely unleashed. There are some things I can’t write about because they involve others or they are too private. I know I’m supposedly anonymous here, but about a third of my 340 followers know who I am. If I were truly anonymous, I could say more. What to do about this? I could set something up that would be truly anonymous, I suppose, but the things I would write there would be so tied to here, it would be difficult not to give myself away.

Writing a journal is an outlet, and that serves a valid purpose, but not one that is as compelling to me. I can’t be truly unfiltered even there, because some poor soul will read that stuff when I’m gone. I’d have to write it in disappearing ink. Fiction can serve as a way to be truthful in less recognizable ways, a way of saying without saying. This would be a way of writing indirectly through the use of images and description, and that would leave things open to interpretation. Worth a shot.

I can name the areas I’m struggling with: caregiving, intimacy, and the rocky parts of our married life. I’ve been a caregiver for so long now that I don’t know how to be anything else. I can’t get too deeply into that here, yet there is so much of it that is relevant to what it means to grieve. Since I no longer have my partner, I no longer have touch in my life, and that was not just an important part of my physical existence; it was a big part of my identity and how I thought of myself. Writing about that raises not just TMI issues but also brings up one of the most difficult challenges for a writer—how to write about sex convincingly and in ways that transcend stereotypes and clichés. Sex is often compared to death, but in life-giving ways. When your intimate partner dies, this is one of the many ways you die, too. It should be written about more, but probably not by me. And our marriage was mostly wonderful, but there were two dangerous periods, including one when we almost didn’t make it. That dark time is revisiting me as I try to process the regrets that grief has brought to the surface. As a writer, I feel a need to dive into these issues, and I’m interested to see what might happen, but the need to keep details under wraps saps motivation. It’s worth doing because whatever I write about those things will lead to insights that will be valuable in other areas and possibly lead to breakthroughs. Still, I feel the need to censor myself.

Here’s the marriage issue in sketch form. We had been together 16 years before we had a child. In our history, though we were not always on the same path, our paths were always parallel. Once a child entered the picture, that changed. It’s no one’s fault; it’s just that we were surprised to find we had different and incompatible visions for how things should proceed, and this was a shock to us. No one was having an affair (as far as I know). We just reached a point where we thought maybe we should separate. It was the only period besides the one I find myself in now where I felt I might lose my mind.

Though we thought we might be through, we didn't fight, and we were a good team in caring for our little one, but it felt like we had reached the end of the road. The reason this is on my mind so much is that grief has an annoying tendency to dig up regrets. Though I’m still not entirely clear what happened, my regrets center around the lost time. We wasted too much time feeling that way. I wonder what we could have done, what I could have done, to help turn things around sooner than we did. After reading our letters from the first two years of our relationship, I’m pretty sure that if we had sat down and read them, it would have helped us work out our differences much sooner. This makes me mourn the lost opportunity.

June 3 was our wedding day. This year would have been our 48th, but thirteen days shy of our 46th, I became a widower. In our minds, the wedding day was an annoying formality that only existed for the benefit of others. We wanted to elope. We didn't care—we were married from the start. I know marriage gets a bad rap, but I’m a big fan. I loved being married. It felt like my natural habitat. I know, it has a patriarchal history. For so long, for women, the choice was to be a bride, a nun, or a librarian. An unmarried woman could be a nurse or a teacher, too, but not much else. We had a traditional ceremony, took traditional vows, and she took my name—all kind of retro even for 1978. The ceremony and vows were to please her father, who was evangelical and a reverend. She took my name because she preferred the sound to her family name. (I have to agree.) She chose an “old maid” career when she decided to become a librarian. From a distance, I suppose her choices could seem old-fashioned. Like some fucking trad-wife.

Not if you knew her. She was a rebel through and through, and the most dangerous kind—the kind you least suspect. No wonder I fell for her.

Husband and wife are loaded terms. I never wanted to be a husband, but I’m so glad I was hers. (Just like I never wanted to be a father, but I’m so glad I am one.) We didn't have to be those things to each other, and except for legal ways, we weren't. We were a different category, and, as I said, whatever that was, we were that long before we married. I don’t have a word for it. We were married, but we made that mean what we already were together. We made it ours. So, yes, I’m a fan of marriage, but what I mean is I’m a fan of our marriage, even the troubled parts, and how we came through that so beautifully.

I’m proud of us.

So what advice can this former husband, this formerly long-married man, offer? Not much. You’re on your own. Just make sure, if you are going to do this, to marry your best friend in the entire world. That’s all I’ve got.

I’ll leave you with this TMI journal entry written by some random married man:

Plunged in darkness, legs became arms, your lips, breath, your hair cascading. Pulled by your undertow, I surrendered. I opened my eyes in water. I drank and drank, delighted to drown, all five oceans, not enough.

Notes

Here’s something I wrote about “Morning Has Broken” last year:

For some reason, maybe because I was writing about Eden, I remembered for the first time since the day we married that an instrumental version of “Morning Has Broken” was played at our wedding. My wife came from a religious family. Her father, a minister, officiated the ceremony. The music was religious, but my bride, the future children’s librarian, who was a rebellious sort but always in the kindest possible ways, chose a hymn by children’s author, Eleanor Farjeon. I have a hunch her fondness for Paradise Lost had something to do with her choice as well, plus that the song is barely religious, and though it evokes Eden, it’s really about spring in this fallen world.

A stealth, subversive selection. Praise with elation. She was a wonder.

Use the power in your heart

[Previously]

I wish you were here. It’s 93-degrees today. We would grill out or dine on the patio at our favorite restaurant. After a long, brutal winter, I finally feel comfortable in my own skin. As you know, my only complaint about 90-degree days is people who complain about 90-degree days.

In two days, it will be two years here without you. To deal with that, I’m transcribing the letters we wrote to each other during our first two years. (Don’t worry, I’m editing for our daughter’s eyes.) I’m doing this as this horrible anniversary approaches to focus on the beginning of our relationship rather than dwelling on its end.

Here’s something from our letters that captures what we were like together, something that was a constant, and that makes me laugh every time I think about it. In the middle of our second year of letter-writing, I’m telling you about that day’s sociology class:

We talked about adolescent love today in class. Did you know that people my age cannot sustain a lasting relationship? And of course, a relationship can’t last between an adolescent boy and an older girl! And it is utterly impossible for a young couple to cope with a geographical separation of any kind. I’m afraid that you and I totally contradict Mr. Erik Erikson’s studies.

A few days later, I opened your letter and read this:

Who is this Erik Erikson? We should have a talk with that man.

Of course I fell for you. My question is, who wouldn’t? That sense of humor, that kind of mildly sarcastic banter we had over the coffee table through the decades, or over 600 miles and several days as each letter made its way home. We had so much left to say, didn’t we?

In those letters, you mentioned the Narnia series several times and how much it meant to you. You said we should read it together sometime. We never did. I so wish we had. I decided to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this week for the first time. I wish I could talk to you about it.

We will mark the day you died by hosting an outdoor gathering with neighbors where everyone will tell stories about you. This is not a sad event. We’re focusing on happy memories. There will be food and drink and a playlist of your favorite songs from your childhood, your DJ years, and your concert-going life. We’ll supply large index cards and pens for writing the stories down and collecting them. If people need prompts, I’m asking them to focus on things that make them smile and laugh. I need the uplift.

In my former imagined scenario of how our later years might play out, I was always the one who went first. I’d even thought out what I would say to you if my death wasn’t sudden. Here’s part of my planned deathbed speech:

Please don’t be sad for long. I want you to smile when you think of me. Go, and live your life. It’s what I want for you.

I’m finding this to be easier said than done. My therapist says grief is proportional to the strength of the connection. “Fifty years together, two apart,” she says. “It’s normal to be hurting this much. Your connection was strong and lasted almost your whole life.”

That’s a whole lotta grief. What do I do with it? I’m left with all this love that has nowhere to go. Someone said to me recently, “You gotta move on.” People always say that, but they never mention how. It strikes me as a cowboy Western mentality. Moving on, I suspect involves a fair amount of whiskey and some occasional gunplay.

Here’s what I imagine you would say to those types who say to move on: “Well, they need to do their homework and brush up on their proportions, don’t they?”

In TLTWATW, there’s the line

And it was all more lonely and hopeless and horrid than I know how to describe.

Bullseye. I’m adopting this as my new answer to the dreaded How-Are-You question. (Only, I’ll use the present tense.)

Random Person: Hi, how are you?

Me: More lonely and hopeless and horrid than I know how to describe. How are you?

Next, Lewis writes,

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you had no tears left—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.

I know Lewis lost his wife, too, but that was after this book, so he wasn’t referring to that here. Maybe I should read A Grief Observed, but I’m not religious like he was, and I know I won’t relate if he uses that as his source of comfort, which I suspect he does. I’ve read Mere Christianity, Till We Have Faces, his science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Screwtape Letters, and possibly other of his Christian apologetics books, but not the Narnia series or A Grief Observed. After reading TLTWATW, I’ll read the rest of this series, at least.

I know for sure that The Last Battle was important to you because you told me how it gave you the language you needed for understanding how to live in your Evangelical family without swallowing that shit whole, something I see now that allowed your expansive view of life to thrive. I’m fascinated by that Narnia-loving girl you were and that, somehow, she came into my life and, with a wave of her hand, changed it entirely.

I’m still in the “You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again” part. I’m not even sure what he means by the “quietness” he speaks of. Is he talking about a kind of resignation? Is it a good thing? At least he didn’t say Susan and Lucy needed to move on. Fuck that.

Those two letter-writing years felt like they would go on forever, didn’t they? Remember how happy we were when that ended? Now, here I am at the end of another two-year absence. These past two years have felt like forever, too, but the letter-writing years were temporary. This time, it truly is forever. Do I need to quote that Lewis line again?

We are not like Susan and Lucy. We will never see Narnia again. I worry about how many more years there will be here without you, because I hate it here without you. But don’t be concerned. I have reasons to hang around, even though it mostly feels like I’m running out the clock. I know I have to live up to this, to rise to the occasion, somehow.

I have to—for you. And that’s enough to keep me going. Who wouldn’t be motivated by that? It’s all a matter of proportions. These numerous recalculations make up who I am now, or who I’m becoming, but I’m reminded that all of them lead back to you.

I’m not convinced that the “more lonely and hopeless and horrid than I know how to describe” part will ever go away. If there is “a sort of quietness” to be had, it will have to coexist with the other parts. But I can tell you this: our letters make me smile much more than they make me cry. It’s so clear to me why I fell so hard for you. Our connection was so strong from the start. I was the luckiest man who ever lived. That’s not hyperbole. Now I’m the saddest, but I’m also the one who is the most filled with gratitude.

In our letters, when we talk about being together, we call it being “home.” Now, it may be true that my love no longer has anywhere to go, but for a long, long time, I was home where I belonged. Unfortunately, there are too many reminders that I’m now on the wrong side of that wardrobe door.

When I read your letters, though—and now while reading Narnia—for a little while, at least, I feel you near, like I’m almost home.

[Previously]

After two ten-month stretches of being apart, my girlfriend and I were overjoyed that in just days we would be together “for good.” Here is what I wrote in my last couple of letters to her:

Just think, from now on we will spend every season together. Let’s never forget how much it hurt to be apart. I want to always appreciate being with you. I think I will, but if I ever slack off, remind me of these long, cold, lonely months. I don’t think I could ever forget. (May 2, 1976)

I used to enjoy being alone, and I still do, but now all I can think of is being with you. . . . Being alone always had something missing, and you showed me what it was. (May 3, 1976)

I live in that kid’s opposite world. That was the beginning of 48 years without separation. Now, I’m almost two years distant from our final separation. The end was unbearable. The memories of our “harsh realm” of April and May 2024 are brutal. Toward the end, my wife suffered from terminal agitation. She was restless, sometimes delirious, sometimes paranoid. She would pull at her IV and strain to remove her hospital gown. When she came home from the hospital, I found that I had to sleep in a chair beside her hospital bed to make sure she wouldn’t get up. Usually, it was 3 a.m. when things got tense. I would sit on her bed and explain to her over and over for hours, usually until about 8 a.m., that it was dangerous for her to leave the bed. She wasn’t strong enough. She was upset with me about this.

Once she screamed, “Help! Help!” She wanted someone to come rescue her.

From me.

Another time, she looked me in the eyes and said, “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.”

“You just quoted Dylan to me,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

I couldn't help but smile. She was still in there, somewhere.

I kissed her. “Thank you for that,” I said. “I know what’s happening, and I'm here. I’m with you.”

Our last “date” was a Dylan concert. Lines from his songs pop into my mind a lot these days, like when someone asks, “How are you?” I usually say I’m doing the best I can, but I’m thinking, “When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?”

Yeah, something is happening all right. My therapist says my grief is normal. If this is normal, then what does it mean to do worse? Well, I’m not trying to off myself. There’s that. I get things done. I’m social. Okay, then. Those sound normal-like. She reminds me that my wife and I were a couple for fifty years, starting when I was sixteen, and it’s only been two years since she died, so it's normal under those circumstances to feel devastated and utterly lost.

When she said that, I thought, So I’ll be doing better, in what, like in 48 years?

As you can see, on the inside, I’m a difficult patient. On the outside, though, I’m a good do-bee, and I’m in good hands. But I’m not just devastated and lost, I’m restless. I’m afflicted with my own version of terminal agitation. To an outsider, if they saw the itinerary of my days, they’d think I’m being productive. I’m busy and do a lot of things most days, like writing here on Substack, but really, whatever I’m up to, it’s just me trying to rip out IVs and pull off hospital gowns. I’m fidgety, restless, agitated, impatient, and I curse a lot more than I used to.

Hey, whatever that is, get it the fuck off me! Get me the hell out of this bed!

So I turn my lonely eyes to lonely eighteen-year-old me. I’m alone, and, with every breath, I hate it. He did, too, but he also had an appreciation for being by himself that I’ve lost. I remember even in recent years enjoying alone time during the day so I could do what I wanted to do without distractions. But that was a few hours at a time. I don’t need that all the time. It’s like the Twilight Zone episode where the guy who loved to read found he was the only person left on earth and suddenly had all the books to himself!

Sweet.

Then his glasses broke.

Even though teenage me appreciated alone time, he sensed something was missing. That lucky kid found out what it was, and it changed his life. He found his paradise—or it found him. His Garden of Eden was the person he never tired of being with, but who left him enough space to become himself.

I’m on the other side of that paradise. From this perspective, I’m an outcast from Eden, restlessly wandering toward god knows where. I’ve tasted the apple. I know too much. I’m still in the harsh realm.

Young me was excited because he and his love would soon “spend every season together.” This is my second spring since 1976 without my love by my side. Early me worried he might forget how missing her felt. Later me wants to reassure him: Don’t worry, you never did.

Now, I worry the opposite, that I’ll forget what it felt like to be together. He’d probably tell me, Don’t worry, you never will.

I like that kid. His girlfriend was pretty great, too. I learn from him. He always rose to the moment. I’m having trouble in that department, but, to be fair, he had help. He was in excellent hands.

Typewriter-ing Part I Update:

The Smith-Corona Sterling arrived at the school library. Here are photos of some book labels created on the Sterling and a few things the 3^rd graders typed. They did well!

The librarian said her students “line up whenever I open it up. It’s been a great addition to the school library.”

Santa’s Workshop:

More than a year ago, my daughter mentioned that a certain typewriter had caught her eye, an Olympia SM 3, which is a highly sought-after model. (What can I say? My daughter has excellent taste.) These tend to go for $600-900 on Etsy, so I kept my eye out for a decent fixer-upper at thrift stores until I finally found one. I restored it to give to her as a Christmas gift. It was in good condition for one made in 1958, not too dirty, no stale cigarette smoke stench or mildew scent, which are common with typewriters until they are cleaned up, and no stuck or sluggish keys. Everything worked, but there was one problem: The type was misaligned.

The bottom line is how it looked before I tinkered with it. The upper line shows a close, but no cigar moment. It should have been an easy fix, but the adjusting mechanism was deep inside the frame and inaccessible without taking the body apart.

After some trial and error, I got things lined up better.

Here’s how it turned out:

A thing of beauty. Damn, now I want one.

Typewriters and Voice or the Reason Why I Use Typewriters:

Typewriter enthusiasts always remind me of the Rolling Stones line, “Your father’s still perfecting ways of making sealing wax.” Now that I am among the enthusiasts, I can’t help wondering, What’s so wrong with perfecting sealing wax? My reaction to teaching on Zoom during the Covid shutdown was to be more analog sometimes and get some relief from the digital age. I started writing with fountain pens and cool pencils first. Next, I got my two Underwood typewriters out of the basement, had Tom at Cambridge Typewriter fix them up, and I experimented with writing first drafts on them.

The reason I had two Underwoods is because of family history. My grandfather worked at Underwood in Hartford for decades until he retired in the 1950s. I owned them for purely sentimental reasons. Once I visited Tom’s shop and saw his refurbished machines on display, I decided to get serious about using mine, at first just for the fun of it and as a kind of F-you to the Zoom era.

Though I enjoy analog things, I’m no Luddite and have been an early adopter of many types of electronic devices. I have nothing against a good MacBook and remember the early thrill from being able to rearrange paragraphs using copy-delete-paste on word processors. That was no small thing after years of having to retype whole documents to do such things. It felt so freeing, and it was. Like most good things, however, there is a downside. The ease of making improvements to a document can get in the way, can stop you from advancing as you try to perfect that sentence or that paragraph.

The enthusiasts give various reasons for choosing typewriters for writing, mostly to do with avoiding the distractions that invade your train of thought while you’re writing on a computer. That’s definitely a plus, as long as all your devices are in some other room while you use your typewriter. It’s a good reason, and every writer should try it for a while.

Other reasons they list include the feel and sound of typing with a typewriter, particularly a manual one, which may take some getting used to, but once you do, it’s glorious. There is a subset of computer users who understand this. They build custom keyboards for their computers, attempting to capture some of that typewriter feel. One of my students wrote about trying to get just the right “thock” sounds for his keyboard. What he seemed to be doing was approximating aspects of the typewriter experience, even though he had probably never used one!

The tactile aspect is big, but that’s not the reason I’m encouraging you to try. Here’s why: When I write on a typewriter, I become someone else. My voice changes. I’ve been trying to figure out why. It’s not a case of cosplaying an old-school newspaperman. I don’t put on a fedora and light up a cigarette. It’s not some nostalgia trip. There is a practical side.

I subscribe to the “Shitty First Drafts” idea that Anne Lamott writes about. You need to get something written, no matter how it turns out, because at least then, you’ll have something to revise. I’ve practiced this when writing on computers, but I like it better on a typewriter. On a computer, because it’s so easy to fix things, it’s easy to get compulsive about it. Since I cannot fix things easily on a typewriter, it keeps me moving ahead. I can get a rhythm going.

I’m not fiddling with corrections or rearranging things as I go because either it’s too tedious or impossible. Fixing a typo would mean instead of backspacing and retyping, you have to move the carriage all the way to the right, scroll the page up to isolate the mistake on the eraser table (provided you have erasable bond paper which you’d need to buy vintage), erase the mistake, brush the shavings aside without dropping too many into the typewriter works, guide the paper back to the precise spot where the mistake occurred, line everything up exactly, and then fix the mistake without mistyping again (no easy trick for me). To switch the order of paragraphs, which is a breeze on a computer, you’d need scissors and paste.

Ha! I guess I just talked you out of writing on a typewriter, but hear me out. On a typewriter, I am forced to be in a first-draft mindset, forced to escape any tendencies toward perfectionism, and this frees space in my brain that would normally be taken up with second-guessing and editing my thoughts. (Young-ha Kim calls such internal interferences “artistic devils.”) Not only am I eliminating interruptions from texting and social media, etc., I’m also eliminating interruptions from my inner critic, which then calms down, allowing me to get into a quieter, trance-like zone. There’s no pressure to get it right because I’m not trying to get it right, so my writing is looser and more spontaneous. And when you are looser and more spontaneous, you are more likely to type something that surprises you and leads you down a path you never expected to walk down. That’s when the world melts away, which is my favorite part of writing.

On a typewriter, my body is in motion in a different way. The motions on a typewriter are much more forceful and include different hand and arm movements that range from swiping the return lever each time the bell rings to rolling in a new sheet of paper every once in a while. When it comes down to it, I am printing, not just typing. I have freshly printed material right before my eyes, not a backlit screen. It’s not a bunch of ones and zeros creating the illusion of text. The printed material exists in the world, not the cloud, wherever that is. Yes, you will have to scan to text later—or even better yet, retype to get it into your word processor. The benefit of retyping is that you are tricking yourself into revising, and you’ll hardly notice that’s what you are doing.

In my case, time travel may be a factor as well. I am writing in the way most people wrote for most of the twentieth century, so it’s easy to get in the spirit since it’s one of the ways I wrote when I was young. There is still some muscle memory there, I suppose. Of course, if you are not one of the olds like me, this won’t happen for you in the same way. Still, the connection to previous eras may resonate enough to help you step away from your current self for a time, and who wouldn’t want that?

Besides, the machines are just plain cool, which will make you feel cool. As I said, if you are a writer, you should consider writing with a typewriter sometimes. It might change your writing. It will at least break up your routine.

Owning typewriters makes me recall an old Lay’s potato chips slogan, “Betcha can’t eat just one.” Likewise, it’s difficult to stop at one typewriter. You have been warned.

Update 4/24/26

I haven’t done any typewriter work in a while, but I need to fix up this cool Royal for my brother-in-law before I make a trip his way.

I still don’t know what to do about all the typewriters in my house that need repair. I’m doing so many things these days that I just don’t have time to work on them. As the weather improves, I may do more with them. I can work on the porch for the cleaning part. I don’t like to work with things like mineral spirits in the house.

I came across this article a few days ago about a professor who brings typewriters to class for what she calls “analog days” to give students a taste of the days before everything went digital. I used to do this, too, but one typewriter at a time. They’re heavy. Sometimes, I’d bring in a bunch of fountain pens and nice pencils for analog days—much easier. I can’t imagine the work involved in providing typewriters for an entire class, but if I were still teaching, I’d find a way to do it.

I love what the students said in the article:

“It dawned on me that the difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you,” said computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong.

“While writing the essay, I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then,” Lertdamrongwong said, referring to the typewriter era. “But it’s drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone.”

Ok, so now I’m inspired to get off this contraption and get out the typewriter toolbox.

[Previously]

On Saturday, I finished a Writer-Type newsletter about my recent writing slump that may have broken the spell. On top of that, on Sunday, I wrote a song for the first time since 2010. The song is weird and cool, and it was fun to write. I’m thinking up lead parts and bass lines now, and toying with adding a bridge, but I’m also thinking it’s good as is.

I like that the song is weird, that it surprised me, because that’s what I like most about writing. It occurred to me—my slump is about that. My writing hasn’t been surprising me lately. On the weekend, both my writing and songwriting did.

I think the song is about the utter impossibility of living without a lost loved one. The incongruous image in the chorus is a cry of desperation, but also kind of funny. I like that tension. I think grieving people live in their own universe. They are distant from those who have not recently lost someone close, and light-years from those who have not lost a partner or a child.

It’s true there is a connection to those who have had similar experiences, but there’s even a distance there. A gap between. I think what we are is alone together. We are alone in our grief, yet we are together in our isolation from everyone else. We are together in the impossibility of truly being together. We are lost together. There is some comfort in that, but it comes with unwelcome reminders of our very individual pain. It’s an impossible place. I live in an impossible place.

The song captures that feeling in a quirky sort of way. It made me feel good for a while, but these days, the things that make me feel good don’t have much of a shelf life. I think that’s because images from April and May two years ago, the worst months ever, have resurfaced. It makes me feel hopeless, that in spite of all I’ve been doing, I’m as lost as ever.

In the almost two years since my wife died, I’ve done so much. Besides cooking, writing like crazy, meeting with neighbors often, seeing various friends for coffee or to go out to eat, traveling to Spain, going to readings and shows, participating in speaking engagements, getting caught up with medical stuff, and working out intensely for more than a year, now I’m even relearning guitar and, to my surprise, writing songs. I’ve been really busy.

I have plans for other things. I have a band reunion in Idaho this summer. Because there has been some exciting progress on the physical front lately, I plan to sign up for a new gym that specializes in those with neurological conditions. Also, for someone who keeps saying I’m done with going to shows, my Apple Wallet is filled with tickets for upcoming events: Courtney Barnett in May with my daughter, Big Thief in August with friends, Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock in November with my daughter to see our friends, Eilen Jewell and her band.

In her song “Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party,” Courtney Barnett sings, “I wanna go out, but I wanna stay home.” Yeah, that’s me. You can’t write that song, it’s mine. I want to do these things, I do, but, you know, deep down, I really don’t. I feel like I’m in a constant battle to push back against the part of me that wants to stay home.

I think the reason I want to stay home is because when I go out, I can’t shake the feeling that someone is missing, and that reminds me that a big part of me is missing. There’s a Bob Dylan song called “I’m Not There.” Wherever I am, I’m not there, so why bother going at all? Well, I’m hoping that if I keep doing things I kind of don’t want to do, that will somehow change something. I need something to change. My therapist agrees.

Here’s the song as I was working it out, done on an unplugged solid body electric and recorded on Voice Memo. It’s really raw. That means it will probably always be my favorite version. It’s a beautiful mess. It made me happy for a minute.

(Good advice for old writers, too.)

I remember feeling really down about it and that I was never going to get anywhere and all this kind of thing. . . The thing I remember saying to myself was: whatever is weird about you and weird about your way of seeing things and doing things is probably the thing you should be doing.

[Previously]

Mood:

Secretly, deep inside, I accept I’ve no option but to retreat from a vocation I’ve never achieved any success from and my plan now is to fling the towel and go to Brazilmysorebalimontanatrondheimnyonsbristol, as soon as my lease is up.

—from Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett

I don’t know what made me pick up Pond again, but I’m so glad I did. Maybe I know. It’s my current Bible. When I open it, no matter the page, something speaks directly to me. Her other books affect me that way as well. Reading Peter Bichsel did this recently. Calvino, for decades. Moby-Dick? That goes without saying.

I’ve been on a kick for a couple of months where I’m making a point to read books written by friends of mine. I’ve been blown away. From one friend, some early-reader stories so touching and generous and funny that lines from them pop into my head randomly. If you see me and I burst out laughing for no discernible reason, it’s my friend’s fault. From another friend, a strikingly innovative book of poetry and then a novel filled with sentences that speak to my working-class roots so starkly and vividly that not only do they cause me to relive long-forgotten moments and remember people from my similar childhood, but they make me wish I could write like that.

If you want to borrow a book from my collection, you’re welcome to, but I must warn you, I make a mess of them. I underline and highlight in various colors, write notes in the margins, and begin new essays and stories on the blank pages at the end. Today, I opened Pond and soon saw the above passage marked with my trusty Caran d’Ache Graphicolor pencil in graphite and with a note highlighted in yellow and again noted with my Mitsubishi Vermilion/Prussian Blue pencil. And there it was: the perfect encapsulation of my recent feelings about my writing. You see, lately, I’ve been wanting to throw in the towel.

To Sing the Blues . . .

For quite a while, I’d been on a tear. In the past 17 months, I’ve written at least 300,000 words (not counting journaling). A few of those words weren’t half bad. Writing so much in that span of time—this is something I’ve never experienced before. So why the long face? It happens now and then. There can be a number of reasons. Here are just a few:

1. I’m good at this, but only good enough for it to be maddening (like with everything I do).

2. I write stuff, but there’s nowhere for it to go.

3. I can’t do things the way I’m supposed to.

4. I’m not ambitious enough to try for more.

5. Really, what’s the point?

6. I feel one of those dreaded creative plateaus coming on.

I’ve been here before. The first one was after graduate school, which did more to take the fun out of writing than anything else I’d experienced, including Mrs. Snow’s fourth-grade class, and that’s saying a lot. The longest dry streak lasted a year, starting when my wife was diagnosed and continuing for 6 months after she died. It ended when I started Writer-Type to force myself to write, which has sustained me since.

Until recently.

What Writer-Type has done is make me think about where the real but often elusive power in writing comes from. The reason is because I have seen this in my writing here more consistently than ever before. What caused this? And why don’t we teach it?

I used to be a musician, and I was immersed in the folk, blues, and gospel traditions. There’s a saying, “To sing the blues, you have to live the blues.” It’s accepted as a truism, which automatically makes me mistrust it. Here’s my question then: Has my writing tapped into this richer sense more than before because my wife died?

If the answer is yes, then I want to be the shittiest writer who ever lived. I want all my sentences to be fingernails on the chalkboard, every insight to be something you’ve seen cross-stitched and hung on your grandmother’s kitchen wall, every scene to be more predictable than the most sugary romcom ever, every philosophical insight to be beneath even the level of “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” I want to be that kind of writer—you know, a hack who is happy and content with his hackery. I don’t fucking want to live the goddamn blues, hell no, even if it makes me the Robert Johnson of writers.

I don’t know if it’s true that my writing improved because I suffered, but the truth is, it probably didn’t hurt. It didn’t make me a better writer alone, though. It was writing constantly for months and months that pulled the most weight. (See above word count.) But that couldn’t do it either, not in isolation. That, plus reading great writers like my two friends, along with writers like Bennett and her first book, Pond, my current Holy Bible. There’s more. It was also because I wrote here about my teaching career, and doing so reminded me that in my field of composition studies, the Holy Grail of essay writing has always been the kind of writing that ChatGPT now produces so casually. We were teaching our students to sound like machines. I sought to undermine this at every turn. While reviewing and writing about what went into my teaching over the full span of my long career, all that started to seep more deeply into my writing. Bereavement definitely played into the mix, but it wasn’t the only ingredient. The role of the grieving pieces was to practice IDGAF writing. It was like adding garlic and ginger and red pepper flakes to hot oil. The rest of the ingredients were already chopped and ready to go. It just needed to be fired up.

Mood Swings

I like what Bennett’s narrator says in another passage I marked up with my fancy pencils, one with a reference to a traumatic moment that occurred in childhood on a day when she was feeling “high hopes” about an upcoming event. I see this as related to the play-the-blues-live-the-blues saying:

And didn’t I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I’d previously alchemised.

This is one of those where-have-you-been-all-my-life passages that I live for when I’m reading. Omg, I’m elated reading that. My down mood about writing is instantly lifted. Immediately, I have this piece I’m writing now to write, and another that I know will come after that, and then there’s the part I scribbled on the blank page in the book that will rejuvenate something I’ve been working on.

Writing—hard as I try, I just can’t quit you.

This morning, I was all Someday Baby, you ain’t gonna trouble me anymore.

Now, I’m all If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

And then Bennett’s narrator says she doesn’t have the kind of “outlook” she sometimes sees in others.

He’d solved the problem, you see, and that’s the way some people are. They are ceaselessly finding ways of getting to grips with the world.

I talked about this in some of the writing/teaching pieces when examining metaphorical concepts. Lately, my outlook has been infected by questions of purpose. It’s like the dreaded question adults always ask teenagers who major in a creative field, “What are you going to do with that?” These days, I’m that lame grown-up asking that clueless question to myself. This annoying part of me had been nowhere to be found for a long time, but lately, he’s been hanging around here. Shit. Shut up! So I’ve been in a melancholy mood about writing.

Melancholia is part of the human condition, of course. Even the luckiest among us can’t escape for long. It comes from living, loss, your own pending demise, from empathy for others, and from reading fiction, drama, and poetry, especially, and other things like history. It’s unavoidable, non-negotiable, like grief. Lately, it’s derailed me. Other times, it fuels me.

On Writer-Type, I’ve been tapped into a cocktail of what I’m reading, plus the way I taught, plus a few shots of my high-shelf grief, and this has induced a new freedom about where I’m willing to go when I write. This has led to a sense of fearlessness that has never been quite this strong. I’ve had a what-have-I-got-to-lose attitude in all I write. All of these things produced in me a new outlook, which includes a new writing outlook. And outlook, Bennett says, “is everything.” Maybe that’s what we should teach when we teach writing.

What do you do, though, when you lose your new what-have-I-got-to-lose outlook?

Reading Bennett again, and my friends, has made me consider hanging on to that towel a bit longer.

Brazilmysorebalimontanatrondheimnyonsbristol can wait.

More great stuff from Bennett.

Dove vai, dove vai, dove vai, dove vai, dove vai, dove vai

• What does it even mean to write now?

[Previously]

[Late] upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

I’ve written a lot about grieving on Substack, yet the slogan for Writer-Type is that everything here is about writing, even when it isn’t. So, how are those grieving pieces about writing? Well, they started out as attempts to show how raw, unfiltered writing helps you process difficult things. Capturing this particular difficult thing, I soon realized, is like peeling and slicing an onion inside a house of mirrors. You expose one layer, only to find several others, all instantly multiplied and reflecting off each other at disorienting angles. One of the first things that happened when I started writing about losing the love of my life was that because of this disorientation and this impossibility of pinning anything down, I stopped trying to do that and instead wrote about how it feels to live in this fragmented, alien world I find myself in. Because of this, my writing sounded new to me.

My writing has changed not only in the grief pieces but also in the newsletters about writing and teaching. How much of this change is because a terrible thing happened? How much is because I’m now writing so much and in such different contexts that it’s just a natural stage of development? Or am I, like Dante, so obsessed with my Beatrice that in my attempts to capture and make sense of what I had and what I’ve lost, my writing has become my existence, an outgrowth of my overwhelming desire to keep my Beatrice by my side?

Perhaps it's a combination of all of the above, yet a major force behind this may be that I’m not only a different writer, but a different person. I don’t recognize myself. And that’s unsettling—and this, in an unsettling time. Of course my writing is different.

Writing itself is lost in a forest dark inside a house of mirrors right now because of ChatGPT and other LLMs. That plays into this more significantly than I’d imagined when I started this project. It feels like a defining moment not just for me but for the entire writing world.

In this larger view, what does it even mean to write now, when it’s no longer required of us? Am I merely perfecting ways of making sealing wax in an age where nobody can find an envelope? Is the whole thing ruined now? Would I be better off doing something else, like, I don’t know, fixing typewriters?

Lately, I’ve been on a Dante-like quest to find a pathway that will lead me out from these forests dark. Or is this purgatory my new address, and I’d damn well better get used to it?

Along the way, I want to explore matters like voice and style in more detail—things often pushed to the side in composition class. I want to dive in with Ann Berthoff’s idea that all writing courses are creative writing courses to see what that means now, in this age where writing is being reduced to prompt generation.

Since I don’t have Virgil or the Virgin Mary or Beatrice to lead the way, I’ll let writing be my guide. Some upcoming newsletters will explore where this leads me, if anywhere.

Notes

Writer-Type is almost a year and a half old. In most ways, it has served its purpose—it’s got me writing again and given me the language I need to process some of the difficult matters I’m facing. As a bonus, as far as I can tell, I have about 80 regular readers. I’ve never had this before. Thank you.

Updated at the end

[Previously]

[I’m posting this one day early.]

Grieving is a state of mind you’ll definitely want to avoid. I’ve been through some rough things, but I’ve never felt this close to losing my mind. It’s like I’m one blink away from that. Somehow, though, I continue to get shit done, so I guess I’m more stable than it seems. I’ve been doing all the adulting it takes to deal with probate and estates and city, state, and federal bureaucracies. I’m cooking and grocery shopping and meeting people for coffee or lunch, having guests over, going to shows and readings, working out on the bike trainer, fixing stuff around the house, and preparing for a couple of upcoming speaking engagements. For just over four months now, after wondering for a year if I’d ever write again, I’ve been writing up a storm. This means, from what I’ve read, though my grief is prolonged or complicated or whatever you want to call it, I’ve been functioning—which means I likely don’t have a disorder.

Good to know.

Lately, writing has been more fascinating than ever, and I’ve always been fascinated by it. When I’m writing, I can take a step back and say, “Okay, what the hell is my brain up to now?” If grieving didn’t hurt so much, it would also fascinate me. It’s wild. I mean, my brain is just wild these days. When I watch what’s happening to my mind, I’m kind of enthralled. In this newsletter, I want to take a close look at what’s been going on. (Some of it isn’t pretty.)

As I mentioned in “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” (my most “viewed” newsletter and maybe one of the best things I’ve ever written), I found that some of the scariest things my brain has been up to, like anger, are typical and harmless. I haven’t found anything yet that isn’t to be expected (save perhaps one), but when they are happening to you, they don’t feel typical or harmless. Let’s take them one-by-one.

Anger: Baby Please Don’t Go

I am so angry. This is understandable. I watched my life partner and best friend since I was sixteen years old suffer terribly and for months on end. If that doesn’t make you want to smash everything in sight, nothing will. I haven’t smashed anything, though. I haven’t punched any walls. Never been the type. My father was, and my philosophy has always been to ask, “What would Dad do?” and then do the opposite. That still holds. (Thanks, Dad.) Though my anger is understandable, I want to understand it more, because it has seemed like there’s more to it than being angry about the unjust thing that happened to the one I loved so deeply.

In an interview, Mary Francis O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, spoke about bonded relationships and how the brain encodes them. “Once you bonded with that person, that physically changed your brain, and they are in your brain physically, forever . . . They’re a part of you.” When that person dies, “a part of how we function in the world is taken away.”

My brain feels ditched—ghosted. It’s trying to figure out what happened. It can’t figure out why my wife won’t reach out to me. This may be why people so easily interpret ordinary things as signs from their beloved from the other side. It’s like all those old blues songs where the guy can’t figure out why she left him. He still thinks she’ll come back, but it sure is taking a long time. He’s all wrapped up in puzzlement, and it’s starting to get on his nerves. If the river was whiskey, he’d be a diving duck.

I mentioned before that I’ve never been through a breakup. I had amazing beginner’s luck. My first girlfriend? She married me. Weirdly, her death feels like she broke up with me. Part of my brain thinks so, apparently. Not only did she leave, she never told me why, never tried to work things out. That’s so rude! As my brain tries to process this, it feels a mixture of resentment and guilt. It goes from hurt and anger to How did I ruin this? I’m going through all the rumination involved when relationships end. “It’s like the brain is trying to undo what happened,” O’Connor says. This can slow progress. She calls rumination “avoidant” because it keeps you from appreciating the positive things around you in the present moment, and I admit, that’s been a struggle, but I try.

What Is Love?

My wife and I had a great love that lasted a very long time. We thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company and never tired of each other. Yet, like a spurned lover, I want another chance. I have this new skill set. I want to love her in the ways I’ve learned how to love her since she was diagnosed, the ways I loved her while caring for her, but I want to love her in these ways while she is well. I want to show her how many amazing things I’ve learned in the last sixteen months that the word love doesn’t even touch. I want to do it all again, given what I know now. Why let all this knowledge go to waste?

O’Connor explains how all these conflicting feelings of anger, love, confusion, guilt, regret, and bargaining are to be expected. It’s just my brain doing what brains do. “What you’re feeling is way more normal than you think,” she says.

I’m so fucking normal, it’s killing me.

Retiring While Grieving: When the Wrong Decision Feels Right

My wife and I planned to retire last summer. She died in the spring. I knew it would be best if I kept teaching, but when I realized I wouldn’t be able to give my students my all and that it wouldn’t be fair to them to keep going, I decided to go ahead and retire.

I knew this would cut me off from 18 to 22 year-olds, and I knew that would hurt. I’ve been hanging out with that age group since before I was their age. (My future wife was 18 and I was 16 when we started dating. Plus, I always had older friends because I looked older than I was—a trend that unfortunately continues.) I miss students terribly. I miss my colleagues, too. I’ve discovered that work friends don’t easily transition into the real-life kind without a bit of a push, which is an issue because I’m not used to putting myself out there. That means many people I’ve seen regularly for years, sometimes decades, are nowhere to be found (except on Facebook, which is little consolation). So it was a mistake to retire, I guess. But I had to. To alleviate this, I’m being a bit of a pest with former colleagues, with modest success. I’ve seen four so far.

O’Connor makes a connection between losing a closeness bond through death and what it feels like to retire. When you retire, you also lose a part of yourself. That means I’ve had a double dose of losing myself in the span of a couple of months which is not advisable.

What’s left of me?

O’Connor says grief is a natural response to loss, and grieving “is a form of learning,” a kind of “post-traumatic growth.” My grieving, retiring brain has been going through quite the workout. There’s much rewiring to be done.

Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Another thing that freaks me out but also fascinates me, is my grieving brain on happiness. I was very happy with my life, but for 16 months, happiness has been mostly AWOL, and I’ve often wondered if I’ll ever feel it again in the same ways I used to. Sometimes, though, something that should make me happy in a low-key way feels a bit out of control. It’s like my brain is saying, “Oh, Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, come in, come in! Long time no see! Would you like a drink? Can I make you a sandwich? Here, have a seat. Put your feet up. Stay as long as you like!”

I haven’t found anyone talking about this yet, so maybe it is truly weird and just me. The jury is out, but I’m curious about why this happens. My theory is that those happy chemicals have been scarce, and when just a drop trickles in, my brain is so thirsty for them that it opens the floodgates—Wheeee! After being in a happiness desert for ages, all of a sudden, I’m trying to hold back a deluge of happiness over the tiniest thing. Maybe my brain is saying, “Remember this? That was fun, right?” I think that since sorrow is the deepest feeling I experience from day to day, my brain desperately wants me to feel deeply about something else, anything else.

I’m monitoring the situation. My brain is like a friend who can also be a loose cannon. I have to keep my eye on him. It wouldn’t be great if someone besides myself noticed this happiness on steroids thing. They might think I’m being over-the-top in my enthusiasm (because I am), and I imagine that might be off-putting. In such a situation, I’m not sure it would help to say, “Oh, pay that no mind. It’s just my brain trying to trick me into being happier.”

Along with this comes guilt about feeling happy at all. And then there are those moments of true enjoyment, like when I was an interlocutor at a book event and was feeling great about it until I felt my wife’s absence and thought about how pleased she would have felt to be there. All happiness now comes with qualifications, with sad trombone sounds. Maybe that’s why sometimes my happiness likes to take a couple hits of speed.

Widow’s Fire

Another thing that’s a real thing, apparently, is widow’s fire, which is what you are probably imagining it is. It’s a widowed person’s overwhelming, sometimes uncontrollable desire for sex. Thankfully, this one hasn’t hit me. You won’t find me on Bumble. (Sorry to disappoint you.) I’ve got enough problems without that. Though I’m not hot to trot and not looking for anyone, I’m devastated to find myself single. The last time I was single, I was a high school sophomore. Ever since those days, I had someone to wrap my arm around, someone to take my hand as we walked down the street. To think of spending the rest of my life never being touched in those casual but intimate ways is more than I can handle. Not widow’s fire, but maybe widow’s afterglow is more my speed.

I don’t see any way out of this. I’m going to be single forever. First, I’m not a catch. I come with several drawbacks. Before you say “Oh, but you’re highly eligible” and then pause to try and think of reasons why, let me reassure you. I know I have some good points. My wife was amazing, and she not only chose me, but she stayed with me. She could see beyond the drawbacks, but I can’t expect that from anyone else.

Here’s my imaginary dating app profile:

Sixty-something bald, disabled man with multiple sclerosis, a heart stent, and a bit of a beer belly (hey, I’m working on it), and who sometimes may seem inexplicably happy while also on the verge of tears, is looking for whoever will take me. Thanks.

I think I know which direction those swipes will go. It’s all very confusing for my brain, which is used to me being part of the most wonderful of closeness bonds.

What I’m left with is longing. Longing is long, hard, thankless work. I long for what I had, what I’ve always known, what my brain is convinced is supposed to be there still. Every cell in my body aches for someone I can never, ever have.

Good luck with that one, brain of mine.

What I need to figure out is how to be alone. How does someone who has never been alone ever get the hang of it? Maybe I’ll reread Walden, sign on with a whaling ship, move to the Outback, or take up smoking—who knows?

Like I said, my brain is wild right now. It’s also freaking interesting, unless you happen to be in it.

Update 4/10/26

A year later, my brain is still playing tricks on me, but at least I understand more about why.

I’m realizing now just how complicated it was to retire right after my wife died, but I still don’t see how I could have done my job effectively, so I guess I wouldn’t change that. Maybe if I took another semester of leave, then came back for a semester that would have been good? Who knows? It’s all so damned tricky.

The happiness thing I can now confirm is not just me being a weirdo. Someone else who is widowed told me it happened to them. Yeah, I get unreasonably happy sometimes over small things. It’s strange. My brain wants it so bad. I try not to scare people. At least I’m not crazy (I think). But what bothers me about it is that I now have rapid mood swings, something that’s new to me. What makes me weirdly happy today might depress the hell out of me tomorrow. I don’t like this development. I think it’s because I’m no longer accustomed to getting excited about anything, and my nervous system doesn't know what to do with that, so it jams things into reverse.

A couple more things:

• I’m still angry, but more in a sad way than a mad way.

• Last year, I was all enthused about writing. I’m going through an awkward phase on that one.

• I still feel abandoned, but, unlike the blues singers, I’m not delusional.

• Still not hot to trot. Still not looking, but this now seems more like a central question that needs resolution. Which road am I going to take on this? TBD.

• On longing, see the previous bullet point.

• I’m not alone anymore. My daughter and her corgi live with me. So, no whaling ships for me, no Outback. I may reread Walden, though, or The Outermost House. I haven’t taken up smoking—yet.

Imaginary Dating Profile Update: Sadly, I’m still bald, though I’m slightly less disabled (!), which is shockingly welcome news. The stent is still there, but, according to my cardiologist, I’ve made an excellent recovery—9 years out, all functions and labs are great. Yes, I’m still emotional. That one seems permanent, but I’m managing it better. The beer belly? Much improved and well on its way out.

So, you know, take a number.

~ ~ ~

Some Writer-Type stuff:

I’ve been slacking on the One Year Later posts, so I think I’ll abandon this and go back to doing archive posts on random days.

I’m not writing much lately, only in my journal every morning. The grief therapy is going well, but it’s bringing up a lot and leading to vivid dreams, like the one below. I’m trusting this is just a necessary stage in the process.

I hope to get back to posting new things, but right now, I’m re-evaluating everything.

Still playing guitar, though:

[Previously]

Dear B,

Yesterday, my therapist said I should talk to you. Out loud, not just inside my head. Sometimes I do, but only when I’m desperate, one of those moments when it feels as though I just can’t go on without you. That’s when I say things like, “Please come home.”

I’m feeling like that now, so I guess this particular “talking” session doesn’t really count because my therapist wants me to talk to you when I’m feeling okay, not just when I’m down. I’ll try it next time I’m in a better place. When I feel like this, though, it seems like I’ll never be in a better place. Being with you, that was my better place.

Mornings are tough because this was the time when you and I usually sat at the small kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking. When was the last time we sat there like that? What did we talk about? I can’t remember.

There were so many Last Times that passed without notice—the last time we went out to dinner, the last time we read the same book at the same time, the last time we laughed so hard together we couldn’t breathe, the last time we cooked together, the last time you walked past me and gave me that familiar pat on the behind, the last time we made love. I can’t remember any of those. Why would I? We had no idea. We thought we had countless times ahead.

The change hit like a tsunami. Things got so serious so fast, blocking everything else out, quickly overwhelming us, and leaving us dazed and confused. Our usual way of living? Poof. Gone. Instantly.

Here are some Last Times I remember from back then that I’d rather forget, like your last chemo session, the two-year anniversary of which was three days ago. I remember because out the window, I could see the light stanchions of Fenway Park. When was the last time we went to a game? Who knows? The baseball season was just beginning, and I couldn’t have cared less. Still. We didn’t know that would be the last chemo session.

And of course, I remember your last day at home. As the ambulance waited by the front door and as they carried you out, I knew you would never be back. That unbearable image won’t go away.

Not much later came the last time you spoke. I had no idea that would happen. What was the last thing you said to me? I don’t know. “I love you,” probably, because it would have been just before I left to get a few hours’ sleep. I can’t be sure.

Since you left, I’ve struggled with mornings the most. I’ve tried so many things, reading, listening to music, sitting by a window to watch the sunrise, checking Facebook memories for traces of you (a terrible but irresistible urge, but I finally quit a while back), making to-do lists, taking care of bureaucratic matters (there’s been so much of that), but, finally, I settled on writing in a journal while I drink my morning coffee. Then, I don’t notice the quiet. And often, I’m thinking of you as I write. In a way, then, I’ve been talking to you for months now, just not out loud. I promise, soon I’ll do my homework and talk to you in my better moments, not only my worst.

Another Last Time I remember is the day before you died. I had just returned and said, “I’m here,” and as I leaned down to kiss you, you reached up to touch my face. That touch, your last, wordless, loving caress, I will always treasure. It was the sweetest thing ever.

With that touch, you spoke volumes.

Thank you for that. I love you always. Talk to you soon.

[Previously]

As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things . . .

(From Walden)

• Last year, from the end of February until mid-March, Newsletter 14 appeared in 4 parts. A year later, I’ve decided to combine them into one. It’s made up of seemingly random segments (a writing technique I’m fond of—blame Moby-Dick) that I hope will make sense to readers by the end. If not, at least there are some cool stories along the way.

What’s That Funny Noise?

A gentle rain falls outside an open window while a two-year-old boy rolls toy cars across the living room floor. His father sits nearby on the sofa, absorbed in his newspaper. From the edge of a braided rug, a calico cat, eyelids growing heavy, watches the boy play. “Hrrrumm-hrrrumm,” the boy murmurs as he pushes various cars and trucks over the wooden surface.

A faint rumbling sound builds in the distance. The boy looks toward the window. All living room traffic halts. The cat’s radar ears pivot.

“What’s that funny noise?” the boy asks.

“Oh, that? That’s just thunder,” the man responds without looking up from his newspaper.

The boy glances again toward the window, then back at his dad. No response. He looks out the window once more and then at his cat, who yawns and stretches before curling up on the rug. Slowly, the boy turns back to his cars. Before long, the engines restart, and traffic resumes.

What Does Open Mean?

A group of designers sits around a conference table. Their purpose is to develop a new can opener design to help the company jump ahead of its rivals. The conversation focuses on which enhancements might set the opener apart from the rest.

A: What will give us an advantage over the competition?

B: Sharpness is key. And speed.

C: More powerful, but quieter.

D: Self-cleaning, too.

E: Compact, taking up less counter space, plus a wide choice of colors.

A: It should handle cans of all sizes and shapes.

The group continues discussing improvements, and as 5:00 approaches, they approve a short list of recommendations. Feeling they’ve made progress, the designers pack up their briefcases.

At another company, a different group of designers toss ideas around. Much like the first group, they at first talk about possible can opener enhancements. After a while, they decide the discussion is not so productive:

A: I think you’re right. Let’s back way off from the problem. What does “open” mean?

B: To me, “open” means that something was closed . . . now it’s open.

C: What about a crater? It’s always open, isn’t it?

D: Sure, but that’s not what “open” means to me.

E: Both of you are using “open” to describe a state. I think of it as describing an action . . . I “open” the book. The book was closed now, I open it.

(from Synectics by W.J.J. Gordon)

The designers keep talking about things that open. Someone mentions a clam. Someone else mentions pea pods. Eventually, this leads them to a new understanding of their task.

The focus shifts again: What about the can? Meanwhile, the clock ticks unnoticed.

The Present Can Opener Art

When a child who hears thunder asks, “What’s that funny noise?” how do you respond? You can name the noise, says Synectics author W. J. J. Gordon, but this “kills the question” rather than answering it. Naming the noise only “dispels the strange.” Speculation ends, inquiry stops, and associations get nipped in the bud. Language then becomes static. For instance, you might ask, “What’s that bird?” and someone might answer, “A goldfinch.” “Oh,” you say. “Pretty.” Next, you talk about the weather. But Richard Feynman says his father knew this kind of answer was inadequate, so instead of just naming the bird, he said to his son, “Let’s look at the bird and what it’s doing.”

This is what the second group of designers did. They looked at the can opener and what it was doing (or not doing). Gordon says that their ability to “universalize” the word allowed them to reconceptualize the problem and get beyond ordinary enhancements. Like with Flower and Hayes’s “good writers,” this group was “simply solving a different problem.”

The first group, no matter how well-intentioned, limited its options by holding to a limited view of the task and perhaps also by its inflated view of its own knowledge. They were the experts. Nobody needed to tell them anything about can openers. This group was too invested in its expertise and held views, in Gordon’s words, “too close to present can opener art.”

James L. Adams, in Conceptual Blockbusting, says there is so much stacked against innovative thinking because

The structured information in your memory is so important to you that you may dismiss information that is inconsistent with that which is already there.

Thus, new or contradictory information is often “devalued.” Those designers knew their stuff, but it didn’t occur to this group to consider what “open” might mean or to ponder the nature of cans.

Expertise, which is advantageous in most instances, can sometimes become a trap. Isaac Asimov claims that to come up with new ideas, you need to have expertise or what he calls a “good background” in the subject area, but he adds you also must be “unconventional” in your “habits.” The first group had the former but not the latter. This boxes you in, placing imaginary boundaries around the task. It is only when you can break free of preconceived notions that it’s possible to come up with something truly innovative, where you are not just putting, in Gordon’s words, “gadgets on existing engines” as the first group did.

Though I agree with Asimov about the “good background” or expertise issue, I wonder what he might say about our Dinner Party Math student. She didn’t have the background but had unconventional habits, which included a different frame of reference, which is key. For instance, some important insights in evolutionary biology came from physicists who didn’t have a good background in biology at first. Unconventional habits may be the primary driver and may need to precede background knowledge.

The second group, also experts, was more innovative because they questioned the meaning of “open.” This unconventional approach opened (ha!) speculative paths that weren’t available before—the same as the arrow solution in the 9-dot problem did. Because one member chose to “back way off from the problem,” the group was able to step back from their role as experts as well and see things differently. (We saw this in action in the first Writer-Type newsletter with the choreographer.)

Once the second group of designers focused on the word “open,” they started making, in Asimov’s words, “connections between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.” Picturing a can opening like a clam or a pea pod, for instance, leads the designers to imagine how an opener could function differently. The focus now is not on the can’s lid but on its seam.

The Wrong Right Answer

The father tells the son that the funny noise is thunder. It turns out, this answer kills the question. If your answer to the question, “What kind of bird is that?” is “Goldfinch,” the questioner may think that’s all there is to it. If instead you say, “That’s called a goldfinch, but watch how they swoop up and dip down like waves as they fly, and listen to how their in-flight call sounds like ‘potato chip’ each time they swoop up.” This response helps teach the kind of observational skills Mr. Feynman cultivated in his son, who later became the kind of thinker who asked questions like “What does ‘open’ mean?” This style of response encourages the questioner to “notice things” in the way Feynman mentioned, and this leads to more interaction. When that happens, who knows where it might lead? Perhaps it will create a memorable experience that you can still recall decades later when someone interviews you. Or maybe it will lead to a whole new kind of can opener.

Yes, goldfinch is the right answer, but sometimes right answers teach the wrong things.

Listeners and Their Answers

Feynman and Gordon’s claim that an answer word might not answer connects with Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination when he says,

No living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment that is often difficult to penetrate.

At first glance, such a view seems unnecessarily complex. Naming seems much simpler in contrast. Clear. To the point. People like that shit. Yet Bakhtin says language used for naming only “take[s] the listener for a person who passively understands but not for one who actively answers and reacts.”

Paulo Freire shows how such thinking infects many teaching environments. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire talks about what he calls the “banking concept” of education, where teachers are depositors of information, and students are often seen as empty containers that need only to be filled with the teacher’s knowledge. Little more is required of students than to memorize: “Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Pará is Belém.” Adams, sounding quite Freire-like, says, “culture trains mental playfulness, fantasy, and reflectiveness out of people by placing more stress on the value of channeled mental activity.” Order and clarity take precedence over complexity, ambiguity, and nuance, and as a result, Freire says, words lose their “transforming power.” Words and their environments become rigid rather than elastic. What you end up with, says Freire, is no back-and-forth, no dialogue, not communication but rather, one-way “communiqués.” Students then become accustomed to receiving such bank-deposit pronouncements, no questions asked.

“What’s wrong with those answers?” you might ask. “That noise, in fact, was thunder! For your information, the capital of Pará is Belém!”

True. Lost in those answers, however, is significance and association: “What Belém means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil,” says Freire. There is little room for gray area thinking with this model. Adams shows the potential fallout from thinking that relies on naming without the elasticity of association and significance:

To be convinced that all people who own guns are wrong, that abortion should be outlawed, that government should be abolished, or that the free market can solve all social problems pretty much guarantees that one will not contribute much creativity to problems having to do with guns, unwanted pregnancies, national organization, or social welfare.

Instead, people holding such stances attempt to solve complex problems with question-killers. (Government waste! Free speech! Entitlements! Wokeism!) Pronouncements serve as stand-ins for inquiry. From a young age, we become conditioned to accept all kinds of question-killer, non-answer responses as adequate. The result of this banking concept/exam model of education, Adams says, is that “We tend to stay within our habits with an accompanying loss of creativity.”

This Wonderful Solution of All Difficulties

Gordon says this learned complacency has profound implications: “When we live with the familiar system without questioning it, we lose our awareness of the unfounded assumptions which underlie the system and our acceptance of it.” Not too long ago, for instance, that funny noise and occasional accompanying lightning strike was thought to be evidence of the wrath of God. If lightning struck your cathedral, which apparently was not all that uncommon, clearly it was because of some shenanigans among the faithful. I mean, what else? As Natalie Angier points out, it didn’t occur to anyone that the frequency of cathedral lightning strikes might have been related to the often preposterous height of their spires, combined with a tendency to build cathedrals atop the highest possible vantage points. Then along came Ben Franklin with his lightning rods, and, coincidentally, God, for the first time in recorded history, suddenly lightened up a bit.

Uncritical acceptance of passed-down wisdom didn’t stop with lightning theory. Earlier scientific explanations for combustion provide an example. According to Eliezer Yudkowsky, for a long time, if you asked questions on the nature of fire, you always got the same answer. “What is the orangey-bright ‘fire’ stuff? Why does the wood transform into ash? To both questions, the 18^th-century chemists answered ‘phlogiston.’” Yudkowsky explains phlogiston theory this way:

Phlogiston escaped from visible substances as visible fire. As the phlogiston escaped, the burning substances lost phlogiston and so became ash, the ‘true material’. Flames in enclosed containers went out because the air became saturated with phlogiston, and so could not hold any more. Charcoal left little residue upon burning because it was nearly pure phlogiston.

Well, I guess that settles it, then!

Fact-free reasoning of this sort was accepted without question. For instance, if you wanted to know what animated and led to the evolution of living things, the answer was élan vital [life force]. Yudkowsky says such an answer “functioned primarily as a curiosity stopper. You asked, ‘Why,’ and the answer was ‘Élan vital!’ Yudkowsky adds,

This was an earlier age of science. For a long time, no one realized there was a problem. Fake explanations don’t feel fake. That’s what makes them dangerous.

With such answers, he says, “Your curiosity has been sated but it has not been fed.” Phlogiston was a self-consistent system of explanations that didn’t allow for questioning its own axioms. It was untouchable, and it was definitely going to be on the exam.

Jonathan Swift lampooned this train of thought in Gulliver’s Travels when the great scholars of Brobdingnag examined Gulliver and, marveling at his diminutive stature, speculated that Gulliver must be a watch mechanism or maybe even an embryo since he was much too small to be someone with dwarfism. His state couldn’t be explained through any natural phenomenon in their world, so the scholars conferred to come up with a hypothesis.

After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally lusus naturae [freak of nature]; a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of occult causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge.

Phlogiston theory was widely accepted during Swift’s era, so his critique was ahead of its time. Eventually, science would experience what Lakoff and Johnson call a “cultural shift,” complete with new metaphors.

The age of “[t]his wonderful solution of all difficulties” was coming to an end, replaced by a developing toleration of ambiguity. New figurative language led the way, replacing old metaphorical concepts that limited thought and inquiry and established imaginary boundaries. As we saw earlier, Lewis Thomas had a breakthrough when he said the Earth is like a cell. Previous paradigm shifts occurred when Einstein called spacetime a fabric, when Newton compared an apple to the Moon, and when Darwin used a tree to illustrate the origin of species. Such an “elastic environment” restores language’s “transforming power.”

Adaptable, Manageable Beings

According to Gordon, even well-established, proven answers must be challenged. The best way to break free of self-consistent systems, says Gordon, is by using “play” as a device for “upsetting or distorting inner consistency.” The second group of can opener designers comes to mind, the ones who played with the word open.

Gordon says that when Nikolai Lobachevsky played with Euclidean geometry and the parallel postulate, he upset the inner consistency of the system. This connects with what Richard Feynman proposed when he talked about doing more than naming the birds. One way to see what this bird is doing is by behaving like the second group of can opener designers when they questioned the meaning of “open.” This encourages what Gordon calls “speculative play with logical systems” and can become a source for innovation. Gordon claims Lobachevsky’s question made “the familiar strange” (parallel lines that diverge from each other) and, as a result, opened up important new ways of thinking that otherwise would not have been possible, thus leading to the invention of a new system.

Gordon says play with language and with conceptual systems serves to shake us from “view[s] too close to the present can opener art.” He adds,

Making the familiar strange and sustaining that strangeness requires a constant vigilance to reawaken the evocative quality of comparison relationships. It involves achieving new ways of asking old questions.

There we go with comparative relationships again! Similes and metaphors change perception. For sure, Lobachevsky would have been in that second can opener group with its clams and pea pods, as well as in the trees-like-broccoli camp.

Ready answers and given knowledge are popular, though, because they certainly come in handy. They save so much time. Yet they are incomplete explanations at best and too often lead into the more dangerous territory of unquestioned assumptions and even to Yudkowsky’s phlogiston-like “fake explanations.”

Answering “thunder” to the question “What’s that funny noise?” is a non-answer, a curiosity stopper. It’s the name of the bird, not what the bird is doing. If we become beholden to such answers or become trapped in self-consistent systems, we become Freire’s “adaptable, manageable beings.”

Speaking of, here’s an example. We’ve talked about spots and dots a lot; now, let’s look at lines.

https://psychologyfanatic.com/asch-conformity-study/

Some of that Freire-like adaptable, manageable beings business shows up in a psychology study known as the Asch Conformity Experiment, where people in groups were asked, as Adams phrases it, “which of three lines of different lengths was equal in length to the fourth line.” Each group had only one real member, and all the others were shills instructed to guess wrong. Thirty-three percent of the real subjects, says Adams, “changed their initial correct judgment to agree with that of the ‘shills,’ even though the difference in line length was clearly discernible,” thus demonstrating how people can become conditioned to accept “common judgment” and “majority opinions” even when they are highly suspect.

There is an awful lot of this going around these days.

If your judgment of line length is compromised because of the influence of others (who, incidentally, are lying to your face), just imagine what you would be up against with ideas like phlogiston or élan vital. Who would dare to question the wisdom of the age? I mean, who do you think you are? Consequently, we bow to what is presented to us as given knowledge.

We have a history of doing this with writing instruction, too. Often, there has been a debate model mentality lurking behind the typical English essay. This places a heavy emphasis on argument. In a debate, your goal is to present your argument convincingly enough to win, so you aim to win at all costs. There’s not much space for play or elasticity or for “upsetting or distorting inner consistency” of your position or for pushing the boundaries of your topic, which means you’re leaving out one of writing’s essential characteristics—its tendency, if you’re listening, to complicate the issue.

But if such complexities get in the way of your winning argument, best leave them out. Otherwise, things could get messy. Writing isn’t allowed to be messy. And God forbid you risk being unclear.

What About Writing Students?

Okay, so what if we bring this down to the individual level? How would all this stuff about bird names, question-killers, and curiosity stoppers apply to someone who has trouble with writing? Take Matt, for instance. Matt has always had the same problem in English class. He thinks he’s got it covered, but his teacher always wants more.

“I like to get to the point,” Matt says.

(Translation: “Get off my back.”)

He doesn’t feel dumb when messing with computers, but in English class, he struggles, suffering, he believes, from writer’s block. When asked to write about it, he comes up with things like this:

Having completed high school and going through two years of college, I have learned a great many things. Some academic and some social. My learning experiences in high school were different from those I had in college. My experiences were very different but both were very important.

His teachers have often reacted to his writing by talking about things like “the main idea,” “audience,” and “supporting details.” They use words like “general” and “specific,” “context,” “organization,” “sentence variation,” “thesis statement,” etc. “Transitions,” Matt has learned, are a big deal. And being unclear is downright unforgivable. Also, the paper should “flow.” This means, he gathers, that his essays do not flow. (That’s because they get to the point!)

All the English class talk just sounds like distant, rolling thunder to Matt. He tries again:

The writer must give the reader the whole picture. He must be precise and he must be explicit. The writer should educate the reader. He should not be vague. He should not give just part of the picture.

Matt wants to be agreeable, and he prays his teacher will be satisfied with that. Matt’s teacher wonders what it is that keeps Matt from applying what he seems to know about writing (i.e., a writer must give the reader the whole picture). Matt mentions readers but never asks the Gordon-like question, “What does ‘reader’ mean?” Meanwhile, his teacher, who needs to take a step back from the problem, seems at a loss and may be too close to the present first-year English essay art. Bakhtin, though, was not. In this passage, he talks about “the listener and his answer,” which may help.

The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Framing itself in the atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.

What if while writing you imagine being in a living conversation with your readers in which you anticipate future answer words, where words are dynamic, part of a dialogue rather than a communiqué, where questions are cultivated, not killed? For Bakhtin, the message is constantly in motion, being rewritten or co-written by the listener and the answer words. Here, communication is not one-way. It’s not even two-way. It’s what he calls “dialogic”—more like an explosion of unanticipated chain reactions. Thinking of readers as listeners who answer helps you to anticipate possible responses, which alters what you will say as you are writing. Your imagined listeners are your co-writers in this sense. This clears the way for the writing to move in unanticipated directions.

Here is Bakhtin being a little less than clear on the subject:

If we imagine the intention of such a word, that is, its directionality toward the object, in the form of a light, then the living and unrepeatable play of colors and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, not within the object itself . . . but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with alien words, value judgments, and accents through which the ray passes on its way toward the object: the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object makes the facets of the image sparkle.

Now there’s some Dinner Party Math for you, some Pedagogy of the Imagination. Words come alive through association, what Bakhtin calls “social atmosphere,” not through definition. “Now let’s look at the word and see what it’s doing,” Mr. Feynman might say. Writing with this in mind helps you to recognize the social atmosphere created by readers’ potential responses to your words.

Baby Talk

In The First Idea, Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker speak of a kind of listener and their answer when discussing childhood language development. A key aspect of language acquisition and cognition, both for individuals and in Homo sapiens’ evolutionary development, they say, is what they call “circles of communication” where gestures, emotions, and sounds are responded to, which in turn promotes additional responses. Even before a child has words, she learns that the listener will answer and that answer will require a response as well. This is how a child learns to read expressions, tones, and gestures and anticipate how her own will be read:

When an organism is involved in a continuous flow of back-and-forth communication, it is constantly sampling subtle variations in its environment . . . Each time the organism responds, it also changes that environment ever so slightly. As it changes the environment, the organism creates variation that it must then process. In higher-level biological systems, that is, the primate and human brain, this continuing exposure to sudden variation challenges the organism to discriminate more subtly among these variations. Each more discriminated perception leads to a highly altered response that in turn alters the environment further, resulting in a cycle of increasing differentiation. For this to occur, however, the organism must be involved in a continuous flow of co-regulated communication. Only a continuous flow permits a continuous sampling of subtle variations.

So Matt is right! Writing should flow. How? In the way Greenspan and Shanker say, with circles of communication, a continuous flow of co-regulated communication. In such an environment, words become Bakhtin’s ray-words.

After significant and repeated exposure to co-regulated communication, writing students may begin to see that it is under these conditions that their words may “sparkle.” Here they are engaging in what Bakhtin calls “dialogism.” As students develop a sense of listeners and their answers, what Linda Flower and John R. Hayes call “a richer sense” of what they are doing emerges. The continuously altered environment is continually making the familiar strange, making it possible eventually to question underlying systems and head in unanticipated directions.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says performance gets better or worse depending on how your skill and challenge levels match. When skills and challenges rise to complement each other, you enter a zone of high creativity. When challenge is too much higher than skill, it results in anxiety or worse. When skill is higher than challenge, you get boredom or worse. When both your skill and challenge levels rise high enough above your average levels, you are in what Cziksenthmihalyi describes as a “state of flow.” Adams describes this too, saying, “Most of us have experienced such times, sometimes at work, sometimes at play, when the process of creating something new is so captivating that it pushes our cares and worries aside.”

That kind of flow.

Developing a sense of readers and their reactions helps create this flow, where the skill and challenge levels are raised. As with the infant and caregiver and their circles of communication, challenges and skills progress in tandem and in response to the continuously altered environment. All this is just baby stuff. Before he even had language, Matt learned it—back when he was at his mother’s knee, say Greenspan and Shanker:

For example, when a 16-month-old toddler explores his mother’s ear, looking at it, yanking on it a little bit, making interesting gurgling sounds of fascination, . . . [the mother] might be fascinated with her toddler’s curiosity and signal back to her toddler a sense of pride with a warm supportive vocal tone suggesting curiosity and admiration for her toddler’s curiosity. She might also lower her head to make it easier for him to look in her ear and point to his ear as though to show him the similarity. As he touches his own ear, and then again touches his mother’s ear, acknowledging the similarity, she might show him her other ear, and so forth and so on.

In this exchange, they say, several things are happening. The child is learning that its gestures and emotional signaling will get a reciprocal response, that intentionality can produce results leading to a budding sense of purpose, and that often a response will result in unexpected consequences, such as the mother showing the other ear, which in turn may lead to new emotional reactions and gestures—all reinforcing that nascent sense of purpose and concept of self as well as building the foundation for later pattern recognition, problem solving, and gray-area thinking. For writers, the equivalent is a developing sense of readers, agency, and voice.

Interestingly, caregiver-infant interaction in the West has not always been like this. Greenspan and Shanker point out that at various periods in history, such as in Europe’s Middle Ages, childhood was treated differently than it is today. Small children were not given as much attention beyond basic human needs. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that attitudes toward children began to change along with caregiver interaction, with adults “communicating new attitudes and values to their children even before they could speak”:

According to our model of human development, capacities such as critical thinking that characterize the Renaissance could not arise from lecturing children or instilling values in them in a deliberate and conscious way. Rather, it comes from second-to-second and day-to-day interactions which create implicit mastery of this type of core capacity.

The interaction they describe here echoes Freire’s ideas for literacy. They claim that “such a renaissance occurs in the life of each infant and child through the interactions he or she has with responsive caregivers.” For the sake of argument, let’s presume Matt had a post-Middle Ages childhood with a fair amount of Renaissance-style interaction and flow. Why would he then abandon these skills in English class?

Because things are different in school. While home and social life usually consist of circles of co-regulated communication, often, too much of school life is the capital of Pará is Belém. Circles of communication are routinely short-circuited, clipped, the curves hammered straight. Our high-stakes, exam-model school system is all business with not much room for playing around. High school English class focuses on the proficiency levels required to pass standardized essay exams. In such an environment, says Bakhtin, thinking about language takes

into consideration only those aspects of style determined by demands for comprehensibility and clarity—that is, precisely, those aspects that are deprived of any internal dialogism, that take the listener for a person who passively understands but not for one who actively answers and reacts.

Stop Making Sense

Like Bakhtin, Thoreau spoke against holdover attitudes and practices, valuing complexity and ambiguity in language over fixations on clarity and the names of the birds. He strove to find ways to break free from the narrow confines of what he called “common sense”:

It is a ridiculous demand that England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.

Thoreau is not being curmudgeonly here. He’s not yelling for us to get off his lawn. He’s not criticizing clarity to bolster his contrarian brand. For Thoreau, a fixation on clarity causes you to shy from the “flying as well as creeping things” aspect of language and thought. As a result, other potential meanings are lost. In the world he’s railing against, parallel lines never diverge, professors merely clear their throats and dust off their phlogiston lecture notes, and your father is still perfecting ways of making sealing wax. Dialogism, differentiation, circles of communication, and sampling of subtle variations are all lost. There are no highly altered responses that, in turn, alter the environment further. Things stay pretty much the way they are, something that hierarchical power structures just love.

Later in the same passage, Thoreau sounds positively Gordon-like, saying, “The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.” Viewing the relation between a word and its object in too narrow a way, as Bakhtin, Gordon, or Thoreau criticize, can result in the kind of writing where both the word and its meaning are diminished. Such writing leads to a kind of understanding, which Bakhtin says

constitutes nothing new to the word under consideration, only mirroring it, seeking, at its most ambitious, merely the full reproduction of that which is already given in the word . . . such an understanding never goes beyond the boundaries of the word’s context and in no way enriches the word.

Ann Berthoff says, “Meanings don’t just happen; we make them, we find them, and form them.” This process is not orderly, and it’s often far from clear, yet it’s a process that can lead beyond the false clarity of the banking concept and into new territory. It involves “tolerating ambiguity” and learning the “uses of chaos.” Adams describes it similarly, saying that the main inhibitors to creativity and innovation are an “inability to tolerate ambiguity,” an “overriding desire for order,” and not having an “appetite for chaos.” Adams continues,

I am not suggesting . . . you should shun order and live in a totally chaotic situation. I am talking more of an excess fondness for order in all things. The solution of a complex problem is a messy process. Rigorous and logical techniques are often necessary, but not sufficient. You must usually wallow in misleading and ill-fitting data, hazy and difficult to test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities.

We all know compulsive people, those who must have everything always in its place and who become quite upset if the order of their physical lives is violated. If the trait carries over to a person’s mental process, he is severely impaired in his ability to work with certain types of problems. One reason for extreme ordering of the physical environment is efficiency . . . The process of bringing widely disparate thoughts together cannot work too well because your mind is not going to allow widely disparate thoughts to coexist long enough to combine.

Asimov would pounce on the “widely disparate thoughts” concept with his cross-connections and comparison relationships ideas. The second can opener group demonstrated the benefits of the practice of allowing “disparate thoughts to coexist long enough to combine.” Thinking of listeners and their answers opens up such possibilities for writers.

In some areas of his life, Matt can juggle disparate thoughts, but in English class, poor Matt likes things neatly folded. After all, that’s what he has been taught. So in English class, he finds himself trapped in the Middle Ages, an environment devoid of “continuous sampling of subtle variations,” leaving little room for learning to “discriminate more subtly.” All Matt can do under such conditions is to make sure things are “dressed right.” He stops himself from saying things that might interest him if he’s having trouble explaining himself or if he thinks he is being unclear. It’s safer, he believes, to keep things under wraps. If Matt tries to say more, things could get messy, and he’s been trained to be afraid of that. Messy writing is bad writing. It causes teachers to spill a lot of red ink. It causes grades to tumble like it’s 1929. So, in a way, Matt does become dumb when he writes. It’s kind of required. His teacher, too, feels dumb. He gives voluminous, oft-repeated communiqué-style comments and suggestions, but nothing breaks through. His directives just lie there, like one of Weiner’s dead birds. His words don’t sparkle.

Underneath it all, though, Matt is a good student who thinks he’s doing what he’s been told. And he suffers for it.

Rock the Boat, Please

With Matt in mind, I want to talk about Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall’s term “constructive discontent” which they call an essential aspect of creative thinking and which most children exhibit naturally, especially into their teen years, because, “to the young, everything needs improvement.” This quality, however, is tamped down in school. As we grow older,

we learn from our society that “fault-finders” disturb the status quo of the normal, average “others.” Squelch tactics are introduced. It becomes “good” not to “make waves” or “rock the boat” and to “let sleeping dogs lie” and “be seen and not heard.”

In English classes through the years, Matt has had all his writerly constructive discontent trained out of him. The reason Matt feels kind of dumb when writing is because he has learned too well. The reason Matt’s teacher feels kind of dumb when he tries to respond to Matt’s work is because he thinks Matt hasn’t learned enough.

If the teacher gives the usual corrective, mistake-centered responses, what will happen? Greenspan and Shanker show the effects of negative reactions from caregivers which can cause a child to

become bound up with feelings of hopelessness or even shame. These feelings may then serve to organize and give meaning to a variety of interactive experiences accompanied by frustration or discomfort.

A teacher’s comments can land like that, only adding to Matt’s sense of hopelessness about his writing and contributing to his unwillingness to take risks.

Among the things Elena Ferrante says writing “requires” are “maximum audacity and programmatic disobedience.” She adds, “My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations.” This is in keeping with what we’ve seen others say about creativity, such as Asimov’s valuing those who have “unconventional habits.” Since school and society discourage such behavior, writers and teachers of writing need to be like those obnoxious teenagers who believe everything needs improvement. After all, there is a good reason the young members of The Who sang, “I hope I die before I get old.” There is danger in losing that edge.

It takes audacity to reinvent the can opener. You must be a disobedient sort to roll up the nine dots into a cylinder or to write an essay that challenges all you’ve been taught to hold dear. Of the things I value most highly about writing or teaching, not one has anything to do with order or following rules. For writing, then, status quo-types need not apply. But often, the status quo is what gets taught.

Notice Ferrante says “requires.” If she’s right, and I suspect she is, that means teaching writing means teaching disobedience. This means that the “best” students may need the most work and the “worst” may have the most to offer.

How would teaching disobedience work? Think back to the dance example in the opening newsletter. The student had habitual patterns for how he moved his body because of cerebral palsy, and the teacher had habitual ways of thinking about dance and choreography based on her years of experience and her acquired expertise. To meet the challenges they faced took constructive discontent—a kind of rebelliousness and disobedience. Rules needed to be broken. It was either that or give up.

Since Matt has been burned too many times by corrective reactions to his writing, he now becomes someone he isn’t. As a writer, he’s rigid and limited in his views. He loses his sense of self and sense of purpose (both of which are essential for writing) even though he retains these in other aspects of his life. In his essays, he thinks, it’s safer not to rock the boat and to let sleeping dogs lie, so he abandons himself.

Matt, then, becomes the kind of writer who makes statements without nuance or elaboration while holding firmly to established views. There’s not an ounce of constructive discontent to be found. But the authors say all is not lost. “Interaction” can come to the rescue. Responding “reciprocally” (like when the mother turns her other ear) can remedy the situation and provide incentives for taking the initiative, re-establishing a sense of self and purpose and triggering a renaissance that reintroduces the dialogic habits of his early childhood and rekindles his earlier constructive discontent. And it’s not just Matt who benefits, say Greenspan and Shanker:

Engaging in co-regulated emotional interactions is just as important for the caregiver as for the child. Through their interactions, the caregiver gradually learns at a very intuitive level how to negotiate with the child through different types of interaction patterns . . .

Both the student and the teacher learn from each other.

Unfortunately, right now, Matt and his teacher are one and the same. They are the father on the sofa during the thunderstorm. They are the first group of can opener designers. They speak of colors and blades when they should be talking about clams and pea pods.

For his teacher, too, a renaissance is needed. He needs to learn how to read. When Nancy Sommers says, “instead of reading and responding to the meaning of the text, we correct our students’ writing,” she’s describing how teachers unconsciously fall into the pedagogy of severity trap. We read student work differently than we read other writing. With students, we read for what we think should be there, not for what is there. This is an extension of the long-held practice of hunting down grammatical errors in student writing. To counter this focus on errors as mistakes, Mina Shaughnessy argues that an error is not always what we think it is, that there is often a logic behind it. Mike Rose says error, rather than being a product of ignorance, is sometimes “rooted in other causes.” Teachers are often influenced by similar tactics when commenting about the content of student work. We can’t turn off the urge to correct. Because we have a strong mistake-detecting reflex, often we end up correcting not just grammatical errors but also student thinking. What truly needs correcting is the way we read student writing.

Kevin J. Porter talks about a “pedagogy of charity” vs a “pedagogy of severity” where he argues that when responding to student work, instructors should focus on Donald Davidson’s principle of charity where “we seek to tolerate ambiguity for the larger aim of understanding ideas.” Davidson values this over “seeking contradictions or difficulties.”

Everything Is Simple ‘til It’s Not

Things that don’t seem to make sense shouldn’t be dismissed without further examination. When writing about Davidson’s principle, Arthur C. Lee cites Richard Feynman to illustrate how it’s important to seek understanding even in the face of an apparent paradox:

Feynman writes in his Nobel Prize Lecture about struggling with the notion of backward causation in quantum electrodynamics:

“. . . all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr, that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.”

This means things that seem easy to categorize, label, and dismiss as paradoxical, contradictory, or just plain wrong may deserve another look. This benefit-of-the-doubt mindset is both charitable and an example of constructive discontent in action. For this reason, unsuccessful student writing is sometimes the most interesting kind. There is almost always more there than meets the eye. Gradually, I’ve learned to rebel against my former instincts as I’ve realized that the usual methods only work for those who don’t really need them and in fact do harm for those who are not as tuned in to how the English composition game works.

So what am I going to do about it? Like Porter, Sommers, Shaughnessy, Rose, and many others, I strive to read my students’ work with new eyes. I am more aware now how something that looks like a poor effort may instead be what Susan McCarthy calls, “an early stage of a journey toward grace, competence, and comprehension” or an example of what Paul Williams describes as a case of someone learning “to reach beyond his or her present abilities, beyond what he’s sure he can do and into the unknown.” (Just like I’m doing here!)

In “How to Read Like a Writer,” Mike Bunn takes these concerns about how we read student work further, saying that if you read like a writer, you are looking at “writerly choices” and trying to understand why the author made those choices. He cites David Jauss’ carpenter metaphor: “You must look at a book the way a carpenter looks at a house that someone else built, examining the details in order to see how it was made.”

This both dovetails nicely with Porter’s charitable readers concept and adds a twist to Davidson’s argument because, as Bunn says, “you’re reading to understand how the text was written—how the house was built—more than you’re trying to determine the meaning of the things you read or assess the quality of the piece.” You are not asking, as in Barry’s example, “‘Is this good?’ or ‘Does this suck?’” You are not even asking, “What does this mean?” Instead, you are seeking to understand the choices the writer made.

The Art of Saying Nothing

As you might have guessed, “Matt” was a real student and his clueless teacher? You’re looking at him. I needed to back away from the problem like the second group of can opener designers did. I already knew about Sommers and her idea that we should read student writing the way we read other writing but with Matt, some enhanced version of this was needed. That’s where Porter came in. If the focus is on understanding, not correcting, what did I need to do to understand what Matt had written?

This was a tough case. His words on the page seemed robotic, and since things were mostly grammatical, I couldn’t in desperation pounce on that. There was something else going on. It was as if he had perfected the art of using language to say nothing at all. Come to think of it, it was impressive—a work of art. His words left nothing for a teacher to grab ahold of, nothing for me to understand.

Maybe he’s hung on to some of that constructive discontent after all because it was almost as if this was his way of rebelling against the unreasonable demands of English teachers and their precious little “academic essay” genre. So what now?

I needed to understand what made Matt so reluctant to say anything in his English essays. Maybe Bunn could help. Matt and I needed to talk.

How to Answer a Prayer

As I said in the first newsletter, I often find compelling connections to composition issues in unexpected places, and the following is an example, one that also influences how I read student work. After suffering a stroke, Neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor was forced to see things from the patient’s side rather than the doctor’s side. As you might imagine, it was revealing. Often, she felt she was on the receiving end of poor, though well-meaning, treatment. She then outlined how she wished her doctors had treated her. Here are some items from her list that when I first read them, made me think about Sommers and Porter and caused me to imagine my students saying similar things to me:

I’m not stupid, I am wounded. Please respect me.

Be as patient with me the 20th time you teach me something as you were the first.

Be aware of what your body language and facial expressions are communicating to me.

Make eye contact with me. I am in here—come find me. Encourage me.

Trust that I am trying—just not with your skill level or on your schedule.

Do not assess my cognitive ability by how fast I can think.

Break all actions down into smaller steps of action.

Please don’t finish my sentences for me or fill in words I can’t find. I need to work my brain.

I may want you to think I understand more than I really do.

Focus on what I can do rather than bemoan what I cannot do.

Remember that in the absence of some functions, I have gained other abilities.

Bolte Taylor’s bullet list is downright holy. It’s a patient praying that her doctors will listen as she teaches them how the principle of charity works. Will her caregivers hear her prayer?

I am an MS patient. Through the years, I have unintentionally been treated insensitively on occasion by some doctors who spoke to me in the ways Bolte Taylor is trying to change. It sucks when someone who is trying to help you makes you feel worse. This treatment has further awakened me to how I affect others, especially my students. When it comes down to it, I see my role in this relationship as one of a caregiver. My students are in my care, and for me, what Greenspan and Shanker say is a reality, not an analogy.

Whenever I am responding to students in any way, I strive to keep Bolte Taylor’s pleas in mind. In my commenting, I break all actions down into smaller steps of action. I do not finish sentences or fill in words. I focus on what students can do and refuse to bemoan what they cannot.

In the same way my body language in class can send unintended messages, my commenting also sends messages I may not be aware of. To counteract this, I work to be respectful and patient even for the twentieth time I teach a student something. In class, in conference, and even in my commenting on assignments, I am trying to make “eye contact,” because I know someone is in there. I know that some ray of light may be buried in that difficult essay waiting to be noticed. I remind myself that most students are trying but not always on my schedule because something that’s going on in their life or something about their history as a student may be hindering their progress. I realize now that a lack of certain skills should not blind me to that student’s other abilities and that those other abilities can be harnessed to assist them here. Taylor’s points, when combined with the other works I have mentioned, have contributed to my commenting style.

I said Matt and I needed to talk. Often, when talking with a student about a claim in their essay that I don’t understand, I’ll ask, “How did you get from there to here?” When you ask such questions about not just what but how students write, you sometimes get answers that are far more compelling than what you see on the page. When I hear something like that, I say, “Why not write down what you just said, because it’s great.” Then I ask “Why do you think you didn’t say that in your essay?” This, like when the mother turns her head revealing her other ear, leads to more responses.

I can simply ask Matt why he seems reluctant to say more. When he tells me, “I like to get to the point,” I can respond with, “What do you mean by ‘get to the point’? What point?” When he tells me what he means, I can say, “That’s good stuff; write that down.” It gets the ball rolling. Now, I can reveal my other ear.

With a student like Matt, having a back-and-forth like this begins the circle of communication Matt will need to transform his essay. This will help him develop a sense of listeners and answers and see how that can help him to shut down less. He’ll see that he has something to add to the discussion the class is having about these issues. His contributions in his essays and in class discussions will generate additional responses from classmates which will in turn change what he will write. He will be immersed in a social atmosphere which will alter his responses and change his writing further. Matt will be participating in an ongoing conversation in an ever-changing, permissive environment where constructive discontent and unconventional behavior are welcomed—where it’s not only okay to make waves, but where wave-making is the point. All of this will help his concept of what “reader” means to become more elastic.

Ultimately, I want my comments and interactions with my students to be like a walk in the woods with Feynman and his father. I want it to be “no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.”

With Feynman and the pedagogy of charity in mind, let’s take a moment to go back to where we began in this long (sorry) newsletter, to that opening scene of a father and child during a thunder storm. How could the father’s answer have been less question killer/curiosity stopper and more circles of communication?

What’s That Funny Noise, Revisited

“What’s that funny noise?” the boy asks when he hears distant thunder.

“What does it sound like to you?” the father asks.

“Scary!”

“It does sound a little scary, doesn’t it? What kind of scary?”

“Monster scary!”

“I know what you mean. What kind of monster do you think it sounds like?”

“A giant lion! Or a dinosaur!”

“Well, don’t worry, there are no lions around here. And there are no dinosaurs anywhere anymore. The noise was ‘thunder’ which is what happens sometimes when warm air way up in the clouds rubs against cold air. It’s like when you walk on the carpet and touch the doorknob and sometimes, ouch!, you get a shock.”

“Are clouds flying carpets?”

“That’s a fun way to think about them.”

As the rain continues and the thunder rolls across the sky again, the boy forgets his cars, and the father forgets his reading. Instead, he gets crayons and paper so he and his son can draw monsters and flying carpets. They tell stories, make scary noises, and laugh.

For this lucky boy, the word “thunder” now sparkles. It is a many-faceted thing, rich with subtle variations, making up a “living and unrepeatable play of colors and light.” This “social atmosphere” is now inhabited by flying as well as creeping things, by giant lions, dinosaurs, rumbling clouds, shocking doorknobs, and, most of all, by the memory of his dad and himself drawing pictures together one rainy day. All of these and more spark a vibrant yet all-too-fragile renaissance, one that only when accompanied by constant vigilance holds the power to keep those thundering Dark Ages at bay.

Notes

I was lucky enough to see the Stop Making Sense tour in person while living in Pittsburgh.

Update 3/29/26

• I hope people will hang in there with this now that it’s one piece. It shows some major contributors to my evolution as a teacher. I had plenty of weaknesses, but one thing I can say in my favor is that I had a signature style. Now that I’m not a teacher anymore, I have more time to write, and maybe I can put more of these ideas into practice as a writer.

• I tried to do a voiceover, but it got compressed too much. I may try again.

• This, along with my recent AI newsletter, feels like a keeper to me. Ask me again in a month.

Large update at the end

• (This is one day early.) As I said in my post on Thursday, things may be slow around here for a bit. From reading this, it looks like the same thing happened this time last year. I’ll try to do these One Year Ago posts in the meantime.

• Another grieving one. Sorry. I’m hemorrhaging subscribers over this. Oh well. But these also get the most views. Hmm. Doesn't matter, just interesting is all. Subscriptions won’t cost you anything other than adding clutter to your inbox.

[Previously]

I’ve been missing from here for a bit. The reminders of this time last year are hard to handle. It was when what little hope that remained went missing.

The Barnes passage about missing and happiness brings to mind what Saint Augustine said about remembering happiness:

For even when I am unhappy I can remember times when I was cheerful, and when I am cheerful, I can remember past unhappiness. I can recall past fears and yet not feel afraid, and when I remember that I once wanted something, I can do so without wishing to have it now. Sometimes memory induces the opposite feeling, for I can be glad to remember sorrow that is over and done with and sorry to remember happiness that has come to an end.

I’m not there yet with the “glad to remember a sorrow that is over and done with” part. I can be having an okay day, then, oof, sorrow ambushes me, striking me down with its how-can-you-be-gone blunt impact. I’m left to unhappily remember a happiness that has come to an end and a sorrow that is only beginning.

The memories flooding in now are about confusion, fear, losing touch, the gruesome, gritty details of caregiving, a pending month-long hospitalization, a brief, harrowing 10 days at home again, an ambulance idling at our front door, more hospital time, another ambulance, admittance to hospice on Mother’s Day, for God’s sake, her losing the ability to talk, filling in the details of her death certificate as she lay beside me, still breathing, and 10 days holding vigil while I watched her starve to death and waited to get going on a lifetime of missing her.

If I want to block all that out with a happy memory, I’ll need to roll that film back quite a ways. What am I hoping to find? What happens when I get there? What do I hold onto?

There’s no happiness there, only the sad memory of happiness. Missing lurks at the edges of everything. It takes over and colors the world in sepia tones.

Singer Nick Cave said this about grieving:

Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence.

I read the first line in the above passage at my wife’s celebration of life. The terrible reminder. The depths of our love. Non-negotiable. At the time, that’s where I was at. I’m permanently there, in fact, but now, because of the reminders of last spring, the “whirling gyre” part and its “all manner of madnesses” have joined the fray.

In a few weeks, there will be a ceremony at the library children’s room where my wife worked for over 3 decades. The room will bear her name. An endowment fund for children’s programming bears her name already. There will be sad memories of happiness, of the happiness she brought to that room. Joy is the better word for what she created there. Pure joy.

A few days after that will be the one-year anniversary of her death. I’m reminded once again that I’m never going to be all right and that somehow, I need to find a way to be all right with that.

Be all right with that? This turmoil of missing will never allow it.

I miss her, the life we had together, what it was in her that made me more myself, her companionship, the love we had for each other, the happiness we shared—all of that and more I am missing.

“Happiness, I’ve been looking for you lately,” the song says a little too cheerily. Yeah, I’ve been looking. I catch occasional glimpses. These glimpses are filtered through a lens of sorrow.

“My world is empty without you,” another song says, bleakly. The lines, “But from this loneliness there′s no hiding place,” or “And each time that darkness falls/It finds me alone with these four walls,” perfectly describe what it feels like to live inside this empty world of mine.

Happiness?—forget about it. It’s something shared or it’s nothing at all. This contraption will never get off the ground. Emptiness wins this contest every day.

I already knew some things about missing. I remember missing her during our first two winters when we were apart. We wrote letters every day where we spoke of missing and of together again.

After we married, whenever we were apart, even if it was only for a night or two, I couldn’t sleep. In our phone calls and texts we said, “I miss you.”

What I am missing most is this: I miss pouring two cups of coffee each morning, feeling her hand casually draped over my shoulder while listening to her sweet voice as we talked about anything and everything to begin each day.

Update 3/23/26

It’s interesting to look back on what I was thinking a year ago and to see what’s different now, if anything. At first glance—same, same. But . . .

I found those letters I mentioned last year and read all 576 of them. That was wild. I still don’t know what to make of it. Fifty years ago, the missing was intense. It hurt so much. Last year, it was worse, of course. I expected it to be. Now, it’s somehow even worse, which I didn’t expect.

I’m not alone with these four walls anymore, and that’s a good change. There’s laughter in the house. Thank god. I’m still alone with the four walls inside my head, though, especially when I try to sleep, and when I get up each morning to make my solo cup of coffee. So, same, but different.

I’m in therapy, which has been a good, though not without its challenges. I’m hoping that will change something.

After an almost two-decade lapse, I play guitar now almost daily, however badly. There’s a long way to go, but it’s progressing beyond my expectations. This has spurred me on.

I even bought a new guitar pedal. I never would have imagined that a year ago. Yesterday, I got the rest of my guitars out of the basement, changed the strings on all my guitars, adjusted the truss rod on one, bought a new cable, new bridge pins for the Gibson acoustic, new-style thumbpicks, and a half-capo.

By the way, last week my therapist asked me to make a list of all the things I’ve ever liked to do or been interested in. When I was young, I dreamed of being a luthier. This explains my busy day yesterday:

I must be up to something with this. I’m not sure what. I’m afraid to ask. (Don’t worry, I was never that guy who always brings his guitar to the party.)

My writing has progressed beyond Writer-Type since last year. It’s overwhelming, to be honest. I have too many ideas for projects, a few of them are book ideas, one in particular that I feel compelled to get going on, even though I know it will do a number on me psychologically. That’s just how I roll, I guess.

I want to focus on fiction. The unpublishable kind. That’s where my heart is, my preferred subgenre. God help me.

I’ve been working out intensely for over a year. That’s been good. I’m back to my high school weight, so I feel better physically, which I hope will help me mentally. . . TBD.

I fear, though, that there’s a chance this has extended my life.

Have I mentioned that my sense of humor has always been a bit dark? It usually made my wife laugh. She would have laughed at this. Now, nobody gets it. I have to explain my jokes. That was funny. At least to me.

“From this loneliness there’s no hiding place.” Yeah, that’s the same. It will never change, I guess. Come on, just deal with it, you wuss.

I’ll find a way, I suppose.

I mean, I’m lucky. I have good friends, but my daughter used a term last night I’d never heard, one that changed my perspective, that gave me language for something that nags at me. She talked about “catch-up” friends. When she said that, it struck me. Come to think of it, almost all my friends are the catch-up kind. You see each other periodically, not regularly. You spend the whole time catching up, so in a way, it’s a case of arrested development. It’s like picking up a guitar every once in a while. Don’t expect much.

It’s no one's fault. It’s just interesting. I suspect this has gotten worse in the online era. I noticed that before—the sort of fake connection social media gives you—but now, I’m hyper-aware.

I got spoiled because I once had a best friend whom I saw all the time. There’s no making up for that. There just isn’t. No wonder my world is empty. I need an everyday friend, but I’d be happy with a weekly one. Good luck with that.

If I post that on Facebook, someone will “like” it, which is kind of sad. I feel so sorry for us all.

Speaking of social media, I’m quiet-quitting Facebook and Instagram. They’ve been banished to page nine on my homscreen. I haven’t looked at them in a while. I think I like that. I’ll take them off my phone and iPad next. Unfortunately, Substack is starting to give me that same vibe, the one that starts out pretty good, then gradually sours and gets worse and worse. It’s the damn feed. It reminds me of graduate school, in fact. A lot of territorial shit. It makes me lose the will to write. So I listen to music a lot.

Have you ever noticed that “My World Is Empty Without You” and “Paint It, Black” are kind of the same song? Brian Jones’s sitar riff is a riff on the melody Dianna Ross sings in her chorus. To my ear, about eight consecutive notes sound identical. The Supremes song came out a few months before the Rolling Stones tune. I can’t hear one without thinking about the other. I could easily play a mash-up version on guitar while interchangeably singing words from each.

Both songs are examples of Augustine’s “sorry to remember a happiness that has come to an end,” which describes most songs, when you think about it. There are a lot of musical examples of Barnes’s “turmoil of missing” and his “sad memories of happiness.”

I have my AirPods in all day and night, except when reading, or writing, or playing guitar. Definitely when working out and cooking, or when doing luthier-like things. Unfortunately, also when I can't sleep, which is most nights. Maybe it’s cathartic. Maybe it helps me with processing. It could be counterproductive, I imagine. I hope not. I’m sure all this listening has something to do with my new/old guitar obsession. I want to play and sing about these things. It feels like release, at least while I’m doing it.

This is the puzzle I need to talk about in therapy. I’m always doing things. That should be helping me. Why do I feel the same?

I kind of like this repost-with-an-update thing. Old is the new new.

If you are unsubscribing, so long, it’s been good to know ya. Thanks for hanging out for a bit. Come back any time. Then we can catch up!

• This is from a journal entry. It’s been a hell of a week. Things may be slow around here for a while.

• Btw, I’m looking for ways to renounce my gender citizenship. Is there an embassy for that? Unfortunately, I won’t be able to write a newsletter about this matter. It would be a doozy, though.

[Previously]

To My Therapist:

No, I don’t have suicidal ideation, but I also don’t have whatever the opposite of that might be. Ideation for living—that’s what I’m missing. The thought of being here for twenty years without my wife is utterly unbearable to me, like a prison sentence. That’s why I can’t think too far ahead. On the other hand, the thought of leaving my daughter is equally unbearable. I guess that’s a pretty good definition of stuck.

You asked me to list things I’ve liked to do throughout my life, so I did. I’ve recently tried all the ones I am physically capable of and even some I can no longer manage. Nothing works. Not reading, not guitar, not working out, not camping, not traveling, not fixing typewriters, not even writing.

Cooking comes closest these days. Seeing friends feels good, but only while it lasts, and it never lasts long. Falling in love? Yeah, I liked that. It would be a great way to feel alive again, I suppose. It’s hard to imagine, though, given that I come with so many drawbacks and given the fact that the one I loved was in a league all her own. I mean, it would be unfair to anyone who came next.

When I was young, everything was out of balance, but then my future wife came along, and she single-handedly righted the ship. It was a miracle.

You said I’m “locked in caregiver mode.” Of course, I was a teacher for 43 years. I’m good at doing things for people. Doing things for myself? Not so much. My wife handled that. I didn’t need to worry. She looked after me, I looked after her, and together, we looked after our daughter. For a long time, things were in perfect balance.

Now, the ship is listing again. It needs ballast. This time, I can’t hold out for miracles. It’s up to wobbly old caregiver me to right this wobbly ship.

This ship is in distress. I’m stuck, and I’m locked in. Against my will and by choice.

Notes

• My therapist is excellent. Going there is the highlight of my week. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy, though. And life has this annoying tendency to keep throwing shit my way despite the therapy sessions. I wish I had a pause button. Just let me do this for a while, Life. What’s your hurry? You’ll get your chance. You always win.

• My last post was a little rushed. I fixed some things and re-recorded it because I was otherwise pleased with how it came out. So, see—despite my love of em-dashes, Writer-Type remains an AI-free zone.

[Previously]

The Fear Is Real

So many writers, including ones I greatly admire, fear the blank page. It taunts them, so they avoid it when they can. I’ve never understood this. To me, blankness is a playground. It doesn’t represent my many inadequacies as a writer; rather, it represents fresh starts and new possibilities. I want to fill that page up, because once I begin, I don’t know where it will lead, and this thrills me. In other words, rather than fear to attempt, I can’t wait to get going. I’m weird, I know.

I witnessed this fear with students, as well, though there are differences. In school, you are required to write, which is an immediate killjoy. School, in my view, is a big reason why fear of blank pages is epidemic. In school, there’s too much at stake. As Peter Bichsel says in “Knowledge Is Resistance,”

In school, one doesn’t learn things and subjects, one learns work. One learns that work is unpleasant.

I wonder, though, whether something else Bichsel says is part of the problem for some. In his piece, “Reading,” he says,

People who read are, among other things, people who can acknowledge questions without immediately needing an answer. They can live with questions without answers. This may already be subversive.

Maybe fear of the blank page has something to do with this lack of ability to live with questions without answers. For some, getting started is difficult because they have more questions than answers. Again, school may be an accomplice in this because of its emphasis on the well-made plan. If this is the case, how do you begin to fill up blank spaces?

Bichsel says readers can live with questions without answers. Writers need this skill, too. Ann Bethoff calls this “tolerating ambiguity” and “learning the uses of chaos.” For some reason, I have a high tolerance for such things. Questions without answers get me going. I suspect it’s something I learned early and outside of school. I grew up in a tension-filled and chaotic home. Questions without reliable answers swirled around me all the time. This was my natural habitat. Because of this, I acquired a strong sense of “constructive discontent.” That’s one reason school wasn’t a great fit for me. I didn’t trust the answers my parents gave me, and for good reason. Why would I trust teachers’ answers? Answers in general became suspect.

Much later, when I inexplicably found myself teaching, coming across Ann Berthoff’s work set me free. Now, I knew what I had to do—teach my students to tolerate ambiguity, to live with questions without immediate answers or answers at all. My quest the entire time was how? I looked everywhere, including and especially outside my discipline, which, like any field of study, can sometimes feel like being locked inside a fortress. I found the thinkers who focused on questions over answers and developed a Bichsel-like attitude that it’s “not about learning the material, it’s about learning through the material.” Most of the writing/teaching newsletters here are about that quest.

Answers Are So Boring

Bichsel says some people only ask questions “that have straight answers.” He says,

The people asking these questions come from a school where only answers are worth anything, and questions are asked only if the answer is known.

This, in many ways, describes traditional instruction in English composition with its emphasis on argument, persuasion, and comparison-contrast over inquiry. In many cases, these courses were taught by overburdened and frustrated people who held degrees in literature, not in rhetoric or composition. They wanted to teach literature and write, not teach comp, but they drew the short straw. Probably, they also had a hunch that the English essay is essentially a fake genre, so they treated it accordingly. Usually, the emphasis was on a recognizable product with a recognizable structure that was reasonably correct, written in a disembodied voice and style, and that took a strong position on some random issue. In other words, a ChatGPT essay, only long before ChatGPT.

We taught bland versions of voice and style for ages, even if we didn’t emphasize it. What stops us from teaching more compelling versions? Maybe it was because the English essay has no audience other than the professor, and because answers were favored over questions.

No wonder news programs and newspaper columns are mostly random opinions based on gut feelings. But hey, some of those opinions can sound pretty convincing! They are blandly authoritative, contain persuasive-sounding language, and have an aura that smacks of seriousness and importance. However, they have little interest in questions, except when used as red herrings designed to get you to accept handed-down knowledge.

That’s why with my students, I didn’t begin with arguments; I began with stories. For me, the creative writing route was the way to go with students. With stories from your experience, you are more likely to find your voice. You are more likely to encounter questions that don’t have answers. You will gain experience with ambiguity and learn to write about why that thing you are writing about is so tough to pin down.

When students write about key moments from their lives and describe scenes and observations storyteller-style, it’s easier for them to fill in that white space. Students become practiced in this art of being okay with questions that don’t have answers. They dabble in ambiguity and see the benefits of spending some time there. In doing so, they discover how practice in the uses of chaos helps them learn through the material and helps them fill the page.

Claire-Louise Bennett and Me

I’ve written about Claire-Louise Bennett here before, so imagine my surprise when, reading a collection of Bichsel’s work, which I’ve also written about recently, I came across Bennett writing about Bichsel. Her piece, “A Little Band of People,” is described by the editors of Music and Literature as her tribute to Bichsel, but since I’ve read Pond and Checkout 19, and Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, I can’t help but read “Band” as a story. To me, that’s what it is, even if it isn’t, and that makes me question the essay form.

She describes a particular writing technique that then leads her to her comment on Bichsel’s writing.

I used to write in bars and cafes often, especially when I was a regular smoker and you could still puff on a cigarette in those places. With no particular subject in mind when I perched up to the counter with my notebook, I’d make a start on a fresh page by setting down a few immediate details.

This piece by Bennett begins with her sitting at a bar, writing down her thoughts and making observations about her surroundings. She was supposed to go to a “launch” but hadn’t made it there, she speculates about why, she notices someone’s “lovely” hair, wonders what she should do about her own hair color, describes a man at the end of the bar who is looking at her, describes the “barman,” and then she recalls time spent with someone named Bruno. In writing this way, Bennett’s opening section of the essay serves to illustrate her upcoming point about Bichsel’s writing.

In that part, Bennett reflects on earlier small descriptions she wrote while sitting in bars and observing people. She’d been thinking those pieces lacked significance because they were “too local” and wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else. These were just for her, something enjoyable to do. Reading Bichsel changed her mind. She says,

Then, recently, I was introduced to Peter Bichsel’s writing and some of the stories I savored reading the most encouraged me to think about “localness” in a different way, because, actually, it is precisely this quality that, at this time, appeals to me most strongly in Bichsel’s work.

Bennett then quotes Bichsel on this matter:

My urgent objective is never anything else but to fill this page with letters—writing is an ongoing struggle with the blank paper.

Of this, Bennett says,

Indeed, one sure way of vanquishing the white nightmare is to simply record what’s there beneath my nose.

After reading Bichsel, Bennett’s solution to the blank-space issue is clear. Just imitate him, as she had already done, in fact, though without knowing it. What to her had been an insignificant practice suddenly resonates in ways she never imagined. She says,

Paying attention to the local, zoning in on what I recognize, or half recognize, nearly always gets me writing something.

This kind of writing not only gets her going, but often leads somewhere. She’s not only filling that space with letters, but she’s also finding her way toward what will become her subject matter. She says,

It seems to me now that whatever that something turns out to be, it is perhaps not so slight and inconsequential as I thought.

About this seemingly random, insignificant writing technique, Bennett adds,

I derived a lot of pleasure from passing the time this way—and I also felt that putting pen to paper in public somehow contributed to my development as a writer. Following my private thoughts while at the same time staying close to my immediate surroundings and noticing the small social occurrences that shifted the air around me blurred the line between writing and living in a way that was emotionally fortifying and creatively scintillating to track.

It seems that if Bennett’s piece is essay writing, then it provides ways to think about English essays in a new light, especially now in the AI era. In the first part of her essay, while sitting at a bar, Bennett shows us how to write like Bichsel (and like herself) as she describes the scene and the associations that it brings to mind. The essay is a lesson in technique and a blueprint for developing a writer’s sensibilities while you’re busy filling the page with letters. “Band” is amazing, actually, a cool blend of expository and creative writing that provides glimpses into the origins of things like voice and style.

A Deeper Understanding of What I’d Been Doing

Just as reading Bichsel gave Bennett new insights into the kind of writing she’d already been doing, reading this piece by Bennett has given me a deeper understanding of one of my teaching practices—having students begin with stories.

I did it because students are more comfortable writing about their lives than about articles where the subject matter may seem distant from their experience. I gave them parameters, for example, to describe an example of something you know or that you thought you knew and were wrong about, and to describe a key moment from this experience, showing us where you were and when, who was with you, and what people said and did in that moment.

As they write their stories, focusing on their observations and the immediate surroundings of their story setting, they are writing in their own voices and making observations that they have come up with on their own based on the particular details that drew their attention. They are writing about these things in a style of their own as well, their natural way of being in their writing.

Later, through writing and revising their stories, and when they read others’ essays and course readings about how you know things, they gain some experience which they can bring to the articles, along with some language from their own and classmates’ stories to assist them as they engage with the texts. They can now approach the experts as peers in some sense, without reverting to a generic style, because they have things to say about this, too, things earned through their real-life experience.

So this is similar to what Bennett talks about. Students describe scenes and explore their topic while focusing on their observations about the scenes they are describing. What’s not similar is that my students were recreating their scenes from memory. If I were teaching now, I would add something. I’d want to pounce on this immediacy aspect that Bichsel and Bennett practiced and provide opportunities for students to focus on whatever is under their noses, so my students could practice filling up the blank page in this manner. I’d prompt them with something like this:

Go somewhere on campus to sit for twenty minutes and put pen to paper in public while observing people or nature or both. Write down what you see, hear, and smell. Write down whatever these things make you think about. In other words, follow your private thoughts while staying close to your immediate surroundings. Write about what’s under your nose.

This would, as Bennett says, blur “the line between writing and living in a way that [is] emotionally fortifying and creatively scintillating to track.” Later, as we examine these in class, we can take a look at the details that at first glance may seem slight and inconsequential and see if any of them might, on reexamination, qualify as worth pursuing further. We could talk about how the writing sounds and look for the most compelling details and expressions, and speculate about where these insights might lead.

With this simple, small, and engaging exercise, students will be developing writerly sensibilities and a reader’s eye for detail and potential significance. While doing this, they will develop habits of mind that they will be able to bring to the stories they will write and to the course readings and research articles that lie ahead. They will be filling the page more easily because of their surroundings and writing in compelling ways from the start, as they use their own senses and voices. They will feel the power of that. They’ll notice the difference between this and that familiar ChatGPT style.

I only recently learned the power of this. When I took my first solo trip after my wife died, I did what a dear friend recommended and kept a journal, and I sometimes sat in public cafes or parks to write down what I noticed. I wrote down what was right there under my nose. These entries produced several things that turned out, in Bennett’s words, not to be as inconsequential as I thought, leading to some things that I expanded upon later. When teaching, I often had students write by hand in class, including first drafts of their stories, so why not have them do this outside of class as well, the way I did in Spain? (And now continue to practice.)

Bennett mostly writes fiction, so you may be tempted to say this is apples and oranges. “Band” is an essay, however, and one that uses creative writing techniques. Bichsel wrote both stories and essays and relied on these techniques for each. To Bichsel’s point that readers “can live with questions without answers,” and that “this may already be subversive,” I want to stress that writers share this quality as well. Politicians, propagandists, proselytizers, and ChatGPT, they don’t.

We should teach through the subject by focusing on living with questions without answers, in other words, teach inquiry and how to tolerate ambiguity, precisely because reading and writing, if done well, are, at their core, subversive. If what students are creating isn’t subversive, then what they are doing isn’t reading or writing at all, but rather, sorting and lifelessly regurgitating what is already known, like some LLM that has never saddled up to a bar.

(One of my favorite songs)

[Previously]

Why I love to cook and write (and play guitar).

All Around the Kitchen

I always liked cooking, but now, I love it. I’ve cooked since I was a kid. My family was in the restaurant business, so I’ve been in busy kitchens since I can remember. By age eleven, when we grilled at home, I was the chef. Most of it was easy: burgers and dogs, then choice cuts of steak and fish. Our front yard was a beach, so often, we caught our own fish. In the summer, it was my job to gut, scale, filet, and grill what we caught.

Later, I married an excellent cook. Once our careers were in full swing, she cooked most meals during the semesters (except for seafood and beef dishes, which were my territory), and I cooked most meals during the summer, usually on the charcoal grill. Though I cooked a fair amount, I’ve never done so as constantly as in the last two-plus years.

My wife was an amazing baker, too. She baked the best pies I’ve ever tasted, and she made muffins every Wednesday morning to share with neighbors, along with the cappuccinos she brewed. There were always baked goods in the house. I ceded the baking territory to her, but I made cookies or crisps sometimes, or a flourless chocolate cake for her birthday. Last fall, I made pies for the holidays that came out nicely, so I may bring baked goods back into my life. (Maybe since I’m working out more than ever, I can afford the risk.)

Rhubarb pie is my favorite—straight up, no strawberries. Since my pie crust is now up to snuff, during rhubarb season, I’ll be baking pie, and I’ll even have some for breakfast.

Cooking as Caregiving

When my wife became ill, she was unable to eat much, so I prepared what I could for her, things she might be able to swallow, like scrambled eggs or soup, until she was unable to eat at all.

Our daughter, who lived nearby, and I still needed to eat, so I cooked for us while caring for my wife. People offered food, but mostly, I turned their offers down. Since my wife was only consuming things like Ensure at this point, if people gave us food, I would have had to throw a lot of it away. Besides, cooking was a way I could care for my daughter while trying my best to care for my wife.

Being responsible for every meal every day was new to me. It’s been going on now for 27 months. The only interruption to that was in April 2024, for the entire month, and then the last part of May, for ten days, when my wife was in the hospital and then hospice. Eating meant a lot of DoorDash or whatever I could find near the hospital or hospice. It was unhealthy, and I was putting on the pounds then, because I was eating bad food and not working out at all.

Writing as Caregiving

It’s clear to me how preparing meals is a form of caregiving, but I never thought of writing in that way. Outside of sending letters and cards through the mail, what other caregiving role can writing play? With a well-prepared meal, you don’t need to convince people to partake. With writing, it’s usually a hard sell to get anyone to read anything. The Writing While Grieving newsletters started as a kind of self-care, a way for me to sort out an onslaught of intense, confusing, and sometimes frightening feelings. I didn’t expect many people would read them. Hearing back from readers has made me aware that some of these pieces resonate with others who have suffered a close loss. Even for those who haven’t faced that yet, some of this has added to their perspectives. The idea that something I wrote could help someone else is a new idea to me, and an emotional one. It has been gratifying and comforting to hear from people.

I want to make you some soup.

I Found My Way Back to Writing Through the Kitchen

After my wife died, I got back to cooking, and my daughter and I had dinner together most evenings. The kitchen connects me with my wife because we spent so much time in that room together, team cooking, cleaning up, preparing for guests, sitting at the small kitchen table for morning coffee, often with muffins she baked. The kitchen in our place is so heavily used that the wood floor has almost no varnish left. It looks like a floor in some dusty juke joint. I love it.

Cooking has been one of the only things through this stretch of time that has been comforting as well as uncomplicated for me. I wasn’t writing or reading or working out from December 2023, when my wife was diagnosed, until late November ‘24, when I finally forced myself to write by starting Writer-Type. But I was cooking all that time. In a way, that constant food prep led me back to writing. It makes sense, then, that when I started this, I wrote in the kitchen.

Cooking Takes Me Away

When in the kitchen, since I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts, I put in AirPods and listen to music. I get out all the ingredients and kitchen implements I’ll need for the job and start chopping or mincing or whatever is required, and in the process, I get lost in the textures and scents of that world.

One of my favorite things to make is soup from stock. That takes time, so I’m absorbed in it for a good part of the day. I’m in the zone, as the saying goes. I’m in a flow state, which is my favorite state. This reminded me of the feeling I used to get while writing during summer breaks, which was the only time I could write for a sustained period. My regular activities in the kitchen reminded me of what it felt like to feel good. After months of medical caregiving and then devastating loss, I’d forgotten that it was even possible to feel that way.

Teaching Writing: Recipe Swapping vs Good Stock

Now, if you’ve read any of the writing/teaching posts here, you know that I’m not a fan of following recipes for writing. Ann Berthoff said one of the problems with writing instruction is that it often amounts to “recipe-swapping.” Cooking depends heavily on recipes. So what’s the difference?

I follow some recipes closely. These are usually simple ones that have been perfected by others, like the garlicy pasta with broccoli rabe I made last night. It’s simple, delicious, and a new favorite. After making it several times, however, the recipe makes me think of other things I could do with it, such as adding chicken, or an alfredo sauce, or mushrooms to mix it up occasionally. So following a writing recipe can give you a start, I suppose. Composition classes, traditionally, never went much beyond that, though.

For other meals, I’ve done them enough that I can wing it and cook by feel. Soups are like this. Whether it’s chicken or white bean or turkey and mushroom or clam chowder or lobster or fish stew, making stock feels intuitive now. I’ve developed little touches along the way that have enhanced the flavor. If I say so myself, I make excellent soup. (I wish my writing tasted as consistently good.) Making soup from stock is the closest cooking comes to feeling like writing for me. My best writing depends on a good stock, and over the last year or so, that part has become clearer. After my previous Writer-Type posts simmer for a while, I find there’s a lot I can do with them. I’m motivated by this.

This, it turns out, was how I taught. Through writing drafts in a scaffolded sequence of assignments that included annotating course readings and student writing, we spent most of the semester making good stock, building up to the eventual feast.

Grieving Is Love

Because my love of writing has taught me over the years how one activity can connect with others, I am able to apply similar skills in different situations. So writing or cooking can provide lessons in other areas, even in love.

Over the past couple of years, cooking has become a new love because of how it has shown me new ways to love my daughter and help her with her loss. It’s also how I help myself bear my own grief. This happens when that feeling of getting lost in the process takes you away from everything else, and then when you see others enjoying what you made with your own hands.

At dinner, when my daughter says, “Thank you, chef!” I know she feels loved, and so do I. I know, too, that my wife would be so pleased. This makes me realize that when cooking for my daughter, I’m also caring for my wife.

Now, excuse me while I grab a guitar and head to the kitchen to sing me some Dan Zanes, cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo, while I figure out what I’m making tonight.

Notes

• Next, we’ll take a break from grieving and talk about the blank page, and in another newsletter, I’ll argue against making sense.

(My wife’s rhubarb pie:)

[Previously]

In conversations lately, I’ve been trying to change my pronouns. So far, I’m pathetic at it. For ages, it’s been We, Us, and Our, not I, Me, or Mine. I said things like “We visited Italy.” “The neighbors are joining us.” “Our house needs painting.” When I’m talking with people now, I keep stumbling over these words, correcting myself. “On Saturday, we—I mean I—had neighbors over for a potluck in our—my—yard.”

I’ll never get used to it, it seems. It must be so annoying to listen to my glitchy speech.

I’ve been wondering what makes it so hard. It must be more than those words being habitual. I’m guessing that maybe it’s also because it means letting go. Letting go is on my mind a lot, and it’s a much bigger question than language use. Once you start, where does it stop? Should I just blow everything up? Get it over with?

“Strike another match, go start anew,” the singer wrote, because “It’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

One of the most surprising things in all of this is that there is nothing to hold on to. There’s nothing I can point to and say, “This, yes, this is the same as before.” In the TV show of my current life, Rod Serling would appear, lit cigarette in hand, and say “Imagine a world in which every object is unfamiliar, every person you have ever known seems as if they are in disguise, where everything you once believed has twisted into unrecognizable forms, where all your interests have gone up in smoke.”

I expected to be in utter despair, to be wildly angry, to not know what to do with whatever is left of my life. What I didn’t expect was that in losing her, I was also losing myself. Also, I had no idea that all of our favorite places would no longer feel like mine, vacation spots, restaurants, concert venues, coffee shops. As the song below says. *

There were other surprises. I didn’t know that you could have a lot of friends and still feel all alone. Someone who knows about these things warned me, saying that I would need to spend time with people who didn’t know us as a couple.

I didn’t know what she was talking about then, but I know now. When friends who knew us as a couple see me, I remind them of their loss, of their grief. Seeing me is a downer.

I get it. When loved ones die, we don’t want to think about it. My presence makes people think about it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not their fault. I’ve been on the other side of this, so I know how it goes. Everyone has been more than kind and incredibly helpful. I’m so thankful for this. I don’t know what I would have done without all this support. But many contradictory things can be true at once. Such contradictory feelings can give you vertigo, too. Old friendships are just different now, and it’s one more thing in a long line of incredibly complicated things I need to figure out. And I’m tired.

To address this, I’ve resumed hosting the weekly neighborhood gathering for drinks that I started maybe fifteen or so years ago. I plan to have regular dinner guests, too, the first batch coming next week. This gets people used to solo me, and my lonely house, and it gives me a break from the emptiness and brutal silence inside my walls. I’m trusting that if people have more exposure to whoever I am now, this will help bring on a different kind of normal, and my presence will no longer be a source of sorrow for our/my friends.

Because of the advice I received that I mentioned earlier, I’m also cultivating friendships with those who didn’t know my wife, and I’m finding that to be a comfort in unexpected ways.

I think my wife would be proud of me for trying these things. Though she’s gone, I still have much of what we built together, not in the same form, but a lot of the raw material is there for me to work with.

What I can’t shake is the feeling that, despite everything I’m doing, I’ll never be all right. What does that say about me? That maybe I was never whatever she thought I was, that whatever she saw in me was an illusion?

Those depressing thoughts inspire me in a weird way. As I’ve mentioned before, my wife was remarkable. The freaking city is naming things after her—that kind of remarkable. Plus many more kinds. I want to uphold her name as well. One way is to work toward living up to her image of me. I feel a sense of urgency to show that her faith in me was not misplaced. Maybe that will be enough to keep me going even if I’m never going to be all right.**

When it was We, Us and Our, everything was so fine. It’s hard to let that language go.

Notes

*

**

Update 3/6/26

Still struggling with the I-Me-Mine talk. I’ve been quite social since this post and I’ve always enjoyed being with friends. It still feels like I’ll never be all right, but I’m working on being all right with that. To be honest, it’s been a struggle, especially during this brutal winter.

At the end of this one, I said some things that revealed how insecure I felt about my own worthiness. I imagine I’ll be working on this in therapy. Here’s my take at the moment:

Once, I heard an author speak who said you’ll be okay if, as a kid, you had at least one parent who likes you. My parents loved me, I suppose, but they didn't like me. And then my future wife walked in, and everything changed. Not only did she love me fiercely, but she liked me with the same intensity—liked being with me, talking with me, or just being around me and being quiet together. I was sixteen when this started. Now that she’s gone, emotionally, fifteen-year-old insecure me has resurfaced in some ways—that kid who lacked the love and support he had no idea would be his and that would be there real soon. Part of me is him again. Though he was sad and lonely, he was so lucky. For him, the best was yet to come.

Last year, I was doing, but I wasn't doing well. This year, I’m still doing so much, and in some ways I’m doing better, but in some ways, worse. Something really good, miraculously good, happened, but it’s something I can’t talk about here. So, yes, I’m much better and greatly relieved. The “worse” part is related, though. When the really good thing happened, it made me miss my wife even more. So with grieving, even the good stuff is emotionally draining and hard to process.

In the Alisa Amador song I posted here, there’s a progression I’m aiming for. I want to get from the first verse to the second verse—from not all right to maybe.

Look, I’m a mess, and hard as I try, I can’t envision any kind of future, but I’m giving it all I’ve got, even if I’d rather curl up in a ball somewhere. That’s progress, I guess.

Most of all, I know my wife would be proud of the things I’ve done since she left us. I know what she would say to me. Maybe that’s enough to get me through, enough to help me find a way to make the day feel better than the night.

[Btw, my house is no longer lonely and definitely not quiet. My daughter and granddog are my roomies now. So I get to say we and us and our a lot.]

[Previously]

Today, I spent an hour talking about you to a stranger. She wanted to know what you were like. As I was describing you, as I listened to my own words, I felt a surge of pride. I didn’t realize how much I needed to do this, to explain to someone who never knew you what you were like, what you meant to me, and still mean to me.

I watched my therapist’s face as I spoke. I saw the moment when my words broke through. I didn't say things like remarkable or radiant or important or beloved. There was no need. You have that effect on people still.

What a life you lived. I’m so glad I was here for it, that I got to witness and learn from it, that I had a front row seat. I was and still am truly blessed. My god. I can’t get over it. I’m trying to find ways to live like that, like someone who, though he will never miss you any less, also knows these things about himself.

My therapist is going to help me with that. You know what? Because of what I saw when I read her face, I believe her.

[Previously]

Winter now brings on memories of caregiving. It was two years ago at this time that I was accompanying my wife during her chemotherapy sessions. One of the things you obsess about when a loved one dies of cancer is What could have been done differently? What might have made a difference?

I am unhappy with the care she received from her oncologist. This is based on information I know now that I didn’t know then. When you find yourself in the situation we were in, you are desperate and place your hope in the doctors’ wisdom and experience, but it’s all new, and you don’t know how to manage the onslaught of new and conflicting information.

My wife was suffering from what she thought was a severe case of acid reflux, but then she started to cough, and that persisted enough that she made a doctor appointment. It turns out, she had pneumonia. Her doctor gave her antibiotics and scheduled her for an endoscopy, which revealed that she had a tumor. It’s not the tumor I think about—it’s the pneumonia. Why? Because it kept coming back.

The chronic pneumonia was caused by a fistula in her esophagus that allowed fluid to enter her lungs. I never heard about the fistula until she was hospitalized in April, four months after her diagnosis. Even though the chemo went well at first, and the tumor was shrinking, because of the fistula, things were not going to improve. She didn’t stand a chance. The pneumonia was the telltale sign. The doctors should have known that the pneumonia was a bad sign, especially after it came back. They should have known that this was a hospice situation from the start, and they should have told us that. Instead, my wife endured months of intense suffering. The suffering was unavoidable; however, it didn’t need to go on for so long. So, I’m angry with the oncologist. Still.

I should have known. There was an incident I can’t stop thinking about. My wife was a lovely person who was also a people-pleaser. Her responses to the oncologist’s questions were sometimes too rosy. I sometimes pushed back a bit on what she reported and offered my take. The oncologist said, “I see, you’re a glass-half-empty person.” I didn’t say anything, I was too taken aback, but I was thinking, Half empty? In case you haven’t noticed, this glass is fucking broken.

After she said that, I knew she wasn’t going to listen to me. We were well into this. Could we change doctors now? I felt the disruption would only make a bad thing worse. Just one of a million decisions I second-guess all the time.

I’m angry about those months of suffering. Really angry. But here’s the glass-half-full version of the story. Every time doctors brought up some new procedure that offered more suffering and little hope, she opted in. I was puzzled by this. Her suffering was immense and relentless, and there was no respite. It was hard to watch. I couldn’t understand why she insisted on going on, even though the best-case scenario was always bleak. When a doctor at the hospital said we can do this painful thing, which likely won’t work, otherwise, it’s hospice, she chose the procedure. Our daughter and I were there. Here’s what my wife said to the doctor: “I don’t want to leave them.”

I can’t stop hearing that. My wife was always a couple of steps ahead of me. I liked this. Why? Because it was the cure for my cluelessness, and I was always learning. I get it now. All I was able to see was the horror show that was unfolding rapidly in front of my eyes. She had a different vision. Here’s the best way I can explain it:

On the chemo days, for instance, things were stressful, but there was a certain calm. We would ride in the car and talk about normal things, maybe with music on low. As the infusion was happening, she would read or nap. I would read with one eye on her, in case she needed anything. One day, as she slept, the sun highlighted her lovely face and fell on her silvery curls like in some Renaissance painting. She was ill and much too thin, but I could not take my eyes off her face. I was looking at the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. That image is sharp in my mind as if I am looking at her right now. And here’s what I was thinking, I’m with her. She’s with me. I knew that soon, I would never be with her again, but I was with her at that moment.

There is nothing memorable about the drive home except that we were together. I don’t know what we talked about. It doesn’t matter. We were together. She hadn’t left us yet. This is what she taught me. She would endure anything. I would, too.