Don’t Write Alone: A Post-Election Community Write-In Event

A recap of Catapult’s second write-in event and reading list

On Tuesday, December 20, 2016, Catapult students, contributors, instructors, and other members of our community met for our second-ever write-in event, Don’t Write Alone. In the wake of the presidential election, we wanted to create a space where our community could come together to share the stories we have turned to for comfort, inspiration, and solidarity, and spend an evening writing our own stories as well. As Toni Morrison writes, in an essay read by Catapult instructor Michele Filgate last night, “Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” Below is a list of the readings shared at Don’t Write Alone; we hope they fuel your own artmaking as they did for us last night.

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Darley Stewart started the evening with a reading from Claudia Rankine’s ever-essential Citizen:

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.

You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.

Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.

As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

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When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in 
silence you are bucking the trend. 

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Liv Lansdale read from Catherine Lacey’s “Remove Yourself,” a piece of writing that perfectly excavates an interior moment of feeling out of control (and is a great introduction to Lacey’s novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing):

In this situation, any rational person would be hurt and being hurt would cause her to have a real feeling, and that real feeling would make her cry in a real and serious way. A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset. Her feelings would show up in her body as if she had no choice in the matter and this would cause her to realize she needed to find a way back to her home, to her real life that was somehow going on without her.

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Christine Jacobson read an excerpt from Joanna Walsh’s short story “Online.”

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Yuka Igarashi read from Zadie Smith’s “Fences: A Brexit Diary,” written for The New York Review of Books following Britain’s vote to withdraw from the European Union.

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Michele Filgate read from Toni Morrison’s essay, “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” in which she recalls the advice of a friend after the presidential re-election of George W. Bush in 2004:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

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Alisson Wood read Elizabeth Bishop’s classic poem on the art of losing, “One Art.”

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Jen Hinst-White read “Saint Francis and the Sow,” a poem by Galway Kinnell:

though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

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Catherine LaSota read a selection from “Seeing” by Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (as collected in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New):

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, “not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.” My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones that show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a bigger triangle. I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d likely notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I must maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m especially observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio.

When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and, with a steel knife, claw a rent in the top to peep out, even at the risk of a fall.

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway, transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

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Kayla Tanenbaum closed the reading portion of the evening with a poem she discovered through Instagram, “Her Time” by Lang Leav, and Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “My Vocation,” written in Mussolini’s Italy in 1949.

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Following the readings, everyone in the room took Morrison’s advice and got to work on writing projects of their own.