What We Must Not Write

Quotes I've saved and am trying to figure out why, # 2:This one is from  Stephen Corey, the inimitable editor of The Georgia Review: “The best writing we do is that that lies closest to what we must not do."I’m thinking about that “must not do,” as meaning “Uh-oh, this will expose my father, my mother, this will get me into trouble with my ex-husband, etc.” Or maybe Stephen has in mind something else. Maybe he means that what I must not do is fall over into un-truth. What I must not do is let sentimentality stand for what actually is the case. Or, what I must not do is scrape my emotions so raw that I can’t make art. I expose my heart: this is good. I expose my anger: this is good. Or whatever. But when I lie quivering upon the altar of my own exposure, isn’t it pretty hard, quivering like that, to make art?It’s like meditation. We must be unhooked from the fluctuations, in a way. We must be both within the pain/joy swings, and outside of them.But even taking his sentence at face value, it’s true that the best writing I do is when I am up against it. When what I have to say almost ought NOT be said. For several reasons. Maybe because I really don’t want to hurt anyone. When I was working on an essay for my memoir, Driving With Dvorak—in one particular essay, I was worried a lot about that issue. How much did I want to expose of some major difficulty in my family? I wrote the essay one way. I showed it to a couple of writer friends. They said many good things about it. It even won honorable mention in a national contest. But when it came time to include it in a book, oh dear, I just couldn’t do it. It would very likely cause a few people some pain. I took out some major details. I reworked the essay to make it far more contemplative, less graphic. My writer friends complained but agreed that they liked the new version, too.  I had come as close against what I “must not tell” as I could go.  But it seemed as if scraping against my own boundaries left an energy, a surge, still, of what was not there.There are lots of ways in which we “must not tell.” That’s one. I’m also thinking of my book of poems, The Devil’s Child—which I still swear is the best thing I’ve ever written, although the world didn’t beat a path to my door. (I did get a good review in Poetry magazine, though.) I told it ALL: the story of a woman who was hideously sexually and psychologically abused by her parents, who were members of a satanic cult. I used her words. It’s VERY hard to read. The details will almost make you sick. It almost made me sick to write it.So, what does “must not tell” mean in this context. I felt it almost as a responsibility to tell it all, exactly as she told me. To make art of it, for a whole lot of reasons. Partly the same reasons my friend Ann Pancake made art of mountaintop mining in West Virginia (Strange as This Weather Has Been. Find the book at a local indie bookstore near you, with Booksense. (http://www.booksense.com/). When a writer can get inside people, to see how it is with them, trouble is no longer abstract, it’s personal. When Elie Wiesel wrote Night, he knew he must tell it all, put the Holocaust in our faces, seen through one person who was there.So, back to the question of what we “must not tell.” Frankly, I think it’s more a matter of HOW we tell. And now I’m back where I started. When we recollect emotion in tranquility (fat chance, actually!), we are thinking as much of HOW to tell as we are of WHAT we tell. We’re aware of form, of shape, of the ancestry of telling, of our heritage as writers. We “enter the stream,” from private to collective, implicating us all.Stephen said it. Get close to what feels so raw it doesn’t want to be told, and there is the place where the fountain is shooting up pure energy.  If we get too close, we’ll drown.  Here’s where we find what NEEDS to be written.