on beginnings

As I was finishing the final essay of Echoes, I emailed Ellena:

I'm finishing the third essay on washing machines, water, movement and seeking balm. I tend to find endings tricky and have the added pressure of it being the book's ending. Do you have any advice? Is it a matter of remaining patient, diligent and curious, and re-reading the essay and collection for the 'deeper' meaning?

Her advice, as always, was excellent. She suggested looking at the 'balance' of the piece overall, ensuring there was 'weight' at either end and evenly dispersed throughout:

'Circling back' is one strategy of doing this. Return to an image, a scene, or an argument you started describing at the beginning of the essay/chapter, and finish the thought, return to it, or extend the image, in the concluding passages.

A 'volta' is another strategy, which is a term that technically means the 'turn' in a sonnet, but which can be used in shorter essays, too. See the volta in this essay, by Annie Dillard: https://nabuckler.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/the-death-of-the-mothhandout.pdf

*

While cleaning my room recently, I found my first, second and third manuscripts. 

In a writing class, Alexander Chee says that the book(s) you publish and those you don't shape you. Echoes was third manuscript. My first and second manuscripts focused on migration/fate and feminism/sex respectively and weren't what I really wanted to write.

I'm now working on my fourth manuscript.

I love the early stages of a manuscript—gathering research and notes, putting together a 'mood board' of things I want to write about and sketching a mind map that links these.

*

I knew 'Through the Looking Glass' would be important when I published it in 2018 but I did not know it would take years to emerge from the shadow M cast over my writing and life.

'Through the Looking Glass' (2018) is about M but it's also not about him.

It was more than a one-night stand but we were never friends. I held back so. much. One night, when he asked if I liked the way he had fucked me, I said, "I fucking liked it". WTF.

'smudged lipstick' (2022) is not about M but it's also not not about him.

I worked on it on and off for a year. It started as an essay about longing and the ephemeral vs. permanence. I submitted it to the LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize but it was incomplete. The sections on M were the weakest, so I cut them and submitted the next version ('Shades of Longing') to the Deakin University Nonfiction Prize. I was shortlisted.

I'd known that it would never become anything more but I still thought about him from time to time, even four years later. I thought that because I didn't think about him all the time, it meant that I had let go, that I had never wanted more, that I didn't want more.

I was scared to remember, to engage with my memories. Perhaps I knew that if I were to contact him, it would likely be for the last time. I was not yet ready for the consequences.

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas)

Last December, I contacted M. We texted for two months but didn't meet.

It is finally over.

This June, I began with a reading on letting go ('smudged lipstick') and closed with another on new love ('How to Find a Husband in Aries Season').

Something needed to end for something to begin.

P.S. I recommend Mary Ruefle's 'On Beginnings', published in Madness, Rack, and Honey, which I'm currently re-reading.

I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that there are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don't be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don't be afraid. Go to sleep now.

—Mary Ruefle, 'On Beginnings' in Madness, Rack, and Honey