After more than a year of sick leave, I am ready to go back to the classroom, and to theater production. But I’m going back with a new understanding of what I want in my life: what I need to cut loose, and what I need to find—in a material and metaphysical sense.
"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
—Winston Churchill
It takes faith to believe that some people will want what we have to give. For my part, writing is an act of faith, and of hope. If I want my life to have meaning, I know it means communicating with other people, in a manner so intimate that there are moments I feel we’ve somehow shared—through words—a part of our human experience that cannot be expressed by words. I think this is the paradox that metaphor solves. And I believe everything is metaphor.
The new editorial calendar is Sunday hybrid writing , and Wednesday poems. I hope you’ll enjoy—or continue to enjoy—reading my biweekly LitLetters1 as much as I enjoy writing them.
Swimming
Wasps are drawn to water. Which is odd, because they can’t fly with wet wings. Maybe all creatures are drawn to what can potentially kill them?
On Friday I went swimming with a friend. It was an outside pool, so I wore a long sleeve suit to cover the radiated areas of my shoulder. “I can swim,” I say. But by that I mean that I can keep my head above water and eventually cross the length of the pool. My arms and legs, wildly inefficient for the task. I cough more than once. And my stomach clenches when I wonder what I’ve swallowed. This is good for my pectoral muscle, I tell myself. Good for my shoulders.
This is good for me.
My friend complains that the pool is crowded. I’m too embarrassed to say that I’m grateful. Even, later, when we move to sit in the warm, shallow kids’ pool, I’m relieved that there are people there.
Thalassophobia.
I have a wet suit hanging in my closet because when I was 50, I was determined to conquer my fear once and for all by swimming in “open water”. I picked a nearby… what is the line between a pond and a lake? I managed 400 meters. Not near the width of the thing, but a stretch of opaque water with a muddy bottom.
I can do a lot despite fear. I have tried surfing, diving, and sea kayaking. Always weighted with fear. I am good at fear.
As a teenager I swam across the Kentucky river and back again. I could barely breathe, thinking of the water moccasins, the snapping turtles, the men who drank Budweisers by the case, and sunk their dune buggies in the mud near the shore.
The last time I tackled a kind of memoir-in-verse, I was the protagonist.
[…] The first time
a boy
wanted to kiss me
I made him do it
underwater.
That’s when
I knew I was amphibious,
when it occurred to me:
Everything can be overcome; […]2
Everything was true, except the overcoming. The overcoming was a fairy tale in which little boys weren’t drowned in their bathtubs, while men with hands that smelled like automotive oil, flicked cigarette ashes into the sink.
It was a fairy tale in which my “understanding” undoes the damage, breaks the habits, clears the slate for something new. Clean.
Pristine is a pretty word. So pretty it has to be an illusion.
Now I’m writing a story with no protagonist. Because maybe we do what we do to survive. And while there may be no shame in that, it must follow there’s no glory.
Do we root for the lion or the wildebeest? Can you not pick a side?
There’s a virus that nestles in the brains of rats and makes them unafraid of cats. It’s called toxoplasma. In human brains, it messes with our dopamine.3 We’re more tangled up with the world than we know.
One of the three questions for the wasp project is whether I/we/one can learn to accept a state of fear while letting go of malice. Can I swim, in fear, and not eviscerate my memories, and assign blame?
Will I learn how to hold the knowledge that a wasp can sting me, without trying to kill it?
Can I just let it be?
My MA mentor Theodore Deppe told me, regarding metaphors: “Just let the fox be a fox.” It’s what his mentor had told him.
Let it Be, by the Beatles, has become my go-to hymn this past year.
Thank you for taking the time to read/listen to my work. I hope it moves you somehow. And I hope you have a great week!
Warmly,
Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.
LitLetters is a term coined by Tara Penry to describe a substack missive that is not a “newsletter”: https://substack.com/home/post/p-144621450
From the poem “Red-Eared Slider”. mixed states. Wigestrand forlag, 2004.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579228/
Here having breakfast at 10 am because my body did not want to leave the warm and cool sheets. A poem niggled at me last night and your writing brought it back if it is still there to write.
Wishing you well for your return to work!
Your new writing schedule looks great.
Here’s to making meaning, despite the fear!
Thanks for a thought-provoking essay.