In praise of interruption
What's your image of the writer's life and how does it compare to your life?
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Last week, I taught a class on “embracing interruption” in the writing process, for the wonderful organization Scribente Maternum. We discussed the feelings of powerlessness many writers feel around our ability to connect with and dig into the writing enough, or without interruption—and tried to come away with some practical ideas for elbowing out time and space.
Even more than all that, however, my goal was to communicate that interruption can actually be a gift to our work. This from someone who absolutely hates to be interrupted when I am deep in thought or writing (and who hears you scoffing already!). I think, actually, this is why I have tried to look at the interruptions that happen when one is writing at home, with children or other domestic obligations and entanglements piling up, in another way— out of survival.
But also, when it comes to the writer who is also a mother, we have plenty of images of women who cannot access their work— who are stuck in one of Tillie Olsen’s silences. She is haggard, stressed out, touched out, angry, and not only because she lacks physical and psychic space, autonomy, authority over her own mind, and time, but because she has found herself in a life that feels fundamentally uncreative.
And yet, nothing could be further from the truth than that last point. And I don’t mean this to be twee— a mother creates whole worlds every day, literally serves as clock and narrator of her children’s lives; her work spans disciplines and history, sometimes within a matter of minutes. She is world-building all the time, crafting characters in and against her image, for better or for worse.
And so, I am resistant to the image of mother-artist v. art monster— the blocked creative v. the total devotee— even as my own writing life has at times been structured by that duality:
I am going away tomorrow for two days to read, write, and walk on the beach. It’s an opportunity that was gifted to me, and I am taking it. But whenever I go away to write now, I think about this presumption, which structures so much of how we talk about creative work: this idea that the body and the home and the kids and the needs all must be as far from view as possible, in order for us to make meaningful work.
In her essay, “On Interruptions,” Sarah Ruhl invites her readers to consider not the silences created by those women who cannot write, blocked as they are by care work, but the silences between the writing: “the bodily fluids, the tears, the various shades of—”.
She is at that moment interrupted by her son, who comes into the room, and therefore the essay, to ask, “Mom, can I poop here?”
Later, he types a 7 in the middle of the essay, and rather than revise it out, Ruhl stets the 7— let’s it stand.
I love the idea of allowing the distractions to stand, rather than creating a piece of writing that renders them doubly invisible. We may not all want to reprint our children’s poop questions in real time, but I think it’s worth asking, particularly for those who write about domestic settings and home life, how much of the already invisible work are you editing out, and why? How much of everyday life do you revise out because it feels unworthy of literary attention? And how many silences are created by the belief that we need a life free of interruption to make meaningful work?
What is gained or lost by me telling you or not telling you that, right now, I have 4 minutes and 50 seconds left to finish this before my kids come home?
Ruhl’s essay ends with a revelation about the moments that get in the way of the work:
“I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life."
In her review of Ruhl’s book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, Rachel Cusk cites Woolf:
“In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf considers the difficulties facing the unhistoried, culturally marginalized woman writer: “Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use. . . . Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses.” If women’s literature were to have a future, she continues, there is a “great part which must be played in that future . . . by physical conditions. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”
So often we shape ourselves into and around standards of creativity, and aesthetics, that were not created for us. In our class, we spent some time unpacking our preconceptions about creative labor, about what that work looks like and who does it, and when, and how, and where. We also spent reminded ourselves that there is a tradition of writers and artists who brought the home, housework, and maternal labor into the gallery space, into their writing, into form, and who said, look at this.
Now I want to ask all of you: What have you been taught about a writer’s life? What does the writer look like? What do they do all day? Where do they work? How do they work? And most importantly: How does this image and these expectations compare to your life?