Hi everyone.
The other day, the writer Thomas Moore (not the Irish one from the 1800s) posted on social media that the best piece of writing advice he’s ever been given is this: “The mind is the only free space.” And I’ve been thinking about it ever since. (Moore’s most recent book is here, if you’re curious.)
We know that minds can be easily compromised and that a purely free or unencumbered mind is a fantasy, but I think Moore was making an important point about how we limit our imaginations, especially when the contents of our imaginations are up for sale—whether it’s through books we write and sell, or through the things we are sold (and how we are sold them). It has never felt more necessary and more challenging to guard my mind/imagination/soul—whatever you want to call it. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this. The paradoxical and puzzling thing is how it needs to be guarded if it’s going to be something like “free.”
Right now I’m teaching a creative writing workshop online. It’s a class that explores hybrid forms of writing—those books that can’t be easily classified as just “memoir” or “literary fiction” or even “horror.” Knowing that that the class is coming to a close soon, I asked the students to articulate why they bother with writing—what makes it worth it for them. (It’s a bit strange to say “students” in this context, because they are all adults who signed up for the course of their own volition, to work seriously on a piece of writing, and I am probably younger than most of them, but “workshop participants” sounds so dry and lifeless.) Everyone had thoughtful, sophisticated, complex answers—and each person had something different to say—but there was a common thread. Each student expressed concerns that the space of their imaginations (where they do their thinking, feeling, dreaming, relating) had shrunk in recent years and recent months in particular. And they each knew that unless they are writing, it just keeps shrinking. They were each saying in their own way that writing is an expansive act for them. I thought back to that advice Moore was given.
What have you been doing to keep your imagination alive? Or, put differently, what do you do in the hope that your imagination won’t shrink until it’s gone?
I’ve found myself turning to books and music more than ever before. Some recent favorites:
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager
Geontologies by Elizabeth Povinelli
The Cipher by Kathe Koja (a classic, finally reprinted after many years out of print)
Blond by Frank Ocean
Hounds of Love by Kate Bush
IC-01 Hanoi by Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Sending love. LL
I’ve been thinking a lot about accessing that “free space” as well, and the extent to which the hybrid I’m working on could ever survive in the marketplace, or even hold together on its own. It ends up being an exercise in letting go of past traumas related to the literary world and the new challenge then becomes imagining exactly who your new reader is or might be.