THE BLACKBIRD LETTERS #6: WRITING AS PROTEST

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at thirteen aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. This is the sixth dispatch.

Dear Aarik,

I have been thinking a lot about what you wrote last time, on writing as self-awareness: Writers go on endlessly about their voice; all I really know is, if you write long enough, at some point you can’t shake the sound that emerges.

It is a thing, as the kids say, writers going on endlessly about their voices. I spoke with a few writer friends this week and one common theme emerges: how do we keep our integrity in a world that needs us to constantly push the boundaries of our conviction and comfort in order to stay relevant?

You and I have talked before about how slow our feet have dragged toward publishing books (my first last year and yours still yet to come and both of us now in our 41st year). I think part of that is encapsulated in your observation, writing long enough means you can’t shake who you are and—I’ll add—you’re much less likely to keep on bending, bending until you break to become what you aren’t. I’m much less likely to bend at 40 than I was at 35 or 30 or 25, and I’d venture much more likely to bend than I’ll be at 50 or 55. As much as I disliked the idea five or ten years ago that age and suffering and maturity grounds us, mostly because I needed more of it, I’m coming into the sound that’s emerging.

Ah, there I am.

And who I am has turned into a surprise, if I’m honest.

Recently I was faced with some emotional manipulation from someone in an emotional moment, and everything in me protested against my own self in response. On the surface I wanted to capitulate to their plea, to soothe and solve with promises I didn’t mean and humming noises at intermittent moments. But I didn’t. Because deeper down in me there was this louder voice saying, “No. Oh no you don’t.”

There I am.

Writing has helped me to separate and differentiate and split and slice and see so many layers of injustice, not just in the world, but in me. I have always said that writing is sanctifying, if we’ll let it have its work in us. If we write long enough it’s not just our voice that emerges, it’s what we will and won’t stand for, it’s what is wrong and right, it’s what we will protest against or capitulate to—these all emerge. Some of what we believe becomes more black and white and some becomes more gray, which is the beginning of the word gracious, which I choose to believe is a grace.

Writing as a form of protest is not just the prophets and seers and sayers all pounding out their treatises upon keyboards in whatever opportune moments they find (which, in these days, is every moment). It is, at its core, a protest against very our own selves, a protest against our laziness and fear and envy and avarice. It is a choice to say that we won't let the unsaid win. We won’t let the nebulous fears that tighten our chests and lumpen our throats to have the last word. We won’t let the insidious greed and envy and comparison eat us alive, churn us into nimble little monsters who won’t let anyone go in front of us. Writing as protest is the art of learning to say, “No,” and namely to our own selves.

Eventually it may carry into the public no, the noes we say to image bearers who twist what they bear, the noes we say to corporations and churches leaders and conventions that circumvent the grace and goodness of God in people’s lives, the noes we say to injustice. But it sure has to start with me. And it has to start with the me I am and not just the me I wish I was or want to be.

I have learned before I write yet another protest against another, it had better begin with a protest against my own flesh. This is what Jesus meant about the speck and the log, I’d venture, but from which we’ve wandered an awful long way.

Tell me, I want to say to my fellow writers, tell me of your inner demons, tell me of your flesh. I want to hear the war that waged within you as you navigated complex stories and spaces. I want to know how hard you fought and how much you wept and how little you prayed. Tell it honest, tell it slant, tell it however you want to, but tell the truth because the truth is ten thousand little protests that got you where you are and every one of them matters to God and to me and even to you because there you are and there you were all along.

I think I forgot I was writing this to you, Aarik, friend. I think I started to preach a little to myself and to our writer friends. I just see so many voices trying to jump over the bars that keep getting raised around their heads and I just want to hold their feet to the ground for a minute, to remind them that it’s not the bar that determines their worth as a writer, but the words themselves and the work they do with them.

Write your hearts out, I want to say. Wring them out. Protest too much. Say what you want to say. Do the work. Stop doing the work the algorithms and acquisition editors and sales teams want you to do. It will all work out in the end. Sure, it might mean your first book comes when you’re 40 or 50 and not 30, but it will be a better work because you will be a more sanctified you. You will have learned all the giant protests in the world don’t work if every little protester himself doesn’t submit himself to the slow and tedious and wondrous work of change, one moment after another.

I think you’d agree, friend.

Love,

L