"Dirt Being Dirt": Creative Writing from the Breaks

by Irene Cooper

photo by Hannah O'Leary

The poet Carl Phillips won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection, Then the War. Phillips is a favorite poet—sensual, surprising, and cerebral. He’s a Black man, and gay, and has embodied and explored those identities throughout his body of writings, starting with his first collection, In the Blood, published in 1992. In 1992, AIDS is rampant, and riots break out in Los Angeles after four police officers are acquitted of the beating of Rodney King.

Bouncing around Google just after Phillips won the Big P, I came across a video of the poet reading his poem, “Dirt Being Dirt.” Obvious to say, but it bears repeating: A poem is one thing on the page, and another on the tongue. The last line hits hard, and differently, across experience: “You broke it. Now wear it broken.”

Some weeks ago, Sherrilyn Ifill, who for ten years served as the head of the Legal Defense Fund— the non-profit civil rights organization and law firm founded by Thurgood Marshall—gave the annual Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library, entitled, “How America Ends and Begins Again.” Friends, it is an example of rhetoric such as we have not seen in some time—honest (brutal, even), informative, and, impossibly, hopeful.

I’ve seen a lot of references, lately, in creative nonfiction and elsewhere, to kintsugi, the Japanese art of finishing the mended seams of broken pottery with gold: Cracks not only visible, but celebrated. It’s often difficult, however, to celebrate our fractures and fissures, our breaks. But there are other, perhaps more practical responses.

Ifill talks about listening to the people in the margins, the falling off places, if you want to hear the truth. She offers, too, a number of actionable suggestions on what to do with that truth. Phillips writes:

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon, it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless:

Writers sometimes worry they have nothing to write about, that their writing is merely decorative, or otherwise unworthy of attention. I would argue that the pull to write indicates the need to write, and a need for that writing. Creative writing takes courage, as well as time and energy and fortitude. That is, if the writing is trying to get at something. Which is not to say that truth is always the catastrophic fracture: One may crack a joke, or break into a grin, or bust out laughing.

The bold, golden seams of a vase or bowl that has undergone kintsugi suggest to me that the piece is stronger, now, at the site of the break—and that the piece was worth the attention to repair it. Ultimately, we may not want our revisions to be exhibited quite so nakedly in our work. But as I read through my first draft and start to be aware of the various fault lines and fires, I understand that this is where the beauty begins, in the attention to the unfinished, needful edge.

This is where I’ll learn how to wear it broken.

Learn more about how to invest in and develop your creative writing at The Forge. Already a Smithy? Go write.

Image by SEBASTIEN MARTY

The End?

Mike Cooper

When we tell a story, even a “true” one, we have a beginning and an end. “One day…” eventually rolls into “…and so, that’s what happened’ (or, as Forrest Gump says, “That’s all I have to say about that”). We look at a story as a “slice of life,”—a moment in the cosmic timeline, an experience where someone (possibly ourselves) saw the world one way, and then something happened, and now it’s seen a different way. The impact and meaning of a story depend on where we end it. It’s where and how we leave our readers/listeners. The story can end with a “happily ever after,” or with our character staring out at the snow that is falling, falling, and falling “upon all the living and the dead.” It can end in chains, or the release of chains. It can end in true love, triumph, or the deepest loss.

But it is still only a moment. How do we capture the truth of life? Isn’t that what we’re after? Where is our beginning? An amoeba crawling from the primordial ooze? The Big Bang? The birth of God? And where is our ending? How could we even speculate?

This is, I think, why we write: in order to capture the whole picture, the meaning behind our happiness and suffering, the reason we push on, the understanding of our impermanent permanence. This involves acute speculation and introspection on our experiences, and most people aren’t interested in going there. The writer is a philosopher, a logician, a truth-seeker, a theorist, a dreamer. We look to other writers for their insights, we lean over the page or the keyboard and make an attempt to explain w-h-y.

As far as I know, no one has come up with the definitive universal truth. So we approximate it, hint at it, catch a glimpse of it as it walks past our window, stand next to it on a crowded bus. The end of the story, of the good story, leaves us (and our reader) on a trajectory toward discovery—the open-mouthed, chin-scratching, finger-in-the-air, “I had it on the tip of my tongue” moment that keeps us going, and thinking, and wondering, and trying to figure this whole thing out.

Jackson Browne says it quite well in the song “The Road and the Sky”:

When we come to the place where the road and the sky collide,

Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide.

Burn bright, shoot straight: forging metal and forging story

by Ellen Santasiero

Photo: Ellen Santasiero

Forging an iron hook was supposed to be an easy task for those of us new to metalworking.

I was one of eight students at the Adirondack Folk School forge in upstate New York, where each of us had our own forge, anvil, and an array of smithing tools.

Our teacher Steve was a large man who wore wire-rimmed glasses, a gray-blond ponytail, and no gloves. When I entered his class, he asked if I had any experience in a forge. No. Metal working? No. How about welding? No. Hammering? Um.

Unfazed, Steve started and stoked a fire in the forge to which I was assigned. He raked through the blaze and pointed out chunks of coal, coke, and slag. Coke and coal burn differently, he said. Coal combusts dully, and smokes. Coke burns brighter, and its flames shoot straight. Slag is waste. It doesn’t burn; it just slows the fire down. Ah, I jotted in my notebook, slag is like extra words in a piece of writing. In the trash it went after Steve showed me how to remove it with a miniature hoe.

Steve then presented me with a long, skinny, four-sided steel bar, no bigger around than a pencil. This I was to work into a graceful hook that tapered into a curlicue at one end. He inserted the metal piece into the throat of the fire. When the metal bar glowed molten orange, he demonstrated the process of forging, and let me practice striking the heated metal at an angle with a snub-nosed hammer. Steve moved on to other students. I re-heated the metal, removed it, placed it on the anvil’s nose, and started banging out a curve like he'd showed me.

Ostensibly, I was there to make a hook, but really, I was there to discover how like, or unlike, forging metal was to forging sentences and paragraphs and stories. After all, we chose the image of a forge to represent what we do in the Forge creative writing program, so I wanted to discover how deep the analogy could go.

Circling back to my forge, the previously unflappable Steve saw me hesitate before hammering and he shouted, in German, no less: “Schmied wenn der eisen heiss ist! Strike while the iron is hot!” I struck, poorly, but then of course, because I am a writer, I put my tools down, picked up my notebook and asked him how to spell all that stuff.

For the next hour or so, I ferried my piece in and out of the fire, and clanged and clonked until the metal curved and I tapped out the decorative curlicue. My nose ran, my hair got in my face, and even though the shop was ventilated, my lungs contended with a steady flow of the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that hung in the rafters above us.

Friends, I am here to tell you that, save for one important aspect, forging metal is nothing like forging sentences and paragraphs and stories. Forging metal is filthy, smoky, noisy, hazardous, and entirely physical. (This is not to say that it is not fun.) Writing is not any of those things unless you count the hazards of sitting and staring at a screen too much.

The important aspect the two processes share is that they are both iterative processes. Each require a constant going back and forth to the metal, or the material, as the case may be, to modify, re-shape, edit, and sometimes scrap the entire blasted work. Often, beginning writers are surprised by this. They’re dismayed by the amount of revising they must do. Writing is harder than they thought. They may rethink their commitment to the writing life. Does it get easier?

When asked in 2022 how she’s developed as a writer over her long career, American novelist Gish Jen said she’s more sure-footed than she was in her early years, but, she added, there is always more to learn. The bar keeps rising. I think we have to love the process, or let the process be the reward, which may be the same thing stated in two different ways.

Making the hook was hard. After acing the curve and the curlicue, the thing twisted beyond my control and I couldn’t seem to hammer it back. I cut the end off, flattened it, and called it a sculpture, to which Steve, calmer now, responded, “OK.” I was done. Eager to type up my notes and write this post, I coated my creation with a wax that smelled like sweet, rank cod liver oil and let it set a while, and then went home.

If I spent more time working at a forge, I suppose I’d find other correspondences between writing and smithing, maybe even poetic ones. Until then, I’ll just wish all of us the patience to make work that’s bright and shooting straight, like coke burning.

The writer workin' it.

Photo: Ellen Santasiero