How to Discover Your True Writing Voice with Jeannine Ouellette

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]

Well, hello, Jeannine, welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so happy to have you on today.

Jeannine Ouellette [0:08]

Well, I’m so happy to be here. Thank you so much again for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:13]

Well, I am super excited about the conversation we’re going to have, but before we get there, I just want to hold up your book, The Part That Burns, which I have had on my bookshelf. I have mentioned it in webinars that I have taught, and I have recommended it to so many writers, because you are such a gorgeous writer, and just at the line level, I’m in awe of your work. I feel like there’s an energy that shows up on the page that I can feel like a transmission when I am reading your work, and so that’s how I feel about you. But you know, there are going to be some listeners who haven’t heard of you before. So, what would you like them to know about you?

Jeannine Ouellette [0:57]

Well, first of all, thank you — those were beautiful words. I taught a workshop yesterday, a three-hour live intensive on Zoom on voice, where one of the things that I said was that writing can offer a form of transportation to a reader, and what you said felt like the highest praise to me. So, thank you. And I guess what I would want people to know, more than anything, is my passion for language and what can happen for us in our lives when we cross this threshold where words are no longer just words, but they’re this representation of something so much more powerful. It’s that our voice — I’m thinking about that again; I taught a workshop on voice — and so this idea that our voice is part of us. It’s physical, it’s spiritual. Our breath is part of our voice, and so when we’re able to capture that in words on a page, it’s part of us. And as we do that, we change ourselves, and we change our lives, and we sometimes change other people’s lives and the way that we relate to one another. So that’s my passion.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:27]

Well, and I would say that your passion is contagious, because so many people I know are interested in the work you do, and they have been touched by it. There are several different things that I want to talk with you about today, but since you mentioned voice, maybe that’s a great place for us to start. So, you were recently teaching about this, and I will be teaching about this later this year, and here’s what I know about voice: it is one of the issues I think that is very difficult, especially for new writers, to understand. It is also something that creates a lot of angst or anxiety — how do we create this? What is it and how does it work? But also, I think it’s incredibly important for people who are trauma survivors to feel like they have a voice, that they can — what I hear people say — write their truth, or speak their truth, or share what is on their heart without fear. So, let’s just begin with a general definition of what voice is, or what are your “voices” — which is something that you talked about in your Substack.

Jeannine Ouellette [3:37]

The first thing I would want to say is that when we’re talking about voice in the context of creative writing, I do distinguish that from the way we talk about voice when we say — as you very appropriately honored — that for trauma survivors, of which I am one, there’s something so urgent and necessary in being able to have a voice, to be able to claim and speak a truth. Those two things — it’s not that there’s no overlap. But when we’re talking about finding our voice as a writer and doing that through the portal of craft, that’s a little bit of a different thing. And again, it can include — and certainly if you’ve read The Part That Burns, it did for me — finding our voice as a writer can encompass the really hard work of being able to tell a story that’s really hard to tell in a way that can be a gift for someone else rather than a burden. So, I think that when we talk about voice — again, I said right at the outset, I’m passionate about this, but understanding the craft of voice, it’s very difficult. It’s one of the hardest things to teach, and it’s kind of a thorny, complicated craft element to even understand, because we as writers don’t have a singular voice.

Voice is layered and composed of multiple components. And then we also don’t have the same exact voice across projects. So, when I’m writing The Part That Burns, that’s not the exact same voice that belongs to the book that I’m working on now, even though they’re both my voice, and I think you would be able to tell they’re the same writer — but the project voice is different. And then beyond that, character voice is something that really matters, not just to fiction but also to memoir. Because I think if we’re doing a good job in our memoir — and the memoir is not highly experimental, so there are always exceptions to every rule — but if we want to write a memoir that does what we want it to do, it’s probably going to include the voices of other people speaking for themselves, in direct dialogue, in their own voices. And that’s another element of voice on the page: being able to listen hard enough and craft carefully enough to do justice to those other voices. So, you can see, the way that I understand voice and the way I teach it — it’s very complicated, but it’s so essential and it’s so powerful.

When I was teaching yesterday, I realized, as I listened to myself speak, that even though the way I teach voice holds that the voice we write in is a curated voice — it’s not the same as the voice that we use to talk to our partners or our kids or our friends; they’re related, not wholly separate and distinct, but the voice for the creative work we’re doing on the page is curated, and most of the writers I admire most say the same — that relationship is really fun to notice. I noticed it when I was teaching yesterday. A lot of the people in the workshop were people who read my work on Writing in the Dark on Substack, and/or have taken classes from me before. So, when I said, “Oh, you know, I can actually hear traces of my writing voice in the way that I’m teaching right now” — it’s not that same voice; it can’t be, I’m ad-libbing and it’s off the cuff — but I can hear it, and there were nods. And so, I think when we can understand voice, when we can start to really engage with the hard work of understanding voice, the other really cool thing that can happen is we can start to see this multiplicity of voices that we all have, whether we’re aware of it or not. We can start to see those voices come into closer alignment with each other. And when that happens for me, my feeling is that we’re becoming more whole. So, I think voice has the capacity — it’s another avenue for us to pursue that wholeness.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:50]

Yeah. I love that — voice as a way for us to be whole. And one of the ways that we increase that sense of wholeness is by understanding some of our parts, right? And so, Sonia Huber, in her book on writing voice, talks about the various voices that we inhabit in a writing project. And Sue William Silverman talks about the same thing — she and I had this conversation about the persona, or the mask, that we wear when we approach any piece of writing. So, we inhabit a specific identity for each piece of writing, and that will change the voice that we’re using. And I think you talk about that really beautifully — how yes, there’s that specific thing we’re doing that is a matter of craft, but also it is an embodiment of some aspect of ourselves. So, there is some unique piece of us that shows up in everything that we write. It’s that ineffable piece of voice that we all want to hold on to, and that is so light and airy we can’t actually grasp it.

Jeannine Ouellette [9:56]

I love that you mentioned Sue William Silverman, who was one of my grad school advisors. And Sonia Huber’s book on voice was really important to me when I was working on a long, complicated craft essay a few years ago on child narration, which is another aspect of voice. But when you mentioned Sue, it reminded me also of her work on the voice of innocence and the voice of experience in memoir, which is yet another way to look at the layers of voice even within a project. Our narrating voice is not uniform across a project. And I think so much about creative writing has to do with having names for things and being able to recognize them — having names for things allows us to recognize what we see when we’re reading and what we’re doing when we’re writing. And that’s empowerment. So, if you’re teaching a three-hour intensive craft workshop, as I did yesterday, you’re going to see around that one-and-a-half to two-hour mark people starting to feel overwhelmed. I’ve been teaching long enough to anticipate that; I knew it was going to happen, and I also knew that what I was bringing yesterday was rigorous. I wasn’t soft-pedaling it — this is a rigorous topic, and we’re going to really take it on.

And when I said that, people looked relieved and nodded. But I said what I said to them: don’t worry about that now. Let it roll off. You’re going to have a replay. You’re going to get the notes from this class. Just let it soak in like rain, and you can come back to it. Once you’ve slept on it, taken it into the body, taken it into memory, come back to it, and all of a sudden, all these terms that I’m using — some of which you may not have heard before, or not heard in this context — I promise, will make more sense. May not make perfect sense, but they will make more sense. You’ll say, “Oh yeah, okay, I do get that.” And once that starts to happen with these tools of craft, and we can name what we’re seeing and what we’re doing, that gives us the ability to be intentional. It gives us the ability to do things on purpose. So, we’re all using the voice of innocence and the voice of experience in our writing all the time, but we may not know it — we may not be able to identify what we’re doing. And once we do know it and are able to identify what we’re doing, then we can modulate; we can move in and out, or we can recognize that maybe the reflective voice of experience hasn’t shown itself for a while, and maybe there’s an opportunity there — and this is going to come in revision, obviously — an opportunity to come in and readjust the balance of things. So yeah, I think being able to name things is part of the end-all be-all of the study of the craft of writing, which is another way to study the craft of living.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:18]

Yeah, and when we have language, we understand at a deeper level. And part of not just knowing the words, but embodying those words and understanding them, is to allow for this to be practice — and let’s lower the stakes. That’s what I’m telling people all the time: let’s lower the stakes and just be in that chop-wood-carry-water mode, so that we can practice this and allow ourselves to understand these words over time. And I say similar things when I’m teaching — I’m like, I’m going to share a bunch; watch the replay, because there’s going to be something that you’ll get at a deeper level. And also, I think when we’re doing this work, one of the things that’s really helpful is that as we begin to understand this language and we embody it, we develop our values around things, so that when we’re coming to, say, the concept of voice and writing, we’re not just going, “Okay, here are the vocabulary words, and I know what they mean” — or “these are the decision points” — but what do I value? And this is a piece of voice, but it’s not necessarily the deepest heart of voice. But I think it’s going to lead to a conversation we can have around it, and that is: what is your favorite punctuation mark?

Jeannine Ouellette [14:41]

Well, I have to admit — and we talked about this in my workshop yesterday, because it’s controversial, but I don’t care — the em dash. You know, it’s so powerful, it is so flexible, it can do so many things, and it’s also beautiful, like just visually, em dashes — there’s something beautiful about that. And so, I refuse to give it up, despite the fact that it’s supposedly now a tell for AI. I don’t care. Yeah, it’s a fact — like, I guess almost 30 years ago, when I was editing an original parenting magazine, my assistant editor dubbed me the Em Dash Queen. And so, yeah, I’m not changing that. But yeah, Lisa, that does tell you a lot about voice, it took me until The Part That Burns to really embrace and make the most of — as far as I can within my style — the short declarative sentence, because my default style is a longer, more meandering, clause-filled, em-dash-adorned sentence.

So, I wanted to say something about your point about practice, because you are so speaking my language. It’s so incredibly crucial, and it also feels like the most underemphasized and undertaught aspect of a creative writing practice — which is a practice. When we look at all of the other disciplines across the arts, there is a very recognizable realm of practice. Musicians play scales, they rehearse, they practice music. Similarly, for dance, artists do color studies and sketches. And yet, for writers, we too often, as you said, approach the page every time as if we’re making the thing itself — something that’s going to belong to whatever project we might be working on or might want to be working on.

It seems to me very, very difficult for writers to embrace the idea that this can just be practice, and that the practice in itself — the process of the practice — is valuable. It changes us. It allows us to take risks that we would otherwise resist. It allows us to be willing to make messes. Or, like I said earlier, in The Part That Burns I played around — because of that child narrator — with a lot of stylistic choices in my writing that hadn’t necessarily been inherent to my default writing style, and that came through playing around. It came through playful constraints that I didn’t necessarily have any idea might become something. They were without expectation. And yeah, I think it’s so important to give ourselves — it’s a gift — to give ourselves the opportunity to play, practice, fool around, make a mess, and not expect it to be anything. And one of the ways I like to encourage writers to think about that is that we can be a little bit brainwashed, I guess, by this capitalist notion that everything we do has to be productive — that if we spend an hour writing without asking it to be anything, just maybe practicing various things or trying some new constraints to see what happens, or whatever it might be, that that’s not time well spent because it didn’t produce some kind of recognizably saleable product. So, it can feel really good to rebel against that and say, no, actually, I’m an artist, and I need to practice. And it’s good to practice, and it’s joyful to practice. And I can give myself that time.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:18]

Yeah, it’s one of the least emphasized pieces of the writing life — the importance of just practicing for the sake of practice. And I’m going to share a little story about that. But before I do, I just have to say: you are of my tribe. I am also an Em Dash Queen. I love it. I love it. And I was having a conversation with several writing friends recently where we all love it, and so how do we embrace it and make it ours, despite what AI is or isn’t going to do out in the world? But back to that idea of practice. I spent four years in a mindful writing group where we got together — and at one point we were all over the world; one person was in Australia, there were some of us here — we figured out, time-zone-wise, how to make it work. We got together and we meditated, and then someone brought a prompt or an exercise, and we wrote, and then we read it out loud, and there was no expectation it was going to be anything more than that. And some really incredible work came out of that experience, for me and for everyone else involved. But it was because we didn’t have an expectation, and we just allowed it to be this experience of building a sandcastle on the edge of the water. You write something, and then you allow it to wash away, and you don’t have to own it — it doesn’t, you don’t even have to work on it again if you don’t want to. You can just appreciate how beautiful this was and then move on. And I think that’s a practice I encourage people to engage in at whatever stage they are in their writing life, because yes, practice is great when you’re new, but practice is also how we embrace beginner’s mind as a person who has been writing for a while.

Jeannine Ouellette [21:10]

I think it’s urgently important for people who have been writing for a while, because we can get —there’s something about — when I teach, I almost always teach across levels; in other words, from beginner to advanced. And I really believe — and I think my students would back me up on this — that that’s possible. It’s not always possible, but in the way that I typically teach, it is, because we’re working with the kinds of assignments — and I think of them as invitations — that I give to my students, that really level the playing field. Because the things that I’m asking writers to do are generally outside the wheelhouse or comfort zone of the experienced writers in the room, asking them to do things that are so specific and so constrained that they don’t allow an experienced writer to just come to the page the way they typically always would — again, in that default mode — which actually can be the hardest thing for the experienced writers. Why? Because once we think we know how to do something, and we can pretty reliably produce a pretty decent paragraph or whatever in response to a fairly open-ended prompt, that’s going to typically be — especially in a group, it’s human nature — what a writer is inclined to want to do. We want it to be what I call good, right? I don’t want to write something bad; I want to write something good. And now you’ve given me this laundry list of things I have to do, and I don’t — how will I know if it’s going to be good? Like, I don’t have control over the material anymore. Which is the point. Oh, I don’t have control — I don’t know what’s going to happen on the page. And that is exactly the point. So let ourselves have opportunities to surprise ourselves, to do things that deliberately take us out of that comfort zone where we’re able to produce on repeat in a way that, yes, will very possibly and probably likely produce good writing. But in my way of thinking about writing, creative writing is meant to be creative, and to create inherently means to make something new. And in order to make something new, we have to — particularly when our tool is language — and language, you know, language is exhausted right now. Language is a depleted, exhausted, abused tool. Words have been debased, and now this is what we have to work with. So, if we want to take this tool with which we are all inundated in our daily lives — in the digital world, on screens, with earbuds in our ears hearing podcasts, etc., etc. — this tool with which we are utterly inundated, if we want to breathe life into that tool, if we want to make it — as Wendell Berry says — capable of telling the truth again, if we want to make it into art that can simultaneously hold beauty and tragedy and sorrow and humor, then we probably — and in my view, definitely — need to give ourselves some new ways in, new ways into the language, new ways on to the page that help us to cross over that threshold, out of the familiar into the unknown, where we have a real chance of discovering something that is new, that we did create, that surprises us. And when that happens — you know, when I see it happen in a workshop, and somebody says, “Wow, I don’t know where that came from; it’s like being in a trance” — and they look up and say, “I just — I don’t even know what to say about this, I don’t know where it came from or how I made it, but here it is” — and they like it — that’s, you know, it’s like, I don’t know what it is, but it was surprising, and I kind of like it. And that’s really exciting. And that can happen whether you just started writing last week or you’ve been writing for 30 years, like I have now.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:59]

Can you give us an example of an exercise you might give to a group that shakes people out of their comfort zone?

Jeannine Ouellette [26:08]

I mean, a lot of the — so my workshop, the original workshop, Writing in the Dark, preceded Substack. I started teaching it at the very beginning of the pandemic, which is where the name came from, because this was a time of mass uncertainty. And I’ve been — so what is that, six years now? — running this continuously, a workshop that goes six weeks at a time, then a new session starts, etc. And I almost never teach the same thing twice. It’s always new material, because so many people take the workshop so many times. I don’t want to be repeating things they’ve already studied or prompts they’ve already done many times before.

So, by necessity, and also just by my own curiosity, a lot of the exercises in that workshop have gotten more constrained, tighter, with more steps, and — but they would be too hard to explain on this podcast. However, we did an exercise yesterday in the voice workshop. It’s not revolutionary; I didn’t make it up. Let’s say this is an exercise I think all writers should be doing on a more regular basis. It’s just an imitation exercise. So, we took a piece of writing — writers could supply their own, and if they didn’t have anything, I had something from Joanne Beard for them to look at. Some of them swapped out theirs for hers, because it really was a great passage from “The Fourth State of Matter.”

And they got a certain amount of time, and the instruction was: really study this short passage — like you said, how does the writer work? What are their sentence lengths and rhythms, punctuation? What kind of imagery, what kind of repetition? Look for as much as you can. We had a constrained amount of time to work with, to really get under the skin of this writer’s craft choices. Then we had a certain amount of time — not long, maybe six minutes — to write 150 to 200 words, attempting to write in the style of that writer. We came back from it, people shared what happened for them, and it was a very common response that they were really surprised — by a different topic, by the way; we weren’t writing to the same topic as the sample we were imitating — that they were really surprised and taken with the sound of their own voice. It was their voice in this other container. To the point where one person even said, “Is this okay? Can I use this? Is it wrong, ethically? Is it plagiarism?” Which it’s not. And that’s a whole other conversation — we did talk about writing after other writers, etc. But learning from another writer’s style and discovering in a short passage that you love it because you tried the Hemingway-esque short, literal, declarative sentences, or George Saunders’s wry, tragic irony—style isn’t something we own, you know, and we modulate it within a piece. So anyway, the whole point being that being boxed in by the technical craft choices of another writer unlocked something, for many people in the workshop, that they couldn’t have gotten at just through free writing.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [29:01]

Yeah, I love that exercise. I’ve given it to clients and to students for years, and I’ve used it myself, because I think there is something that wakes up in you in response to that voice — it helps you clarify something about your own voice as you do it. And I will often have people choose three different writers with very different styles and do something in succession, just to see what happens: how are you transmitting or translating that information? How is it showing up in your work? And another very simple constraint that I learned — gosh, I think this was 20 years ago, off of MySpace. Okay, we’re going way back.

It was Chuck Palahniuk — he put this challenge out and said: for six months, remove the words “feel” and “know” from your vocabulary, just that, and see what happens. And I was just amazed at how much it pushed me to write clearer sentences, to think about what I was actually trying to say, or what emotion I was trying to express, from just that simple constraint.

Jeannine Ouellette [31:31]

You’re speaking my language right now, because I have a lot of opinions about interiority that aren’t necessarily in line with the way I hear other writing teachers talk about it. My theory about that is simply that we’re in some ways saying the same thing — it’s just that when we talk about interiority, I don’t think we tend to give writers enough, beginning writers and learning writers enough, tools to differentiate between one kind of interiority and another. And so, this interiority that begins with “I feel,” is a very filtered interiority that brings us straight inside the intellectual, abstract mind of another human being. When we can capture the kind of interiority that is also at least partially embodied — because, like you said, we take away those filtering tools, “I feel,” “I think,” “I know,” whatever —exactly as you said, it forces us to look more closely, think a little harder, reach a little further, to express something in a way that isn’t that same default way.

And I think we’re very similar in our teaching aesthetic and sensibilities, because your exercise of looking at three very different writers to imitate in succession — one of the things I really love for people to do is choose a passage from a writer who is so far out of your style range that it’s ridiculous. Really stretch to someone you couldn’t write like, and wouldn’t want to even if you could, and imitate that and see what happens. And it’s inevitably — almost always, as far as I know — surprising, because you realize that maybe there’s this one sentence in there that you come up with by doing that, and you say, wow.

The gift and the joy, the delight of seeing yourself write something that isn’t familiar to you. When I think about why we started writing — I said a few minutes ago I’ve been writing for 30 years professionally, but I’ve been writing since I was a kid. And I think that most of us who are very passionate writers have been writing all of our lives; we did develop this relationship with language when we were children, and at that time, it was fun. There was real joy and pleasure in making sentences and making stories or poems or whatever little books that most of us probably made and taped or stapled together. It was joyful — there was nothing torturous about it. It was really the pleasure of art-making, and that tends to get lost along the way as we move further into the writing life. It’s really important to engage with practices that reignite it. We can’t eliminate the hard work of writing as adults — there are hard parts, especially if you’re seeking to publish; there are going to be parts that are very taxing. I’ve spoken a lot about the fact that I didn’t really enjoy writing a book proposal — that’s not my sweet spot. So, there are things that we have to do that we don’t want to do and that aren’t our favorite. But if we don’t at least keep that part of us alive that has that joy and that spark and that “wow, this is fun” response to writing, we’re really losing something. And it shows in the work.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:00]

Yeah, it really does. And I think that aliveness is something that I want to talk about with you, because we’ve been talking about what I would call the headspace of writing — the craft of writing in the sense of what happens on the page — but there’s also what happens in the heart. That’s one of the things you talked about at the beginning of this episode: that studying the craft of writing is studying the craft of being a human being, that it awakens you to your own humanity. And another thing that you say on your Substack is that writing saved your life. So, tell us more about that aspect of the writing life.

Jeannine Ouellette [36:16]

So, starting with the second part first — yeah, I do say writing saved my life, and I really believe it. I’ve had some really hard times in my life, but I’ve never wanted not to be alive. However, I cannot imagine that I would have been able to be alive in the life that was meant for me, had it not been for the discovery of writing. And I think that is because I learned, at a really early age — by about nine — that I could make things with words that in some way, however small at that time, externalized part of an internal experience that I didn’t fully understand, that was at that time scary and in which I was trapped, that I didn’t have any escape routes from. But through language, I was able to take pieces of that and make things from it. Not to say in any way that I was writing memoir-ish stuff — I wasn’t — but I’m thinking of this poem I wrote in sixth grade that captured this sense of complete aloneness. It wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about my life, but I knew on some subconscious level what it was doing. It was like, oh — and my teachers really loved it, they thought it was beautiful. And that was this experience of: oh, I can take a bad feeling inside of myself and make something that is separate from me but part of me but has light in it. It was very empowering.

And I think it gave me a lifeline to hold on to for the whole rest of time. And I think this understanding of how writing — the study of the craft of creative writing — is just another way to get closer to understanding the craft of living, comes from the recognition that everything that we talk about on the page also applies to living a human life. Think about this whole complicated conversation we’ve had about voice and then think about how that helps us understand the ways that we modulate our voice across arenas of our lives, in different relationships. And the difference between interiority and exteriority — when we begin to understand that we see how it is a tool with so much applicability in our daily life. You said something about stakes at the beginning of the episode.

I use the idea of stakes — so in fiction, and we have to talk about it in memoir too, we ask: what’s at stake here? And every time a sticky situation comes up in my life, I ask myself, what’s at stake here? What’s on the line? And that question helps me understand what I can let go of, because so often there’s — like, so many agents will say about so many novel manuscripts, there’s not much at stake. And so, when there’s not much at stake, I can breathe that out, don’t really have to sweat it. The idea of desire in writing — we know, when we study the craft of writing, that a protagonist, whether it’s us in our memoir or a main character in a novel, has to want something. That desire is the engine; desire drives plot. Same thing in our life. And one of the tools I use with writers to look at this idea of desire is that as the writer, we need to know what the character wants, why they want it, what are the misbeliefs getting in their way of getting it, and what’s at stake if they do or don’t get it. Well, when you start to think about that all the time in your writing life, you are definitely more aware of it in your living life. What is it that I want? Why do I want it? What are the misbeliefs getting in the way of my getting it? And what’s really at stake if I do or don’t get it?

The truth is that it’s very easy — easier, I think, than most people recognize — to be moving through your life in a direction based on what might be a largely unexamined desire. It might in fact even be a false desire, something that we once wanted but no longer actually want, yet we’re still trudging along the path toward getting it, because we aren’t engaged in a really alive, frequent practice of examining what we want and why we want it. So those are just a few examples of the way that I see narrative — the study of creative writing and narrative — informing the way that we can become more whole and actualized as human beings. And it really makes me feel empathy for anyone who doesn’t have access to the craft of writing as a tool for understanding human beings. Writing and psychology are probably the two closest fields. What I mean to say more clearly is that psychology is probably the field closest to creative writing, and we can’t really be as effective as we’d like to be on the page — can’t create work that is as compelling and true as we want it to be — without having some basic understanding of human psychology, because we have to have a very burning curiosity to understand the characters in our stories, fiction or nonfiction. And in order to achieve that understanding — well, that’s what psychology is. It’s about motive and consequence, behavior and human inconsistency, the way that we do things that are out of character, and why.

So, looking at those dynamics and understanding how they’re working on the page is so powerful to understanding how they’re working in real life. Subtext, Lisa — think about subtext. When you learn to use subtext as a tool on the page, a powerful tool, you begin to so much better understand the subtext of life. When you begin to understand the power of metaphor on the page — what metaphor can and can’t do, what really is a powerful metaphor versus a surface, constructed metaphor that’s not really doing much work other than putting words together in a writerly way, which I don’t recommend—then you know what happens? You begin to look around you, and the whole world comes alive with metaphor, because everything has the capacity to represent something else or evoke something else. And so, when we begin to understand, we begin to see all of that. And I guess last of all — so you really got me going in my real passion area here — but we cannot, and this is an absolute, this isn’t just my opinion, this is for real: we cannot be truly the creative writers that we want to be if we do not learn to pay attention — really, truly pay attention the way Mary Oliver has compelled us to do, the way Annie Dillard has asked us to do. We have to learn to look at the world, not inside of ourselves, but out into the world, and see things and see them in detail as they are. And so, think about that for a second — if that’s an exquisite skill for writing well, and it is —the practice of that skill, which is difficult, it’s much harder than it sounds, something Marie Howe says that it hurts us, that it literally hurts to sit with things as they are. You said during a meditation: don’t make a story out of something. We always want to make a story out of something — and by the way, I was making a story out of it. We’re very quick to turn everything into a story. Looking at the thing itself holds us back from that long enough to start seeing through the thing, and that is where the real magic starts. And if we are practicing that — and it has to be practiced, because it’s not something we can simply achieve and then we’re there; we’re always going to slip away from it, because really, it’s an aspect of mindfulness. And if mindfulness were easy, it wouldn’t be a multi-billion-dollar industry. So, we have to keep practicing, everyday practice, practice — and if we can achieve that as a practice in our life, well, that changes everything. That changes everything about how we live, how we understand who we are in the world, how we understand the people around us, how we understand the relationships between things. So yeah, I think writing and living are, you know, one coin with two sides.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [46:32]

That is such an apt metaphor for the experience. And yeah, writing, and learning the craft of writing, and understanding why you have to pay attention, helps you be in the present moment, right? And as writers, we are often fully present — if we’re doing it well, which of course we don’t always do — we’re here, and then we’re also collecting and maybe reflecting. So, there’s this dynamic interplay that’s happening as we’re doing that work, and so much about the life we’re living can come from that. And what I’ve also seen is that — you know, back when I was in graduate school, I think this was 2010 — my supervisor said, you can’t change the past, but you can change the story you tell about it. And there is something really powerful about writing down the story that you’re holding, and then using the tools of craft to empower yourself to understand it in a new way, to have some mastery over it, so that maybe it’s not okay, maybe it was painful, maybe you didn’t have power in that moment — but you have power now.

Jeannine Ouellette [47:56]

You know, there’s something else about what you said that I really ascribe to. If we make something that we can love out of something that we lived — that was painful, that was hard, over which we had no control — if we can make something that has some element of light in it, or beauty, that becomes the new version of the experience. This is just human cognition, you know — that becomes more important than the memory itself. And every time we revisit the work of it, the writing work of it, the crafted version of it, it’s really difficult to articulate how profound a healing that is, because we’re taking something that often we had no agency over and making something out of it, and now we’re the creator of it. And even though it can still contain everything that was hard — it’s still true, it’s real — now we’ve shaped it into something. And this is why I like to teach the difficult but exhilarating craft of making beauty out of trauma, because it’s absolutely possible to write about really difficult things in a way that still has a luminous, beautiful quality. And when we can do that, the result — I feel like it’s really extraordinary. I know that for me, writing The Part That Burns has completely changed my relationship to those childhood events, and even the more difficult young adult events in that book. Yeah, everything that happened still happened — you know, like you said, it doesn’t change what happened in the past, but it surely changes the feeling of it in the body.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [50:22]

Yes. Melanie Brooks’s book Writing Hard Stories — every single author had something to say about that that was very similar: that when the book was done, it was like they exhaled, and whatever that original energy was around that experience, it had been transformed into something else. And I think that is one of the most powerful things that can happen from memoir, and from writing about true life stories or experiences that we’ve had. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I’m going to — would I say — poke the bear on one thing, just push you a little further as we begin to wrap up. You like to push your students to see things in a new way, and often we have to go to the place that’s a little scary or a little uncomfortable. So, when you think about your writing life and the work that you do, what is the piece that’s maybe a little itchy, a little scary, a little dipping-the-toe-into-the-unknown for you?

Jeannine Ouellette [51:34]

You know, I haven’t thought about that a lot lately, in a very intentional way. But it’s interesting that you raise that question, because up until I wrote The Part That Burns, the most difficult and elusive thing for me — the thing I had not been able to do — was to write about my childhood. That just wasn’t available to me, and I knew that I had to crack that nut in order to finally be able to write about anything else in a really true way. And I think that is the biggest area of unknown for me. So now that I’ve written The Part That Burns — I did that — it actually is surprisingly easy for me now to write about childhood. And what I’ve discovered is that I spent a lot of years — I talked about this yesterday in the voice workshop — writing really pretty essays about everything that happened after the age of 18. And I think what will be the question for me to engage with in this next season of my writing life is: how much, if at all — because I don’t really know what I want yet — how much, if at all, can I write truthfully about my life? How close can I get to the lived life now? How close to the fire can I come? Because what I was doing before — the kinds of essays I wrote before — were pretty, but the truths they contained were all subterranean. And I think that’s why they were better than the sum of their parts, because there was something there even if I wasn’t revealing it — something felt, something incongruous about those essays. But they weren’t really writing into the center of it. I had to get through The Part That Burns to be able to do that, but it still kept the adult version of me really safe, because The Part That Burns ends, by intention, about 25 years ago. So, yeah, it’s interesting. I appreciate that question, because since I write on Substack so prolifically, and that includes a lot of writing that people know what’s going on in my life — but like we all know, anyone who’s kind of very public like that, it’s also curated. And if I were going to write into the fire of the lived life now, it wouldn’t be on Substack. It would be something else, because there’s a division for me between my creative writing as art and my newsletter, which is a vehicle for teaching. So yeah. I guess thank you for that, because I think that’s a question that has been rolling around in my mind. It’s not about writing another memoir — I’m not saying I would or wouldn’t, that’s not the point. It’s more the artistry of it: if, and how close, do I want to come to the threshold of the now in a truthful way?

Well, I’m going to be thinking about that and about how it relates to my own writing, because yeah, I think there can be that safety in looking back over time at an event that shaped you — one that isn’t part of your experience now — but writing into the now, there’s a lot of charge and a lot to navigate. Think about Joan Didion, and some of these essayists who have written into the now, even “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joanne Beard, which was really writing right up to the threshold of the lived life. There’s just so much courage in that, and some of the memoirs that have come out recently too. So anyway, it raises food for thought. Yeah, so thanks for the question.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [55:12]

You are very welcome. And I could talk to you all day, Jeannine, I really could. And yet we all have things we have to do. So, as we wrap up, I just want to say my heartfelt thank you for being on here, for the generosity of your knowledge and your expertise and everything that you shared today. If people want to learn more about you, subscribe to your Substack, or just figure out what you’re up to, what are the best ways for them to do that?

Jeannine Ouellette [56:45]

Well, definitely Writing in the Dark on Substack. I’m there almost every day, so that’s a great place to jump in. And I just want to acknowledge the community there, actually, because it is unique and extraordinary — a community of human beings who are writers, yes, but also surgeons and teachers and firefighters and retirees and sailors who are literally out at sea right now, and all over the world, this incredible diversity of human experience, everyone cheering each other on, supporting each other, sharing work if they want to — it’s never a requirement — but engaging with this important work of writing ourselves a little closer to our own humanity. It’s a really beautiful community, so they deserve a lot of credit for making Writing in the Dark what it is. So, we’d love to see you there. I’m also on Facebook, you know, like most people my age, and Instagram, and I try to keep up there a little bit, but mostly Substack.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [57:59]

Well, the links for all of this will be in the show notes, so listeners, fear not — you will know exactly how to reach Jeannine. And Jeannine, once again, thank you so much for being here. It has been just an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Jeannine Ouellette [58:16]

Well, thank you. It was a delight. I loved it.