Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Boully
Cover design by Christina Vang
Book design by Connie Kuhnz
Author photograph © Agnes Donnadieu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boully, Jenny, author.
Title: Betwixt-and-between: essays on the writing life / Jenny Boully.
Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040747 | ISBN 9781566895187 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Authorship.
Classification: LCC PS3602.O89 A6 2018 | DDC 814/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040747
252423222120191812345678
For Patrick, Penelope, and Augie: per aspera ad astra
Contents
Preface
the future imagined, the past imagined
Forecast Essay
On Writing and Witchcraft
Inner Workings, in Meadows
Einstein on the Beach/Postmodernism/Electronic Beeps
On the Voyager Golden Records
The Page as Artifact
Between Cassiopeia and Perseus
Kafka’s Garden
Six Black-and-White Movies in Which I Do Not Find You
Moveable Types
How to Write on Grand Themes
The Art of Fiction
Fragments
22
On the EEO Genre Sheet
The Poet’s Education
Writing Betwixt-and-Between
On Beginnings and Endings
Acknowledgments
Preface
Betwixt-and-between is a phrase that has continually enchanted me ever since I read J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird. Peter Pan is referred to as a “betwixt-and-between”—he is not quite a boy-child nor quite a bird, not wholly living in make-believe nor wholly living in the consequential world. Peter is simultaneously domesticated and feral, devoted and aloof, brave yet vulnerable—I grew attached to such hesitations, refusals, yearnings, oscillating and uncertain desires. It seems to me that my writing life is also a betwixt-and-between, a place where writing that isn’t quite this or that exists, writing that strives or serves to make manifest the inner workings of a life that isn’t quite about writing nor quite about living. It is a daydreamy type of life punctuated by pulls of the literary kind—informed by my writing projects and reading but not quite speaking directly to them.
The following essays began to appear when I began to write truly as a writer. The earliest piece was written shortly before I began work on my first book in my early twenties, and the most recent piece was written only recently. Without success, I have tried—despite knowing that they did not, in anyway, fit in—to include some of these in other essay collections. It took me nearly two decades, while writing other books, to realize that I had been writing this very book. What created a motley assemblage when tacked on to other essay collections, suddenly, when arranged together, existed in a way that appeared, in however an in-between state, to cohere.
In revising this work, I tried my best to retain the spirit in which these essays were written; that is, I attempted to make sincere choices and respect the person I was when I wrote them. Some essays showcase my academic inclination, some are more personal, and some live in the realm of imagination. No matter their guises, I hope you will see how multifarious is a writing life, how slowly it grows its pearl, how it is or is not, how it depends on us to call it into being.
Jenny Boully
Evanston, January 2018
the future imagined, the past imagined
In the writing life, an occasional glance sometimes out of windows where clouds scuttle and the sky is autumn blue, but somehow one is not a part of it; in the writing life, an occasional glance sometimes into the mirror where the body and one’s possessions are caught, but somehow one is not a part of it. I keep meaning to but never do throw the thoughts of the outside out. In the writing life, a continual desire to make manifest something known, to somehow be a part of it.
Sometimes, I harbor a strange paranoia that although I keep visiting and having visitors to my desk, nothing is getting written, but I think that what I do is write. I think this because I have fragments all around, and I am sure that I have not written them, yet they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do turn them into something. I refuse to see that the mirror too is glass, a window, a glass with a thin sheet on which I am written, a sheet that keeps the inside in. To be a part of it is to be apart from it.
How is it that seasons change? Do they change so slowly, so creepingly, because we so rarely break away from whatever it is we are dreaming to notice? What the season brings us to suffer (because seasons, no matter how lovely, will bring us to suffer), it brings when we are not looking. I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there. It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it: the leaves shivering then falling about as if to remind me that somehow, despite leavings, there is some magic, some beauty there. I tell myself I don’t want it: the mountain view, the shimmer of summer rain, a trout-filled creek. How is it that I came to be here this way, with the wind a suggestion that it was, indubitably was, autumn (already and again)? What I want was in bed; he kissed me and said good-bye. And at three o’clock in the afternoon, the world takes on a stormy look.
Sometimes, I think that maybe I’ve been on antidepressants and antianxiety medication for the past three years and somehow am not aware of it. I think this because there are medicine bottles all around, stamped with various dates
