Friday Write #132

when writing reveals "the secret logic of life"

Greetings, writers—

I picked up Anne Truitt’s Daybook: The Journal of an Artist the other day and opened to the page pictured below.

That last line struck me, and I wonder how many of you felt a similar jolt of recognition. Why, I wonder, does that part of me never give up?

Whether my writing is going well or not, there’s always some restless creative impulse (occasionally better described as a thwarted desire) whirring in the back of my mind, kind of like the way cosmic microwave background radiation hums ceaselessly throughout the universe.

Anne Truitt, a sculptor known for large-scale minimalist sculptures, obviously felt this incessant drive. And she started keeping a journal of her practice in 1974, at fifty-three, after two large retrospectives of her work left her feeling as if “the artist in me had ravished the rest of me and got away scot-free.” In a plain brown composition book, she began to explore her identity as an artist alongside her role as a single mother of three. “The only limitation I set was to let the artist speak,” she writes in Daybook’s introduction.

Truitt writes of “a magical period in which we [the artist and her sculpture] seem to fall in love with one another” and of sunlight streaming in a window while she’s cutting celery; she considers ambition, death (of her parents, a vivacious cousin, and her own near death from acute appendicitis), “the cave of womanhood,” and her “troublesome” sculptures. Reflecting on a childhood chore of separating cream from fresh milk, she says she never understood how that hand-cranked device actually worked: “nor do I understand,” she writes, “why the simple act of writing has so apparently effortlessly revealed to me the secret logic of my life. And, in that logic, a faith to illuminate my days.” Daybook is a graceful, serious, and intimate inquiry into what it means to be an artist and a (female) human.

Some of Truitt’s sculptures (photo from annetruitt.org)

Today, take one line from Truitt’s journal and use it to begin a scene, a poem, a freewrite. Do you or one of your characters feel a vague yearning for something? What sort of ordinary day might someone not want to live through? What was the air like at 5 a.m. in your world, whether fictive or real?

Happy writing—

Emily