Friday Write #90

Struggle builds resilience

Greetings, writers—

Today is a day of false starts. It’s 7:00 a.m. as I type this sentence, and I’ve already begun and discarded posts about the pleasures of writing on a summer morning; Kafka’s ideal way of living; Edith Wharton’s writing process; and what it might feel like to be the mother of two writers, each of whom published memoirs in which you were a character¹. (Not that good, probably?)

Any of these failed beginnings might become a future newsletter, but today’s post will be about trees, and a big idea that went wrong, and something I read that made me inexplicably sad. That’s the fun/pain/wonder/madness of writing: you sit down at your work in a spirit of hopeful openness (or as close to that state as you can manage), and then you start writing words, and you wait to see which ones catch. From uncertainty and doubt comes a paragraph, eventually. Or a newsletter, scene, or poem.

I was staring out the window, waiting for a new idea and admiring the trees in our parking strip, when I remembered how we got them, which was that right after we moved into this house, someone knocked on our door and asked, “Would you like five free trees?”

Who would say no to that? Not us. And so shortly thereafter, the good folks from Portland’s Gray to Green program planted five Pistacia chinensis Bunge, aka Chinese pistache, in the narrow space between our sidewalk on the street. Twelve years later, they form a latticed green wall between our porch and the rest of the world.

free trees! the one on the right sometimes has a hummingbird nest

Thinking about these trees reminded me of the trees in Biosphere 2², that grand failed experiment that sealed eight “biospherians” up in a bubble in Oracle, Arizona for two years, from September 26, 1991, to September 26, 1993. The goal was to explore the possibility of creating a self-sustaining, closed ecological system. In other words, could these eight people—four men, four women—survive and thrive while locked up inside “dazzling white Buckminster Fuller-type geodesic domes and barrel-vaulted chambers straight out of ancient Babylon³”?

The short answer: No.

“Just the fact that the same number of people came out as went in is a triumph,” noted Mark Nelson, one of the biospherians. Hunger was a constant companion; so was “irrational antagonism,” a term psychologists use to describe what happens between a small group of people when they’re stuck together too long.

You guys, I find this Biosphere 2 thing so fascinating (the pet bush babies! the sexual dynamics! the plunging oxygen levels! their “healthy starvation” diet!) that I could write about it for thousands of words. But I will not. I will just tell you about the trees.

In Biosphere 2, the trees grew much faster than they did outside of the dome. But then, before they were mature, they fell over and died.

Because there was no wind.

So the biospherians had to use wires to hold their branches up.

When I read that—when I thought about those trees needing help holding up their arms, which is one of the primary things they’re supposed to be able to do—I felt so many things: sadness, awe, anger, pity. It was an outsized reaction, perhaps. But isn’t that what we ought to have to spark us into writing?

Plenty of people have run with the obvious message here, which is that struggle builds resilience. Without the stress wood that trees form in the real world, they can’t thrive. Without struggle, a person can’t grow.

Valid! But it’s not actually what I’m interested in. I’m telling you about the trees and the lack of wind because this tiny detail has haunted me for months. And it’s that kind of thing—the particular detail, or story, or emotion—that you can’t shake off that can drive you toward something truly powerful in your writing.

Today I offer you a few prompts based on my morning ramblings.

1. Go back and find one of your false starts, and see if you can breathe new life into it. (No work is ever wasted, even if you toss it into the trashcan.)

2. Think about a story, or a fact, or even a line from a book or poem that has stuck with you for a long time. What is the emotion associated with it? Either write from that story—or write from the emotion it sparks.

3. Write a scene in which two of your characters are stuck together for long enough that they start to drive each other nuts. (Like my friend’s daughter once said to her: “Mom, I can’t stand the way you breathe.”)

4. Write about a tree. A few good tree poems—birches only, just because—here and here and here.

Happy Friday, happy writing—

Emily

P.S. Did you write something short and awesome? Put it in the comments!

1. I’m talking about the brothers Tobias Wolff and Geoffrey Wolff here.

2. Planet Earth is Biosphere 1.

3. Within the three acres of the structure, there were seven different biomes, including a rainforest, a mangrove wetland, a savanna grassland, and a fog desert (what is that?).