Sharply Felt Local Intimacies
In his New Yorker essay titled “Dessert,” novelist Colum McCann writes, “Our job is to be epic and tiny, both,” and his lovely story slips back and forth between the two, focusing on a piece of chocolate cake and the way a minor act of indulgence can signal something profound.
This idea of the big and the small is echoed by Vladimir Nabokov who, in his book Speak, Memory, writes, “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”
As we return to our shared acts of writing, let’s turn to the epic and tiny, both. Let’s diminish the large and enlarge the small…
- Start with the large: recall a major life event – or a few – and write a quick list of them, without too much detail. Just get the ideas down. Step back, look at what you have, and see which one feels warm and needs to be written. Take some time, write it up, develop it - maybe a page or two.
- Now see if you can slide from the big picture into a single detail, like you’re moving from wide angle into a close up. The detail might initially seem mundane, disconnected. No worries! Just write it down. Then elaborate. Expand. Embellish. Maybe write a scene. See if you can write so that the detail starts to get big.
- Then, let the project sit a while. When you return, see if you can revise and tell the big story only through the smaller one. Turn the piece inside out. And as always, feel free to mess with the form.
You could take a look at McCann’s story. And here’s his encouragement: “There is a need, now and always, for sharply felt local intimacies.” Let’s share some sharply felt local intimacies!
As always, "rewriting" can happen in any medium. Responses might be images, drawings, video, sound: whatever!