This piece was featured first on Nov 13 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
I’m teaching a writing class for the first time. Whew, it’s hard. Most of my own writing is intuitive. I just try to put the words in the right order. So, it’s excruciating (and fascinating) to back out the mechanisms undergirding it. This class asks the question: How can you write about a place in a way that gets at how it works not just how it looks?
So far, my favorite thing has been sitting down with writing that I love and figuring it out. Can I name the tactic?
So, I brought out Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones, a brilliant memoir about bodies, disability, lineage, and art. And I began leafing through it until I hit this little passage, just a connector paragraph that opens a chapter:
“Days pass, all the same. Trash in cans steam in August’s humid heat. Petals from rotting blossoms fall from branches and the wind sends them skittering like beetles across the avenues. September brings a sudden chill that strips the trees of their leaves. October’s easy skies turn orange with smoke from Canadian wildfires. The last of the leaves die, desiccate on the stem. New York City is loud, stays loud.”
Here is, essentially, a time-lapse. Hold the camera steady and watch what changes and what stays the same. This one is elegant and short, a month in a sentence. What a trick! Seasons may change, but New York stays loud. (True.) A city is, as a friend of mine would put it, a very long event.
If you want to—and no one has to!—you can try out writing a time-lapse passage, like we did in my class. Here’s how to do it: Pick a place on this earth, at any scale. Set a timer for 10 minutes. And then go: describe in some sentences a time-lapse of that spot from now until the new year.
You can send them to me here (just reply to the email), and maybe I’ll share some next week.
To get you started, here’s what I wrote in class. I chose my parents’ backyard in Washington State.
“The outdoor furniture has already been stored away. No more sitting under the umbrella and watching the big green wall of life shimmer in the wind. The grass stops growing, mower covered in a tarp. The leaves are almost gone already and the grass is revealed to be half something else: thick mats of moss emerge from between the blades in the unending wetness of week after week of rain. The creek, which had been a cute trickle, will turn into acres of marsh with a slightly deeper channel running towards the Lewis River. Soon, the only thing to do in the acres of trees behind my parents’ house will be to look through fat droplets hanging down from naked tree branches, and see the whole world turned upside down.”
Writing to know the places we live in and sometimes love, that’s your one good thing.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
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- Do you want to know more about a San Francisco sex cult from the investigative reporter (Ellen Huet) who wrote the book? Go to this event with friend of the letter, Tracy Clark Flory.
- Erin Rickenbaker of El Chato is teaching a sherry class on Saturday
- Check out the next edition of the Tritone poetry series at Tamarack in Oakland on Saturday night.
- Friend of the newsletter Liam O’Donoghue is DJing at the Eli’s Mile High Club on Saturday night.
- That new Rosalia album is shakes hand, shakes head, whistles a bit … Just go listen. With sherry.
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