Courage is a cardinal virtue

Some fragments on brave writing.

Please forgive the shot of book in an actual real life bookshop, but all the pics to illustrate courage were super cheesy and frankly this is the bravest thing I have ever done.

Many of you here are writers, and all of you are readers, or you would not be interested in this adorably old-school word-person platform. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes writing brave, because one of my deep values is courage. I’m mainly interested in work that connects, rather than just informs or impresses. I want to read writing which weaves typed characters into a thread that tugs on our shared humanity. My favourite is when I can hear a person taking risks - not someone who is overly concerned with signalling their status or pretending certainty, but is prepared to reveal the tenderness of their particular experiences. To quote Hamilton, I’m looking for a mind at work. All the labels for this have been worn out (authentic, real) but you could boil it down to one, maybe: honest. That kind of writing always requires some courage.

This theme is very present for me because my book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times is out today (next week for the US). I feel as vulnerable as a peeled grape (as well as looking forward to a big dance at the party tonight). So I’ve been seeking out voices to steady me, to help me to stay loyal to my values of courage and truth telling even as the costs of those things become more visible. I had a hunch some of you might also find them nourishing.

Firstly, can I point you to this amazing essay from

Sarah

Stein Lubrano? It is long and so full of ideas that I have already read it three times. It focuses mainly on how we are too obsessed with being original, and the different kinds of labour we value, and made me think about online influencers in an entirely new and quite moving way. For our purposes, one paragraph stood out to me, as something to aspire to:

“I do not think it is mere happenstance that both [David] Graeber and [bell] hooks are absolutely alive on the page, fully present and themselves, clearly stubborn unrepentant weirdos utterly unconcerned with pretence…They are not just readable, but happy to show their audience most of their rhetorical moves along the way. They are interested in seemingly mundane questions that are probably alive in the lives of the reader and happy to repeat themselves over and over again (as good teachers generally are). They are able to do this while keeping everyone’s attention because they are (as my wonderful agent likes to put it) “good company on the page.””

Oh to be a stubborn unrepentant weirdo. I also want to be good company on the page. Company comes, of course, from companion, com (with) and pan (bread). The people we break bread with. There is a closeness implied, a closeness that most of us know is possible, if rare, in good writing. The companionship of a good book is partly an author’s (or indeed, character’s) voice joining a conversation in our own minds. It is a form of relationship, I am coming to believe, asynchronous and geographically distant, but relationship all the same. It only happens when we have a sense of who they really are.

Then, in a profile of artist Miranda July in the New Yorker, I found this

Back at July’s table, as we went through her notes for “All Fours,” the question of the book’s style kept coming up. “Giving myself permission to write straight,” one note said. “I’m so tired of the ways I’ve been clever and funny and strange,” another began.

I asked July what she meant by writing “straight.”

“I got so used to making a character that is weird enough and unreliable enough that she can say things that are really not O.K., and do things that are really not O.K., and everyone will laugh, but part of them will resonate with it, like, ‘Oh, God, I’m kind of like that,’ ” she said.

……Cheryl, who began her fictional life as a singular, bizarre presence, ended it as an Everywoman. “Oh, that’s a new thing,” July thought. “Maybe you can just say it.”

That effect—aliveness—is what July was after in “All Fours.” “This won’t ever be autofiction,” she wrote in her book proposal, “because, for me, nothing takes flight without the alchemy of invention.” But the invention would be pared back, tied to the real, in order to let in something else: risk……It’s risky to let people see who you think you are, to expose your prejudices, your ego, your wild, embarrassing hopes and absurd failures. But that is what the book is about: giving up the cover of convenient fictions in order to own life’s facts.

The word aliveness stood out to me, for obvious reasons. July’s work implies that aliveness - maybe even fully aliveness - isn’t possible without risk.

Neither is relationship, which is what I think aliveness is all about. Our convenient fictions keep us from each other, make us feel more like strangers in the world than we need to. Intimacy cannot exist without vulnerability, without the possibility we will be wounded. Which is why, of course, it takes courage.

It can also go too far. I’m feeling my way towards these edges. There is such a thing as too honest, too vulnerable. Tenderly weaving connection with the reader without leaving ourselves entirely undefended is a high wire act. Maintaining a stable sense of self while doing so requires spiritual core strength. This sobering poem, called Heart, by Margaret Attwood is a helpful warning:

Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.

It was either that or the soul.

The hard part is getting the damn thing out.

A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster,

your spine a wrist,

and then, hup! it's in your mouth.

You turn yourself partially inside out

like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.

There's a broken plop, the racket

of fish guts into a pail,

and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot

of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.

It gets passed around. It's slippery. It gets dropped,

but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.

Too sour, says another, making a face.

Each one is an instant gourmet,

and you stand listening to all this

in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,

your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden

deep in your shirt and chest,

shyly, heartless.

· From Margaret Atwood's The Door, published by Virago

No reader is worth losing our heart for. I hope that the honest sentences which took courage to write and are making their way to people today will be good company, but my heart is for my family, community and friends. My God. They accompany me and en-courage me (literally, put courage into me). They are where this all comes from, and who it is all for. They are the ones I will dance with tonight. I can’t wait.

Other things

• There is a wonderful review of Fully Alive here (by Rev Rachel Mann who if you don’t know you should because she is the best of a noble tradition of poet-priests and generally wonderful even when she is not saying nice things about me).

• I had a lovely podcast conversation with Kenny Primrose for his podcast The Examined Life.

• And another great chat with

  Dougald Hine
  over on his substack Writing Home. You can find the recording here.