What definitions, thoughts and dreams I’ve snagged from In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, edited by Olivia Dresher for Impassio Press. In her introduction, Dresher, a fragmentary writing enthusiast, introduces fragmentary writing this way:  “lack of a traditional beginning or end. Instead, the two are merged into a brief and concentrated middle, “a short expression or description of a thought, memory, insight, mood, perception, image or experience…,” “one can jump into a paragraph or even a few lines and feel and immediate involvement…,” “quick, illuminating bursts…,” “feel complete as they are…,” “energy within a fragment that gives the writer and reader a sense of freedom… .”

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Forms the collected fragments take: diaries, notebooks, aphorisms, vignettes, selections from letters, an essay written fragmentarily on postcards.

Tone the collected fragments take:  psychological, philosophical, poetic, spiritual, political, mixtures of the above.

What inspires the fragments: abstract thought, nature, travel, tangible aspects of a moment or simply playing with words.

What fragments do: break off  “a point of their own choosing; “happen by themselves.”  Becoming a writer of fragmentary writing is “something you come to realize about yourself,” says contributor and playwright, poet, journal writer Guy Gauthier.  You learn, he says, that “you can’t control or direct the flow of your creative energy.”

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I am not far into my reading of In Pieces, before I feel certain that if someone asked me that old question about what book I would wish to have with me should I be marooned on an island and be able to have only one, I’d say In Pieces.

It’s a good thing, I think, that I haven’t been marooned before now, before the book was published. I could not have been as well stocked with material for inspiration as I am now–marooned or not. Each fragment, many sentences inside the many fragments, call forth moods, thoughts, and associations about much I have wanted to say. And I know for any mood or thought or association I have, I’ll have a variation or entirely new one the next time I read the fragment.

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I am affirmed reading In Pieces about the way I often read–holding up a fragment of the story or textbook like a jewel in the light, carrying it to other light, looking again.  I cannot take my mind off the fragmentary writing In Pieces offers–velvet bag of gems spilled onto the jeweler’s bench.

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 The way my son loved geodes, the way a gem might carry something of the unpolished stone it came from.

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If you have been told you should be a writer because you write such good letters and then feel you are failing at becoming a writer because your novel and short stories are unfinished, fragmentary writing as a genre means you are already a writer.  Really. Breathe. Nod yes when your friends tell you “should.”  Talk over them with these words, “I am.”

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In Pieces contributor Felicia Waynesboro, in her unpublished manuscript, Pulled from the Fire, writes: “Those long hairs that get caught on a strip of film–there’s always only one hair at a time.” Permission to write the odd observances, see where they go. Waynesboro continues saying the hair “pauses while the ‘action’ lays backdrop in another world where the hair is not supposed to exist.”

What do I see that others might not linger on as I sit at the airport gate, my flight from Detroit to Seattle an hour late: the way the upholstery tags sewn into the neck-rest pillows on sale along the kiosk wall lay like lolling tongues, in the air-conditioned atmosphere inside the airport. The tags probably say it is illegal to remove them; today they are admonishing tongues put to rest, cordoned off to the side, while a steady stream of travelers pass them by; I feel released to be myself in an airport, free of the etched boundaries of dogma. I might be off to anywhere in the world on any business I choose to be on.

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Access to myself, that’s what these fragments are providing. Pieces of myself percolate up from the depths where they are buried, and instead of feeling jagged, I feel the deep edges of being alive, responding to the world, not shutting it out.

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Felicia Waynesboro writes, “Sitting nearby while someone reads something you have written is like having blood taken–it’s alright as long as you look away,” and I nod in agreement. I wouldn’t have said it this way. But now I have an apt way to articulate this feeling, a model for articulating other feelings. I think this: Writing the words of others when you agree with them is like putting a platter of food on the table, hoping company will come and share it, and it is like being the company who has come and eaten.

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I read a line inside a Waynesboro fragment and it becomes a fragment, one I might use as an epigraph for a poem:  “our inadvertent awe of the common things we live with that we do not understand.”  I want to explore the “inadvertent awe.” Or maybe I want to collect adjective-noun phrases that stick like this one does. I start today with a phrase my cousin used as he described my grandchildren: “insanely adorable.”

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In another fragment, Waynesboro writes, “It would be a lot more painful to sympathize with the complexities that mother must feel–that she has no words for–than it is to resent her for the shallowness of her responses.”  The beginning of seeing her mother whole. What my teachers meant when they said the writing is smarter than we are.

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Contributor Giles Goodland offers excerpts from an unpublished manuscript, Thought Experiments, 2002.  Immediately, I want to experiment and to play, too. “To sigh is to sing in snake language, to sniff is to whistle in dog-talk, to snicker is to sob among mice.”  I do not understand the first two phrases but I feel Goodland’s words at work, the getting out of words leading somewhere. When I read his phrase “to snicker is to sob among mice,” I feel that I will never snicker again without thinking of the vulnerability of all humanity, trying to hide it or not.

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I read Goodland’s word thread, “the salt in the sea the soap in the bath the sugar in the tea,” and I know I’ll be spinning my own lists:  the grinds at the bottom of the coffee pot the gravel under my asphalt driveway the stars I can’t see. When Goodland writes, “a jet unzipping a seamless sky,” I am a little girl again in New Jersey, playing on a lawn looking for clover and buttercups.  There are not many planes. When I hear one overhead, I wonder where I’ll travel to in my lifetime.  My lifetime. A concept that unzips the day just then, into here and later, here and not here, little flowers and a vast lawn left over.

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Goodland writes, “the best philosopher does not think things through because to know is to destroy and to learn is to lose.” How it took earning an MA in Creative Writing to believe that after attending grade school during the Cold War.

Another inverse: Goodland writes, “you can only commit good acts unconsciously and evil acts consciously so the more aware we are the worse.” Something to chew on for days. Most of the years I’ve known since 1960 have seemed devoted to consciousness-raising, with ever-increasing momentum.  What might we be undoing? I must re-read Dorothy Parker’s essay “Good Souls.” I must read the way she describes self-sacrificers as oppressive to others.

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A fragment from inside a fragment of Mary Azrael’s fragments from her 2003 journals: “Small details. Solid rock.” A writing lesson. She writes, “…the truth is, if somebody gave me the gift of a month with no obligations except house cleaning, I’d be excited and happy.  Getting ready for a new life where everything matters. Now. Not ‘later.'” Would these words explain to my husband what I am doing when I say we can’t let things accumulate in the ample storage under our house?

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Contributor and poet Kim Stafford offers “word-dreams on the first day back at work after summer.” My favorite is: “‘yearnity’ (i.e. the life of good longing in the present, the infinite possibility of the present). When my husband is in a good mood he says, “percertainly,” when I tell him about what I think is important. Percertainly. Perfectly certain? That’s how our relationship feels during this lovely meeting of our minds and hearts. The Latin preposition “per” means through or by. Through what does this meeting of ours come? By what means?

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Contributor and MFA graduate Thomas Heisler writes, “I like to have a lot of different shoes because they all make different sounds and with each pair it’s like a new conversation.”  I want to walk on linoleum with new tennis shoes. I will say yes to the request to teach in local nursing and retirement homes for a month. I want to slip my clogs on today, hear the sound of shovels in my footsteps as I leave my desk for the car, as if my steps are preparing ground for a new building.

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Heisler writes, “the last supper that wasn’t a thing like the last supper” and describes a parting from his parents before he “moved for the last time in their lives.”  There is a last of everything in his description of the evening: a last meatloaf he ate the most of, a last bottle of wine he drank the least of, a last discussion of world politics, a last washing of dishes together, a last opportunity to say something more than ‘bye when the elevator doors slid open, a last opportunity to acknowledge the way they gave him what he so desperately needed–the words that he was going to be all right.

I want to slow time down in my writing today. I want to retrieve the moments of last times.

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Contributor Eberle Umbach fashions fragments after her reading of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. She describes the way of life and isolation in Adams County, Idaho.  So simple to do this, it seems with her lists:

EIGHT DOLLARS IN DECEMBER

3 cucumbers
2 green peppers
1 bunch spring onions
1 bunch spinach
1 head cabbage

THINGS NEAR AND FAR
Stop light: 30 miles
Rice vinegar: 30 miles
Fast food: 75 miles
Mall:  100 miles
Airport: 100 miles
Rodeo: 15 miles
Gun club: 2 miles
Church: 2 miles

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Under the title INCURABLE, Umbach writes about receiving her beloved’s poor medical diagnosis. He told her to please not cry anymore. She “went to sit in the draw where the spring comes out of the earth and runs down.”  “When I came out,” she writes, “I had stopped crying. I took his hand, loving him so much. And now we have begun.”

In another fragment called, “AT FIRST,” Umbach writes, “it is that shadow which completes things, which creates the thin bearable edge of unbearable beauty–which returns that beauty to the everyday, the immediate, the inalienable. I always forget this, and always, remembering it again seems insurmountably difficult–at first.”

The rhythm of grieving. What I must remember and allow.

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Fragments: smart, poetic, authentic, mischievous, essential, informed. Any few moments reading the work in In Pieces grows vast as time on that imagined desert island. This refreshes me, brings me from anywhere to the  “draw where the spring comes out of the earth and runs down.”

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Contributor and notebook keeper Andrew T. McCarter writes that people who articulate their convictions in bumper-sticker sized phrases think he hasn’t thought long enough about the issues. It strikes him that the bumper-sticker convictions serve “precisely the same purpose as the vehicle bumper itself.”

I thought of a bumper-sticker sized phrase I was going to print:  Awareness is political. I had just read somewhere that we “change the world by how we view it.” Now I am thinking about what we must protect, what we must say to protect it.

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McCarter’s quiet phrase:  “Alone is the biggest word I know, even bigger than the word God.” Alone is the peak we must all conquer, to see we have the help of others, to see we are all digits in one hand.

A few pages later, I read contributor and fiction and essay writer Audrey Borenstein’s fragments: “If you stay there, presently your eye will discern shapes, you will remember that the darkness too is dappled.”

Alone is to be in darkness. Alone is to begin to see the dappled light. The sun burns through the clouds at the top of the mountain when we realize the connections we have to others, others to us, and see the ropes that tether us to safety.

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Borenstein writes about a God who created humans “perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps out of the cosmic longing to connect with creation in a way that would reveal the nature of God as perceived by the created.” As perceived by the created. I make a note to write what I perceive of a higher power, perhaps in a journal called, Perceptions of the Created–I could explore by writing from the point of view of poems I have written and poems I have read, from my garden, from the furniture I have arranged in a room.  Then I could begin to explore myself as “the created” and examine my perceptions about myself as something shaped. Borenstein provides help with this idea, “History, the story of a spiritual ancestor woven into the tapestry of our civilization, that tells you how to find the threads of your own story, so that you recognize what you are weaving with your deeds.”  I am something shaped, something shaped to act and even by inaction, always acting.

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Prolific and well-published creative nonfiction writer Richard Goodman relates his boyhood experience of gardenias in his yard the summer of 1954.  When he touched a flower, a “brown corruption” appeared “where I had placed my finger.”  When his mother cut gardenias to float in bowl full of water, he looked at the flowers, thinking, “nothing in the world was as white.” I think of my own learning about the ways I could damage the world, especially the inside world of those who loved me, of those I loved.  Nothing was as white as gardenias for Goodman.  What are the images of the perfection to which I held myself and always somehow soiled?  Getting along with my sister–warm air on the skin of our backs between the straps of our sun suits; the way I told her what I thought were myths but have turned out to be true–that sliding grape halves over your teeth could clean the tarter off them.  I couldn’t finish a game of Monopoly or tickle her back for as many minutes as I had promised in exchange for wearing her blue suede hair bow or the white blouse.

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I come to the pages of In Pieces with contributor Stacy Carlson’s fragments. I wonder if this is the same Stacy Carlson who was a student of mine years ago when I taught at Lakeside High School in Seattle. I loved her writing and eventually published one of her essays in my first book about writing personal essays. I have lost touch since. I quickly turn to the book’s contributors’ notes–she grew up next to a graveyard in Seattle, they say. I remember this. I learn she has won awards for her manuscripts, that she is writing a novel about PT Barnum’s American Museum.  I turn back to the fragments from her journal. Stacy writes, “I know about the world from reading and hanging around in junk stores.” Seattle’s junk stores. The pink cowboy boots I found in time to wear to my 20th high school reunion in New Jersey, symbol of how I’d redefined myself.  But to learn about more than yourself from the junk in junk stores, you need to have a context or to look for one–what is milk glass? How did it come to matter?

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Stacy writes, “Tonight I sat on the edge of a burning cane field and watched the sun go down.”  I knew she became a traveler.  Now I know the quality of her contemplation.

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I move from Stacy’s (how can I call a student by her last name?) words to those of the next contributor, Jason Anthony.  He’s kept a notebook of his time working half the year for eight years in Antarctica.  He calls August there “a brief truce while light speaks with time.”

He says, “this snow is the white teeth of the wind, and the wind is the voice of this silent kingdom.”

He says, “Our summer day will be four months long. Snow piles up under clear skies and sets like light cement.”

And, “Wind is the journey Antarctica makes into us.”

“Where I say white, think pale reflected greys and incremental blues. When you ask which blue, think bruise behind lace,” he writes.

I think of my grandson, how at four everything interesting came or went to Antarctica, according to him. Anthony writes, “To be standing here…is to be stretched thin by the imaginations constant quest for place and context…”

I imagine myself reading Anthony’s words to Toby, beginning a discussion.  “Did I really see two small pearl-white birds with rounded heads and oil black beaks? Did I invent them to keep me company?” Anthony asks. I want to ask Toby what he sees.

And so, I am done for now reading alone on my desert island.

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I have written this review from words in the book’s first third. I look forward to writing from the second two thirds. I have learned how packed fragments are, how ready for unpacking, and I have learned to think of self as always unfinished, a jigsaw puzzle perpetually in pieces, and the pieces perpetually in need of writing.

I cannot imagine my writing life in the days to come without my copy of In Pieces beside me.