Writing from our experience gives us the opportunity to know more after the writing than we knew in the experiencing alone. When we can combine our experiencing of outer events with our experiencing of inner events, using the outer as metaphor for the inner, we craft new tools for illuminating ourselves. Each of the tools allows us to see a facet of our thinking and being we may never before have articulated to ourselves.

Over the past three weeks, you’ve had the opportunity to read three essays by acclaimed personal essayist Brenda Miller. In each of the essays, Brenda recounts small experiences she had while away from home. She reflects on how the words others spoken to her while she was in those settings provided a window for her to explore aspects of her writing life and what it takes to craft essays.

Rereading Brenda’s openings, you will notice how she gets her feet and ours into her essays and then begins to target her subject. A closer look at her strategy will help you borrow from it to explore your own experience in surprising ways. By reading Brenda’s three beginnings in a row, one taking place on a naturalist-led walk, one in a writing retreat room, and one in a car, you’ll see clearly how she utilizes events in a specific environment as a launching pad for reflection, a way to use what the outside world has provided to make a query of the self and find words for inner transactions. In this kind of essay, we follow an individual in an unfamiliar setting and learn how the events in that setting and conversations with others yield previously unarticulated perceptions.

Here are the three openings:

“The Case Against Metaphor: An Apologia“:

I’m on a walk in Point Reyes—a national seashore north of San Francisco — with a biologist. Where I see a generalized “nature,” pretty enough, Rich sees a marsh that teems with activity: he points out green herons and yellow-legged sandpipers, Virginia rails and kingfishers, coots with white beaks and a coyote with ears red as a fox. We see the coyote only because Rich noticed a deer, quite far away, who “looked kind of nervous.” He followed the deer’s gaze to see the coyote lurking among the trees. All deer, to me, look nervous, but Rich has lived in Point Reyes for 30 years and his eyes, I imagine, are different than ordinary eyeballs — clearer perhaps, or wider — and his world seems more populated and friendlier than mine. We walk in that stance particular to naturalists, heads swiveling, our hands curved to fit the rim of the binoculars held against our chests.

 He stops and points out a spider web glimmering on a bush. “It’s the pumpkin spider,” he says. It looks like an ordinary web to me, silky, luminescent, already a little tattered. I’m gazing around for fresh sights with my binoculars when Rich murmurs, as an aside, “The pumpkin spider eats her entire web every evening, then spins it new again in the morning.” We walk on, but his words lodge — I can actually feel it happening — in the region of my brain that makes metaphor.

“On Thermostats“:

Where I’m staying right now, at an artists’ retreat in Virginia, for some reason I control the heat in two separate blocks of rooms: in my residence and at the writing studios. The only thermostat lives on my wall in both locations, and it’s up to me to ensure that the heat is set at the “desired comfort level” for all ten people involved. What, exactly, that level might be for ten different people has not yet been made clear, and so I’ve kept the little red lever, naturally, attuned to my comfort, which is always a bit on the chilly side, to keep me alert.

You wouldn’t think it’d be such a big deal, this tiny responsibility, but I find I think about it all the time: I’m constantly pinging up from my chair to check the temperature, imagining the other writers at their desks, wreathed in scarves, rubbing their frostbitten hands (or wearing those Dickensonian gloves, with the fingertips cut off), sniffling, catching their death.

“Decoys“:

The other day I rented a car from Enterprise, and good to their word, they sent a car to pick me up. The driver, Stan, was nearly deaf — I had to repeat everything I said to him at least twice — and he spoke in a gravelly southern accent that turned everything in his mouth the texture of fine cornmeal pudding. But he had bright blue eyes and a friendly smile, and he wanted to know all about me.

“I’m an artist myself,” he said. He makes wooden decoys, and came in third in the Decoy World Championships last year.

Now that the beginnings are in your mind, explore what is happening at the very opening of all three.

In the essay that beings with her walk with the naturalist, the speaker brings us into her setting by comparing the naturalist’s way of seeing with her own untrained way and then by having us see despite the way they see differently, they are this morning walking the same way — “heads swiveling, our hands curved to fit the rim of the binoculars held against our chests.” The speaker, the naturalist and now we, Brenda’s audience are one, ready for the next event, the naturalist’s words taking up residence in the essay’s speaker: “The pumpkin spider eats her entire web every evening, then spins it new again in the morning.” We are experiencing a dynamic between similar and different. What is different–the new surroundings, the naturalist’s vision, the information about the spider — attaches to a way of being the writer identifies as similar.

In the essay about her experience with the thermostat at a writing retreat, she begins by letting us know where she is and what responsibility she has been assigned and then she tells us, how without instruction from anyone, she has settled on a temperature to keep the thermostat at. However, feeling uneasy about the responsibility and how others may be feeling, she then keeps adjusting the thermostat that regulates the heat in her residence and the others’ studios as she envisions them chilled. Then she tells us how having this responsibility makes her think of why she comes to retreats–to get away from responsibility and experience the mind as a receiver rather than actor.

Again, we see, through Brenda’s eyes, the similar in the different–she is in a new place with a new responsibility but she recognizes in herself, the way she is normally, a way that interferes with writing. In this place, with this stimulation she gets to see her inner behavior and overcome it. Ultimately, she’ll weave her thermostat experience into her writing, her mind receiving it as metaphor to work with, to provide a route to insight:

And maybe, in the end, we just have to learn that there are no perfect conditions for writing. No perfect conditions for anything, in fact; maybe the best we can do is learn how to take each bit of the world as it comes, to have no real preferences, only what the Zen masters call a “radical acceptance” for things as they are. There are so many thermostats, after all, we try to keep calibrated in this world, and every single one of them eventually fails.

In the third essay, “Decoys,” Brenda tells the reader she is being driven by an Enterprise Rental Car employee to the car she’s rented to see the landscape for the weekend. By the second paragraph, as in the first essay, she is engaged and reporting what they speak about. She has learned that he is a duck decoy artist, and it isn’t long before she is both listening and imagining what fashioning his decoys is like and then using the notion of creating decoys to evoke something of the act of creating in writing. Again, she is using what is different — decoy art and writing — to illuminate her understanding of what goes on when she shapes memory on the page.

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You can follow Brenda’s lead in mining singular moments in your life and the encounters you have for putting your truth on the page.

The essential ingredient for this kind of essay is receptiveness to the outside world. Brenda has gone away to write. She is involved with the process of writing even as she is out with a naturalist, confronted with thermostat guards, or driving with a decoy artist. Because she is not busy taking care of her usual commitments, she has time to dream and to play and to absorb. When she is in this state, the world delivers people and their perceptions into the events of Brenda’s days, “pinging,” to use her word, her receptive unconscious into conscious inquiry through images and associations. The result is a seeing of what she is experiencing as metaphor for how writing alters and affects her being.

We can’t all leave for writer’s retreats, but we can all find a way to access that part of ourselves that is receptive and around which events, images and dialog align themselves into new meanings. We can all change our environment for a short time, short enough to let go and absorb what is new around us. If you can take a whole day to do this, you can have the extra hours to shed your too-much-to-the-world-extended self and enter the quiet inner space by reading and walking and listening to ambient sounds. Most likely, you are lucky if you get a morning or an afternoon or an evening. Whatever the time you have, enter into an activity new to yourself by yourself. That way you will not be distracted and unable to notice what images, sound and events seem important to you, as opposed to others.

Where to go?

• Do a guided or self-guided nature walk.
• Take a city walk or a seminar in a field new to you.
• Visit an historical library or museum.
• Tour a factory, mill, farm or historic house where a docent talks about the history and community.
• Find an exhibit where you can read and take notes on the displays.
• Go to a place where people are busy in an activity and you can overhear them or listen to instruction–a small airport for private planes, a hill where hang gliders take off, a park where serious kite flying is going on, a ball field, a place where people are fishing off the docks or digging for clams.
• Spend time at an ethnic marketplace.

What is important is that you don’t feel too overwhelmed with the grandeur of where you’ve gone or with feeling overly conspicuous. You’ll be more apt to hear things that connect with your mind and feelings if you are not feeling like too much of a stranger or too much in awe, feelings that, just like companions, can distract you from your intentions of catching what feels meaningful for making metaphor and exploring. The small ways we feel a stranger and in awe are more lucrative for this assignment.

Be sure to bring a notebook to jot down whatever appeals to you to jot down. We learn so many things of interest without quite knowing why they have caught our attention. Write down the names of people and events, flora and fauna, and equipment. Write down dialog, how-to information, and descriptions of what you see and hear and smell and taste and touch where you are. Write down anything that enters the scene that catches your fancy — a bird, a dog, a toddler, an elderly person, or seeds on the wind, whatever it is.

Now, leave this place and go to a quiet place to write. That place may be home at your desk, alone at the library, in your car. It may be directly following the event you’ve taken notes in or hours or days later. Whenever you settle down to write, start as Brenda does, showing us yourself where you were. Pick out the one most important thing that is happening — a naturalist’s talk, a driver engaged in conversation, an odd responsibility you have in the situation (maybe you’ve been told to tell the speaker when she gets too quiet for others to hear or been asked to carry some equipment or samples or give out booklets).

Next, let your mind make leaps to what this situation makes you remember from your life past or present. Whatever that is, write about it, describing it well through the senses, noting how you felt then or now about the situation.

Come back to the “present” of the essay, which is the place you started from, the tour or visit you were making. What is the same about it and the place your heart and mind leapt to by association? Explore this.

Lastly, now that you know something new, what will you do with this information? How will you behave, folding it into you life; how are you changed? Write what occurs to you into the essay. Brenda decides to forget about the thermostat, crack open the door because they others have made it to hot, and get to work writing. She knows she will raise her binoculars “and see, in sharp focus, this balcony and this climbing rose, this rocking chair, and barely—like a ghost, like a shade—the faint contour of a person bent over her notebook, writing it all down.” She drives away, “duckless, into the perfect autumn day, sunlight gleaming off every real autumn leaf, red flashes of real cardinals along the fence, my borrowed car nosing along the highway, so clearly a real car, and me inside it, new memories already on the way.”

What will you be doing? Write your essay and find out. It will nourish you.