“Learning to Drive” by Katha Pollitt in The New Yorker Magazine, July 22, 2002:

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 “Learning to Drive” is an engrossing and humble piece of writing from a leftist writer of renown, who refused to shy away from using very personal material. Her essay narrates her driving lessons with an instructor named Ben, a gifted teacher from Manila.  As he offers her advice on why she is having trouble driving well, she takes these lessons to heart and in so doing exposes her own heart. When Ben says she does not observe well, she lists a string of important behaviors she had failed to observe: that her mother was a secret drinker, for instance, and that her live-in lover was a philanderer for many years showing signs she somehow overlooked.

As the learns to drive, she grows in her conviction to get her license, get in her car, listen to the rumble of the engine turning over (the anger she feels?) and then drive well–a metaphor for thinking on her own again and reuniting with her self-determination.  She drives with Ben and allows herself to examine the anger she feels toward her lover who said he left because she was not enough, sexually, politically, and otherwise. She realizes that he was having enough sex with at least two other lovers to believe he didn’t have to bring much to her bed and she wonders why it is she who is supposed to have brought more to the relationship.

The author tells us she sometimes starts to meditate on rain blurred street lights and think about how romantic and sad they look and how this notion of romance couldn’t have existed before electricity and so even though it seems old fashioned it is modern. She realizes this thought itself is one her ex-lover would have, and she wonders if she will ever get her mind back wholly to herself.  Even though she sometimes leaves her hands in her lap at intersections and isn’t ready with them on the wheel when the light turns, she is learning to drive and, as she does, purges herself of a failed and angering romance.

In fact, even as she decries the faith she put in her ex-lover, she is putting her faith in another man, her instructor. She believes in Ben, her third driving teacher; he will be there for her even after she takes the driving test and he will help her learn to drive the freeways.

I find it interesting that within the cocoon of a good learning situation, where the author can build trust and comfort, comes embodied learning about how to do what she needs to do to make a clear passage to new stages in her life.  It is also interesting that this is her third attempt to learn to drive, but she won’t strike out because she is highly motivated.  Learning to drive will raise her esteem in her daughter’s eyes and in her own eyes now that she is unpartnered and coming to terms with her loss and her ex-lover’s deceit.

Here is a list from the essay of what Katha Pollitt learns for making her life passage as she learns to drive:

“Observation, Kahta, observation! This is your weakness,” Ben exclaims and the author writes, “This truth hangs in the air like mystical advice from a sage in a martial-arts movie,” going on to recount the list of negatives she failed to observe her whole life.

In describing Ben as the perfect man in her life right now, Pollitt writes, “…his use of the double-brake is protective without being infantilizing, his corrections are firm but never condescending or judgmental, he spares my feelings but tells the truth if asked.”

“He’s a big improvement on my former lover,” she realizes drawing a lesson from her own description of Ben in comparison to the former lover.  The ex-lover had, she writes, “told a mutual friend that he was leaving me because I didn’t have a driver’s license, spent too much time on e-mail, and had failed in seven years to read Anton Pannekoek’s ‘Workers’ Councils’ and other classics of the ultra-left.”

“Ben would never leave me because I didn’t have a driver’s license,” Pollitt posits, “Quite the reverse.”

It seems that by using our engagement in practical life situations as the basis for our writing, we may be able to learn more quickly than by merely “working on ourselves” without the benefit of writing about the events in our lives.

Your Turn

See if you can brainstorm a list of things you are currently learning to do.  Then brainstorm problems you have that perhaps have no clear-cut solution or have solutions you haven’t been able to put into motion yet.  Pair one of the problems with one of the things you are learning to do.  Let the process of what you are learning to do become a subject that you will take on for an “outer story” in your writing.

Write a narrative about learning this new process. Be detailed. Let the details call up associations to your “problem” and see how this leads you to a way of being that helps you through the difficulty.

If you don’t think you are learning anything new, go out and sign up to learn something new—a new language, a new way to garden, scuba diving, etc.  Or, force yourself to visit a new place and write about that journey while also letting the new sights, sounds, difficulties and easy patches conjure up elements of the problem you are working on.

Writing is a tool for promoting self-growth.  What we do in the outer world helps us contemplate our inner world if we are watchful in the way that writing asks us to be.

Brenda Miller, Season of the Body, Sarabande Books, Inc., 2002

Click here for an excerpt of one of the essays in Miller’s book

“To me, these days, story is more about continuance, the ways we keep coming back, the ways we keep going on.  As I write, I feel my past selves loitering inside me: a girl listening to the ringing telephone at her hospital bedside, a young woman sitting cross-legged in meditation for days at a time; a massage therapist cupping her hands on the holy bone. These younger selves, and many others, conspire to make me what I am at this moment…”  Brenda Miller writes this in the epilogue to her extraordinary three-part collection of essays.

In this lulling collection, Miller chants and she lists.  She uses words and their definitions, makes leaps of associations among images, and reports physical sensations of the body.  Ultimately, Miller weaves a spell under which she conjures the silken essence of life, even as life sometimes offers her rough fibers.  There is a clear line throughout the accumulation of essays about the work involved in accepting loss: of an important lover, an important time in life, and the ability to have children.  What is a woman without the ability to have children?  Who is a woman who lives without a partner?  How does the forming of bonds outside of the usual expected ones happen and by what grace?  To what and to whom does one attach extraordinary love and affection if not a husband and children?  How do we take disappointment and nourish growth without bitterness?  How do we take what life has dealt us and create that other heart, the “extra heart” Miller speaks of:  “a contrabassoon to echo my everyday pulse.  It’s not my imagination.  I hear it there, beating inside me.”

Miller asks difficult, important questions and she seeks a way of feeling, living, and observing that will help her find the answers she craves, to know them deep inside and to have them become the matrix of her spirit.

Let’s study one of her essays to find a way we might inspire ourselves to write lyrically to discover our “extra heart”:

In one essay entitled “Artifacts,” Miller writes in parts subtitled: Angel, Shell, Crystal, Dead People’s Things, and Empty Vessels.  This is an interesting list.  It has movement from three specific item names to the names for categories of items.  It is as if the writer experienced a rush of desire to emotionally take in more of the meaning of her things and in so doing created a momentum.  She comes full circle from angel to empty vessels, two items that conjure spirit rather than matter.  In fact, Miller’s words become artifacts of the spirit.  Cumulatively, these meditations on the things around her become a meditation for moving deep inside.

Once you have read the descriptions Miller provides in the order she provides them, your inner self has moved from the surfaces of tangible objects into the landscape of spiritual meaning.  The angel’s O-shaped mouth that Miller says could be registering surprise or singing, the shell that becomes an eye staring at her, asking her to go deeper in a spiral path to the center, the crystal that can change the color of light falling on skin, and the dead people’s things “sad now in the wrong hands” all speak of her mission.  “Go deeper, observe, empty out, fill up,” they say.

How does one fill up by emptying out?

Miller writes, “And as I surround myself with empty vessels, I become aware of my own heartbeat, the shallow labor of my lungs against my ribs.” How fragile the exterior world is, how changing, but how substantial the interior world, the world in which one can flow through the discovery of timeless messages in objects and life events.

Your Turn

Look around the place where you live or write or work.  List some of the tangible things you see.  Can you group some of them into categories: things that have strayed from home to my office, things that I keep because people gave them to me, things I no longer know why I have, things I would get rid of in a heartbeat, etc.

Choose one of the categories you have just created.  Call a piece of writing by the name of that category.  Inside the essay, make subheadings listing particular objects from the category you have invented. Describe these objects.  Take off from the physical description and tell anecdotes about the history of that object in your life—whether it’s been around a long time or a short time.  Some of our descriptions may have humor and others may show anger or fear or annoyance.  Some of the objects may engage you in dialog. Let them.  Keep going describing each of these objects.  Try for a least five as Brenda does. Stay away from even numbers—odd amounts lend themselves to discover because there is something off balance!

After you have described all the objects you want to, read through your descriptions.  What subtext can you find?  In other words, when you are describing these objects what do you think you are really exploring emotionally? Whatever that is, replace your working title with a new title that says what that emotional exploration is: Being left, being promoted, being fired, graduating, having a child, losing a parent, making friends, moving, hating, loving, yelling, whispering.  See what happens when you read your descriptions under the new title you have just given your piece of writing.

A Year in Van Nuys by Sandra Tsing Loh, Three Rivers Press, 2001

Click here for more information about the author

This collection of essays, inspired as a parody of A Year in Province and all that is written to get going on our own material. No matter how quotidian or lowly in rank or lacking in glamour our lives may be (in Loh’s case the San Fernando Valley city where she lives), it is our senses of humor and our imaginative conjuring that make our subject matter compelling.  What entertains and delights others are a strong voice, humor and an ability to make readers view the world through discerning eyes. Loh pulls this off in spades!

One strategy Loh adopts frequently in her essays is the classification/division approach to humor writing.  Whether she is writing about kinds of friends or kinds of listening, she combines her original but instantly recognizable categories with details and language that make her voice hover on the fine line between laughing with and ranting against life and what it offers.  Hence, we recognize ourselves and both shrink back from and laugh about our foibles.

In “The Winter of Our Discontent,” Loh writes, “Look at my pallid, low-fat smorgasbord of thirtysomething friends.  They fall into maybe…five different categories.”

She continues her essay by naming and writing about them:

“One, friends who are only available once every three months, for lunch…”

“Two, friends who leave loving, elaborate—even tearful—fifteen-minute-long messages on your answering machine once every two years at approximately eleven-oh-five at night…”

“Three, friends who have morphed into half of a couple you no longer recognize…”

“Four, friends who always urgently want to see you and who always urgently cancel at the last moment for an even more urgent reason…”

“Five, friends who, like the Unabomber, have become total hermits…”

In the essay “Summer Where We Winter,” Loh again divides and classifies to elucidate (the nuances of living in Los Angeles. She sings the praises of a population that has mastered the art of “controlling the flow of one’s inattention.” She delineates ten ways to do this with titles for the segment of the population most likely to practice the type of listening and anecdotal descriptions of these practitioners at work.

Sample listening styles are: “‘I Married a Nutcase’ Listening,” “‘Defensive’ Listening, aka ‘They’re Mad at Me for Never Listening’ Listening,” “‘If I Don’t Listen, I’ll Pay Later’ Listening,” and “‘Making a Deposit for My Monologue to Come Later’ Listening.”  Sample practitioners include “Every Human Couple,” “People with Friends,” “Women with Friends,” “Graduates of Twelve-step Programs,” and “Those of Us Who Still Insist on Suffering Through L.A. Cocktail Parties.”

Your Turn

Think of your pet peeves in life.  Can you form a category from some of the items in your list?  Can you then divide that category into at least three divisions?  Kinds of neighbors, kinds of neighbors’ dogs, kinds of dog walkers. Ah, okay that’s one highest on my list of pet peeves right now.

Can I name the divisions with words that indicate why I am peeved?  Here are some that come to mind: Dog walkers who walk five to six dogs at a time and leave no space on the sidewalk or front lawn fringes for anyone to pass while their dogs sniff around and do their business, dog walkers who stop and chat with you or others while their furry friend digs holes in your yard, dog walkers who failing to scoop the poop smile and say they usually do that but forgot their bags today, dog walkers who walk their dogs under cover of night and never scoop the poop, and dog walkers whose dogs bark at you in front of your own house.

You get the idea. Use the classification and division technique to organize a whole essay or to start one off or to deliver information in the middle of an essay.  The divisions and classifications you create and the order you put them in helps communicate how the world looks through your eyes.