I am so pleased to share news of Brenda Miller’s new book, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, available now for pre-order ahead of the July 13 release date. She has answered questions I posed to her and shared an excerpt from the book. A contributor to Writing It Real over many years, you can find her work in our article archives. Just type Brenda Miller in the article search box for a list and links to them.

July 1, 2021

Sheila
How did you approach the task of putting together this book?

Brenda
The essays in A Braided Heart were written over a long span of time, probably close to twenty years. As writers, we naturally want to explore the nature of our writing lives, but I’ve always found that references to being a writer in personal essays to be a bit off-putting—meaning that it takes me, the reader, out of the world the essay is creating.

So, I had many small pieces about my history as a writer or my thoughts about writing that never quite fit into any of my other collections (believe me, I tried!) As my career as a writer and a teacher evolved, I also published several craft essays that readers found useful for their own writing or for teaching creative nonfiction. I would receive many requests for these articles over the years.

In 2019, I was between projects and had been working mainly on poetry. I had some time for a writing retreat which you, Sheila, graciously provided as a week in your lovely home! I was curious to see how many of these writing-on-writing pieces I had floating around and began to corral them into a manuscript. I was pleased to see that there were enough to make a book. I then played with order so that I could find a way to balance the more personal essays with the more academic pieces.

Then the pandemic hit, and I was corresponding with my friend and writing buddy Julie Marie Wade. We wrote about the nature of collaboration during isolation, and that piece became a fitting epilogue to the collection. (As it happens, our collection of collaborative essays—Telephone: Essays in Two Voices—is coming out at nearly the same time as A Braided Heart, just a few months later, this fall.)

Sheila
What do you most hope readers will come away with after reading the three sections in A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form?

Brenda
The first section collects essays that form a picture of how writing has been a part of my life from a very early age up to the present day. Many of those pieces were written during writing retreats over the years, where one is hyper-aware of how writing defines you. I hope these essays will inspire readers to think about their own beginnings as a writer and how that thread has continued to be prominent in their lives.

The second section is where the more academic pieces belong, clustered together to give readers insights into the nuances of craft, especially in lyric forms such as the braided essay or the “hermit crab” essay. Many of these pieces started as talks I gave at places such as the Rainier Writing Workshop or the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

The third section returns to the writing life closer to the present day and these short pieces are kind of a hybrid between personal and craft essays, mainly focused on how I keep myself writing. I hope readers might find some spark there for their own writing practices. The last piece, “The Shape of Emptiness,” brings us into my life as a writing teacher, and for me, this seemed an apt way to complete the body of the collection, on the word “love.”

Sheila
The essay is extraordinarily moving, sparked by a student whose mother died three weeks before your class ended. He promised he would be back in a week and he was. He presents to the class from his question “What is the shape of emptiness,” having had each classmate squeeze a lump of playdough and then displaying all the squeezings on a table. You write:

…he gathers our hands and gives them back to us one by one. We take them from him carefully, so we can carry our emptiness into the day. We compare them, showing off the shapes of our grasping. Curled like prayers. Like anger. Like love.

In what ways do you think this book has come from you at just the right time?

Brenda
I’m honored that this book has arrived in the world just as we are emerging from one of the weirdest and most challenging years we have faced as a community. I think our priorities shifted, became clearer, and I hope A Braided Heart will speak to staying true to ourselves, knowing that we are all connected. This book reminds me of how writing and teaching will be constants in my life, but that I am entering a new phase of life that will allow me to see how this work will evolve.

Sheila
Thank you for the Q&A and thank you for permission to share the excerpt “The Case Against Courage,” full of reminders about what it means to truly write our experience and gain insight.

A Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction

by Brenda Miller

Recently I gave a reading of a personal essay that was, well, really personal; it inadvertently revealed more about myself than I’d intended. Alas, this happens quite frequently: while I’m actually shy and quiet in my “real” life, put paper and pen in front of me and I’ll say anything, blurt out the most intimate details with no coercion whatsoever. I must be in a kind of trance when I do this, unaware of the real import of what I’m doing; I must be, as Cynthia Ozick has put it, in thrall to the “ghostwriter” at work. In her essay “Ghost Writers,” she says, “Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude and never when they are out industrially chatting on the terrace.”

When I give a reading, I’m “chatting on the terrace,” but I’ve forgotten to put my clothes on before venturing out in public. I’ve been following instinct with my eyes closed, not primping in front of a mirror, so I’ll blithely get up in front of a crowd of strangers and read what was conceived in the dark, concentrating only on the words and sentences and sounds, surprised, when I look up, to see embarrassed smirks on faces in the audience.

After this particular reading, people came up to congratulate me on the piece. Some zoomed right in and shook my hand; some hung back a little, embarrassed, whispering together. Most of them looked me up and down, as if appraising me in a new light. And all of them used the word “brave.” As in: you were so brave to read that essay. Or what a brave piece! Or, the one that really made me wince whispered as a confidence in my ear: I could never be brave enough to write something like that.

I thanked everyone warmly, and I really did appreciate their praise, but I went back to my seat feeling suddenly self-conscious, deflated, a fraud. Brave? I’m afraid of my own shadow. And to anoint me as brave made me feel as if I had really done something wrong, something no one in their right mind would do: risk making an ass of myself in public. Bravery implied that I had screwed up my courage to both write and read that essay, when courage had nothing to do with it. I had simply been in my chair writing. I had been following form and language and voice to get the essay where it wanted to go; at some point, momentum had taken over. I didn’t even know what I was writing until I’d written it, and I’d been chuckling the whole time, enjoying myself immensely. I’d read the piece only because I liked the form so much, loved reading that voice aloud. Brave? Uh-oh, I thought, what have I done?

*

The words “brave” and “courage” seem to come up with great frequency when we read creative nonfiction work that reveals intimate details about an author’s life. We see the acclamation “a brave memoir” in book reviews, or find the adjective “courageous” popping up among the cover blurbs. We overhear the whispers, “how brave,” at a reading where both the writer and the audience have found themselves near tears.

But is it really bravery we’re witnessing? And is courage now considered part of the basic skill set of the autobiographical writer? In fact, I wonder if distilling strong emotion into images and voices that will endure actually takes the opposite of courage. What does it take? Maybe a certain naiveté. Denial that we are doing anything dangerous. Maybe it actually takes courage’s evil twin, cowardice—a refusal to really face those emotions the way a normal, healthy person would, retreating instead into the refuge of form: words, sentences, images. Maybe it really takes avarice, a desire to plunder the most exposed parts of the self for the sake of a good paragraph.

I have great respect and admiration for writers who are willing to risk something in their work; as we all know, powerful writing must risk something in one way or another. And it can certainly be daunting to speak when silence is so much more comfortable. But I’ve come to see that at some point—some crucial point—we need to shift our allegiance from experience itself, to the artifact we’re making of that experience on the page. To do so, we mustn’t find courage; we must, instead, become keenly interested in metaphor, image, syntax, and structure: all the stuff that comprises form. We are hammering out parallel plotlines, not plumbing the depths of our souls, but as collateral to that technical work the soul does indeed get tapped and gushes forth.

*

This allegiance to artifact over experience perhaps becomes most obvious when we experience nonfiction in lyric forms. When creative nonfiction writers choose to write in nonlinear forms such as the short-short essay, the braided essay, or the “hermit crab” (a term I coined in the first edition of Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction for an essay that appropriates an already-existing form to tell its story), they magnify the fact that they are manipulating experience for the sake of art. These writers immediately signal to the reader that the intent is not necessarily to convey information or fact, or to bravely illuminate dark areas of one’s life, but to create the truth of literature, of metaphor—a truth that is not always so direct.

Case in point: that really personal essay I read in public? I wrote it in the most impersonal form: a “table of figures,” where the personal narrative is told, and embedded within, the ostensibly descriptive voice of an objective list of contents: i.e.: “Figure 1.1: A girl becomes aware of herself as a girl. . . .” By contrasting deeply interior material with the more public persona, I mitigated any sense that I might be about to perform an act of indecent exposure in public.

Once we start writing in any form (including traditional narratives), experience instantly becomes transmuted into artifact, whose close cousin is “artifice.” In lyric essays, this sense of artifice becomes magnified—the forms often draw attention to themselves, and so the fact that one is creating an artifact, not a transcript of experience, becomes more obvious. This use of form also heightens the interaction with a reader; as John D’Agata has said of the lyric essay, “they require us to complete their meaning.” There are gaps, moments of silence, other voices, and/or a magnification of a single moment in time: all these techniques signal to a reader that we’re in a realm where there is no absolute truth, where imagination will come into play, where experience is quite obviously being shaped for literary or artistic purposes.

For some writers, especially beginning writers, the conscious use of form can sometimes be the only way certain kinds of truths can be approached at all. Since these truths need to be contained more forcefully, form essentially becomes the writer’s inky courage, much the way the use of form in poetry can give rise to astonishing work. As poetry teachers often witness, when a student’s mind is engaged with the rules of a villanelle or a sestina, the most creative and heartfelt content often arises, the “bravest” content.

Concrete forms allow for what I like to call “inadvertent revelations,” where the writer no longer seems in complete control. Revelation, or discovery, emerges organically from the writing; the essay now seems to reveal information about the writer, rather than the writer revealing these tidbits directly to the reader. In the lyric essay class I teach, I often start with an essay from Stephen Dunn; it is one line long, with the title “Little Essay on Form”: “We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.” This “little essay” automatically sets up the synergy that exists between form and content, and this little manifesto insists that content may dictate form as surely as form can shape content.

We then go on to experiment with form: first the short-shorts, where the restricted space of a single page encourages students to magnify small details until they yield meaning. There’s little room for abstract thought or cliché or long-winded setups in the short-short form—no runway on which to build up one’s courage—and so experience is shaped to give precedence to image, scene, detail, subtle metaphor, not necessarily to “feelings” or bare emotion. We use the online journal Brevity, edited by Dinty W. Moore, to seek out models for this form. In one such essay, “The Sloth,” by Jill Christman, we see that the impetus for writing may have its roots in deep and scary emotion, but the writing goes beyond that, finds the mettle to explore this emotion through keen observation, precise language, and organic metaphor. It begins:

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the water, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.

Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth.

Notice how Christman’s description of grief is not so much an emotional feeling as a physical one: “no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.” She gives us the context for this situation quickly—a fiancé killed—but her most effective move is that she does not start with that line. No, we start with a fact external to her own experience, a physical fact that will become the focal point for Christman’s overarching metaphor. With this ostensibly simple move, Christman shows us that she has the perspective to translate experience into artifact, and she is not screwing up her courage so much as becoming keenly interested in the connections between her own inner state of mind and the images the outer world provides her. Noticing the sloth, the narrator takes herself out of introspection and so, in the end, this story becomes not a polemic about her own personal grief, but about new insights into the nature of grief, an articulation that does not necessarily arise from one’s own experience, but from a literary reimagining of that experience:

I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching.

What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.

These paragraphs end the short essay. From a statement of fact about an equilibrium of temperature, we come full circle, but this fact is now imbued with much more meaning. Because the essay is so short, every image must be precise, every word must further the narrator’s discovery in a focused and measured way. The essay must move like the sloth—slowly, deliberately—opening up space for this grief to manifest in the reader’s own heart. Christman didn’t need courage; she needed that sloth. She needed that sloth to carry the weight of her grief for her, and eventually for us.