Author: Angela Rydell

This spring is change-crazy. I swear a cartoonish “boing-oing” emanates from my desktop thermometer with each leap from one temperature extreme to the next.

Many of the young plants in my garden are like wild animals peeking from darkness rather than eager green sprigs unfurling. But not all.

Early in April, when temperatures spiked past eighty degrees for a couple record-breaking days in a row, crocuses went off like tiny fireworks all over my yard. One even grabbed enough fast and furious energy to spark up under a dwarf hemlock.

As my yard transformed from blanketed-in-white to crackling-with-crocuses, just a couple miles away, the magnolias in Madison’s Longenecker Horticultural Gardens burst into a riotous full bloom—lush, expansive flowers flushed pearl-pink and hush-yellow in the sudden heat. Then the opposite extreme hit: rain and sleet, followed by snow and ice, coated the flowers in a glistening crystalline freeze.

But the blooms didn’t break off. In a few days the freeze eased and, as Madison’s arboretum newsletter described it, “cool cloudy days… like a refrigerator, helped preserve the open flowers and slow the opening of new buds (https://arboretum.wisc.edu/news/arboretum-news/how-magnolia-flowers-weather-an-unpredictable-spring/) .” The trees leveraged something called the “latent heat of fusion,” harnessing energy released during the phase change of water to ice and ice to water, preserving their own blooms.
Photo Credit: Bernard Spragg

The magnolias had what may be the most glorious bloom cycle the city has ever witnessed—brighter blossoms lasting longer than ever.

But every time I found myself admiring a thick blossomed tree, awash with the tranquil joy I often feel when tickled by noodling tendrils of spring, a cloud of anger hovered over the joy and darkened it.

I kept thinking, if only spring could be the way it used to be. If only climate change could change back to just… climate. I even resented the blooming, which made me even madder. I wanted to bow to those boughs, not fume at blooms of beauty unequaled in the arboretum’s history.

And what’s worse, I felt culpable. As if my use of plasticware while on picnics caused the magnolias to super-bloom and muted the budding of my bleeding hearts. As if extra sweaters in my closet caused die-off on my Japanese maples. Which made me feel all the more stupid with anger.

There I was, furious in the face of this sparkling pastel evanescence, feeling helpless, delightfully dazzled, and pissed off—all at the same time.

How much of this was about me, if any of it? All this change is so much bigger than me feeling stuck in the rootedness of the imperfect society I’m part of.

I personally am not the one cause, nor am I the one solution. But maybe I’m like one of those magnolia blossoms tremulous among thousands in Madison, millions in Wisconsin, and trillions across the planet. A part of the whole impacted by external conditions I can’t control any more than a blossom can control the tree it blooms upon.

Or is that metaphor a palliative—seeing myself helpless as a tree to the conditions around it. But maybe a tree isn’t as helpless as it seems. Like the magnolias impacted by conditions out of their direct control, could I, too, reach back into the adaptive wisdom within my nature, resist withering in the weird weather, and instead, use the “latent heat of fusion” as I clash with conflicting conditions, and let it charge me? Give me an extended bloom?

In an interview about her newest book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Sarah Bakewell quotes Robert Ingersoll’s happiness creed: “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

And here I am, in the springing time, about to launch forward, suffused with a coiled urge towards change. To spring upwards out of one phase, into another. As James Wright once wrote, “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

What will that change be for me? Stay tuned.

How about you? Have you faced something that angered or moved you in strange and unexpected ways, until you were pushed to a point you were about to break into blossom? Maybe something akin to this feeling sparked you to write your novel. Write a poem, a story, a personal essay. Even align a group of poems or stories or essays into a collection.

Perhaps a latent heat of fusion has helped or will help you keep writing, even extend or help you better understand what you know and see and understand or wonder at of the world around you, or better preserve something you love as fully and wildly as Madison’s magnolias bloomed this May.

Back in the late 90s, Kurt Vonnegut gave some weird advice to a packed crowd of readers and writers at the Wisconsin Union here in Madison. I’d just started taking my writing seriously and was grabbing tips whenever I could find them from local workshops, audited classes, even a neighbor I’d cat-sat for who had published a few poems. Now here I was at the feet of a master, Distinguished Lecture Series program in one hand, pen poised in the other. But the advice that stayed with me I never wrote down. I might have even dropped my pen when Vonnegut gave it.

He told everyone to write a story, poem, essay—something we could complete. Give ourselves to it wholly. Finish the piece. Then like Buddhists constructing and deconstructing sand mandalas, destroy it.

Yes, destroy it. That’s what he said. I blinked a few times. A sense of unease grew in my itchy fingertips. Destroy my writing?I’d diligently saved every halfway-decent scrap I’d written to date. All my potential-laden lines seemed precious, let alone the final drafts I’d cobbled together. Maybe I could let a scrap or two go. But a completed piece? No way.

I still remember sitting in that chilly lecture hall, huddled in my winter coat, trying to imagine myself crumpling a satisfyingly final draft into a ball and throwing it in the trash—only to rush back, dig it up, and smooth it back out again.

I desperately wanted to write something good. Wanted to be read. To have someone sitting in a dusty office in the corner of a university town say, “Yes, this is something I’d like to publish.”

And Vonnegut was saying don’t worry about it. Publishing isn’t all that important. The writing itself matters more.

Maybe he, the great Kurt Vonnegut, had enough ideas so he could burn a few. But not me.
Heck, what if by destroying my completed work, I destroyed the best thing I’d ever written to date? And no one would ever know? Not even me.

I honestly don’t remember anything else he said. Just, destroy your art. And I remember the feeling that came over me as he continued talking—a mix of demoralization, hubris, horror, exhaustion, and somehow in there, swirling around with everything else, the lightest breeze of liberation.

But I did not take his advice. To this day, I still have a box of poems and stories squirreled away from that early period of my writing, most never published.

Over the years, though, I did unintentionally—not intentionally—lose a few final drafts. The misery of computer glitches and misplaced hard copies forced me to confront the splintering, broken-glass panic of irrevocably lost work. I had to let go of that writing because there was nothing to hold onto anymore. So I’d start again, bemoaning the best of my work while creating something new and discovering, in recreation, that where old best words were sacrificed, new best words could be found.

And each time I started over, I learned I could do good work when all seemed lost. Or literally was lost.

You may be reading this thinking, um, Angela, losing work because of a computer malfunction and reworking those original ideas back into something decent isn’t really what Vonnegut was getting at.

I hear you. There’s a bigger concept at work here than “rewriting is an essential part of the writing process.” Yet a lot of new writers question whether rewriting is worthwhile. I can’t tell you how many beginning writers have asked me something akin to, “Doesn’t taking something apart to put it back together again drain a piece of its originality, the spark of spontaneity? Isn’t that a bad thing?”

Here’s my two cents: The “bad thing”, if there is one, isn’t losing a first spark but putting all your trust in a single spark at the onset. True and abiding originality comes not through the admittedly alluring first blush of a good idea, but through testing and executing and developing your ideas, making room for new ones to grow, even an idea that wasn’t there when you started.

I’m typing this not only for my students, but for myself, back in that audience, holding tight to my pen. Because the more interesting questions for me now are, “How can I become better at letting go?”

Even, yes, letting go of what feels like the perfect idea, the just-right image, the stellar sentence so I can better resee what I just did in a new light, then backwards, then upside down, until I find value not only in construction but deconstruction, shift my attention in new ways so the old becomes new again. So what I’m making now matters as much as any other thing made.

At times, I swear it feels like my writing could even be made, remade, or let go of just as easily as a lump of clay can be shaped and reshaped. Sometimes it seems I’ve been using and reusing the same lump all my life—shaping and reshaping words from a collective mound to be massaged, eased, brought back to form and collapse until I somehow believe I hold in my hands creation repurposing creation. Until the kneading and molding and remolding matters as much—maybe more, yes—than the made thing. Making for the sake of making.

So, over the years, I’ve warmed to Vonnegut’s instruction of destruction. I’ve begun to see it as an invitation to appreciate how nourishing a commitment to the creative process can be. Come to value creating over chancing unpredictable gambles with publishing, and to value and embrace the making over the made, as a revitalizing source of stability and strength.

The Instruction of Destruction

TAKE THE VONNEGUT CHALLENGE

Write something for the sake of writing something—nothing more, nothing less. Write knowing that you will complete it, let it go, and won’t move on to publish or share it with others. But don’t just write any old thing. It may be an essay, short story, poem, chapter of a novel, or more. Craft it. Build it the way you’d build a solid fire. Let the spark grow. Turn it into something meaningful. That means more than one draft. You may spend a few hours or a few days on the piece, even weeks, all the while knowing you will not keep it, knowing you’re writing purely for the sake of making something. Consciously reflect on the process as you’re engaged in it. How is your writing process different than it would be otherwise? What’s the same? Is the writing itself different than other writing you’ve engaged in? In what ways? How about you—are you relating to your writing differently? Is the process more pleasurable, or less so? Both? And if so, how can both things be true at once? What is the writing or process missing? What does the experience help you gain? If a piece of writing isn’t read, is it truly complete? Reflect as you go, share your insights with other writers you know. And I’m happy to hear about your process, too. Simply reply to this email.

BUILD A FIRE JOURNAL

While camping this past summer, I carved out some retreat time and started something I called “fire journaling”, inspired in part by Vonnegut’s challenge. Basically, whatever I wrote each night I’d toss into the campfire. Yup, I went for it! Goodbye, creation! Want to hear more about this process? Click the button below to get on my DIY Retreat Kit Waitlist. My Inlet DIY Retreat Kits include downloadable instructions for assembling your own DIY Retreat (how to make retreat space either away from home or at home), plus a couple spotlights, like how you might use a Fire Journal on retreat.