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Notes on solitude, connection, and creativity
The letters used to come from Corrales and now arrive from Oakland and the Scottish Highlands. Sometimes from Sacramento and Fort Walton Beach. Closer to home—traveling across a couple of boroughs or the tri-state area—stationery is attached to gifts. Small notes on beautiful card stock with company letterheads. The letters all ask something different of me, but I store them in the same folder in the back of my Moleskine journal. My words spoon theirs. I return to them in my lonelier moments. To remind myself that I’m in conversation.
Except, at the moment, I’m not. Though I’ve always had a fondness for paper ephemera, most of my correspondence these days is bathed in blue light: quick emails, texts, DMs, and comments. I put my phone down and look at the few unanswered letters on my desk. There are words to arrange, but I seem only capable of writing about my mail rather than responding to it. I think it’s because I’ve been deep in Slowing, and my vision is still refocusing. A book can be a letter, but it can also be a hole. I fall into it, and other times, I jump headfirst—equal parts pain and pleasure—either way, it’s a long way back to the outside world.
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How it goes: Writing letters requires time. I rip myself away from the minutiae of the day the way I rip a page out of a looseleaf notebook. I look for scraps of paper or empty cards. I shake the ink out of a dying pen I picked up at an art store or restaurant. I don’t always start with Dear, but that’s usually what they are to me. I walk to the post office or mailbox and away from my screen. Then it’s out of my hands. Snail mail never gets old—especially for the recipient. Like Durga Chew-Bose aptly writes in her essay “At My Least and Most Aware” from Too Much and Not the Mood: “I’m still unprepared for how unusual it feels to receive a postcard; the traveled touch of card stock; of tapered handwriting chasing vertically up the side, allowing for a squished tender sign-off. Thinking of you. Miss you. An unforeseen Yours. Even the faint sound of a postcard falling through my mail slot and landing on the floor is, somehow, still enchanted.”
Postcards and letters don’t land on my floor, but what they contain can bring me to my knees. This response is usually elicited from the most prolific letter writer I know: my grandmother, Sharon.
Sharon takes up a lot of room in my writing. You’ll meet her in Slowing. Maybe you’re already familiar with her incredible paintings from my Instagram posts or from other stories I’ve snuck her into over the years. She lives across the country but shows up everywhere these days: in her painting above our bed, a new book proposal, a recently unearthed email exchange we had when I was in high school. (She’s since cast off email and texting—which she refers to as “the machine”—and I don’t blame her.) She is one of the first people in my life who showed me art-making was viable, both personally and professionally. She is ecstatic about Slowing. Because of this, her letters have swept in like a storm this year. We’re both getting older, and she is trying to know me in a way that I’ve only just accepted within myself: as an artist.
I typically like to send Sharon postcards from different museums around the city. The most recent was from Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature on view at The Morgan Library & Museum, which I visited on the day of the earthquake. My scribblings came later but were written like an aftershock. This time, I wrote less about the art and more in response to one of her ongoing requests: Tell me about it—about writing. So I did. I tried to, anyway.
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I’m used to spending long periods of time away from my family. They live in different states and in different ways. Geography aside, it feels apt to write about them in the spring: a season of holidays, birthdays, and other familial celebrations. It’s also a halfway point to November—a month Sharon and I share. (“I wonder if everyone loves the month of their birth best?” she writes me.) But with each passing event, more evidence that there isn’t all the time left in the world to find our way back to each other. This is particularly relevant with Sharon, who—knock on wood!—is in fantastic health for her age, though I’ve wondered about all of the things I haven’t asked or told her.
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke contends that solitude is integral to one’s work—and living an authentic life. “You tell me that those close to you are far away: this means that more space is beginning to open up around you,” he writes to Mr. Kappus. “If everything that is close to you seems far away, then space already extends for you into a great distance, all the way to the stars. You should rejoice in this expansion of yourself; nobody can follow you there. But be kind to those you leave behind by being steady and calm in your dealings with them.”
For the most part, my creative growth has flourished in this state. I have not taken any writing classes. I rarely attend events. I’m an introvert to the core. This runs counter to a landscape where knowledge and skill-sharing are commonplace, bolstered by the internet and social media. Recently, though, I’ve watched camaraderie become more conditional—sometimes revoked for the sake of “protecting” one’s time and energy. Boundaries are necessary, of course, but it’s become increasingly difficult to understand where the line is when asking for someone’s time and experience. And to, in turn, entrust them with your vulnerabilities.
I recognize it’s rare to have a confidante like Sharon in this day and age. Still, I can’t seem to reconcile my current inability to be in full creative conversation with her, especially given how many people—strangers in many ways—I speak with about their own work. But that’s the great struggle of my life: deciding what’s worth sharing versus keeping for myself. My questions for others form a bridge, but I somehow find myself walking along it like a track until I’m ahead of them, and they can only see my outline in the distance.
I’d like to think the distance between Sharon and me is what keeps us close. We don’t have a typical grandmother-granddaughter dynamic. She has never asserted herself as my mentor or superior and rarely signs off with Grandma. (“Hi Rach, it’s Sharon.”) She tells me more than once that she thinks of us as equals—as being “creatively connected.” Her questions for me never cease. Even if I can’t always respond to them, I think about them and—in the vein of Rilke—try to live them every day, especially when I’m alone.
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“I know I feel surrounded by friends in the paintings that hang around me,” Sharon writes in one of her recent letters. “And when you find good sentences, do you feel they came from another part of you? A part in connection to you, a part you need to summon?”
What I want to say:
The bravest parts of me come up with the “good” sentences. The rest have more growing to do.
It’s strange to write a story—if you can call this a story—inspired by unanswered mail, but they say to write where you’re attention is, so here we are.
Then again, I’m expecting my author copy of Slowing to arrive in the coming weeks, so there’s probably something to this. I wrote it for myself and for you—even when I don’t address you. I stamp myself on the page. The address is universal.
I didn’t say your name in the book out of an impulse to preserve/protect, but I wonder now if that was the right decision.
In Dear Memory, Victoria Chang pens a series of letters to family members and others who have shaped her life. In “Dear Teacher,” she writes: “I still remember the joys of my first book. It’s true, except in the rarest of circumstances, a first book most likely won’t change one’s life in immediate, external ways. But I know my first book changed me. I never stopped wanting after that. Not only books, but to be surprised again and again by the possible collisions of language. And the more I read, the more I realized how hard writing well really was. The more I read, the better I wanted to write.” I think this sentiment sums up where I am in my own writing journey.
Have you ever noticed writing contains all the letters to spell tiring? I’ve just realized that this is what my process feels like a lot of the time—but it’s not depleting; it's more like the feeling that follows an intense workout. (When I’m feeling particularly nice to myself, I put that leftover w in win. Mostly in wonder.)
Writing isn’t necessarily lonely, but it has a way of emphasizing when we are alone. The emptiness is slowly paved over with the crushing reality of words. Some people need help stepping over the cracks; others need to walk the path themselves. I’ve always been inclined toward the latter, which is probably why I’m drawn to Rilke’s call to “live the questions”—to welcome solitude.
Because, in solitude, I recognize that when we continue writing, we continue living. We continue to understand who we are in the recoil just as much as the outreach. That timing informs how we move in the world, towards the page—towards each other.
You have been so patient with me, especially in recent years. You have watched me oscillate between excitement and isolation. I thought for a while I was leaving you behind in this state, but in reality, you have been leading me forward by being steady and calm in your dealings with [me]. By writing to me and giving me the space to reach certain conclusions on my own. Like what Ocean Vuong writes in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “I am writing to reach you, even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”
With every unanswered letter, a chance to reorder the words—and my life.
Your letters are invitations I’m still learning to accept. Please keep sending them. I’ll write back soon.
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“You are filled with great strength, great consciousness, great creativity,” Sharon writes to me. “In that, you have so much power. You are learning to rely on yourself—there is no one else.”
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“I need more than basic tools to write a letter,” Rilke writes, “a bit of quiet, and also solitude, and an hour that does not feel too alien.”
The hour is 6:00 pm. The quiet is within me. The solitude is rolling in like a fog. Those same letters are still waiting for me, but this (slow) story—(news)letter—is a good start. Is it to Sharon or to you? Is it enough? Is it ever enough?
The answers never reveal themselves easily, but here is one thing I know for sure: relationships—between grandparents and grandchildren, mentors and mentees, writers and readers—are not set in stone. They begin on paper, a material born from the earth, and remade into a vehicle for human connection. A book or a letter is evidence of this transformation—that continued bond. A closeness going the distance: signed, sealed, and delivered. Hold it in your hands and know they are asking the questions—and perhaps living them. They have written something down, sent a piece of themselves to you.
Dearest Rachel,
I just re-read Light-Year—it is so fine. The writing itself is good, but the movement of it—horizontal, the seasons with the present—but the vertical of the climb, the unite, the aloneness, the light to you is just lovely, is just necessary—and is so beautifully accomplished. I felt a rush of pleasure at the end—the kind one gets when the work has been a gift given to one when one recognizes it in each of you. That long work that won’t end but only keep giving/taking. It is the current within you, your blessing, your curse. You are among the few who have it.
Continue!
Love,
Sharon
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For Your Next Chapter
If you enjoyed this slow story, here are a few others that might slow your scroll:
“LIGHT-YEAR” by yours truly
In the spirit of this slow story, I recommend checking out “LIGHT-YEAR,” the first essay I published here on Substack. It details my year of anxiety-induced aloneness made softer by bursts of light in literature, life, and love. I’m really proud of this piece and it has planted a seed for me in more ways than one.
“Sitting on the Swings Alone” by Amy Lin
You may know Amy Lin from her about her achingly beautiful memoir, Here After. I was thrilled to be in conversation with her about the book—and more—for the podcast, which is coming next month. In the meantime, she recently published a stunning story on her Substack, At the Bottom of Everything, about aloneness. As she writes at the end of the piece: “It was one of the first moments in my life that I would realize that for some, the sight of someone alone is a question.”
With My Back to the World: Poems by Victoria Chang
Next week, I’ll be publishing my podcast interview with Victoria Chang (whose creative nonfiction work, Dear Memory, was mentioned in this story). For the interview, I spoke with Chang about her recently published poetry collection, With My Back to the World. The collection is in conversation with the artist Agnes Martin’s work and explores themes like depression, grief, and self. It’s an incredibly brave and tender offering.