Our theme for the month of June is “older and wiser.” Writers were asked to write a response to one of their previous pieces. Today, Emily responds to her March 2022 post, “Close Enough.”
I’m not proud of all my writing for the post calvin.
As I looked back over several years of writing for the post calvin to answer this month’s theme, I approached the task with the same grim resignation I feel when I must check mouse traps. Either I shall have to reckon with the gruesome corpse of a joke that didn’t work, or a naive un-nuanced idea I’ve since grown out of, or an ill-considered rant. Or, finding no body, I must assume the problems are still scurrying about in the walls.
The internet, where most of my writing and yours lives, is forever. But the people we are—the versions—are temporary, fluid.
Writing for the post calvin has allowed (or compelled) me to grow up as a writer before an audience. Once a month, I open the curtains and invite whoever may be passing into my life.
(I’m reminded of the time my friend, Lillie, a former tpc writer herself, threw open the window of my suffocatingly hot house where we were canning peaches. “You-whoo,” she hollered jubilantly at a pair of passing strangers. Writing is a lot like that most of the time.)
A new batch of writers will soon join us here at the post calvin. I tell you, whoever you are, with all my love, it is a wildly brave thing to do. That monthly deadline follows you like a pacer in a race. You must write. And twelve times a year you will have to decide what to say about everything happening in all the world and your own visceral life (except when there are theme months).
And writing is a lot like your first eyeglass prescription. Suddenly, it is very intense to be alive.
But however brave or crazy it is to write about being alive, it’s another thing entirely to write about dying.
That’s what an acquaintance of mine, Brooklyn, did.
Brooklyn fought, and eventually succumbed to, a long battle with chronic illness. When she passed away two years ago, I wrote about it and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in a post titled “Close Enough.” I was musing on what, if anything, I had to say or do about suffering experienced at arm’s length.
If you write for the post calvin, you will probably find that you return to an idea, taking run after run at it. I keep coming back to a question Gary Schmidt asks his classes, “Is it your story to tell?”
Brooklyn’s story, and maybe her similarities to me, snagged my attention. Perhaps we are all connected at the root like mushrooms or Aspen trees, and the blow of an axe anywhere makes us shudder everywhere.
But did I have any business talking about it?
Have you ever blurted out a laugh in response to a conversation you overheard but were not a participant in? Or chimed in from across the room? It feels like misjudging the distance between a slowly approaching stranger and the door you are holding open. It feels like reaching across someone at dinner. At best, it’s a well-intentioned flub. At worst it’s embarrassingly rude.
The discernment to know when to say something is, at least for me, one of the most challenging disciplines of being a writer.
I find myself praying a version of the Serenity Prayer—Grant me the humility to be silent, the courage to speak, and the wisdom to know when to do each.
The impulse to respond is often the strongest. We live in a loud world where narrators grow on trees—commentating cicadas.
But it seems to me that writers are especially obliged to build a career on commentary and exposure. We process the world publicly, like coal-mine canaries and wind chimes. More vulnerable still, we often grant glimpses of our own real, strange, miraculous, ugly lives. Sometimes it feels like wearing our digestive system on the outside, like evolving in a transparent chrysalis. Why do it?
Brooklyn chronicled her death on social media. I think, on some level, she was desperate for all of it to not be in vain. Her story should mean something, to someone, somewhere.
That’s how I would feel, at least. Maybe how I would feel is the only piece of the story that is really mine to tell—a moment of empathy. The girl writing about living and the one writing about dying are for an inhale and an exhale the same. A shared breath is the original creative, humanizing force.
Whatever words I regret, whatever past selves I have left behind, I am wholeheartedly glad I wrote “Close Enough,” even though it offers no particularly profound conclusions or helpful advice. It gets very rambly in the middle. But it’s among my posts that have received the most comments.
It resonated. A shared breath.
I don’t know about you, but I find I rapidly outgrow conclusions these days. New information takes out theories with the regularity of the tide dissolving sandcastles.
Those pieces of my writing that still hold up are the ones where you and I stand like an aspen grove with our roots clasped and feel, together, the wind of experience rush through us.
“Isn’t it something?” I shout over a very great distance.
“It is something,” you reply.
And it’s not particularly profound, but it’s close enough.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
