The Blackbird Letters by Lore Ferguson Wilbert & Aarik Danielson

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen reflect on the different angles of writing.

Somewhere between thinking I could write a non-fiction book, then writing part of it, then piecing together a proposal for publishers, I found myself wallowing. I was stuck in the messy middle— or what John Saddington’s illustration would call the ‘dark swamp of despair’:

The same questions kept holding me in the swamp: do I really mean what I am writing? Is what is interesting to me, interesting for someone else? Does this project honestly reveal my truest self? Am I writing to serve myself or to serve others? At the end of all these hours of labouring, what is my deepest hope for these words?

Then, in March last year, one year into my book-writing journey, along came The Blackbird Letters written by friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielson.

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lore and Aarik penned The Blackbird Letters reflecting on the different aims of writing. The short essays appeared every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites.

Their voices, each distinct and affirming, helped to lift me from the muddy, messy, middle and brought clarity to my project and process.

I’ve outlined the letters below and lifted some of my favourite lines from each letter but I recommend taking the time to read the full letters on each of their websites.

May their words lift you from whatever muddy swamp you find yourself in, and help you to realise that your journey to creating something ‘really great’ can mean many, many different things.

#1 Writing as Aspiration - Aarik

We sigh in defeat, resigned to the gap between what we write and how we live. Perhaps every writer is reckless, scratching out promises they can’t possibly keep, a little too comfortable with creating images of themselves that barely resemble the real thing…

We write better than we live precisely because we’re not content—with only what we spy outside our windows, with what stares back from the mirror…

so I write the contours of this world into every sentence—the world as I want it to be.

#2 Writing as Imitation - Lore

The essential work of the writer, I think, is to become. It is not to announce or to proclaim or to even convince. It is to settle down in sameness, to put on the flesh of the reader, hear with their ears, see with their eyes, to take on the weights that bear them down, and suffer with them in their sadness and grief. It is incarnate work, putting flesh on syllables and grammar and words with very little meaning on their own.

#3 Writing as Observation - Aarik

So much of what I write materializes because I don’t know what I saw, heard, touched or felt until I recreate it in words…writing allows me first to separate one scene from another, then to seal the moment and grant it meaning. 

Let me observe until I notice the way everything ties together, a holy hand fingering the knots. 

#4 Writing as Discontent - Lore

Now it occurs to me that almost everything good we do may actually be borne of discontent, a sense that something isn’t just right as it is, even if is.

It’s the painting we never quite finish, the piece we never quite leave alone, the yard I’ll never stop planting in. We keep coming back to make and remake and remake again, because, in some ways, our discontent is holy isn’t it? It’s what we were put on earth to do, care for and cultivate what is there, plant and supplant what is not, bear fruit in multiples. It’s never, never, never enough.

This is why we write but it’s also why we keep writing. Why we’re writing these letters to one another, even. Because no matter how much has been said, perhaps we still need to keep on saying.

#5 Writing as Self-Awareness - Aarik

Writers go on endlessly about their voice; all I really know is, if you write long enough, at some point you can’t shake the sound that emerges.

I’m still learning what self-awareness means; I’m also learning what it’s not. We tend to equate self-awareness with spilling everything onto the page, baring all we know and feel. I think the best writing happens when we balance self-awareness and mystery. Ripples and revelations come through the work, but the painful, intimate details—the how and why I arrived there—are saved for the secret places, for the people I love best.

#6 Writing as Protest - Lore

Writing as a form of protest is not just the prophets and seers and sayers all pounding out their treatises upon keyboards in whatever opportune moments they find (which, in these days, is every moment). It is, at its core, a protest against very our own selves, a protest against our laziness and fear and envy and avarice. It is a choice to say that we won't let the unsaid win. We won’t let the nebulous fears that tighten our chests and lumpen our throats to have the last word. We won’t let the insidious greed and envy and comparison eat us alive, churn us into nimble little monsters who won’t let anyone go in front of us.

#7 Writing as Record Keeping - Aarik

At our simplest and most see-through, writers are romantic little vandals, carving “I was here” into the tops of every picnic table we find. We are artists tattooing our flesh with images and scenes we can’t get free of. 

But I think there’s something more urgent and enduring to this notion of writing as record-keeping. We may be carving out those three little words: “I was here.” But if we attend to our jobs, our hearts fixed on the right things, we add a postscript. “And so were you.”