"Entirely Ordinary"

What I want to say about this week’s reading has to do with the way we make meaning, the ways we find significance and relevance in our activities, how we decide what is important and what is not, and how we do this in writing. What I love about this piece is that July was writing—or rather trying to finish—a screenplay, and it wasn’t there—there was nothing there for her, the words and characters and ideas were not coming, so she followed what was there, what did have her attention, what seemed like procrastination to begin with—calling people from the Pennysaver. The result is fascinating and seems not like an offshoot of her “real” work—but rather the writing she was meant to do all along. So there are several things that I could say about this—at times something seems like a distraction or a tangent to what we are trying to do, but if that is where our energy is, it might just be best to surrender to the pull and follow, or at least get curious about why it has our attention.

I’m also interested in the line on the last page, the beginning of the story about Andrew and the bullfrog tadpoles where she says “And because I was refused by the majority of the people I called, the ones I met with did not feel random—we chose each other.” So I’m interested in the concept of randomness in relation to the subjects we choose to write about. After they are written, just like these stories by July, they do not feel random, but almost “meant to be.” And so often I hear people say that about life, that something was meant to be—always after the fact. When a thing or event comes together in a way that is pleasing we can look back and say it was meant to be, as if it were fated, even if when we began it seemed random or like a distraction or maybe even a mistake. I think this also has some relevance to our discussion about the past and how it functions in the present, how the past is restructured as we access it in the present—past events take on new meaning and relevance in relation to the way things unfold in the present. July’s first phone call to Michael takes on a kind of significance when she meets him and he agrees to share his story. The leather jacket gives her a head-rush and leaves her a little star-struck even though it is “entirely ordinary.” The people and events and objects take on even more relevance as she crafts it them into story.

A third thing this got me thinking about is how our writing, particularly creative non-fiction dove-tails with our lives. I was talking to a friend the other night who is writing a book. She’s in the final editing stages and talked about how the writing impacted her daily experience and her daily experience impacted her writing. We can see this in July’s Pennysaver stories—the writing guided and shaped her experience and her experience guided and shaped her writing.

I’m curious about the ways we weave living and language, the way we make meaning retrospectively, the way a good story can give ordinary things a kind of power and make events seem fated.