Creativity, Emotion, & Story Connection: Or, Mother Writer Jenn Givhan Gets Coffee (And Feels All the Feels) Before She Writes
Dear Creative Writers & Readers,
I want to take a few minutes this morning to chat about something that can get a bad rap in the writing world. Emotion.
An editor once advised me to stop writing “mother bird poems.” She was accusing me of writing poems that rely on cliché and sentiment rather than providing a diagnosis of the complex emotions surrounding childrearing. (I didn’t stop writing these poems, of course. I only wrote them stronger. Here’s one published in Rattle).
And yet, making the stuff of dreams a reality, making a story or poem or novel that asks us to change ourselves — these comes from emotion. It comes from the white-hot center of each of us that connects us and asks us to listen to each other.
Emotion hooks us.
This morning on my drive with my 11-yr-old daughter (a fellow writer) down the hill for coffee, a man in a car turning left who gets stuck in the intersection when the light turns red, yells F*** — I can make out the word he’s mouthed.
And I want to know why. It’s like I’ve just watched the trailer for a book or movie, and this man is angry.
I assume he’s upset that traffic’s backed up because now he’ll be late — but even that tacit assumption leaves me with questions. Where’s he going that being late would cause such distress? In fact, I’m so curious, I consider it all the way down the hill where my daughter and I turn right at the next intersection along with the angry man (though perhaps his emotion has shifted since last I saw him swearing through the glass, perhaps it was fleeting anger, and he’s quite content since the traffic jam was only a temporary impediment on his journey) — but instead of turning into the crowded Starbucks line as I do, and as he’s signaled that he intended to do, he seems to realize the entry is too crowded and speeds off to the next parking lot entrance.
While I wait to pull into the drive-thru, I watch for his white Ford Focus in the Petroglyph Plaza parking lot. Smith’s grocery store. A pet-food shop. A children’s gym. During voting season, a polling place, but mostly empty storefronts now, like the forsaken space the Starbucks used to reside before they built a brand new hipster brick building at the edge of the lot for visibility and a drive-thru, that empty facade the coffee shop I used to go inside and learn the baristas’ names, where, on the occasions my family or partner could watch the kids, I sought solace from the cries and neediness of my infant and toddler and sat at the corner table to write the first draft of my first novel a decade ago — ten years that separate me from unpublished mother of very small creatures to published mother of tween and teen, slightly more independent ones, and I’m all up in my feels thinking about this as I wonder where the angry man has gone. His story is merging with mine — for how many F*** have I given & given away on this mothering/writing journey.
“Sometimes I go about weeping, and all the while I am being carried across the sky on a great wind.” –Chippewa Song
Normally by now I would’ve forgotten the man’s car, but this morning, I remember even as brain fog slows my brain lately — even now, writing this, I remember — because hot emotion hooks us.
It sinks its teeth into us and rarely lets us go without a fight.
I assume he was late because I feel late, though, this morning, as most, I’m early (thanks to my ultra-prompt daughter who inherited that trait from her father, certainly not from me, quite at home running on New Mexican time, slow like honey).
Perhaps when the man yelled out and his cry, unheard but felt reverberating through the glass, I could relate to his moment in the story, and for a moment our stories converged.
Perhaps I needed permission to express my own anger, covering sadness, that even after everything I’ve created and nurtured and labored, onto the page and out into the world, I still feel late.
To the party. To my life.
I lost him in the parking lot but have thought of him often since ordering my sweet cream cold brew (a necessity for the creative process, I assure you and will fight to defend this position) and chocolate milk for my girl.
Perhaps he was late to meet someone, a beloved who’d given him this one chance, and he drove the long way through the parking lot, pulled around the other side of the coffee shop where his beloved was waiting for him at a table inside with his coffee of choice (I take him for a Pike’s Place brew with cream, no sugar).
Or maybe it was never about being late; he might’ve been scared to get stuck in the intersection since he’s been in an accident before or lost someone he loved that way — his beloved isn’t waiting in the coffee shop after all.
Or maybe he, as you, dear reader, would roll his eyes at my penchant for maudlin emotion.
Maybe he just hates traffic or has anger issues and yells to relieve the pressure.
That’s still something visceral. Swearing has been scientifically linked to alleviating pain on a physical level and can actually help us tolerate pain better.
Psychologist Steven Pinker explains that “humans are hardwired to swear cathartically… Swearing probably comes from a very primitive reflex that evolved in animals.”
That F-bomb likely had a hypoalgesic effect on the man in the white Focus. And, somehow, through empathy and story, it transferred to me. And now, reader, perhaps to you, too.
So maybe I’m right on time; maybe the man reminds me of my dad, and that’s why I’ve remembered him all morning — my dad while driving screaming F*** and every other colorful word I now know, and my mom sobbing because she was in a terrifying accident during a formative time and hates the car, and my dad’s screaming makes things infinitely worse — as I watch her clutching the “Oh God!” handle hanging above the passenger door, my stomach lurching, unheld, behind her. The way my dad screaming also meant the time he almost accidentally left this world on purpose, and how mothering and writing have always meant a way to stay here, for myself and my children. How I am here, now. How every moment is the only time that ever exists. How maudlin, yes, but nevertheless truer than any other truth I know. I am F***ING grateful to be alive. A living, loving, feeling mother writer. And a damn good one at that.
And this, folks, is what emotion amped up from the onset of story does. It reveals and transforms. It reminds us why we’re here.
It grabs us, sinks its hooks, and says, Hang on, the road’s about to twist, and we with it.
Writers, never be afraid of emotion in your work. It’s what we’re here for. And readers likewise. Challenge yourselves with emotion in what you encounter — your next poem or story, your next scene in your novel, the next pages in your life.
Those gut feelings and intuition that data analysists and algorithms know from the psychometrics target us for whichever ads will catch us, reel us in, sometimes even manipulate us if our heart’s eyes aren’t wide open — those often pesky emotions we like to believe we’ve gotten under control.
Story knows better.
And we writers and readers (and bingers of story on Netflix) do too — deep in our guts — where the emotion resides.
Emotion hooks us, yes, but it also connects us.
The truth is, I don’t know where that man was heading or why, but I know where his expression of raw emotion and my willingness to witness and engage with it took me.
Thank you for spending time in your inbox with me today. I’m sending you love and protective light, always.
And stay tuned for my newest poetry collection BELLY TO THE BRUTAL from Wesleyan University Press and my third novel RIVER WOMAN RIVER DEMON from Blackstone Publishing — both out later this year! Cover reveals coming soon, so make sure you’re hanging out with me on social media! To read more of my stories and creative work, and to see what readers are saying about the connections they feel to the emotion woven into my magical real thrillers and surreal poetry collections, click here.
Be blessed and safe, y’all creative spirits ♡
Love,
Jenn ♡
