Oct 12, 2023·edited Oct 12, 2023Liked by Leslie Pietrzyk
I think of the dark rather as the deep: perhaps a seldom-visited place, but we know what dwells there. What we have to give the story, when we return with it from that place, is humanity--and that demands a weaving of every hue of experience and emotion. The authors whose stories have lived on for decades and centuries, all seemed to know this.
This is a great reminder that we need to get to the emotional truth in our writing and coax it out of the darkness. This is also a great reminder that the teacher is forever the student, too. Thanks, Leslie!
What a helpful and lovely essay, one I am reading just before putting my hand on the greasy old brass doorknob that I will turn before entering my own Dark Place.
Wow. Leslie! This was very helpful, and poignant. Having played sports I always took the teacher-coach dynamic as inherent until you called it out. I like how this shifted from telling with the pronouncements up front and showing with the somewhat illicit writing challenge.
In my own writing I’ve found that the more personal the more rewarding if not better. I’m going to channel my inner Orpheus.
Thank you so much for reading...and for getting the sports element. I love watching several sports but know that writers are not always as enthusiastic as I am! xoxox
Strikes me as a helpful, at times eloquent, personal statement about letting go of her defenses and going where she needed to, as writer, teacher, person. Problem some readers are having with the piece is, I think, mainly due to the teacherly, pronouncing (didactic) tone she doesn't quite escape. Calling yourself a fraud often comes off as a declaration of your own authenticity, which, when insisted upon, creates resistance. Still, several worthy takeaways and a lot of lovely writing.
I'll take your compliments--thank you--and will note that calling myself a "fraud" in print is very difficult for me. Admitting it to myself even more difficult.
Oh yes, I hear you. I wrote an entire play (first a short story) about a teacher struggling to speak (and write) authentically. Funny though how an important line, such as yours about fraud, can, as a moment of self-consciousness, actually interfere with an essay or story's flight. Btw, your use of darkness as a metaphor makes perfect sense, despite the defensive comments it has, inevitably, elicited. Although "darkness" often signifies pain, trauma, it suggests so much more--mystery, the unknown--the story beginning, as Flannery O'Connor said, where knowledge ends. It's less, I think, about what you're writing about than where you're writing from. Thanks for writing so openly and eloquently.
Again, I appreciate your thoughts. Isn't so much of learning about writing finding the metaphors that work for yourself--"dark place" for me, "cave" for others. There's only so much to say about how to write, that I think the best teacher is the one who phrases the same old things in the language that suddenly resonates with you! And I always listen to about anything Flannery says on writing!! xoxox
thanks so much for such a good 'lesson'.. i am getting to a dfark place, and need to stay there.. it is a family narrative that I am 'writing;'. i keep writing, but now it is time to focus and do something with everything that i have written... that is the scary part.. thank you for sharing this..
Reminds me of my first "dark place short story" that was written from a very DARK place (literally) when I was in a low-rent hospital, suffering from a misdiagnosed ailment, a mysterious condition which caused such intense fever spikes that each day I drifted in and out of unconsciousness.
My parents had abandoned me, pre-signing all the medical releases so they would not have to visit.
Sympathetic nurses & volunteers, the Candy Stripers, took pity, becoming my only visitors.
And what a sublime education I received in that hospital; the nurses schooled me about a subject new to naive me - - NYC drug dealing, withdrawal, overdoses, addiction, shooting up, the differences between opium, morphine, heroin (called "horse" then), and cocaine.
I survived my illness.
I wrote a very different story for the school magazine than anyone else was writing at the time - - from this DARK place that my nurses granted me access to, at a time when I was not sure I'd live thru my illness, when it was not clear if the knock-out fever spikes would give me brain damage.
This was wonderful. Engrossing. And a much needed reminder for someone struggling to put words on paper. My dark places don't live far below the surface, and though they're easy to get to, I still hesitate.
Very good essay! I agree with Leslie Pietrzyk that we often need to go to a painful place to write a powerful piece of creative writing. I also agree with Donna Shanley that this place is deep but not always dark. It takes a lot of effort to dig deeply, to explore psychological wounds, to dredge up embarrassing experiences. The best writers are not afraid to journey to this painful realm and to expose their own vulnerability. Barbara Krasner is also right that our students can often teach us a lot. We teachers/professors need to open ourselves up to this kind of learning, as Leslie Pietrzyk did.
A wonderful piece. Congratulations on your courage to tell the shameful truth (feeling like a fraud), to reveal so well the teaching truth that it's so often a two-way street, and carry on with humor and authenticity.
I agree with Donna. For me it's the depths not the darkness. My writing changed remarkably after I read Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer comes to some stunning realizations about the life she has vs. the life she dreamed of. My depths were writing about what it was to be the son of Holocaust survivors and I ended up making my name first as an American pioneer with the subject. For three years my college CW professor had been encouraging me to "write something real" and she beamed when I turned in a new story. This was it.
I have four or five copies of it because I mark it up so much I've need to move on over time to a new one. The highest compliment anyone paid to one of my novels was saying that my Rosedale in Love was a "very Jamesian novel about a Whartonian subject." Set in 1905 New York, Characters in it at one point talk about James and his novels.
:-) They inspired me in senior year of college along with FitzGerald, Durrell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolff, George Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller.
Oct 12, 2023·edited Oct 12, 2023Liked by Leslie Pietrzyk
And before that I was reading Restoration and Neoclassical Drama and all the 18th Century novelists, then Jane Austen and the American and British biggies in the 19th century (except for Dickens), and a full year of every damned Gothic novelist there was. I somehow missed the Sensation Novelists and Trollope but that's okay because I found them in the 1990s and 2000s and that was tons of fun. Oh, and in college I read all the Russians, Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Stendhal but read more off-the-beaten-path French writers later. There are new OUP translations of Zola that are amazing.
Not my intention. The writer can only write what they're able to write and some stories may be too scarring and too deep. The metaphor of the journey means that the writer (Orpheus) must be able to RETURN to the light to tell the tale, and some stories/writers are unable to do so--whether right now, or ever. And there are plenty of "dark places" that do not contain what we think of as abuse and/or violence--i.e. betraying a friend. For me, Amy Hempel's short story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" is an excellent example of a "dark place" story that is not about abuse. Thanks for reading & for weighing in.
Okay, I understand. Please do be careful about the phrasing next time as I know too many who believe the only way to make good art is being mentally unwell like Stephen King during his addiction years (some think that was his best and he can’t write good anymore). It’s a huge problem in music as well.
I get that you didn’t mean to make it sound mean and having others with different walks of life giving their opinions will certainly create more understanding.
I don’t think that is a logical conclusion. My own experience as a child living through World War II is certainly a dark place and has led to my writing a number of poems. Similarly, the discovery that an older sister, Rita, died in her cot when she was only 3 months old spurred me to write about it:
And now that I am very old, it inevitably triggers poems about the end of life. Mind you, what I have written probably won’t qualify as “the best poetry”.
“The best poetry” is really the problem. You can’t mindlessly say stuff like that in articles without people struggling with trauma or depression thinking they must cling to mental illness or lose artistic talent--that idea is still very much prevalent.
I disagree. A dark place can be interpreted in many ways. One of my poetry mentors calls it the cave. That we have to go into the cave and pull out what's there: what we hesitate to confront, what makes us uneasy.
I would have loved to see that metaphor in the article instead of what was said. Because that’s much better than saying your best work is your trauma--which sadly remains a sentiment in literary circles that people are trying to dispel
If you're a reflective being, isn't life itself abusive and traumatic? We need artists who find light as well as those that share the dark. I think of Marc Chagall.
I’m talking about people being raped and told their poems about their rape is their “best art” thus forcing the person to relive the trauma instead of moving on. Billie Eilish is a good example. She had more fans when having depressed music than healthy. There’s too much “mental unwell=art” still to not carefully say what you mean by dark is a metaphor, not literal.
I think of the dark rather as the deep: perhaps a seldom-visited place, but we know what dwells there. What we have to give the story, when we return with it from that place, is humanity--and that demands a weaving of every hue of experience and emotion. The authors whose stories have lived on for decades and centuries, all seemed to know this.
Thanks for reading & for weighing in! Your comment about how "we know what dwells there" is especially resonant for me. We DO know!!
This is a great reminder that we need to get to the emotional truth in our writing and coax it out of the darkness. This is also a great reminder that the teacher is forever the student, too. Thanks, Leslie!
Thanks for reading!! xoxox
What a helpful and lovely essay, one I am reading just before putting my hand on the greasy old brass doorknob that I will turn before entering my own Dark Place.
Wow. Leslie! This was very helpful, and poignant. Having played sports I always took the teacher-coach dynamic as inherent until you called it out. I like how this shifted from telling with the pronouncements up front and showing with the somewhat illicit writing challenge.
In my own writing I’ve found that the more personal the more rewarding if not better. I’m going to channel my inner Orpheus.
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you so much for reading...and for getting the sports element. I love watching several sports but know that writers are not always as enthusiastic as I am! xoxox
Strikes me as a helpful, at times eloquent, personal statement about letting go of her defenses and going where she needed to, as writer, teacher, person. Problem some readers are having with the piece is, I think, mainly due to the teacherly, pronouncing (didactic) tone she doesn't quite escape. Calling yourself a fraud often comes off as a declaration of your own authenticity, which, when insisted upon, creates resistance. Still, several worthy takeaways and a lot of lovely writing.
I'll take your compliments--thank you--and will note that calling myself a "fraud" in print is very difficult for me. Admitting it to myself even more difficult.
Oh yes, I hear you. I wrote an entire play (first a short story) about a teacher struggling to speak (and write) authentically. Funny though how an important line, such as yours about fraud, can, as a moment of self-consciousness, actually interfere with an essay or story's flight. Btw, your use of darkness as a metaphor makes perfect sense, despite the defensive comments it has, inevitably, elicited. Although "darkness" often signifies pain, trauma, it suggests so much more--mystery, the unknown--the story beginning, as Flannery O'Connor said, where knowledge ends. It's less, I think, about what you're writing about than where you're writing from. Thanks for writing so openly and eloquently.
Again, I appreciate your thoughts. Isn't so much of learning about writing finding the metaphors that work for yourself--"dark place" for me, "cave" for others. There's only so much to say about how to write, that I think the best teacher is the one who phrases the same old things in the language that suddenly resonates with you! And I always listen to about anything Flannery says on writing!! xoxox
thanks so much for such a good 'lesson'.. i am getting to a dfark place, and need to stay there.. it is a family narrative that I am 'writing;'. i keep writing, but now it is time to focus and do something with everything that i have written... that is the scary part.. thank you for sharing this..
Sounds like you are on to something...all my good wishes to you on this writing journey!! xoxox
Truly gorgeous, and one of my favorite writing essays ever. I will read this again and again. This is the pep talk I needed. Thanks, Leslie.
What a beautiful comment! Thank you. Selfishly happy you feel some pep b/c I want to read new work from you!!!! xoxox
Reminds me of my first "dark place short story" that was written from a very DARK place (literally) when I was in a low-rent hospital, suffering from a misdiagnosed ailment, a mysterious condition which caused such intense fever spikes that each day I drifted in and out of unconsciousness.
My parents had abandoned me, pre-signing all the medical releases so they would not have to visit.
Sympathetic nurses & volunteers, the Candy Stripers, took pity, becoming my only visitors.
And what a sublime education I received in that hospital; the nurses schooled me about a subject new to naive me - - NYC drug dealing, withdrawal, overdoses, addiction, shooting up, the differences between opium, morphine, heroin (called "horse" then), and cocaine.
I survived my illness.
I wrote a very different story for the school magazine than anyone else was writing at the time - - from this DARK place that my nurses granted me access to, at a time when I was not sure I'd live thru my illness, when it was not clear if the knock-out fever spikes would give me brain damage.
My story "No Way Out" was accepted and published.
I won a gold medal for literary achievement.
I was 15 years old.
My pen and Muse have stayed "on the dark path."
Wow!! What an amazing tale. My heart started racing as I read along. You have so much courage.
Thank you very much, Leslie.
At 15, I had already encountered many unforgettable traumas.
Example: my mother left me alone on a sidewalk in my baby carriage -- before I was able to walk -- with only my spaniel for protection.
I watched, in utter horror, as a little girl was run over by an oil truck, her blood splashing the sidewalk like gruesome rain.
When my mother finally showed up, I tried to explain the sudden death I had witnessed to her - - with a baby's very limited vocabulary.
My father found my sputtering TERROR so hilarious that he mimicked it for years to guests.
There was no way I could count on my parents to rescue me.
I suppose these dark experiences forge some writers, Leslie.
Thank you for your essay here!!
No words. So horrific. xoxox
It definitely was horrific. Thank you for your compassion, Leslie. x o x o
This was wonderful. Engrossing. And a much needed reminder for someone struggling to put words on paper. My dark places don't live far below the surface, and though they're easy to get to, I still hesitate.
Thanks so much for reading. Wishing you all the best in your writing journey. xoxox
Very good essay! I agree with Leslie Pietrzyk that we often need to go to a painful place to write a powerful piece of creative writing. I also agree with Donna Shanley that this place is deep but not always dark. It takes a lot of effort to dig deeply, to explore psychological wounds, to dredge up embarrassing experiences. The best writers are not afraid to journey to this painful realm and to expose their own vulnerability. Barbara Krasner is also right that our students can often teach us a lot. We teachers/professors need to open ourselves up to this kind of learning, as Leslie Pietrzyk did.
Best wishes! Janet Ruth Heller
website is https://www.janetruthheller.com
Thanks so much for reading & taking the time to comment!
A wonderful piece. Congratulations on your courage to tell the shameful truth (feeling like a fraud), to reveal so well the teaching truth that it's so often a two-way street, and carry on with humor and authenticity.
Thank you so much! xoxox
I agree with Donna. For me it's the depths not the darkness. My writing changed remarkably after I read Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer comes to some stunning realizations about the life she has vs. the life she dreamed of. My depths were writing about what it was to be the son of Holocaust survivors and I ended up making my name first as an American pioneer with the subject. For three years my college CW professor had been encouraging me to "write something real" and she beamed when I turned in a new story. This was it.
Thanks for reading & for weighing in! I love PORTRAIT OF A LADY...a good model for going deep, for sure.
I have four or five copies of it because I mark it up so much I've need to move on over time to a new one. The highest compliment anyone paid to one of my novels was saying that my Rosedale in Love was a "very Jamesian novel about a Whartonian subject." Set in 1905 New York, Characters in it at one point talk about James and his novels.
Wow! That's an AMAZING compliment!!!!
:-) They inspired me in senior year of college along with FitzGerald, Durrell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolff, George Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller.
Can't argue with that reading list!!
And before that I was reading Restoration and Neoclassical Drama and all the 18th Century novelists, then Jane Austen and the American and British biggies in the 19th century (except for Dickens), and a full year of every damned Gothic novelist there was. I somehow missed the Sensation Novelists and Trollope but that's okay because I found them in the 1990s and 2000s and that was tons of fun. Oh, and in college I read all the Russians, Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Stendhal but read more off-the-beaten-path French writers later. There are new OUP translations of Zola that are amazing.
That just means the best poetry can only come from abuse...which is not a great sentiment to carry
Not my intention. The writer can only write what they're able to write and some stories may be too scarring and too deep. The metaphor of the journey means that the writer (Orpheus) must be able to RETURN to the light to tell the tale, and some stories/writers are unable to do so--whether right now, or ever. And there are plenty of "dark places" that do not contain what we think of as abuse and/or violence--i.e. betraying a friend. For me, Amy Hempel's short story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" is an excellent example of a "dark place" story that is not about abuse. Thanks for reading & for weighing in.
Okay, I understand. Please do be careful about the phrasing next time as I know too many who believe the only way to make good art is being mentally unwell like Stephen King during his addiction years (some think that was his best and he can’t write good anymore). It’s a huge problem in music as well.
I get that you didn’t mean to make it sound mean and having others with different walks of life giving their opinions will certainly create more understanding.
I don’t think that is a logical conclusion. My own experience as a child living through World War II is certainly a dark place and has led to my writing a number of poems. Similarly, the discovery that an older sister, Rita, died in her cot when she was only 3 months old spurred me to write about it:
https://cajunmuttpress.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/cajun-mutt-press-featured-writer-12-27-21/
And now that I am very old, it inevitably triggers poems about the end of life. Mind you, what I have written probably won’t qualify as “the best poetry”.
“The best poetry” is really the problem. You can’t mindlessly say stuff like that in articles without people struggling with trauma or depression thinking they must cling to mental illness or lose artistic talent--that idea is still very much prevalent.
I disagree. A dark place can be interpreted in many ways. One of my poetry mentors calls it the cave. That we have to go into the cave and pull out what's there: what we hesitate to confront, what makes us uneasy.
I would have loved to see that metaphor in the article instead of what was said. Because that’s much better than saying your best work is your trauma--which sadly remains a sentiment in literary circles that people are trying to dispel
Thanks! You might want to take a look at Maria Mazziotti Gillan's Writing Poetry to Save Your Life. In this book, she talks about the cave.
Oo that sounds good--adding to my list!
If you're a reflective being, isn't life itself abusive and traumatic? We need artists who find light as well as those that share the dark. I think of Marc Chagall.
I love that you mention Chagall. Light as well as dark--yes!
I’m talking about people being raped and told their poems about their rape is their “best art” thus forcing the person to relive the trauma instead of moving on. Billie Eilish is a good example. She had more fans when having depressed music than healthy. There’s too much “mental unwell=art” still to not carefully say what you mean by dark is a metaphor, not literal.
Thanks for reading...I hope your writing goes well!