Read It and Weep

I'm blubbering; you don't see what the fuss is about. We're both right.

Hi writers, I love to talk about writing but I’m tired of having to figure out what readers want. They want everything! This is a piece where I tell you it’s okay to fall in love with something I might hate. It’s a piece that cries out for some conversation. What turns you on? What do you love that everyone else hates? What do you hate that everyone else loves? How does any of this translate to your own writing?

Be nice now but be honest. Let’s see what you’ve got!

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Anyone who reads for pleasure knows that reading can be as emotional as listening to music. We all know what it feels like with music: that catch in our throats when we hear the music we fall in love with, as if what we’re hearing is for our ears alone, as if it was written just for us. We may not own it but it surely has taken up residence.

My ringtone is the shire music from Lord of the Rings and no matter who’s calling, no matter what I know I’m going to hear from them, when the call comes in and the music starts, I’m soothed. I love it so much. And I couldn’t possibly explain why.

I feel the same way about any sublime combination of words. They’re words I’ve read a thousand times before in different contexts, but the arrangement, the alignment, is everything. And no amount of analysis will tell me why that combination of words has grabbed me. As a writer, I’m supposed to try and figure out why they work, but when I’m in their thrall, I don’t care.

All of this because I came upon an article called “The Island That Humans Can’t Conquer”, written by Sarah Gilman. It’s from Hakai Magazine, a magazine I’ve never heard of before, (Sorry, Hakai) but I loved that title and I had to read on.

The first paragraph took my breath away — the sweep of words drew me in, sent me soaring, made me catch my breath— because words can do that to me.

I’ll get to the paragraph in a minute, but first I want to say — you won’t hurt my feelings if after reading it you don’t agree. Just as we’re all going to have different tastes in music, in food, in art, in soulmates, we’re going to have different tastes in words.

So here’s the paragraph that caught me and forced me to read on:

St. Matthew Island is said to be the most remote place in Alaska. Marooned in the Bering Sea halfway to Siberia, it is well over 300 kilometers and a 24-hour ship ride from the nearest human settlements. It looks fittingly forbidding, the way it emerges from its drape of fog like the dark spread of a wing. Curved, treeless mountains crowd its sliver of land, plunging in sudden cliffs where they meet the surf. To St. Matthew’s north lies the smaller, more precipitous island of Hall. A castle of stone called Pinnacle stands guard off St. Matthew’s southern flank. To set foot on this scatter of land surrounded by endless ocean is to feel yourself swallowed by the nowhere at the center of a drowned compass rose.

I was hooked, but would I stay? Yes. Yes, I would:

My head swims a little as I peer into a shallow pit on St. Matthew’s northwestern tip. It’s late July in 2019, and the air buzzes with the chitters of the island’s endemic singing voles. Wildflowers and cotton grass constellate the tundra that has grown over the depression at my feet, but around 400 years ago, it was a house, dug partway into the earth to keep out the elements. It’s the oldest human sign on the island, the only prehistoric house ever found here. A lichen-crusted whale jawbone points downhill toward the sea, the rose’s due-north needle.

What draws me in is Gilman’s ability to make me see magic in what amounts to a barren land in the middle of nowhere. I’m right there with her as she discovers the remnants of a prehistoric house, and she nails me down with that last surprising line about a whale jawbone, finishing up with a reminder of the compass rose.

I read the entire piece and I wasn’t disappointed. It was a beautiful piece, through and through, essentially about nothing more than what makes this island so inhospitable no human would want to live there.

I’m not here to defend my choice, I’m here to rejoice over the kind of writing that takes my breath away. This particular piece didn’t make me blubber (Not saying my title was clickbait…), but it did make me want to read on, and that’s the goal of every writer — to give readers something they can’t resist, something they’ll read to the end and feel satisfied when they get there.

I cry a lot reading fiction. Off the top of my head, I can think of E.L Doctorow’s Ragtime, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, and Ann Frank’s Diary.

But it doesn’t have to be sad to make me choke up, it has to be so lyrically beautiful I can’t stand it. I can’t explain it and I don’t want to. I just want to feel it. I can do that just as often with nonfiction. Oliver Sacks can do it. So can Joan Didion, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and William Manchester.

If a writer can move you, the subject almost doesn’t matter. If a writer can move you to tears, you’ll never forget it. It’s a moment of intimacy you’ll always share, and if nobody else gets it, well, nobody else has to.

So what do you think? Come on, you’re thinking. Tell us!

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