I wanted to write about carpet snakes. I wanted to write their skin as art, how it is the lick of a tree stump, a million shadow branches jumping out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to ask the question: why is it, we humans are still not capable of molding ourselves ourselves so thoroughly in the natural world?
But instead, I became lost for words.
Writing is an epic exploration. It is a foraging, a digging, a hunt for words, ideas, seasons and stories. The great French feminist writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous calls it an “unburying”.1 My unburying sends me to books and down the rabbit hole of reading. In all the various corners and chambers of the page, I unearth words and try to render the world both understandable and interesting.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the way I am guided by the writer Jeanette Winterson and her insistence that, “when we say ‘I haven’t got the words’, the lack is not in the language nor in our emotional state, it is in the breakdown between the two.”2 My search for words has become a search to rehabilitate the broken. I am trying to piece together the breakdown that emerges when words and the world collide.
The world is shifting on its axis and so this rehabilitation is becoming more difficult. AI writing is seeping in between the crevices and cracks of our lives. I see it in the university papers I mark and as I discuss the implications with friends and colleagues. What does it mean for writing? What does it mean for reading? What does it mean for ideas and creative thought? Is this the final breakdown between language and our emotional state? Even the smartest minds haven’t quite worked it out.
And so, I continue to read and as I read I see writers writing from the spaces in-between, the cracks in the page where the words of writers before them have gone.
On Substack over the past few weeks American writer and Booker prize winner George Saunders has led a study of “Her Fathers House” a short story by Italian writer Maria Messina. Alongside his own analysis Saunders welcomes conversation with his readers (most of whom are writers) as well as from the story’s translator, Elise Magistro.
Messina, who died almost 80 years ago, was born into Sicilian poverty and taught herself to read and write. Her work of the early twentieth century was almost forgotten until Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia rediscovered it in the 1980s. It was later translated into English by Magistro.
Saunders says.
“I think any of this who (no pun intended) toil in the vineyard of writing have likely been struck by the possibility that our work will come to nothing – will never find an audience or will briefly have one, then lose it. Literature stays alive by being read, and what we read depends on what is available for us to read – what has been translated; what we’ve heard about; what has stayed in-print or been brought back into print. It depends, in a beautiful way, of the small movements of the reading hive.”
I have now wandered down the rabbit hole of Messina’s works and discovered that one of the few places still publishing and selling her work is the Feminist Press, a small non-profit publishing house that emerged during the second wave feminist movement and became responsible for ensuring the voices of marginalised and silenced women were amplified.
And so, Messina’s story shows us how important it is to continue searching for the right words. It is important for us to continue trying to rehabilitate what is at risk of being lost or simply fading away.
I spent a lot of time early this year finalising the co-edit of book focused on the writing work of Cixous with my friend and colleague Insister. In the chapters, writers responded to Cixous’ work through creative auto-ethnography. In essence, this is another project on the search for lost words. It is another unburying.
Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects
Your post this week sent me down a rabbit hole of my own. Your mention of Feminist Press sent me looking for Australian feminist publishers. I discovered Spinifex Press and it's love at first sight! Their catalogue looks incredible.