In this thoughtful essay Sara Baume recounts visits with painter Mollie Douthit in her studio. There, she gets to witness the evolution of Douthit’s lake home series over time and learn a little about the artist’s process. Along the way Baume discovers that matching vision to product is as challenging for painters as it is for writers.
I always brought the dogs with me and I would grit my teeth as they snuffled around the canvasses and wagged their tails into the partially dried paint. I would try to shoo them away, but Mollie never seemed to mind. Nothing a little linseed can’t fix, she would call out from the kitchen on the other side of the rug. The smell of scented candles, and of food, always filled the cabin – sandalwood, bergamot, fresh bread, toasted seeds, carrot soup with orange in it – and I often wondered if the paintings would look different without the attendant smells. I couldn’t believe that Mollie had no protective feelings toward her work; it seemed rather that she was open to the influence of external forces, accepting of whatever it was that luck had in store. I would be apologetic, but secretly I liked the idea that a strand of hair would adhere itself to the surface of a canvas, leaving a surreptitious signature for a conservator of the future to peel off and ask herself: who was this dog? I had a tendency to search the surfaces of artworks for flaws; I found it exhilarating to locate a drip of coffee – it seemed to me as much a piece of biography as the painting itself.
The deck was red, she said, but it’s brown, I said, and then Mollie explained grounds to me, how she builds colour in coats on the canvas as well as by mixing them on the palette. It influences the shade on top, she said, most of the paintings are yellow beneath the surface, or mossy green, and if there’s any kind of gap it stops the stark white from peeking through. The red of the deck would be richer – righter – because there was brown beneath it.
Looking at the just-begun painting I was struck by the bathos of sandboxes in suburban gardens, by the melancholy act of filling a little pit in a concrete yard with store-bought sand, clean as sugar, and handing a child a plastic spade and a castle-shaped bucket in order to simulate the experience of the tremendous, gorgeous, dangerous ocean. I asked Mollie if there was a shift between what the paintings looked like in her mind before she started work, and what they looked like in the real world, on the canvas, and she barked out a despairing laugh. Trying to align those two things is what the whole of painting boils down to, she said. It is the same trouble with sentences – I always know what I want to say but fashioning it into a string of words that I can type out with my fingers and see with my eyes – that is where the work of writing lies, the torture and the rapture.
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One of the United States’ finest chroniclers of gun violence embedded with Michigan prosecutors as they pursued homicide charges against Jennifer and James Crumbley, whose son killed four students at Oxford High School. The result is a riveting legal narrative centered on Karen McDonald, the chief prosecutor in the cases:
Just past noon on Dec. 2, 2021, McDonald met with her office’s most senior attorneys. Among them was John Skrzynski, “the godfather” of Michigan prosecutors who’d convicted Jack Kevorkian, the pioneer of physician-assisted suicide known as “Dr. Death.” Skrzynski had just turned 70 and needed a new hip, but he remained imposing. McDonald knew he didn’t believe she should charge the parents, but he wasn’t her only detractor. Other attorneys also questioned whether the Crumbleys’ actions fit the definition of “gross negligence” that Michigan law required to convict someone of involuntary manslaughter.
McDonald, who felt uneasy when she couldn’t build consensus, took a seat, an American flag hanging behind her. She scanned the faces looking back. Some, maybe all, disagreed with her. The legal system was built on precedent, and for what she intended to do, none existed. But it was her name on the wall. If there was public backlash, if a judge dismissed the charges, she would bear the consequences.
Be honest, McDonald told her staff. Give me your opinion. But know this: “We’re charging the parents.”
McDonald immediately became an object of admiration to Americans fed up with gun violence, but something else happened, too. Within hours of the news conference where she announced her decision, threats of rape and murder began to arrive on her social media, her email, her cellphone.
Soon, armed security was stationed outside her home, every hour of every day. A former police officer started driving her to and from the office. She no longer went to the grocery store alone. She regretted that her front door was made of glass. It was too easy to see through — to shoot through. She stopped passing in front of it.
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Like Dan Kois, I vividly remember watching South African mockumentary The Gods Must Be Crazy as a kid in the ’80s. Also like Dan Kois, I’d assumed that no good could come of rewatching it as an adult, and that I’d be riddled with guilt for having enjoyed it as an oblivious elementary-schooler. Thankfully, Kois put his retro-shame aside and reported out the fascinating tale of the movie that at the time became the highest-grossing foreign film of all time. (Yes, it’s as problematic as you thought.)
In interviews about the film, Uys invented tales about his lead actor that reinforced this image of the “noble savage.” He told reporters that N!xau had never seen a toilet or slept on a bed. He said that because the Khoisan have no word for work, he simply invited N!xau to come play with him for a while, and “they are such nice guys that when you ask them for something, they say OK.” He said he tried paying N!xau $300, but the actor simply let the money blow away in the wind. He later said at various times that he’d bought N!xau a dozen cattle, or that he was sending a local game warden $100 a month to spend on N!xau’s behalf.
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“The two of us are humanitarian surgeons,” the authors of this essay explain. “Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents…. None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.” In horrific detail, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidwha describe the two weeks they spent treating Palestinian patients, including children with maggot-infested wounds sustained in Israel’s unrelenting bombing campaign and others shot directly in the head—Perlmutter believes they were targeted by snipers. On the week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the U.S. Congress, this essay is the latest in a litany of news coverage over the past nine and a half months that has asked where this violence ends, what it’s all been for, and who, if anyone, will be held accountable for it:
We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available.
Most of the bombardment was directed at empty buildings, but when an inhabited one was hit we’d see a flood of casualties. Those who made it to us alive met very specific criteria: They were trapped in part of the collapsed building that was accessible to people digging with their hands — and their injuries weren’t severe enough to kill them over the hours it took to free them.
Israa, a 26-year-old woman with a fair complexion and a quiet voice, arrived with our first mass casualty event around 4 a.m., on our second day in Gaza. In the chaos nobody could translate for us, so we were forced to improvise as she sobbed uncontrollably on a stretcher. All the ligaments in her right knee were torn; she had three open fractures in her two legs; and a massive chunk of her left thigh had been torn off. Both of her hands had second degree burns, and her face, arms and chest were stippled with shrapnel and debris. In the same incident a teenage girl came in with a lethal traumatic brain injury (she died the next morning) and a 7-year-old boy came in with a ruptured spleen (he recovered after several days).
…
We took Israa to the operating room. In the United States or Israel this would have been a 5-minute transition, but in the most functional hospital in Gaza it took more than one hour to get her there — working in such a severely compromised space, there was simply no way to get a trauma patient into surgery quickly. During her surgery, we realigned her broken femur, tibia and ankle in external fixators, explored an injured artery, cut chunks of dead tissue out of the massive wound in her thigh and her burned hands (a procedure known as debridement) and stopped her bleeding. It took three experienced surgeons almost four hours to do all of this. For the next 24 hours we were at her bedside almost continuously, knowing the traumatized and exhausted local staff couldn’t be expected to care for her properly.
After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night.
One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza.
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In this quiet and poignant personal essay, Sandra Beasley recounts her experience at a writing retreat in Homer, Alaska. The author and poet reflects on allergies, grief, her family’s history, and—especially—her mother: her anxieties, their complex relationship, and how she’d put aside a passion for painting so that she could focus on parenting.
At every turn, my mother made art a valid thing for me to pursue, and so I did. But because I was around to pursue my art, she didn’t get to pursue hers for years and years.
A voice in my head often whispers that the refrigerator is running low, and our shelves are running empty. That to prove you’ve done the best possible job of loving someone else, you have to turn yourself inside out. That you should make a show of having no love left for yourself. This voice says there can be a mother-artist or a daughter-artist, but not both.
Except the sunsets are so long in Alaska, in this month of the summer solstice. A person could spend hours watching the skies turn pink and then purple, cook and eat dinner, put the dishes away and come back—and the sunset would still be there. I want my mother to see this abundance. I am trying to figure out a way to bring it home to her.
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Brendan O’Meara’s Creative Nonfiction Podcast digs deep into all aspects of storytelling, taking us behind the scenes with authors to learn more about how stories get made. Here, we’ve got an excerpt ofEpisode 420, in which he speaks with author and journalist Rebecca Renner about the process of writing her book, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades.
In writing, there’s a tendency to overthink, maybe even overprepare, trying to ensure conditions are just right before beginning a draft. It’s overwhelming to the point of paralysis. That’s when it pays to write before you’re ready. Or, in the case of author and journalist Rebecca Renner, “Just put words on paper.” Renner talks about the surprises she encountered after getting into a writing flow state and the critical role of a thoughtful editor.
This excerpt has been edited for clarity and concision. Subscribe to The Creative Nonfiction Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to hear this conversation in full.
Rebecca: I was writing this during the deep part of the pandemic. And I don’t think any of it came easily because we were all going through turmoil, and I just could not write. And my editor and my agent were like, “Just put words on the paper.” And they just kept harping on me to do that. And I kept saying, “Once I start, I’m not going to be able to stop.” I overwrite, and I’m very verbose. I was correct: I couldn’t stop. I ended up with junk that did not belong in the story. But I also ended up with surprising elements I don’t think I would have encountered if I hadn’t just let my brain open up and get into that flow state where I finally stopped criticizing myself to the point of paralysis.
I’m very lucky that I had an editor who helped me find those diamonds in the rough. Because I don’t think it would have been as good of a book without her.
Brendan: Maybe expand a little bit about that relationship between you and your editor, and how that dynamic helped shape Gator Country. There was one passage I had highlighted, where you write, “writing a book is itself an adventure, no matter how much you plan, you must be open to the unexpected, the outlandish, because that is where the story lives.”
Rebecca: The thing that I said about my editor sort of goes with that. So I’m glad you brought that up. I sang her praises. And this is in the acknowledgments on the very last page, “This book isn’t exactly what I pitched her, it is so much better. Like I did while investigating the story, she put aside her expectations and let herself see the astonishing even when I didn’t, it takes a lot of talent and a lot of hard work, and I thank her.”
But I do think that some editors might have been rigid and dead set on the exact book that they had been pitched and unable to see that the reality of the story was not the same. I had done all my due diligence in researching before I pitched the story and the proposal is pretty long. My editor said it’s one of the best proposals she’s ever gotten. And so it really takes some introspection and I want to say a made-up word like “outro-spection,” being able to remove the sunglasses you’re wearing and see the world as it really is to be able to come upon the story in a way that is not exactly how you pitched it. Even though you’ve done all that work. I really do think that the editing stage is where a lot of the art comes in.
I really do think that the editing stage is where a lot of the art comes in.
Rebecca Renner
There’s an essay that I have gone back to several times. I used to teach it. It’s called “Revisioning ‘The Great Gatsby’” [Susan Bell]. And the writer looks at the various stages of editing that famous book. But one of the things that I go back to is how the writer describes revision as a process of seeing the manuscript, the story in a new way. And so I think we really did that. We had to figure out not what the story was, but what it was supposed to be, and get it to be the best version of itself.
I’ve worked with so many editors from being a journalist that I like to say that I really know what good editing looks like. The best editors will make this very small change, like putting a sentence in a different place, and it’ll change everything. And it’s just gentle, subtle. But it’s also illuminating when you’re working with an editor of that caliber. There’ll be little, tiny shifts that make it come alive. And then, of course, there are parts where she was like, “This doesn’t make any sense and needs punctuation,” or “Can you rewrite this part to have it sound like all the rest of it?” So it wasn’t all perfect. It was definitely a collaborative effort. And I really like working with editors like that.
Brendan: What you were saying a while ago, you were just urged to write, just get stuff down on the page. It’s really important to do that, because that early draft, that rough draft, or maybe the zero draft, as Roy Peter Clark might call it, it’s terraforming the world or making the map. And there are always going to be gaps in that cartography, and you’ve got to feel like “Okay, here’s a dark spot in the map. How do we fill this in?” But sometimes you don’t know that gap is there until you start and it reveals what else you need to do. Unless you have—for lack of a better term—the courage to start and write before you’re ready, that stuff has a tendency to always be in the shadows, and you need to write your way through it.
Rebecca: I’ve actually been reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. And I feel like some people think that book is a little woo woo. I did when I first started reading it, but I really like how he talks about being open to the possibilities of the creative act and the potential there, being able to get into the flow state and stopping yourself from self-criticism and over-analyzing, getting yourself to open up. That has been one of the most important things to do in my creative process because I have to remind myself that I have all the things I need; it’s all there. And then I don’t have to keep going out and getting more details or over-report things, which I have a problem doing, or even in fiction that I just have to believe that I have the story and that I have to get it down. Then I’ll see the lacunae.
Listen to the full episode here.
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Disillusioned and drained after dancing for a living became too much, Laura Killingbeck packed up her bike and bought a one-way ticket to Alaska. Cycling and the outdoors brought her true solitude. In those she encountered, she found generosity, kindness, and what she needed most: human connection and community.
By then I’d stripped in a half dozen clubs, and dancing on stage seemed like a great deal: I got paid to wear glitter and twirl around! Each night was an absurd festival of human desire, raw and unfiltered. It was more interesting than working as a waitress; more bluntly educational than many of my college classes. I planned to use my earnings to become a mountaineer and then build a small homestead. At night when I glued on my eyelashes in the dressing room mirror, I saw myself as a subversive beatnik success story.
After a few days, I crossed the Canadian border and continued into the Yukon. The trees here were smaller and windswept, and the forest seemed to go on forever in all directions. Bears ambled by on the roadside, and I sang to them as I passed. Days turned into weeks, the Yukon became British Columbia, and slowly I dissolved into the joy of flow. Every pedal stroke became part of the rhythm of breath and motion. Every thought and feeling became transient, like the sky. I cried a lot as I rode, often from gratitude, and these tears seemed to cleanse me from the inside out. It didn’t matter what I looked like out here or what anyone thought of me. I was free to fall apart, and inside that dissolution, for fleeting moments, I felt whole.
My body was useful in a way that finally made sense. In that moment I understood: Joy was its own form of power.
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