“Don’t Exhaust Yourself” (from Sisters in Crime)

The full quotation from this morning’s email from my favourite organization is “Challenge yourself; don’t exhaust yourself.”

I’m doing a “January Jumpstart,” which is a kind of crime-writing marathon training of daily writing practice. My relationship with my writing gets tetchy if I don’t write five or six days a week, and it’s much like my affinity for the elliptical machine: if I stay away for too long, I dread getting back to it, because it feels impossibly difficult.

But my fiction is a struggle right now, because I’m trying to revise a novel that has lots of weaknesses. I’m giving it the rest of this month, and then I’m going to move on, if I can’t find enough to salvage.

“Salvage.” From the French, via Latin and medieval Latin, mid. 17th century. “To save.” Used specifically about the rescue of cargo from ships. I’m reading David Gibbins’s A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, while thinking about Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Some rich cross-fertilization of ideas, here, because of the analogy, more broadly, to trauma work (I’m sure there’s a German expression of many syllables for this: the task of uncovering and rediscovering, so that what is salvaged can be used to shape a life worth living).

German’s on my mind because of Freud (always) and the dream/trauma dilemma. Sometimes ideas seem more closely related because of language, and in English, there is not as close a parallel as in German.

I have no German.

Almost no German.

My relationship to German is akin to Plath’s in that it’s a family language I tried to learn, more than once, and the syllables kept getting stuck on my tongue. Ich, ich, ich, indeed.

Freud’s work on trauma and dreams was influenced, surely, by this etymological accident: Traum (dream)/Trauma (trauma). There’s a wonderful expression: Traumafabrik. I need to look more closely into the idea of the “dream factory” that is also being used to refer to art made from trauma. I rather like the idea of a “trauma processing plant.” I’m thinking of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, because my CNF students are reading a brief excerpt in a couple of weeks, alongside a terrific interview with several authors who write “speculative memoir.” Because some stories of trauma are best recounted by “telling it slant.”

So: crime fiction, trauma/dreams/work, and speculative memoirs about domestic abuse which are emphatically not fiction but are–in the broader way that I’ve been thinking about it–crime writing. In a braided essay, the discrete elements are supposed to be brought together, but I’m struggling with that, because my thinking is still in process.

My book project was intended to focus only on fiction, and I’m . . . drifting. Because thinking about true crime and its ethics has me contemplating, too, how memoirs and poetry and dramas that are autobiographical (or not) and address violence against women are a kind of crime writing. This is likely not a new insight, but it’s new to me.

One last example from this week’s reading, and it’s a classical one by way of a contemporary Canadian playwright whose work is brilliant: Erin Shields really dives into the wreck, and her salvaging is from classical and Shakespearian antecedents. Queen Goneril resurrects Lear’s daughter and gives her a voice. I’m now reading If We Were Birds and it’s devastating. I’m not sure I could sit through a performance, because just reading it, safe in front of the fire, is a challenge. Trying to tell, as Shields does here, the story of “millions of female victims who have been silenced through violence” risks merely numbing viewers/readers with a litany of unbearable abuses. But that’s not the effect of this play.

So is Ovid writing about Philomela, sexually assaulted and her tongue cut out, a kind of crime fiction? Is there crime, investigation/revelation/justice? Maybe.

I don’t want my project to become a Casaubon-like Key to All Crime Fiction. But as I work on fiction, I feel myself pulled, this week, to true crime, poetry, the history of archeology, and drama.

And I’m reminded, too, of the limits of time and energy: “Don’t exhaust yourself.” But it’s not always obvious what readings, or offshoots, are refreshing, and which ones will prove exhausting.