When I was younger than I am now I was convinced that I could not be happy and write. Writing was mysterious to me, a deep alchemy that took place in the wake of strong feeling and held me fast until it departed. I could not depend on its regular or fated arrival, only the knowledge that it had come before and would come again. The only throughline seemed to be first, novelty, then, extremity—of emotion and of experience. And I began to live my life with an analytical, historicizing eye, an eye that became an I that lived for the story, that kept the camera rolling in the hopes that that mysterious alchemy would come again.
I don’t feel like that any more, not now, but I still start essays and stories this way—from a flash of something magic, some deep feeling that turns literate, solidifying until it has formed a new sentence in my head. The quickening of that first sentence is something I still treasure; I write toward its aliveness for the rest of the piece.
I’ve been writing this letter series for about two months now, going on three. Since starting Yield Guide, I’ve been looking around and catching myself with that analytical eye again, as I notice what’s in season and what’s in bloom. I began this series in part because I wanted to share the joy I felt in close looking—in identifying plants and learning their histories, bringing texture to the flora of ordinary life. But in the last two weeks, especially as the deadline for this letter approached, I felt myself turning opportunistic as I gazed, wondering where the story was. What the angle was. What was beautiful, and showy, and had a built-in metaphor. Instead of looking for the pure pleasure of looking, I was looking for something to write about.
Look at a mugwort leaf from one side and it’s deep green, with a little shine to it. Flip it over and the underside is pale and silvery, with raised veins. The shape of a mugwort leaf is distinct and sharply lobed, almost like that of chrysanthemums, which lack mugwort’s silvery underbelly; to my untrained eye, mugwort leaves look a little like hands, or antlers. On the plant, which can grow to six feet tall, the pointed leaves droop and wave in the wind. Gathered in bundles, one might think: garland. One might think: wand.
Last weekend I was upstate again—I am moving upstate in two days—and wandering, my mind doing its mechanical-writer’s-mind thing, churning and churning for story. I was drawn to what was colorful and in bloom: jewelweed and pale jewelweed, purple loosestrife, the magenta blankets of invasive knapweed that have overtaken the grassy medians on the Taconic. Driving for miles on Route 22 we passed by meadows and marshes, wet and shining after a summer rain, pale pink and yellow in patches from the goldenrod and asters. They were beautiful, but they were merely beautiful; I pressed my phone against the window, hoping for inspiration to strike.
I often encounter this problem when I write, which is that when I get stuck, it’s not because I don’t know what happens next—though that’s part of the problem—but that I have an idea of what or how I’m supposed to be writing, and I have run into its limits. I often begin drafting with a sense of what I’m writing toward, but with every essay or piece of fiction I’ve ever written, that initial instinct has complicated and changed. No story has ever turned out as I imagined it; no critical argument has ever concluded the way I first argued it; and yet I believe, somehow, each time, that I’ve gotten it right the first time. That I know what this will look like from beginning to end. When the writing gets blocked, I start looking for confirmation, trying to fit the story into a container that no longer suits it. The writing dies: the sentences turn florid, then bland, and then I stop writing at all. Sometimes for weeks.
What I’m saying is, I was looking all around for something bright and blooming because I thought that was what I had to write about, and then, while walking on a trail I saw the waving green hands of a leaf I thought I knew from a friend and I thought, is that mugwort, and I turned a leaf over and its underside was silver, soft, gleaming, and the leaf said yes, I am.
*
Mugwort is known as the mother of herbs. It’s been used in food, medicine, and magic since the Iron Age. Because it’s rhizomatic, it spreads easily, overtaking native flora; the species that I saw, Artemisia vulgaris, is considered invasive in parts of the United States. There are different related plants that are also referred to as mugwort, like Artemisia japonica and Artemisia princeps, which are native to Asia and also have medicinal uses. The leaves of Artemisia v., the mugwort commonly found in the states, are soft, almost feathery. When held to your nose, they smell herbaceous, similar to rosemary or sage.
I’ve been stuck in my writing lately. Or rather, stuck and unstuck. I make a leap, then look around before I’ve fully landed, uncertain if it was the right decision. I’ve been trying to figure out the narrator of my book, who until recently was unnamed. I’ve been trying to figure out what separates us, me and her, and what unites us, and most crucially, how we might see those uniting aspects differently. Because I began this book with a lightning strike, I keep wanting it to strike again.
I’d recognized mugwort from a workshop led by my friend Rachel Ellis, where they taught us to identify mugwort and told us about its medicinal traits; alerted us to its heavy magic and its historical uses. In Japan, it’s been used to ward off evil spirits, tied in bundles with iris leaves and hung outside homes; in the Middle Ages, in Europe, it was used as a magical protective herb. I have, in my mind, this belief of magic as scarcity, as rarity, the strike that surprises you with its blessing. But mugwort grows wild in the abandoned lots of North America, and yarrow grows in Prospect Park.
Though I no longer believe my creative output is tied to suffering or to tumult, I’m still prone to putting it through the suffocating pressure of my own desires—my stubborn belief that something must work as I first conceived of it, not as it actually is. The book is changing as it finds its shape. I cannot force it to be what it is not; I can only write it into what it will become. I’m reminded of the advice Ramona Ausubel once offered in a lecture about revision: look through the work you’ve already written for clues about what it is.
An intention for these weeks to come: to look more carefully at what is plain, and green, and not blossoming. To learn to identify a plant by its leaves, its scent and its shape.
And what I thought was a lone stand of mugwort—I plucked a leaf and held it, stroked it in my palm and carried it along the trail—was one of hundreds of plants, maybe thousands, leaning over the path, slender and swaying and shimmering silver-green. Once I started noticing it, I saw it everywhere. This ordinary magic, close to where I soon will live. Mugwort all along the trail. Growing at the edge of a field. A patch in the backyard of a friend’s house. Once I knew it and could call it, it answered and made itself known.
Till soon,
LP