The Sacred and the Profane

Or listening to mixed tapes found in memory boxes

Because sacred spaces are fleeting

I sit in a sacred space. I’ve traveled across the country to be here. I sit in a leather wingback chair next to the fireplace in the living room of my mother’s house in Iowa. It’s the single place on the whole vast spinning planet where I feel most at peace, most thoughtful, most creative.

I’ve sat in this chair since my parents moved to this house when I was 20. So many different eras, different states of being, different selves. I remember sitting in this chair and tearing up to the last words of Love in the Time of Cholera before leaving to Mexico when I was 24. I remember writing on the elegant page of a handsome Italian leather journal my friend Karima gave me. I remember starting stories (which likely never went beyond the start), and I remember finishing a book in the chair just last summer.

The chair has seen so many words it’s as if Roland Barthes and Toni Morrison sit on its armrests.

It’s hard to know why this chair gives me so much. Perhaps it’s because it’s rooted in a time when I was young, full of all of the best kinds of fantasies, so ready to bound into life. Perhaps it’s because I’ve so often sat in it during interludes between things. Perhaps it’s because the chair has always offered a moment of reprieve. Or perhaps it’s because when I sit in it, I know I’ll be taken care of (even though I am ostensibly here now to be a caretaker).

The chair is my definition of the numen: a divinity or spirit that inhabits a place or an object.

It’s important to revere the numinous places and things in our lives, to look for them, to create them.

I now sit in the chair knowing that the times I will sit in it are likely numbered. We don’t give funerals for such objects, but they deserve mourning.

Because beauty

The beauty of catching a fly. The beauty of getting into a cab. The beauty of steak frites on a rainy dark night. The beauty of wearing a topcoat on a city street. The beauty of picking up the tab. The beauty of slicing a fresh apple. The beauty of not knowing the time. The beauty of a molding piece of cheese. The beauty of a stack of books. The beauty of staying up until dawn just because. The beauty of dried wine in the bottom of a glass.

Because a quote on beauty

“Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting: the self-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other.”

~ David Whyte

Because beginnings

A beginning is always an ending.

Because endings

An ending is always a beginning.

Because middles

There’s a lot to be said about middles because they connect the beginning to the ending and vice versa. But, now that I think of it, they don’t really need to connect the beginning to the end. They just need to be in the middle. Anyway, there’s a lot to be said about middles and not enough space to say it here.

Because contradictions

I wish we thought of people less as spokespeople of a neat and finished personal self and more as messy, variegated, inconstant, polyphonous creatures seeking and seeking and seeking for all kinds of things.

Walt Whitman had it all figured out: “Do I contradict myself?” he asked unselfconsciously. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Somehow, by acknowledging the contradictions and the multitudinous within us, he dissolves the divisions between us. It’s better to speak to a person’s multitudes than their singletudes (i.e., their ideology), in other words.

It’s in our messiness where the illusion of our separateness can be disarmed. It’s in realizing our contradictions (and thereby our fallibilities) where our antagonisms weaken. We’re born messy and we’ll always be messy. So we should be messy together.

Except people like joining teams. Because teams are one thing. A force of unity. Without multitudes. But with divisions to fight for. By definition.

Because a Haiku

I don’t feel like yelling

I have forgotten yesterday’s mosquito

I lied, I stole that bone

Because prompts take us to new places

I’ll tell you one thing about this cassette tape: my friend Bobby Jean took the photo after digging up a memory box she buried in her yard 20 years ago. Someday I’ll tell you the rest of the story. But you tell me yours now.

Use this photo as a prompt, as a random catalyst, as an igniter for any writing project you're working on.

Or … write a story about this photo in less than 300 words and post it here.

Because stories about friendship

What are your favorite novels about friendships?

Ever since I read Elana Ferrante's Neapolitan series, I’ve been a bit obsessed by novels that are centered in friendships. It’s interesting how the drama of our friendships often play a huge role in our real lives, but how seldom they're at the heart of a novel.

Which is why I enjoyed talking to Jean Chen Ho on the Write-minded podcast about her new novel Fiona and Jane.

All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

If you like this newsletter, please consider checking out my recently released collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide.

Lidia Yuknavitch said:

“Somewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure.” 

Grant Faulkner is executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He’s the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner.