The Particular Kinship of Writers

by Sarah Sadie
with featured poem by Robin Chapman

Kinship. When I roll the word over my tongue and around in my mind, I see faces around some kind of archetypal bonfire, rosy in the warm and flickering light. Maybe there’s meat roasting, or marshmallows. Maybe there are stories shared and old songs sung. You know the fire I mean. It lives in our collective dreamscape, our deeply encoded pre-history history.

How kinship relates to writers, and is experienced by us, is a particular question. One that sticks a bit. Writers are by nature observers. We hang back just a bit, keep our notebooks open and our pens at the ready. We listen. We take notes. We stay ready for inspiration. We keep some part of ourselves secret, safe, and a little separate. We’re question marks.

Maybe I’m especially sensitive on the point these days because I just moved to a new community where I know no one yet. I live on a tree lined block of a small town street and neighborhood. Most of the other residents on the block have lived here 20, 30, 40 or more years. I’m definitely the new kid. I’m the unknown. In a neighborly Midwestern way, they make conversation. “You live in that big house by yourself?” “What do you do?” “I’ve noticed you’re away a lot.” My life has absences and gaps that don’t make sense to them. I don’t quite, yet, fit.

As a writer, I think that’s a fine place to be. But it doesn’t necessarily play nicely with the idea of kinship.

As coincidences will happen, my new next door neighbor is someone whose name you might recognize from WFOP calendars and other publications, Wisconsin poet Idella Anacker. She was one of the founding members of a writing group here in Portage that lasted for fifty years. I’ve been part of a few writing groups and that achievement astonishes me. I introduced myself to her as soon as I could and acknowledged the accomplishment. A few days ago she brought over a green leather scrapbook, packed with all the clippings, the articles published about the group, saved from over the decades.

This gives me a way in to the question. Because what is documented in those yellowing clippings is kinship. The kind of kinship we writers build out of necessity and desire. Publication was the goal, and to that end they workshopped, critiqued, shared information on markets and submissions, and cheered each other’s hits and near misses. Recognizable as it is, it reads from a different era. The local paper of the day reported not just on the publications and awards, but also of their holiday gatherings, who played the piano, what carols were sung.

Poetry is news that stays news, Ezra Pound said. Here is news that stays news but maybe in our twenty-first century moment we’ve lost track of it a little: a community of writers gathered around a piano at Christmas to sing together in the dark and cold. Again I see faces, warmly lit, the fires of friendship and common bond. Kinship. Connection.

As writers, a lot of our work is solitary but we sure do need each other. Our distant ancestors created a technology where funny little squiggles across a surface somehow, magically, gain meaning and reach across distance and time to share that meaning with others. In this way we discover our kin also in the writers of the past. One of my favorite poems ever was written five hundred years ago:

Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne?
Cryst yf my love were in my armys,
And I yn my bed agayne!

That voice, anonymous, reaches forward through 500 years of the abattoir of history (thank you Seamus Heaney for the image) to grab me. I feel that visceral yearning (Cryst!) to be once again lingering with my lover in bed, while the smalle rayne falls outside our warm and cozy shelter. News that stays news. Ever current, ever present, ever as real as my heartbeat. That writer and I are kin for sure.

At such moments, I can get a little carried away and feel a kinship with everyone on the planet who ever picked up a pen and tried to write a word, and then write a better word. I feel such gratitude to be part of this roiling river of voices through the centuries, each trying to catch a moment, the texture of what it was to be a human moving around on the spinning surface of the world. And that kinship includes women like my grandmothers, both of whom kept diaries and daily journals, simple records of what happened in their days (nothing is simple, don’t be fooled). These were private documents, not meant for publication, the complete opposite of the Portage Writers Group Idella founded, and yet, they felt that urge to capture their experience by writing it down. Grandmothers, I claim you. Draw up close to this fire that keeps us warm.

It’s a funny old thing, this fire we crowd around. Sometimes it’s crowded and noisy with ancestors and community. Sometimes it’s just me here. Warming myself, and suddenly aware the fire itself is what creates the shadows behind me. What a paradox. If I would claim kinship with other writers, maybe the biggest work is to claim kinship with myself, to venture occasionally away from the safety and warmth of the blaze, and into the shadows. The work of locating those parts of myself I lost along the way. In the end, those are the eyes that haunt me most, my own fragments and figments. Maybe the invitation to kinship is an invitation to integration, to becoming more whole at every level: individual, communal, and on larger, unknowable planes as well.

That sounds like a tall order this morning. Maybe I’ll just pour a fresh cup of coffee and keep trying to put sentences together in such a way that they’ll stick.

Oh who can say where these fancy, funny little squiggles take us, or how we got exactly here. I only know I am here. As are you. These words that I am writing on a Tuesday morning in September, you are reading . . . when? Where? I can’t know. And yet I feel you with me this morning, just over my shoulder, reading the words as they unscroll and ribbon across the page, the screen. Connected by the thread of these paragraphs, for the duration of time it takes to write/read this, at least, we are kin of a very particular kind, close as the breath, and co-creating the meanings between us.

Let’s keep going.