No Other Place

A Few Words About the Work You'll Find Here

If you’re new here, and came by way of Robert Saltzman’s post, welcome.

This means you took the time to read some or all of a long correspondence between Robert and me. I find that remarkable, and want to thank you for taking the time.

When I reread the conversation myself, I noticed a couple of things across its arc. What stood out helps me understand more about how I write.

The first is that something, slowly, reorganized.

That alone was enough.

But there’s something else that’s a little more specific. I can see now that the particular questions I was living inside organized the world I lived in, which means they also organized what I noticed.

For a long time, I thought the most important questions centered around becoming the right kind of person. My old notebooks are full of questions that circled around right and wrong, thoughts predicated on improvement. I couldn’t yet see those questions had already decided what I was and what kind of world I lived in.

Because I kept seeing certain things about myself as wrong, I remained a problem to be solved in the future. And, so long as the questions didn’t change, I kept getting more of the same.

Until one small thing started to happen.

When I sat down to write, I found myself turning toward the questions themselves.

Often, in my exchanges with Robert, a memory would emerge. The first time I came across, in a book:

Check everything against your own experience.

When I’d read that it seemed quietly radical to me. I was also certain I had to be taught what it meant.

Robert never gave me anywhere else to go, never suggested there was anything to learn. So, I began, instead, to look through these eyes, pay attention to these ears, feel this body. At the same time, thought did its thought-ing, offering up its objections. This is a last resort.

And yet, slowly, something became obvious.

There is no other place but this experience.

As that settled in, the need for it to be different no longer seemed quite so compelling.

This brings me to how I write.

I might start with a question or an idea. I might start with an ordinary scene in which something is noticed. Either way, the two must inform each other.

I’ve no use for ideas that live only in abstraction.

I need to see what they look like lived. I need to see whether they hold true to experience.

Sometimes, when they do, something reorganizes.

In the language of daily life.

That’s where my essays begin.

Thanks again for being here.
Onward,
Kate

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Related Reading:

Before I Arrive — A few ordinary seconds without the usual center.

The Layer Between — When watching stops and something comes closer.

The Place I Run To — Open, then narrowing. The move back to safety.