Everything about the game is militant: most notably the colors, green and red and black with various splatters. The type: sans-serif and uppercase mostly, without any of the curves or swirls or softnesses of the more traditionally feminine serifs, italics or even lowercase. Think of a body: a woman with hips and thickness of skin; with wind in her hair; a smile. A man with more rigidity and reservation; the interior obscured by flatness. It occurs to me here that I have to indulge stereotypes to even talk about this. The game of course comes in a box and on its cover are what I presume to be men, nameless and ready, with stakes held high and battered flags awake in the setting red sun. There is so much red.

I am preoccupied with the design. I keep thinking in my head: made by a 19-year-old male. Again, stereotyping. But there is something about the overtness of the masculinity; the rampant arrows and phallic cities; the uninformed stencil font of the title; the attempt to represent camouflage, attempt to reference both modern and antique without choosing: there is simply something so oblivious about it. For example, the rules. The rules are formatted interestingly in a folder with tabs; one has the impressions of having received a mission, an order or set or orders. But when the folder is opened no hierarchy is apparent; the order of things is obscured, mangled, unreadable almost. The tabs jump from A to X without any indication of why or how. My father spends 45 minutes reading and sorting and citing the rules to us.

And the rules have changed. The game Risk was invented in 1959, less than two decades after the second world war. (Are our memories really that short?) My dad remembers playing as a kid in the sixties: to start, he and his friends would simply place their troops wherever they wished and begin their safe attempts at world domination. For instance, my dad would say, “I’d like China” and would then place troops there. The next kid would say, “I’d like Russia” and place troops there. And so on. It is different now. The placement of troops is assigned. World domination, we’re told, is not the goal. Instead, there are “objectives” and achieving them is how the game is won. There are minor and major objectives. Minor objectives: control Europe; control Asia; take over four cities in one turn; control North America. Major objectives: control two continents; control eleven cities; take over a continent in one turn; control two enemy capitals. I can’t tell the difference, exactly.

Before a recent game started, I browsed the headlines on my cell phone, pausing briefly on a New Yorker article involving the Syrian dictator, President Bashar al-Assad. Journalists were estimating 20 to 30 murders a day by the government since March. Peaceful demonstrators carrying olive branches are being sprayed (sprayed?) with bullets, raped and bled out. I write this without even being able to properly imagine it: the bloating, the tearing, the screams, children, decapitations, torsos unattached, how one might even return home after such devastation. Home? For the past two months, I’ve switched off the news in the morning, too sad to listen to it. This is unforgivable, me in my warm apartment. Just today, I tried to explain to my friend about how the reports depressed me and so I stopped listening. He went silent; he, a captain of the Navy for thirty years, a member of Common Cause, listener of NPR: he is deeply concerned. It’s easy to silence the things we don’t want to know about. That night, I turned the news back on.

But before the news: we played Risk. During the game, phone switched off, we said things like, “Egypt is now attacking India.” And: “Stand down, sir.” And: “Hold your fire! Retreat!” And: “I wish to withdraw my troops.” And: “There’s been a massacre.” And: “Russia has been compromised.” And: “The airfield is impossible to overcome.” And: “Blood will be shed.” And: “It was worth it.” And: “Troops must be sacrificed.” We found ourselves funny, too. Laughing and yelling and reciting whatever we’ve heard in movies. During our second game, my sister Tweeted, “That’s right. I own all of Europe and Africa.” I should’ve said something about how problematic the Tweet was, but to acknowledge reality would be to break our suspension of disbelief, I suppose; to leak the private, simple, manufactured reality of the game with facts of real Reality. I went silent.

We also said, “Remember: never start a land war in Asia.” This, family lore. Or maybe its cultural: from the Princess Bride, a movie we must have watched two hundred times. To quote portions of the movie to one another is to laugh, to remember, to feel the fabric of the old couch we sat on while watching. What I like about games with my family is the way all of our history rises up and emerges in the periphery, connecting and reminding. Age has taught us to distance, to not say, to omit certain pieces of reality. It’s not totally easy to talk anymore, if it ever was.

And I think too of the word risk and when it is deployed. Not often, certainly. Lately I have used the word when thinking of a heart: this or that would be a kind of risk. To love is a risk. To be loved, to be vulnerable is a risk. Or: a risk was taken and failure occurred: failure of the heart, of the mind and our bodies and attentions. Risk as related to physical danger is something else: something our bodies enter into for reasons other than love, mostly. To make something is a risk, an induction of fear and the possibility of failure or exposure. Death and hearts are not exactly on the line. Kind of but not exactly. There is, after all, always the possibility of making something else. Not so with humans whose hearts are delicate and in need of certain care.

I’ve recently picked up a copy of Robert Bruce’s biography, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude and, oh my, the love letters sent from Bell to Mabel Hubbard have left me breathless. (Chapter 15, if like me you wish to skip ahead.) Bell spent years giving elocution lessons to Mabel, left deaf after a bout of scarlet fever. Amidst his private lessons and experiments with the telephone, he began to write Mabel of his feelings for her. It’s a longish story, and one I’ll let you discover for yourself, but I’ve found some of his handwritten letters to her in the national archive.

A few particularly delicious excerpts: “You do not know–you cannot guess–how much I love you…I wish to amend my life for you.” And, upon learning of her reservations: “I shall not trouble you any more…if you still think of me as you do now, I shall try to be happy in my work.” And again: “Nature has made me what I am and it is not my fault that I have such strong feelings. I can restrain them but I cannot prevent them from arising.” And then, after marriage: “I am afraid of the distance between us — for something tells me that you care less for me…when I am far away…You have grown into my heart my darling…” Oh my, oh my.

I recommend viewing the archive yourself (Library of Congress), where the letters have been typed up and are thus easier to read. Though they are indeed pretty just to see: where the ink fell thick; the way in which the script leans forward suggesting speed; how Bell signs off, your own; the way he rotates the page and fills space. There is something immediate about a handwritten letter: the way the body of the writer cannot be extracted from what it written: the letter, an extension of a self: a self in the fire of a moment, reaching and thinking and forlorn and still somehow hopeful.

Still at the thrilling AWP, I just left a panel featuring the writers Stephen Elliott, Nick Flynn and Ander Monson, introduced by Graywolf editor, Jeffrey Shotts. Eula Biss, notably the only woman scheduled to speak at the panel, was snowed in in Chicago, alas.

Anyway, in looking over my notes from the panel, I think the ideas and language employed in the discussion relate to visual creativity in important ways. The panel was titled To Tell You the Truth: Strategies in New Nonfiction. While the panelists did (do) discuss art, all comments about drawing or design are my own. Here are my notes, by author.

Introduction (Jeffrey Shotts)
Nonfiction moves beyond reportage into the territory of tangents, dead-ends, errancy and wonder. Just because an essay is pursuing something, doesn’t mean what it’s arrived at is what it’s gained; the form is an alternative to judgment. A question we need to ask ourselves is: do we read nonfiction to experience art or to learn information? An essay, an illustration, a design is fixed in time and space and artifact; the essay is thinking, frozen. A virtual space the viewer/reader can inhabit for a while.

Stephen Elliott
Strategy, part of the title of the panel, implies we as creatives know where we’re going; but strategy only enters the process after the thing is written or made. A filter is a critical utility in order to determine feedback that is helpful from that which isn’t. This relates to aesthetic vision; without a personal vision, you cannot write, cannot make. There are three reasons a person will read a memoir:

1. Perfect/beautiful/really nice sentences.
2. Tension.
   This is built while maintaining story and character and narrative. Themes that digress from the narrative can only emerge if enough tension is built. The self is the thing around which the tension and everything else exists.
3. Honesty.
   This is not about not lying. Lying requires intent but honesty is bordered by self-knowledge…in order to write honestly, you have to evaluate yourself intensely, honestly.

The reader is the most important person, needs to be the first concern of the author. By making characters singular (e.g. only good or only bad), you’re hiding something from the reader. By worrying about someone’s feelings, you’re putting something ahead of the reader. In illustration, when you follow someone else’s vision, the inauthenticity of the pursuit is apparent to the viewer. This cannot happen.

Stephen ended gloriously, “I don’t know. I just came up with this.”

Nick Flynn
People hear what they want to hear. They project their needs and desires and lives onto your work. So one of our functions is to create a screen that others can project onto in order to make meaning from their experiences. We are not writing from the soul; instead, we need to uncover our deeper purpose. Why do we cling to the stories we’ve told ourselves? What is behind them? What do the stories hide? The stories are important only as a threshold to cross. Here is the formula (to which he then said, a la Van Wilder, “Write this down.”:

1. Hear the stories you tell yourself about yourself. The stories you always tell.
2. Start with a random image and discover its meaning.
3. Ask yourself what you think you know and how long you’ve known it.
4. Let the story lose its thread and push further into the unknown.
5. The point where language breaks down is a useful edge, revealing to us the space between the familiar and the unknown.

The story (the essay, the book, the illustration, the design) is not about what happens to us but how we perceive what happens to us. The process of making is more about what we don’t know, is more about discovering the hidden pattern beneath the world. Something happened; some things actually do happen. We need to come up against the reality of the world and perceive them.

Ander Monson
Essays are technologies are designed to handle infinity; they expand and allow us to expand into them, outward from them. They chip away at the stability of the self. What is interesting is the limitless; what is interesting are the limits. The interiors of our brains are the most readily available infinities. Look at Billy Idol’s album, Cyberpunk.

Album cover which came with a floppy disc and instructions to use with a color Macintosh. 1993.

This is a document of what we thought at one point the future might have been. In other words, this is a document of the way Idol’s brain worked at one point in time; it’s a mind we can enter into. The essay-the text, the form and the white space-are places to study, to imagine, to illuminate the dark spaces of our minds. Through essays (design, illustration), we illuminate the world around us, editing it down so facts and ideas get their own tiny spotlights.

From the Q & A
What are other ways to think about tension?

• Tension can be generated by: waiting for something to happen; between two people in a room (keep them in the room together as long as possible); syntax/diction; the tension between the unknown and the known and how it gets discovered; tension emerging from subject-switching and disconnection.

Any new mediums you’re using?

• The web, for Vanishing Point, is used to interact with the text, to undercut what’s happening in the book. There’s a critical element of play important [to the process of discovery]. The web pages constantly erode/modify/self-edit the original; in this way, the web is a performance. (Monson)




• The written word can be as fluid as the stuff on the web. It can contain a kind of archive of information uncontainable in the book. (Flynn)




• The Rumpus is a space in which creative energy is spent in writing emails. We pass along information (about the self, about the world) this way. As writers, we have a smaller audience but create deeper connections with them. That’s what this is about. (Elliott)

From my walk to the Metro station

Without further ado, here are some notes from one panel at the conference.

A photo proving I was at the panel, at least for the duration of the photo-taking.

Playing for Keeps: Intensity and Creativity in the Lyric Essay
Panelists: Steven Harvey, Kathryn Winograd, Robert Root (in absentia), Rebecca McClanahan

In a standing-room only space amidst a largely and perhaps notably female audience, a group of AWP-goers gathered to discuss the lyric essay: what the name means, what it is, what it might be. Here are my notes from the conversation, delineated by speaker.

Introduction (Steven Harvey)
The lyric essay was first named by Deborah Tall in 1994, then-editor of Seneca Review, in a note to John D’Agata. What she said was that he was looking for a form propelled not by information but by possibility of transformative experience. You are talking about the lyric, she’d said. Then Steven asked: but what does a definition matter? Rather, we should ask: when is a lyric essay good? The lyric is a license to experiment, to play with language but must always contain a sense of intensity, level of passion and intelligence. (Throughout the intro, names were dropped: Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, D’Agata and one affectionately named nay-sayer, Philip Lopate.)

13 Ways of Looking at the Lyric Essay in 15 Minutes (Rebecca McClanahan)

1. Something Like Music in My Head
   • - Not all music is melodic (atonal, minor key)
   • - Change a note or two and the essay is a different key
2. Beauty is as Beauty Does
   • - Subject need not be pretty poetic or musical or serious
   • - Humor is almost never discussed with lyricism
   • - Does not have to be large or on the surface important
   • - Absolute attention is prayer
3. Close Cover After Striking
   • - Need two or three elements to start something
4. Lyric Essay as Time Travel, or Move Fluidly In and Out of Time
   • - Elements of the essay existing on independent and colliding time tracks
5. How Many I’s Does It Take to Change an Essay
   • - Speaker as I
   • - The I might be absent at first
   • - There might be multiple variations on self (past, present)
6. Caution: Contents Under Pressure
   • - Every word matters
   • - What is the musical score running beneath essay
   • - Subject must fit its container
7. Say It Again, Sam
   • - Tone poems, repeating phrases/sounds/mantra
   • - Repeated loops or braids (In nebraska, ted)
8. Take a Breath
   • - Music only exists because of silence between the sounds
9. Right Here, Right Now
   • - Feeling of immediacy, of a mind is discovering its subject even as words appear on page
10. Ride the Train of Thought or Language All the Way to Meaning
    • - Language (leaps of thought), engine that pulls the train of meaning
    • - Balance between music and meaning
11. Imagine There’s a Heaven or Hell
    • - Speculate, wonder, imagine, the gift of perhaps
12. Go Ahead and Wear the Crazy Hat
    • - Be weird, idiosyncratic structure
    • - Hat alone isn’t enough; object of affection/true subject
13. Get Out While the Getting’s Good
    • - Endings as openings; allow reader to complete transaction; reader supplies final chord

This is Not a Lyric Essay (Robert Root, read by Harvey)
The lyric essay might be considered as a kind of blurting of words: unplanned, spontaneous, first and final draft, charged. It has a kind of inadvertence. The lyric can be felt in the blood. Place is a lyric essay. Deborah Tall said of the lyric it partakes of the essay in its weight, in its desire to engage with facts, in its passion. The form is simultaneously essay and poem and music; attends language with precision and rigor but with a different vision from poetry about what it might achieve. The lyric is an entity in itself; embodies a sense of wholeness; is an essence; is not decorative. As Lia Purpura says: the form is a necessity of thought.

How Important White Space is in Poems and the Lyric Essay (Kathryn Winograd)
In a poem, white space is everything on the page unmarked. It has the power of juxtaposition; is the poet’s unspeakable; it is movement mapped out. Essays speak of the vertical movement of the essay (verticality through associative memory, descriptions); they contain intersections of consciousness and unconsciousness, of associations. For a poet, white space is what they cannot or will not say, it is their essential unsayable; that which is understood only on intuitive level. Beneath everything I am writing is absence. The ultimate tension in writing, in white space: what is written v. what is not.

Unmaking of the Made-Up Self (Steven Harvey)
Harvey found the lyric after becoming weary of his own voice. After he realized the self as top hat and cape of imagination. The lyric offers a breakdown of the persona, a kind of portal in which the self comes apart, in which the process of disintegration is seen. In the lyric, the voice is absorbed by subject matter and the self-assured persona is liberated. In Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, we witness an insistently low-key self, a weary voice in transformation. In this voice, the I is enlarged by becoming part of something bigger than itself; the self does not have the last word but blossoms, allows itself to be transformed by bumps and texts and countertexts and new information.