What larger story can hold my own? To strive toward originality, I tend to root in origins. The set of transpersonal stories that carries me like a big durable pouch comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. As a recent example, I was trying to crack open an essay exploring what it means to love and cherish my partner’s children who are not biologically my own, and I turned to the enigmatic biblical story of the prophet Elijah, who spent three years with a widow and her son in the middle of a famine and blessed them so that their oil and flour jars were miraculously refilled every day to keep them all alive. It felt energizing to inscribe my own small story of sojourn-love and almost-family into this tale with a goal of discovering something new in both my contemporary story and the ancient one.
Whatever foundational narratives live inside us—fairy tales, sacred stories, myths—the tales are usually skeletal, with hidden rooms, what-ifs, and potent silences. Turning to them as fresh material is midrashic, a word that comes from the Hebrew verb “darash” which means to seek out or to inquire. Midrash is a term in Hebrew literature for exegesis often performed by filling in the gaps of biblical narrative. The midrashic impulse is not to simply retell or contemporize these tales, but to defamiliarize them. Excavations of narratives invite us to bring our own stories—fictive or nonfictive—alongside that material. We peer inside these parallel-running stories and see their undecided futures.
While this midrashic turn appeals to certain subject matter only, we can extrapolate the principle of “what else can hold my story,” what perspective, what sound, what form? A passage from Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (HarperCollins, 1991)—“High up on a stark jut of wasted hickory, a hoot owl turns its head completely around and persecutes the night with its stare”—makes me explore how this departure in perspective from the humancentric story, the slight shift to wildlife agency, can carry my story. Or these lines from C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon, 1998): “Early every evening she sits on the steps of her trailer. The / dirt yard raked. Caterpillar fording the furrows. Mercy, / Louise. If it wasn’t hot hot hot. Cornlight.” How might that clipped, idiomatic, musky vocal register hold my story? Recently both James Galvin’s The Meadow (Henry Holt, 1992) and Han Kang’s The White Book (Hogarth, 2019), translated from the original Korean into English by Deborah Smith, have me thinking about how the vignette form can hold my story. What does it show me about forward motion that is nonlinear?
—Jessie van Eerden, author of Yoke and Feather (Dzanc Books, 2024)
Photo credit: Richard Schmitt