Episode #276: The Subtle Art of Attunement and Its Bearing on Our Writing
Featuring Baron Wormser
Hello naturalists, poets, and writers in search of meaning and consequence!
This week we’re slowing down, inviting listeners to contemplate another world both far and not far away from this one where there’s no electricity, no internet, no immediate access to all the information of the world at your fingertips. This was the world our guest Baron Wormser occupied for nearly twenty years, and the subject of his memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring. We’re channeling a state of mind, beckoning listeners to attune to your surroundings, to what calls and what moves you. And maybe you’ll emerge out the other side of today’s show having reached a meditative, ruminative state. We hope so.
Booker and Nobel winners from past years that are on indie presses:
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Norton)
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Grove Atlantic)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (OneWorld Publications)
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (OneWorld Publications)
The Years by Annie Ernaux (Seven Stories Press)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta)
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (The New Press)
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: Welcome, welcome! I’m Brooke Warner, here with my cohost Grant Faulkner, and on today’s show we’re going to attempt to draw you into a non-technological world where there’s no electricity and no power. We invite you into the journey of your imagination, though this was the very real everyday life of our guest Baron Wormser for nearly a quarter of a century. Grant, I read Baron’s memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring, with such great interest and enchantment because it’s such an atypical story. This book was published in 2006, and Baron lived in the woods of Maine from the 70s through the 90s. I went into the book thinking I could breeze through it and just capture the gist of it, but as soon as I started, I saw what a deep meditation the book is. Its subtitle is A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Land, and so it feels to me the only way to properly honor this book and its author is to slow down our own pace today, and talk about the ruminative, reflective, meditative nature of certain kinds of writing. So I want to start here. Do you think it takes having a slow and deep inner life to be able to write in this kind of style—ruminative, reflective? Like does the writing flow from a state of mind, or do you think you can beckon the state of mind by cultivating or summoning this way of writing?
Grant: What a great question. I’m tempted to say that one’s prose—the way it moves, whether it jump cuts or meanders or gets distracted or digs deep is reflective of the state of the author’s mind, and I think that has to be the case up to a point. But when I think of myself, I change when I write. I’ve said this in past episodes, but I don’t exactly like my mental state these days. I’m distracted, anxious, always looking for new stimulation—I have the mind that a lot of us have, an online mind that has experienced too much scrolling and too much stress. But writing is like a prayer. It allows me to focus and slow down and be really reflective, so in the end, I think you can beckon a state of mind with writing. Just as you can through meditation or exercise.
Brooke: Despite the subtitle telling me that Baron is a poet, I was nevertheless not expecting this book to be as poetic as it is—so that was a delightful surprise. We’ve talked on past shows about the ways that poetry is foundational to other genres. When poetry shows up in fiction or in memoir, that can make it automatically more literary, more meditative. But whether you’re born with an awareness of the poeticism of everyday life, or whether you cultivate it, it seems to me it’s key to living a writerly life. I’m a person who’s taking my first foray into a genre that’s asking a lot more of me than my previous self-help books have, for instance. I’m really good at my thought pieces and my polemics that I like to publish—now on Substack but over the years in Publishers Weekly and HuffPost. But to write fiction or memoir, there’s a total different level of attunement required. And it’s not just the attunement to your story, but the attunement to the world around you, so that you can take what you observe and find ways to articulate that meaning into your work. This was what I was observing as I took in Baron’s words, just this extraordinary attunement to his environment and the world around him. And that world was both vast and small, you know—to live off the grid is such a specific choice, and many people might think that kind of life too limiting, too small, too difficult, but what he offers in this book is an attunement to his environment that I think most of us have shut out or can’t possibly absorb because of the busyness, and the bigness, and the fast pace of our constant motion.
Grant: I love this topic of attunement, Brooke, and I noticed that in so many of the passages in Baron’s book. He writes a lot about trees and woods. He’s living in the woods, he’s surrounded by woods, he spends a lot of time splitting wood. In fact, he says in the book that his favorite task was splitting wood. Even here we see how drawn he is to the meditative. He writes:
In the midst of my work in the woods, I often took time to stare at the duff and the miracle of dissolution. It was slow, beautiful magic: everything—leaves, needles, trees, plants, corpses—became the precious crumble of soil. As fascinations went, it was one I kept to myself; I realized that rot didn’t do much for most people. Despite the brute strength involved and metal clangor, splitting wood was meditative.
It seems to me that our modern culture leaves precious little time to do what he’s talking about here—to stare at something, to get lost in the fascination of something. I’ve tried to create small spaces in my life for this. I made the goal this fall to collect things on my walks, things like leaves, flowers, and berries to make Ikebana flower displays. I once took an Ikebana class. I did it two or three times, but I was surprised by how challenging it was to make this a regular practice. Again, it’s the pressure of my life, which is a shame. It’s something I think about a lot because I think there’s something I’ve lost in not chopping wood. This reminds me a little bit of our interview with Peggy Orenstein, about how she set out to knit a sweater in her memoir, Unraveling, and covered all that goes into a single sweater, including shearing sheep.
Brooke: Yes—that’s true, except that Baron lived this lifestyle for 25 years! Reading this book made me nostalgic at times, sad even, for how much we’ve lost in the push of the busyness of our lives. I wake up in the morning churning over my to-do list that I can never get through on a day-to-day basis. And we sacrifice a lot for that busyness. Baron writes about a lot of the ways of country folk—how they just pop in and visit each other, something I wouldn’t dare do in the city, you know, just come by unannounced. I don’t have a single friend who I think would welcome that. But as to places where I do just stop and stare and get lost, I can say it’s in reading. And this book is exemplary of that because of what I mentioned before. I’m a pretty good speed reader, have to be given the work I do. So I can get through a book fast, in a matter of an hour or two if I’m just scratching the surface and taking in the story. But you can’t do that with a book that’s meditative and poetic or you will miss some pretty fundamental and important moments and truths and observations. So I’m not stopping and staring, but I’m slowing down and absorbing. And I see this as a real gift of words, and especially certain ways of writing, which is the very topic we’re circling today. Writing that exists not necessarily to forward a plot, though this does in its own way, but more it exists to show a way of life, to showcase the power of living on and with the earth. Baron writes in the book, “the household we founded was an attempt to live a poem.” And in some ways the experience of reading this book is that too—a suspended experience of being inside a poem. You know, I’m not a poet and I’m not trying to write specifically, poetically in my memoir, but i am so attuned to the importance of musing, of meaning-making, of reflection, and of using metaphor to get across some of the feeling in my book, and not just have it be a litany of what happened. I read so much memoir, a lot of it pre-publication, of course, so I’m editing unfinished work, and I see too much “what happened” and not enough of this kind of writing that makes me want to stop and stare and just be in wonderment. It’s a lofty goal for any writer to have, but this is the experience I think all of us would wish to give our readers—even if it’s just master storytelling, right? Even if the drive is the plot over the poeticism. . .
Grant: I feel like you’re falling into a poetic rhapsody in talking about this work, Brooke. One, I want to say that the phrase, “the household we founded was an attempt to live a poem,” really struck me. I read the poet Gary Snyder’s description of his house, which he built on the Yuba River in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains, and he talks about the things he builds and the objects he uses in his daily life with a kind of reverence that is almost sacred. This is also making me think of Wendall Berry, the poet who is also a farmer, and who writes really insightfully about nature and organic farming, living according to your ideals, and against the modern American way of life, which he views as a skein of violence. His lyric poetry often appears as a contemporary elegy. To go back to your original question, I think these writers’ prose is infused with their spirit. You feel their lives and views on the page. You enter their prayer, so to speak, their invocation, and you get a nice taste of their lives even if you are living a busy, distracted, madding life like I do. That’s one purpose of reading for me: it allows me to enter a more gentle space. Even though I know I’ll never chop too much wood or become a farmer, it’s nice to experience the beat of their heart for a spell.
Brooke: You know, Grant, once again—we’re circling the power of reading to inform us as writers. I think every time I read something new that I love it resets the bar a little bit higher, but not in a bad way. It makes me realize how much I want to be proud of the book that I’m writing, and how much love and care we have to give to our work, and again how much we have to attune. One of the beautiful things about good writing is the constant ah-has you have when someone points out things they experience as truths, that you know to be true but in different contexts. Baron writes, for instance, about country life teaching us how consequential our endeavors are—and he’s talking about the consequence of things like cutting the wood too long so it doesn’t fit into the woodburning stove, or not being attentive enough, which would result in houses burning down, which was apparently a regular occurrence. And I took those moments of his reflection on consequence and attentiveness and applied it to my own life, my own writing, considering them as things that I want to be more attuned to, to cultivate more than I do. Are there aspects of your writing life, Grant, that you know you’re more attuned to than others, or a place where you might share where you would like to be better attuned?
Grant: I often advise writers to write about why they write because I think having a purpose is an invitation to the page, and knowing that purpose can help you when you’re facing rough spots or experiencing rejection. One of my purposes for writing is that the act of writing helps me to notice. Notice myself, the world around me, the way I move through it all. I think of Mary Oliver’s famous statement that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” I love thinking about this because if we pay attention mostly to our to-do list, then that’s what we’re devoted to, which begs the question of is that what we want our lives to be devoted to. It can be a troubling question, but hopefully by paying attention to our attention we devote ourselves more consciously to the things we think are important. This is a great topic, and one that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, so I look forward to learning more from Baron after this short break.
This Week’s Book Trend:
Triumphant news with this week’s book trend: “Small Publishers are Sweeping the Booker and Nobel Prizes” according to The Economist! This is essentially what we talk, albeit anecdotally, about on the show—editors at big publishers aren’t charged with finding books that have the most literary merit, but finding books that have commercial potential. The Big Five publishers dominate the market with 60% of sales, which is why the acknowledgment by these prize and award committees is a big deal. We need small presses to be doing the work to acquire the books that the Big Five can’t or won’t. I feel a kind of pride about it. It makes me feel like the work we’re doing is reaching readers. And it’s a win for writers too. So, keep at it. This world is for you, too. And we are for you—most definitely.
ABOUT BARON WORMSER
Baron Wormser is the author of twenty books and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He is the founding director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Essays of his were included in Best American Essays 2014 and 2018. His most recent books are The History Hotel: Poems and the reissue by Brandeis University Press of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid.
I loved this episode!
Another fabulous article that strikes to the heart of things. When I read "Still Here" by Ram Das years ago I wondered what it would feel like to have to slow down and pay attention to every moment because one is no longer able to move as fast as when younger. At 79, I know. I've discovered the pleasure in going slow, in being in the moment for the most mundane actions. I'm also reminded of Jack Kornfield's comment regarding the exultation of finding enlightenment—"now the laundry."