Cloudscradle
There is a red barn to the left of a tree, one of the low squatting pines that’s wider than it is tall, above a white house whose roof just barely lines up with the top of the hill when seen from my window across the harbour.
There are two power poles, their cables invisible except on those rare days where fog lies heavy on the sea but has yet to roll over the peninsula.
The road lies so precisely along the hilltop that everything on it is on nothing but space from here, from my window.
This tableau sits on a gentle curve of grass, the lowest point of the ridge, cradling its little piece of the southern sky.
Once a white pick-up passed the first power pole and I saw it on the curve exactly halfway between the edge of the squatting pine and the edge of everything else, where the peninsula’s quilt of houses and trees begins, and at the same time a black-backed gull flew over it back towards the barn—so it seemed, a trick of perspective matching the sizes of bird and truck—
Every configuration of clouds I know to be the one; soon this house will be another I cried to empty out and I will be at the other end of my life and will still miss the red barn and the tree and the perfect curve of the hill against the sky and the clouds will look like this in my memory.
In all these months I haven’t touched my camera, not even on the day when the clouds reared up behind the red barn and the squatting pine as raw columns and the sun rose directly in front of the far-off harbour mouth so they shone like molten metal and the whole scene reflected muzzily in the morning sea.
Five things: Q&A with Kerry Lane
This story paints a scene: the physicality of what is in front of us. The reader sees it as the narrator sees it / you see it: the red barn, the squatting pines, the white house, the power poles. The images are far away, but precise, Can you address this – the importance of the view, and the precision, in creative nonfiction such as this?
Well, why write nonfiction at all? Nonfiction forms must emerge from some drive to capture something real. I wrote this piece in the year leading up to my moving away from Aotearoa for the first time in my adult life; when I look back at my writing from that period, there’s a visceral desperation to capture, to preserve. There were a lot of things I didn’t want to leave behind and was (perhaps still am) terrified to lose. If I’d wanted to write a piece of fiction, I would have; in what I was trying to achieve I felt a sense of obligation to precision. To my mind creative nonfiction has a lot in common with artistic photography: It’s a process of craft, the creation of a work of art, but the real is not only raw material. There’s a commitment and loyalty to the facts of the subject.
Some of this thinking goes much further back than my plans to move. Understanding creative nonfiction expansively, defined by loyalty to the real rather than structure or form, I can trace some of my exploration to poet Richard Siken’s second collection, War of the Foxes. His poetry remains surreal, dreamlike, filmic, and intensely visual, but I read a fundamental shift into the real world between his first and second collections. Lots of the pieces in War of the Foxes are about his own exploration of painting, particularly portraits of his friends, and what you’re doing when you create a piece of art out of a person.
From the publisher: “Richard Siken seeks definite answers to indefinite questions: what it means to be called to make – whether it is a self, love, war, or art – and what it means to answer that call.”
This question also set me thinking about the writing of Lynn Jenner, one of my favourite NZ writers. She speaks about “detail and its halo of light” – this brings us straight back into conversation with photography. If photography is the craft of control of light, how do we apply and wield this way of thinking in the written word? What are we illuminating, how do we deploy shadow? It’s interesting to think very literally here; for example, what light would you photograph a landscape in? Why? Well, what light would you write it in and is it the same? How do you light a written portrait? How do you move the eye around the frame? I’m interested in how to capture the experience of space. I was and am so fascinated with the texture of the light in Dunedin, the way it flows and oozes and has real weight to it. It’s different from the light in other places.
Can you say a bit more about looking at the real/ the actual, and the difficult of this undertaking?
There’s a section in a 2017 interview with poet Marie Howe that I’ve thought of often since I first read it. She’s talking about an exercise she gives her students: ten “observations of the actual world”:
Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.
To be loyal to the real means you have to force yourself to actually look at it. We’ve all had interactions with someone who is engaging with their idea, their expectation of you rather than you as you are. It’s hard to stay humble before something you want to think you understand. It really is painful, and it’s often frustrating as an artist because people and reality are weird and awkward and filled with little truths that don’t fit with each other or with the story you want to tell or what you think you want to say about this subject. At its core, I see nonfiction not as a static thing, but as a process of centring this loyalty to the real in an artistic process. It’s a challenging thing to navigate when it comes into conflict with how we understand craft.
So what does the written word have to offer as a set of processes within which to explore these tensions? You can engage with space in time in a different way to a visual piece or a photo. Using language to articulate space, breath, time, the sensory both immerses the reader and insulates them from the honestly indescribable.
A photographic moment can tell so much more, beyond the photo. What else do you think this scene suggests, beyond what we see? How are the physical images saying what you want to say?
I wasn’t really trying to say anything with this piece; in fact, I was trying quite hard to present my experience of a particular physical place without making any further commentary on it. I wrote this as part of an exploration of the overlap between visual and written forms – I was trying to see how close I could get a piece of writing to a photograph.
I’m interested in what happens when, as Howe was talking about, you actively try to resist metaphor. There’s a selfishness to metaphor, I think, a point at which you stop engaging with something on its own terms and begin to see it as a tool or a piece of raw material to be shaped. This is that means this is no longer this. None of this is to say that metaphor or fiction or synthesis – or selfishness, in fact – are somehow wrong or immoral. Art is a digestive process. But something fascinating happens when you try for total honesty with yourself about these currents of power and purpose in the artist–subject relationship.
As a sidenote, this can be a particularly challenging and fruitful line of inquiry in memoir. I’m thinking in particular about certain contemporary confessional styles that I find really unpleasant; because the subject is the self, there’s no humility or curiosity before it. When you assume you know yourself, know what you want to use yourself to say, and also feel no ethical obligation to yourself as a subject, the process shifts from reflection to strip mining your own lived experience. It becomes extractivist, violent. You can’t assume you know your subject before you’ve even started work – to my mind that’s no longer nonfiction. Melissa Febos has some really interesting commentary on this dynamic in her book Body Work, where she reflects on what drove her to write her earlier (highly successful) memoir in the way she did, how it shaped how she engages with the self and her writing, and how the demands of audience and sector impacted her approach to the subject of herself and her experience. To write something is to pin it down, at least at that moment; it’s a serious responsibility. We come back to that idea of loyalty again: what does it mean to be loyal to reality? When does that loyalty matter more than things like editorial feedback, market demands, your own taste?
Returning to ‘Cloudscradle’, it’s clear that I reached a tipping point near the end and turned inward, even though I was still trying to report rather than translate. If I were being generous to my past self I might say that part of what I was trying to capture here was my internal experience in the context of the place. I think it’s also fair to say that it did become too painful to look directly at a landscape I was so distraught about leaving, and which would remain utterly unchanged by my departure.
Your experience as a creative writer is in poetry, playwriting and fiction. Where are the intersections, for you, between these other forms and creative nonfiction?
Let the record show that I do not believe in “form”.
With that tongue-in-cheek disclaimer out of the way… More seriously, I see forms as sets of models. They’re a way of applying generalisations and communicating to others about those generalisations and how something relates to them. Generalisation is absolutely necessary to be able to talk about patterns and changes in literature – the best map of a territory will always be the territory itself, but that’s next to useless when you’re trying to orient yourself.
Sometimes thinking in terms of a given form or forms will be very useful to understanding or describing a work. Sometimes it will be useful for some parts of your analysis but not others; sometimes it’ll be restrictive, and sometimes it will actively prevent you from seeing things or making connections that don’t fit within the formal architecture you’re trying to apply.
All formal categories are constructed. We construct things for all sorts of reasons and with degrees of awareness of the process. Whether we’re talking about a specific critical model that can be traced to one thinker or a nebulous class of writing that’s emerged out of decades of literary conversation, the borders of a form exist to serve a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is to facilitate a particular analysis. Sometimes it serves the pragmatics of publishing or library cataloguing – how do we help people find what they’re looking for? Sometimes it’s a more sinister reflection of power, such as in the delineation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms or the relegation of certain authors and not others to special interest categories.
As a writer, the assumptions baked into formal categories are worth questioning. If you’re trying to write within a form, why? What other texts does it bring you into or out of conversation with? If you’re trying to violate the boundaries of a form, why? Are you reifying those boundaries by defining what you’re doing in their terms?
To come back to my own practice, the loyalty to the real that I’ve been writing about here and its interface with art is foundational to the way I write in any form, fictional or not. I do a lot of research and am very committed to the accuracy of concrete details. This is true even – perhaps especially – when I wouldn’t expect the audience to notice either way. It feels like a relationship of collaboration with the world; sometimes your partner presents you with something you wouldn’t have chosen or don’t at first understand, and it sends you rocketing off in a different direction. Fictional or poetic work still has a relationship with its subjects, and for me the need for humility and respect in that relationship remains.
The shift from external to internal is noticeable, particularly in the final paragraph. How much are you conscious of the external and internal when you are writing poetry or dialogue for a play, and how does that weave into the way you think about writing a scene?
One of the things I really love about playwriting is how ruthlessly external it is! You have what is said and done on the stage to work with and nothing else. You can make comments and suggestions about internalities, but only suggestions. The director and actors are fully within their rights to ignore them entirely. It’s interesting to look at how different playwrights approach this; some delight in the vulnerable, collaborative aspect while others seem to find it existentially threatening. Wilde particularly comes to mind here – when you read his scripts you can practically feel his ghost breathing down your neck, making sure you don’t mess with his vision too much.
This gives playscript as a form a wonderful ambiguity and can sometimes give the writer a precious get-out-of-jail-free card for the bind of having to choose between two directions to take a scene; you can construct the piece in a way that lets both be true and fob the decision off on someone else.
These processes of writing for stage carry over to influence the way I think about space, dialogue, externality, physicality, etc., in anything else I might be writing. One of my favourite workshops I’ve ever taught was on basic stagecraft for writers of longform prose: novelists and memoirists, mostly. We set up physical spaces in which to explore key scenes and try different ways for characters to move with and around each other and through the space. How does a character’s role in an interaction change if they’re sitting vs. pacing, or if they’re looming over someone rather than on the other side of the room? Do you really need all that dialogue – what happens when you fill or empty a space of language? We live in a three-dimensional, moving, living, breathing world. Whatever the internal experience may be, we still function and perceive the other in externality.
As a writer, you can’t shift between the internal and external, or play them against one another, unless you have a really clear sense of how that externality works. You need a sense of the world’s physicality. A narrator or character’s internal experience always exists in context.
Kerry Lane is a poet and playwright from Aotearoa with past lives in science and teaching. They currently live in Scotland where they work in theatre and refugee justice.