Connective Tissues

Craft Notes

I promise this is not an anatomy class; I could hardly stand dissecting a frog and rat in high school. But I want to start by talking about fascia. In her brilliant, brilliant course 40,000 Words in 40 Days, Mila Jaroniec uses fascia as a metaphor for how everything in a piece of writing connects, and it has stuck with me. But I’m not a doctor, so here’s what smarter people have to say about this connective tissue:

Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber and muscle in place. The tissue does more than provide internal structure; fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin.
Johns Hopkins Health

Notice that fascia is described as “thin.” But it’s so powerful! It holds every single piece of the inner body in place. But not just that! It’s also sensitive – almost as sensitive as skin. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

A fascia (/ˈfæʃ(i)ə/; plural fasciae /ˈfæʃii/; adjective fascial; from Latin: “band”) is a band or sheet of connective tissue, primarily collagen, beneath the skin that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs.^[1] Fascia is classified by layer, as superficial fascia, deep fascia, and visceral or parietal fascia, or by its function and anatomical location.
Wikipedia

I left the links in case you’re in search of rabbit holes (spoiler: a lot of adding layers and interrogating logic involves plunging headfirst into rabbit holes).

Wikipedia lists the roles of fascia: It “attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates.” There are three layers of fascia – superficial, visceral, and deep. Blood vessels runs through all these layers. If you read the full Wikipedia entry, you’ll learn more fascinating tidbits. For instance, fascia forms fascial compartments – distinct groups of muscles and nerves that are surrounded by fascia. There are two fascial compartments in the arm and two in the leg. Muscle fascia reduces friction. Fascia holds “elastic potential energy.” Visceral fascia has to maintain its shape to keep the organs in place, but if it’s too tight, it restricts the necessary movement of organs.

Okay. Fascia. I’m now hoping none of you are doctors because I’m getting too much information from Wikipedia.

Bottom line: we work with words. But when we read, our experience goes far beyond the words. If you read the word onion, you might wrinkle your nose; tears might spring to your eyes. Read the word rage and you might feel it. We have an intellectual, emotional, even physical reaction to words on a page. Moving beyond the level of the word, consider this passage:

Along the sides of the Yuba, the black oaks overlap with the blue, the cedar with the pine. Everything is dry this late in summer and the rocks hold all kinds of heat. I’ve been here before: when I was young. Younger.
“Even Still” by Lisa PIazza

What is the intellectual, emotional, and physical journey you as a reader take, and what happens through and beneath the words to cause it?

I can only speak for myself, but at first I feel cool. I’m beside the Yuba; there are trees. But the black and the blue? That reminds me of bruises, so right there in the first sentence, just after my body has sighed in ease, I am slightly on edge. Then I get to the cedar and the pine and think oh, never mind, I can relax. I notice the word pine. I always do; that word is loaded with double meaning. Then I am surprised to learn that everything is dry and hot. I remember my Texas childhood, black asphalt wavy in the soaring heat. Three words do it for me: dry, summer, heat. We’ve had river and trees; now we have rocks. Flowing, rustling, hard, all in quick succession. Only in the third line do I learn the narrator is physically here in this precise moment and that she’s been here before. I learn she is not young. Then I learn that, perhaps, she still is, but she forgets to think of herself in those terms. She has to correct herself: She is still young, so she qualifies the statement, changes it to younger.

Three sentences. One single-word fragment. But if I really study what’s happening in my brain, body, and heart, there’s quite a lot. My own memories come up. I spent a lot of time on the Mississippi River in late summer, so that whole deck of experiences is right there, and they’re all full-on sensory overload and rife with family drama and nostalgia. None of that is in the words, but it’s in me, and the words – and the arrangement of the words – calls that up.

This is not new information, I know. But perhaps the deliberate noticing is new, the slowing down and taking in, the questioning. I’m taking a course right now through Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing, and when we give feedback, we have to answer the question How did your body respond?

That question is apropos in discussing logic and layers, how a piece works beyond the words. When you were a kid, did you ever press your palm against a friend’s, then rub the back of their hand? You can feel it in your own nerve endings, a phantom touch. It’s a kind of magic, and so is writing. I put pen to paper, hands to keys, and someday, somewhere, someone reads the echo of that touch and feels it in their own spine, neck, heart, face.

Now back to fascia. In drafting a piece, we might have a particular goal or focus. Perhaps we’re trying to evoke a feeling. Maybe trying to destabilize the reader’s idea of reality. Sometimes we’re just trying to find meaning and form in a series of events – real or imagined. Unpack a memory. Explore a question. Stretch out or compress a moment, a millennium. Whatever we want to do, we have words to do it, and words are famous for failing, for being flimsy and imprecise – sometimes too loose, sometimes too rigid. But we’re working with more than just words; we’re working with all the possible meanings of a word, with all the different ways we could possibly arrange a sentence, line, or fragment. We’re playing with the way the thing looks on the page or screen. We’ve got typography at our disposal. We have the fact that reading is a linear act, but experiencing a text may or may not be. By interrogating what’s holding the words together – the fascia, or “rules” of a piece – we can deepen or disrupt a draft’s logic and build or break down layers of meaning. That’s what we’ll explore this weekend, through readings, exercises, and question-centered conversations on the forum and via Zoom.

In our Friday meeting, we’re going to play around with logic, with how we connect ideas. But for now, I’d like you to consider the questions below as you explore the Recommended Readings.

Questions

In what way are these pieces “logical,” even when they might not be traditional or realistic? What role does the authorial voice play in urging you to buy into the slant logic?
How do technical choices (e.g. word choice, white space, form) underscore the logic of the pieces?
How do the prose pieces work at the scene level, to bridge the overarching ideas/emotions of a story to the character’s in-the-moment reactions?
How many layers are present in each prose piece or poem?

Inner Workings: Day 1

Connective Tissues

Craft Notes

Questions

Recommended Readings

Kate Finegan

Black Lives Matter.

Inner Workings: Day 2