Crying on Jupiter
Reflections on all the feels at an out of this world writing retreat
Upcoming offerings
Online craft session alert! Writing Captivating Scenes will get into the nuts and bolts of scene construction for both fiction writers and memoirists. This 90-minute lecture will break down the scene to its basic elements, explore what each element needs to be successful, and discuss how these elements must work together to make the scene shine. The session is October 16, but if you can’t make it live, you’ll get the replay. Register now!
Story Connection: An Evening of Live Storytelling returns October 24, 7:30pm at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. Mark your calendar and stay tuned for more details!
One of my students is offering a Creative Writing Camp, Oct 7-11 for 3rd-5th graders at Eno Arts Mill in Hillsborough NC, perfect for any creative kid on break that week. I wish I could go!
Crying on Jupiter
Both memoirs on the reading list for this year’s Journey to Jupiter retreat had the word Crying in their titles—Crying in the Bathroom by Erika Sánchez and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner—which I somehow didn’t notice until a few months into the planning. Is that why so many people cried on Jupiter?
I wanted Crying in the Bathroom on the Jupiter reading list partly because I identified deeply with Sánchez’s tendency to be moved by art.
“In Barcelona, the architecture of Antoni Gaudí left me speechless…In Paris, I nearly lost my fucking mind at the Louvre…so many of the world’s most iconic pieces all housed in the same place…When I saw Manet’s Olympia at Musée d’Orsay, a painting I had seen in art books and adored, I could hardly believe my life. In Amsterdam…I stood in front of van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms and my chest hurt because it was so beautiful…
I was always bewildered. And I cried everywhere…a deluge of unidentifiable feelings that came out through my eyes…”
—Erika Sánchez, Crying in the Bathroom
I know this feeling. I’ve stood agog at the Musée d’Orsay, though it’s Monet who makes me lose my fucking mind. I took the train out to his home in Giverny where I stared at the willow trees in his garden and was overcome by awe and wonder.
In college, I regularly visited Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) in the airy, windowed modern wing of The Met. I plopped down on the facing bench and studied the splatters, tried to imagine the man who tossed all that paint around, and felt something in my chest I could not name.
I’ve spent countless hours at the Art Institute of Chicago communing with the Buddha and brooding in front of Nighthawks. Every time I turned the corner and came upon the giant canvas of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, my breath would catch. I waded through school groups to say hello to my adopted midwestern grandparents who reminded me of the writers I worked with at the Iowa City Senior Center, the barn I got married in, the classrooms where I first began to ask and answer deep questions about the craft of writing.
One of my favorite activites, enjoyable as well as emotional, is witnessing a piece of art, considering the human being with thoughts, feelings, and artistic vision who made it hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and searching myself to see where I connect with it. Perhaps my memoir will be called Crying in Art Museums.
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The Journey to Jupiter retreat is a four-day getaway I co-lead with Ralph Walker for writers working on book-length projects, memoir or novel, who are hungry for the time, community, and craft they need to advance their projects to the next level. It’s a gathering of regular folks with jobs and families and lots of responsibilities they press pause on so they can disappear for a minute and work on their art. A retreat in the true sense of the word.
It’s tough to get away and crucial—just a little bit of space and time can make a world of difference. Here are some of the momentous shifts that happened in the short time we were on Jupiter:
A novelist working on the first draft of their novel pulled a piece of paper off a giant post-it pad, sketched out three acts, and declared a deadline of Halloween for a completed Act 1.
Another writer, working on historical fiction, decided that some of their revision struggles could be solved by deviating from the cold hard truth and compressing timelines a little, a choice that cleared obstacles that had been blocking them for months.
A self-described “pantser”—a novelist who writes by the seat of their pants rather than proceeding with an outline—made a plan to complete a substantial revision in the month of October.
A memoirist who had been unable to write about a certain event for 25 years broke through that block and began to courageously tell that difficult story.
Another memoirist who found it nearly impossible to advance their memoir unlocked their writer’s block with the power and ease of writing by hand.
A writer who’s been working on a novel for “20 years” realized they had but a few more scenes standing between them and a completed draft.
A lot of people cried, moved by their own art, by the camaraderie and support from other writers, by the sweetly throttling experience of being seen and accepted fully as themselves.
Of course Ralph and I played a role in some of these breakthroughs—in some of these cases, we had direct conversations about technique and process and offered specific tools to these writers to help them move forward.
AND a guiding principle of my work is about helping a writer trust themself and the universe. I believe that the best creative results come when we tap into our gut, our intuition, our spidey sense. Whatever you want to call it, somewhere deep inside each of us is a knowing of where we want to go and what the next right step is.
Sure, sometimes the knowing tells us “I need POV help!” or “I’m not sure what order these scenes go in!” But I still bill that as intuition.
It takes a village to raise a book. And it takes a few quiet days away from life to know exactly who and what is needed in that village.
I said it at Jupiter and I’ll say it a million times more before my last breath:
Your story is in you—it always has been. You are its keeper. You know what it needs—and you know what you need. Get quiet, so you can listen to your brilliant, beautiful self tell you where to go next.
When writers tune into their deep knowing and let it be their guide…well, it’s so gorgeous it moves me to tears.
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Over the summer I had the good fortune to spend a sunny day in Frogner Park in Oslo, Norway, which is filled with Gustav Vigeland’s statues depicting humans and their relationships, how they can come together and shine and also how they can be divided and hurt. There are over 200 sculptures in this park of humans, and they just about cover the ways we love and despair, support and forgive. Many of them made me cry.
In Crying in the Bathroom, Sánchez quotes a Virginia Woolf line I’d never heard, which perfectly captures how I feels existing on this gorgeous, broken planet:
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf wrote, “The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
I thought about this line throughout the Jupiter retreat, as people shared their books with me, their book problems, and their unrelenting yearning to express themselves. And I especially thought about it again the morning we said goodbye.
At the end of the retreat, after 3 intense days of digging into our art and making 17 new best friends/support animals, everybody is Feeling with a capital F. In our day to day lives, we don’t expose ourselves that much—usually we have little to no time for feels. But the morning we say goodbye to Jupiter, to each other, is full of feels. And by feels, I mean tears.
And you know what? I’m here for it. As Jupiter crewmate Penny wrote, we lived some goddamn magic [expletive my own]. Of course we’re gonna have big feelings walking away from that.
Crying is peculiar in our culture; when adults cry, it often makes others uncomfortable, unsure how to respond, which can cause the weeper to apologize, a reflex I’d love to remove from the world. I don’t think expressing a feeling is a thing we should apologize for. On the rare occasion I’m not the one crying, as it was the morning we left Jupiter, I simply breathe and witness the great miracle and mess that is being a human.
Part of my acceptance derives from familiarity—I cry all the time, all over the place. Paintings, symphonies, rock shows, films, fireworks—it doesn’t take much to bring tears to my eyes. Even a kid laughing—or having a tantrum—can push a few drops down my cheek. It’s our deep humanness that gets me every time, that many of the Jupiter crew felt in our last hours together.
To loosely quote Lesley Gore and Mary Oliver, it’s your one wild and precious life—cry if you want to. If you’re in the right place, somebody nearby will be feeling it too.
Keep crying, friends—and keep writing.
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Want to know more about Jupiter? Check out my take on last year’s trip, listen to two crewmates talk about their experience, or read reflections on the 2023 mission from Penny, Lori, Paul, Adam, Susan, and Caroline.
Fantastic!!