“Everybody is in transition — everybody is constantly moving through life and changing in various ways.” —Edward Underhill
How can we make sense of our own selves, when so many different versions of us live in the past, present, future, and beyond? Last month, the WLT’s March Third Thursday tackled this age-old question head on. Program & Member Services Manager Lore Arnold moderated a conversation between writers Marcia Bjornerud (Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks), Cloud Delfina Cardona (the past is a jean jacket), and Edward Underhill (The In-Between Bookstore) on how to incorporate flashbacks and flashforwards in storytelling.
Marcia Bjornerud’s perspective as an academic was fascinating. In writing her memoir Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks, she had to expand beyond what she calls the “straightjacket” of often strictly literal science writing. To do this, she would recount a particular sensory memory — such as finding sand in her socks while she was rushing to the bus in her childhood — and use it as a portal into describing both the development of the geosciences as an intellectual discipline and the narrative of the earth as a whole. In her work as a geologist, Marcia often has to confront the bias of presentism or the “narcissistic now” underlying human-centric myths, and thus she must train to see and think in all four dimensions. As she says, “Just because [the times] are in the past doesn’t mean they’re any less real. Those worlds were very real to the organisms that occupied the earth.” Instead, she proposes that we live in a “polytemporal world,” in which many different versions and stories of the earth can co-exist together. Marcia furthermore points out that humans often have the misconception that we’re “burning up” the past behind us, when in reality learning about the past is actually about building the future. If we don’t understand, after all, how climate change has come to be, how can we prepare ourselves to fight it?
Cloud Delfina Cardona describes her work as an “archive for the future”: she collects the memories, details, sounds, colors, and stories of her experience and of those around her. But her writing expands to beyond just those in her present life — she writes of her ancestors whom she’s never met, inventing new possibilities and digging up buried memories in her poetry collection the past is a jean jacket. As Cloud puts it: “I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams.” In this way, her work is always effectively in communication with the past, a habit she chalks up to her “knack for necromancy.” This is especially necessary, Cloud points out, because of how much colonialism relies on discarding the past, on just moving forward. In one poem she remembers the state-sanctioned Porvenir Massacre in 1918 West Texas, where 15 Mexican boys and men were murdered by Texas Rangers. Though she did not have a one-to-one relationship with the victims of the massacre, she wanted to highlight this history in her work by framing her and her family’s experiences within that historical context. She hopes to continue creating work that provides perspectives and experiences that she herself was never able to grow up around — a letter to the future in itself.
As Edward Underhill notes, queer and trans narratives often have to grapple with time in two different ways: the lack of expectation for an uncharted future and the necessity to reconfigure a storied past. His novel The In-Between Bookstore deals with this same idea, in which a trans man returns to his small hometown in Illinois and encounters his teenage self behind the register of the bookstore he used to work at. This sets in motion a complicated love story — not just between the protagonist and his formerly-closeted childhood friend, but also between himself and his younger self, and himself and his hometown. This is why Edward notes that linearity can thus be limiting: we must confront our past in order to rebuild it, to grow, to even change our futures. For many queer and trans people, leaving is often the only route or narrative that seems safe, yet Edward’s work probes the question — what happens if one had just never left? He recommends leveraging that kind of conflict to propel the story and the protagonist’s emotional journey forward when juggling multiple time dimensions. Having a “central wound” can tie your characters back down to reality, especially if something in the past is affecting how they react in the present. Lastly, for writers, Edward says: “Don’t answer a question the reader doesn’t have yet!”
I had a really fun time listening to this dialogue! Though I personally have yet to touch on time travel in my own work, I learned a lot about how we can think of time in general in writing — of all the inventive ways or questions we can pose when playing with linearity. I loved how each author pulled from different disciplines yet were able to relate on, of course, the complex relationship with time that comes with being human. The last question Lore posed to all writers actually dealt with this same idea — about whether they felt time linearly. I think this question itself atomized the wide-ranging perspectives and expertise each writer brought to the table.
Marcia had answered first that she doesn’t believe so, due to her scientific training as a geologist. But also, when she looks at her sons, she is able to easily imagine their younger selves, infancy and adolescence, enriched in her head. Edward, on the other hand, felt that he did have to view time linearly, to be in the present, because he was “living in a way [he] didn’t think was even possible.” Growing up as a trans person in a small town in Wisconsin, he didn’t have the language to understand who he was. As he grows older, though, he has come to realize that “everybody is in transition — everybody is constantly moving through life and changing in various ways.” Cloud believed, then, that she was always in her own thoughts, memories, daydreams, and timelines. If depression is thinking about the past and anxiety the future, then she is always thinking of either, for better or for worse.
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Continue to support our authors by purchasing their recent releases. You can check out Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks, Cloud Delfina Cardona’s The Past Is a Jean Jacket (Deep Line Poetry), and Edward Underhill’s The In-Between Bookstore: A Novel here.
For more insight into writing and publishing, please join the Writers’ League of Texas today, April 16, for April’s Third Thursday: “Poets Writing Prose.”