Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Earthly Delights, or, Multimedia Bosch

4/16/2018

16 Comments

 
In a poetry class at Wisconsin’s Write-by-the-Lake program, instructor Rita Mae Reese took us to the university museum to soak up a painting and write a poem about it. On a grander scale, that’s the core of Terry Tempest Williams’s Leap, a memoir of her love affair with the three-panel Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Williams writes with the eye of a naturalist, the pen of a poet, and the religious heritage of a Mormon who first watched birds from the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Leap was in the house for years before I picked it up to read. What changed is that I assembled a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of the painting this winter. Sure, I’ve always liked Bosch, and a copy of the painting is bound into the book. But no matter how long I might stare at the Garden, there’s no way I’d study its detail as closely as in working the puzzle. Two months later, I can picture the birds flying out of a mountain or naked bodies in a pool as soon as Williams mentions them.

Her grandmother posted prints of the side panels, heaven and hell, over her childhood bed. Williams is an adult in the Prado museum in Madrid when she first sees the center panel: earth, play, discovery, sensory experience, body, passion, delight, the fullness of this life beyond good and evil. She returns day after day. She counts the cherries. Museum guards stare as she takes out binoculars and notebook to list every species of bird.

​Solving a jigsaw puzzle temporarily changes my perception. Normally more attuned to maps and spatial relationships than to visual detail, for a few days or weeks I notice lines, dots, and spots of light in the world around me. I see gradations of color that I can’t usually distinguish. Poets and naturalists may see this way all the time. To strengthen my writing for sensory detail, I could do worse than to work jigsaw puzzles.
16 Comments
Lisa Imhoff
4/16/2018 09:35:37 am

Interesting to think that someone else may be tuned into, or NOT tuned into, what I am tuned in to. Are you now going to blow up your photos of your recent trip to a large scale, perhaps have a few made into puzzles?

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Sarah link
4/16/2018 10:48:16 am

What a cool idea, Lisa! Do you suppose the visual sensory detail in my novels (currently working on second in series) would get stronger if I converted a couple of Rhodes photos into 1,000-piece puzzles and worked them? Even though I was there when the photos were taken, it might jog the memory for detail that didn't stick in the first place. My memory is so spacial, turn left here and right there and go halfway down the east coast, which is fun for me but not so much for a reader.

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Lisa Imhoff
4/16/2018 11:07:10 am

Tee hee. Having seen a photo or two which you have shared here (or somewhere), they are broad shots. So, yes, it would be one way to force your attention to the closeup.

I am able to look at my old photos (childhood for instance) and pick out all sorts of things that the casual viewer might overlook (without having to have the puzzle made). In fact it is one of the writing projects I have planned, to take at least some of these photos and describe them on a page. Bring the viewer's attention to the flocked wallpaper, the horrible polyester double-knit dress I had just opened (felt TERRIBLE to wear!), my mom's cool paisley pants.

I just read Buy the Little Ones a Dolly, by Rose Bingham of Sauk City. She has GREAT sensory detail in the smells she remembers. (Off topic of puzzles I guess.)

Rich Heiberger
4/16/2018 10:57:32 am

Yes. It is a beautiful way to get the necessary local color front and center into your attention, and then once there you can describe it.

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Sarah link
4/17/2018 08:26:52 am

I find it intriguing that what's front and center in my attention over time affects not only what I notice without trying, but what I can see when I try. Gardening last summer, without much experience, there would be two young plants (one a keeper, the other a weed) whose leaves I could not tell apart. A month or two later the difference was obvious.

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Sarah link
4/17/2018 08:32:48 am

Sensory detail is very much on topic. The few times I've used a camera to take a series of intentional close-ups, e.g. walking through the woods, I've grown temporarily more attuned to close detail. Most of my photos are broad shots because that's mostly what I see. So cause and effect works both directions.

Lisa
4/17/2018 09:05:39 am

Well, hmmmm. RE: Gardening. That's part of the learning curve. RE: Sensory detail. Most of my photos are closeups. Relatively.

RE: How these tie together. So, the final goal is to have a pleasing flower bed. To do that requires a combination of envisioning the bigger picture: selecting the colors desired, considering the bloom times, being aware of the textures — and the detail work: weed removal. To write a novel, or even an engaging short story, requires considering the bigger picture — the general concept of what we are trying to tell and why, as well as being very aware of the details, which will evoke a stronger response in the reader.

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Sarah link
4/17/2018 01:08:43 pm

This past Thursday through Saturday, I attended UW's annual Writers' Institute, with lots of sessions on revision. They talked about successive stages of revision, first getting the story right (big picture, with details of action that make it work) and then zeroing in on details to evoke stronger reader response. The final stage, copy edit, interested me less - grammar and punctuation aren't all that different from nonfiction and work-for-hire - but the intermediate stage of salient details that let you feel and smell the setting, that's where artists, poets, and naturalists work their magic.

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Lisa Imhoff
4/17/2018 03:10:30 pm

Love it. How do you know when to show it to someone for the first time... to get an outsider's point of view?

Sarah link
4/18/2018 07:08:19 am

This has two phases as well. Ideally one has a writers' group to share work in progress. I don't have an ongoing group, yet, but have done something similar in classes. That's whatever we've been able to write, with detail but unpolished, since the last get-together. Then, when it feels done but probably isn't, it's time for beta readers. If two or more of them say the same thing, it probably needs attention, although not necessarily the specific revision they suggested. Some authors work with a writing partner, exchanging work all the time.

A question that came up for me at the Writers' Institute, which I asked but no one really answered, is how you know when you're done - when it's ready to send agents or publishers. The general advice is to wait until it's as good as you can make it, but experience says there's always room for improvement. At some point you have to let go. How do you hit the sweet spot, revise enough but not eternally?

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Lisa
4/18/2018 08:58:12 am

Revision is an interesting topic to be mused upon! Assuming you have now put together the puzzle enough to have sorted all the sky pieces here and the rock pieces there and the grass pieces somewhere else, when to share for the first time ...

After we've been writing for awhile, you know, maybe we should contemplate our work and define what we are always revising? For instance, one of our genealogy writers is a retired social worker. She writes like a social worker. Very passive voice and no commitment to taking her own stand. She's a wonderful researcher but she puts in everything and doesn't leave out any of her findings, even if she thinks they are wrong (research someone else did or had). DG corrects her punctuation, but I ask her to be more assertive in her writing, it's HER story and she has the right to determine the facts based on her conclusion of the evidence. I ask her to do that with every story. I also ask her to relate the people to each other better than she does. She's getting better but for as much as she has written in the last six years, she should be better than she is.

In my own writing, I'd like to think about what I incessantly change / edit. Recognizing that revision and editing are fun, maybe we can minimize it somehow. The last two stories I wrote, I shared too early. Two of our group said that by the end of these two 4-5 page stories, they were completely lost and had no idea who was who. Well, I'm glad I started the projects and now I have words I can move around which is a good thing. The puzzle pieces are there, but some of what I thought was sky might really be a stream... and need to be moved to the bottom of the picture, so to speak.

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Sarah link
4/19/2018 09:06:41 am

Three quotes/observations come to mind. One is from my college history professor Geoff Blodgett, whose response to "Is history an art or a science?" was that it's a craft, like that of a furniture maker or a medical doctor. You have to work within what you find and honor constraints, or your chair will fall apart, your analysis be straight-out wrong, But you also have to bring personal thought to your work. Sounds like your social worker friend is trying to make genealogy a science but hasn't caught on about the art.

A second: I don't remember who recently pointed out that like anything, writing gets better with practice, but only if you learn and improve as you practice. Practicing your mistakes only solidifies them.

Finally, author Shannon Hale writes of "writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." Back to the jigsaw analogy, the first draft is the stage of sorting the blues from the greens and culling out the edge pieces.

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Lisa
4/19/2018 09:48:13 am

Sand... and a few pretty stones, sea glass, ... puzzle pieces.

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Sarah link
4/19/2018 08:50:31 pm

Lovely!

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Lisa Imhoff
4/19/2018 11:48:55 am

I've enjoyed this discussion. It has been helpful to me.

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Sarah link
5/30/2018 08:17:44 am

Writing this at the end of May, the garden is having a similar effect on my perceptions. I can see differences among blossoms and leaves that I couldn't see, even when I held them side by side, when last year's gardening season began.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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