Scott Russell Sanders on Love & Lucidity

 

Last month I attended the 2nd Annual River Teeth Nonfiction Conference at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. In the coming weeks I'll be sharing my notes from some of the sessions. (River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative is a literary journal I recommend that you check out. And what exactly are "river teeth?" Find out here in this essay by David James Duncan.)

Scott Russell Sanders opened the conference with a keynote address. I first encountered Sanders' writing in his book A Private History of Awe. I read it during graduate school and was so smitten with it that I used it as one of the main examples of my critical thesis, "Spinning a Web of Wonder: Capturing and Conveying Awe on the Page." I admit that I geeked out a tad bit when I had the chance to tell him this in person last month

Sanders read aloud two of his essays, which he wrote a number of years apart (20, perhaps). The first was "Buckeye," which you can read or listen to on Terrain.org. The second was "Useless Beauty: A canticle for the cosmos," available online in Notre Dame Magazine.

He shared these two essays to illustrate the evolution of his writing style (and, I daresay, the consistency of his interests). Both essays start with an object (a buckeye in one and the shell of a chambered nautilus in the other), and both begin with a personal story. But "Buckeye" continues as memoir, with Sanders reflecting on his father's relationship to the land, and Sanders' own subsequent relationship to place. "Useless Beauty," on the other hand, quickly diverges from his personal story and muses on instances of seemingly useless beauty in nature.

During his talk, Sanders explained that despite the different approach in each, both essays are about the same thing: "Taking care of things that we love." In each essay, the personal story is an entree to, or is surrounded by, the larger world. As a younger writer, Sanders' work leaned more toward memoir. Now, later in his career, he still writes about many of the same themes and ideas, but through a less personal lens.

Sanders made several interesting points during his talk, including several on the value of art as well as the need for clarity in writing. To paraphrase him: 

• We need art for our love of places. This country is very thinly storied. The Native peoples had connection to and story with the land, but modern culture has destroyed that. Our places need our stories, especially if we live in places that aren't often written about. Our places need our love. What is love? Love is sustained attention.
• Science gives us knowledge, but it doesn't make us love things. Art lets the artist articulate and convey what she loves. 
• Sanders said that his emphasis on lucidity in his writing style comes from his love of science. There is a distinction between confusion and mystery in writing, he said. All writing should be clear, even if it deals with mystery. Obscurity is easy. It's easy to write incomprehensible work, but as writers we should want readers to spend their energy on the things we don't know (that's the mystery), rather than on the things we already have answers for. (In other words, don't try to confuse readers by being vague, sophisiticated, or just plain tricksy. Good writing often deals with unanswerable questions, but don't raise questions in the work and not answer them if you have answers.)

And finally, because Sanders is a master of fresh comparisons and startling descriptions, a few of my favorite passages from "Useless Beauty," with the most striking phrases in bold below.

The lustrous interior reveals a sequence of chambers resembling crescent moons, 30 in all, which the nautilus fashioned as it grew, beginning with a cranny too small to see without a magnifying glass and increasing, step by step, to the size of a child's grin.

* * *

If you study flowers, for instance, you will find quite a few that seem fancier than they need to be. … Look at iris, with its streaked petals flung out in all directions, like the blurred arms of a whirling dervish.

* * *

What of canyons and crevasses, waterfalls and glaciers, the play of current in rivers, the restless ballet of clouds?

For more examples of lovely, unexpected comparisons, and for some great writing, I highly recommend Sanders' A Private History of Awe.