The Wild Bramble of the New: Connecting to the World, Ourselves and Each Other Through Words
Jeannine Ouellete joins Cave of the Heart and answers 6 questions about self-trust
Welcome to Cave of the Heart, a weekly series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.
’s memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best 100 Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature, with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her essays and fiction appear widely in literary journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, Masters Review, North American Review, Calyx, and more, as well as in her popular Writing in the Dark on Substack, where she also teaches writing. Additionally, she teaches at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Writing in the Dark: The School, a creative writing program she founded in 2012. She is working on her first novel.Amanda: Before we start, can you describe the setting where you’re answering these questions?
Jeannine: Outside, the sky has gone a little dark even though it’s only late afternoon, and thunder is rolling in from the northwest. The branches of our burr oaks are swaying in this wind, as is the pride flag hanging from our front porch. Which is where I am—on the porch. And our porch is the best porch for writing because it’s huge and wide and a good portion of the south end is screened in and furnished comfortably enough for family dinners or late evenings with friends or to sit on a couch with my computer on my lap, as I am doing now, with the rain sheeting down all around me. There is nothing like a good old-fashioned Midwestern thunderstorm: the sound, the smell, the way it keeps changing as the sun comes back to illuminate the raindrops. It’s absolutely lovely. And yes, some of it is blowing through the screens. Delicious!
Childhood
Amanda: Were you a chatterbox as a child, or were you quiet or something else entirely? When you spoke up or expressed a preference, what sort of response did you get?
Jeannine: I was a very quiet child—not just shy but scared. I wrote about that a lot recently when I filled out
’s Oldster Questionnaire, because I am curious about the kind of child I might have been in a healthier, safer family. One issue was that my family didn’t have much money, and—as often happens with working poor families, when financial precarity drives decisions—we moved a lot. I went to about ten different schools before finishing high school. This sensation of repetitive loss and being constantly plunged into new schools where I didn’t know anyone exacerbated my shyness. I spent a lot of time too terrified to speak.But I really appreciate you asking about the kinds of responses I got when I did speak up, because it varied so much between home and school. At home, when I spoke up—which did happen at times, in spite of being terrified, because I was also fiery and stubborn—I would be punished, and often severely. Spankings, yes, but more often my mother would simply slap me. She was fast and strong and those slaps hurt. The worst, though, was being sent to sleep in the basement, sometimes for multiple nights in a row.
In contrast, at school I was usually rewarded when I was brave enough to raise my hand. As a result, I was one of those very quiet new girls, always the new girl, who surprised my teachers and classmates by knowing the answers, solving the math problem, being brave enough to volunteer myself for whatever the teacher wanted us to do. This created a positive feedback loop at school: the more I spoke up, the more encouragement and praise I received, and the more encouragement and praise I received, the braver I felt about speaking up.
As you might imagine, I am very grateful to my teachers, one and all. Teachers are heroes. Without my teachers, I would not be who I am today.
Influences
Amanda: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.
Jeannine: I’m going to cheat a little and pool all my teachers together as the greatest influence from my past. I cannot overstate how influential teachers were to my short and long-term sense of self, and my ability to imagine myself into a better future. My teachers saw me in a way that no one at home did. They saw me as curious, brave, and deeply eager to please! Gosh, that made me vulnerable later, that eagerness, that desperate need to please, but that’s another story. In elementary and middle school, at least, the qualities that made me who I was, that made me feel like me, were recognized, supported, encouraged, and even rewarded by my teachers, which ultimately convinced me that I was someone the world could love and accept, too.
I’ll give a couple of quick examples because specifics matter. In first grade, a classmate tattled on me for not having my head on my desk during rest time, and I was horrified and literally paralyzed over what would come next. But my beloved teacher said it was fine, that I was being quiet and didn’t need to put my head down. For whatever reason—who knows, maybe she was discouraging tattling—she made me feel safe and seen instead of punishing me. The world was suddenly a more just place. Later, many teachers commented on my writing and encouraged me to write more and share my stories and poetry. In fifth grade, my teacher let me write a play for our class and allowed us to practice and perform it for the whole school. Later, when things got untenable at home, not long before I wound up in foster care, I started missing a lot of school, and my geometry teacher approached me. I was, as usual, terrified. But what he said was that he knew something was going on in my homelife—he didn’t have the details, he just saw I was having a hard time, and he wanted to say he saw me as a hard worker with an inventive approach to how I solved the math problems without actually doing the homework. That, he told me, was a good sign that things would be okay for me, eventually.
Those are just a few examples of hundreds. Can you imagine how much those interactions shaped my future? Inevitably that’s why I was destined to become a teacher, and why teaching is as fundamental to my creative practice as writing. I am not just a writer who teaches. I am a writer, and I am also a teacher. I am equal parts both.
Creative Spark
Amanda: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?
Jeannine: What a grand question! I had a creative idea like this lately, not for an essay, but for what I wanted to do with my Lit Salon section of Writing in the Dark. The idea arrived fully formed in a bright flash of inspiration, where I knew I wanted to publish work from readers who were writing in response to the exercises I teach each week. I knew they could describe the exercise they wrote in response to, and then I could describe what I saw in their work that compelled me to select it for publication, and in this way, we could have this incredibly rich, almost meta experience of the writing process from start to finish. I was so excited my heart sped up. I was almost trembling!
I ran out to my porch to tell my youngest adult child,
, about the idea, because they help me with Writing in the Dark, which makes them the first person I run to with new ideas. Anyway, they knew as soon as they heard it that it was as exciting, and I launched the new endeavor two days later. It’s been wonderful. But the point is, I felt it one thousand percent in my body that this idea was right because everyone would benefit—writers get a place to share their work, I pay them and publicize their work, my teaching and editorial process is spotlighted through the writers’ Author Notes, and readers gain access to the “back room” of writing, from idea to draft to wrestling with revision, and, finally, editing. Ideas like this, that are so aligned and offer so much to all participants, are my favorite kind.Writing Process
Amanda: What one thing do writers most often do that erodes self-trust and they don’t even know it?
Jeannine: They try too hard, but not hard enough. What I mean by this is that they insist on writing well—in the way they already know how to do—and as a result, they avoid risks.
Most often, people do this without even realizing it, because they’re still somehow writing “for the grade,” just as they learned to do in school. In the digital age, this converts to writing for clicks or reactions. And, yes, this kind of writing has a place, of course—sometimes we just have to write a thing and get it out there in the most expedient way possible! But if this is the only kind of writing we do, this kind of “write, rinse, and repeat” stuff, we are not writing creatively.
And here is a good moment for me to note that I am answering this question from the perspective and therefore the bias of a writer who teaches creative writing, which is a specific kind of writing—it’s broad and can mean many things, not just literary stuff or poetry or hybrid or flash, etc. The term creative can be applied to almost any kind of writing, even copy and “content,” as long as the writing meets the central definition of creative. And for a thing to be creative, it needs to take us somewhere new.
Creative writing requires that we depart the comfortable confines of the familiar and explore new ways of approaching the page, new strategies for putting words together, whole new concepts for what a thing built of words can be. In other words, we have to experiment. That, in turn, requires us to make some messes and accept that our experiments might fail. In science, something like 70% of research experiments fail, or at least turn up no usable results. That’s what it means to experiment! But writers want to think everything they make is somehow usable. I think that’s a mistake. We need to play around more and be willing to make fodder we can’t use in any productive way. It’s about process.
So, what I am saying is that when writers fall—often without recognizing it themselves—into the pattern of doing the same thing on the page over and over again, driven by the need for “productivity” and risk avoidance as well as avoidance of doing other, less certain new things on the page, they can paradoxically erode their own trust in themselves.
And it is a paradox.
You might think that writing very serviceable prose repeatedly would build our trust in ourselves. But I don’t think that’s true for creative writers who mostly already know how to write serviceable prose, which is why we want to write creatively in the first place. Serviceable prose is just mechanics. What brings us closer to the world, ourselves, and each other through our words is the wild, unpredictable and sometimes painful bramble of the new.
Resources
Amanda: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?
Really tough to narrow it down to just one, especially something unlikely. But I think I would have to say poetry, and I think it’s fair to say that’s surprising because I am a prose writer and have only ever published one thing called a “poem,” in the poetry journal Up the Staircase Quarterly, and it was more than 1,500 words long! So, I for sure don’t identify as a poet. I’m a prose writer. But most of the readings I teach with are poems, because I have learned and keep learning so much from poetry. It’s not just what I learn about how to write—the images, the economy of language, the music, the breathtaking leaps to meaning. It’s also about observation of the world, and what it really takes to see the world up close as it really is. That alone is very difficult to do. To go a step further and see the world up close as it really is and also find words that convey the world—sharp, wounded, glorious—that’s truly remarkable, and certainly accomplishes more than whatever poem might result from the process. In the end, it has less to do with writing and more to do with living, this process of poetry. It is about how we live in the world, and who we become along the way. Poetry is the best teacher.
Oh! And I should add: poetry needn’t be difficult or off-putting, even though so many people think of it that way. Sure, some poetry feels like that, but so does some prose! Any kind of writing can be difficult or off-putting, and sometimes that kind of writing is well worth the effort anyway, right? Although, for me, it oftentimes is not. What I am most interested in these days is writing that opens the curtain between me and the world, not writing that builds walls around itself with feats of complexity. I want writing that shows up for me and reveals the world more clearly. Good poetry does that.
For anyone intimidated by poetry, try:
Ross Gay’s A Small Needful Fact
- ’s Good Bones
Ada Limon’s What it Looks Like to Us and The Words We Use
Ellen Bass’s The Thing Is
Marie Howe’s The Boy
Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays
Sharon Olds’s The Clasp
Jane Kenyon’s Evening Sun
Wendell Berry’s Peace of Wild Things
Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese
These are a good place to start—with so many more I could add!
Neurodivergence
Amanda: Can you share about how you relate with neurodiversity, and how you have tended to your needs through writing?
Jeannine: I have complex PTSD acquired from my childhood history of abuse and sexual abuse.
Most sources acknowledge PTSD as an acquired form of neurodiversity. And in that vein of writing with complex PTSD, I would say this: Everything I just described about poetry has been foundational and transformational to a safe writing practice, because it keeps me in the present moment. Writing as a "practice of attention," which is how I see it, and careful, true rendering of the world through language, is ultimately a form of mindfulness. You can see this clearly in the work of the poets I listed above. They write through the body, and reading poetry has, over the years and decades, taught me to write through my body, too. That has not only made my writing better, but it has also made my life better, because it’s healing and enlivening. Every day, I learn to pay more attention—but not in the hypervigilant, PTSD-based way I learned to do in my childhood, which kept me safe but was not healthy. Poetry is a way of seeing truth, and for a kid who grew up in an unsafe world, there’s nothing more reassuring.
Now to you…
Jeannine talks about how much teachers made a difference in her life as a child. Tell us about a teacher who impacted your life when you were younger—or even one who is teaching you something about yourself now.
Each week, Jeannine is publishing essays with some of the most heart-opening writing prompts I’ve ever seen. This link will take you to the Writing in the Dark Curriculum Index. To me, Jeannine’s work feels how I’d imagine it felt when rivers were carving out the Grand Canyon. Have you participated in any of Jeannine’s work—and if so, would you like to share with us where you hope to be taking your writing practice?
Thank you, Amanda, for including me in your beautiful series!
One, I hold particular affection, Amanda, for when you host writing teachers in this series. They've worked to language aspects of their own writing process and writing generally in ways that are so rich and useful. Thank you for this, truly.
Two, I'd never thought of PTSD as acquired neurodivergence and, honestly, it explains so much about my life to think of it that way. It removes some of the feeling of shame and brokenness. What an immeasurable gift, Jeannine. Thank you.