Video: 3 quotes I loved this week
It’s story time! I’m reading my favorite quotes from Jillian Hess, Ramona Grigg and Suleika Jaouad
Hey everybody, I've been thinking about the nature of Substack being very longform-writing focused. And I've been trying to think of a way to connect with more of the readers of The Editing Spectrum around the sound of really good writing.
And so this week I'm trying something new. I'm going to share with you guys three writing samples that I felt just sounded wonderful in addition to having some really great imagery or just perspective.
And that's what I'm going to do right now on this video. So let's get started. I've got on my screen here, I have a list of the quotes. So if you see me kind of looking back and forth that’s because I'm checking my show notes. 😉
Jillian Hess’s piece on Julia Child
So first I wanted to share with you guys a quote that I felt crossed over really well into writing. It was in
"One of the secrets, the pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed."
And I thought for a second about that because the first part of it really does resound with me about writing—that we have to learn how to correct our writing and to know that writing can always improve, can always reach people in a different way.
But I kind of got, I don't know, paused? I kind of got stumped around the idea of grinning and bearing it if it cannot be fixed. And I wondered what are the parallels in writing where something just is what it is and we have to move on?
I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. I'll link to it in the essay where she published it. But I think there are moments where we just have to stop wrestling the beast and just move on with our lives and with the writing that needs to come up next.
Ramona Grigg in Cave of the Heart
The next piece of writing that I wanted to share is actually a snippet from
’s guest column in the Cave of the Heart. If you haven't read that, highly recommend that you do. The first question in all of the Cave of the Heart interview series revolves around childhood and inviting writers to reflect on something specific about their childhood.And I loved the description that Ramona shared about when she was young. I'm going to read it to you now.
My mother said when I was around five, living in a rented house at the corner of a somewhat busy street, I would hang onto the gate waiting for passersby. No doubt I was wearing a dress with white socks and patent leather Mary Janes, the usual outfit. And no one could get past me without at least hearing: “Hi, my name is Mona! What’s yours? Do you live around here? Where are you going? Wanna see my (insert: doll, bear, dress, Mom)? What’s in your bag? Do you have kids? What’s their names? I could play with them…”
That little glimpse into five-year-old Mona was some of the most enchanting writing that I've read in awhile. I love the imagery that she shares of just this eager young girl wanting to get to know the world outside, but she's too young to go and explore it herself.
It really touched me and I'm so grateful that she shared that with us. I'd love to see more imagery like that in the writing that we share. I think the details like what she's wearing, hanging on the gate, it's so illustrative without being a distraction.
It really set the tone. I really loved it.
Suleika Jaouad’s “Prompt 269. What We Remember, What We Forget”
The final piece of writing that I want to share today, I saw, I think it was last week sometime in
’s newsletter; it was an essay that she wrote and I'll link to it here. She said:We aren’t living our lives as reporters, with a tape recorder and a fact checker. So rather than only focusing on if our memory matches up with someone else’s or whether it’s objectively true, I find it interesting to interrogate why we remember what we remember—and what that can reveal.
So the really interesting part about this quote is that it actually really lines up with the, some of the foundations of trauma-based therapy or bottom up therapy, which basically looks at what's happening in the body, rather than top-down therapy, which is a therapy that basically looks at like your thoughts in your mind and trying to bring clarity to what's happening in a cognitive way.
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Part of the foundation of, I think, writing (and it's also interesting that writing and trauma therapy tend to intertwine quite a bit) is that you don't have to, in trauma therapy … the key to it actually working is not having to defend what you feel anymore.
And I think a lot of writers that I've worked with over the years, they get stuck, or their writer's block shows up, because they think they have to defend and convince the people who were in the setting where they feel they were harmed, or how they perceived a certain setting, that they have to convince those people before it's true for them.
And that's a really … when we can move past the point of being responsible for how everybody else perceived a moment and just accept the fact that we don't have a tape recorder, we aren't fact checkers … We have to just work with memory as it lives in us and how it affects us. I think it opens up a door to writing that's really powerful.
What did you think?
Anyways, I'd love to hear you guys in the comment section. Did any of these quotes resonate? Why or why not?
What do you think about some of these takeaways? I loved finding these, I loved gathering these for you this week. Hope to see you in the comments soon.
I love your interpretation of Julia Child's quote! Her no-apologies-mistakes-happen approach is so perfect for writers.
I loved this - it really helped me focus on the passages from these writers in different ways. I really loved the passage from Suleika Jaouad: "I find it interesting to interrogate why we remember what we remember—and what that can reveal.". To which I'd add that a key thing to explore in memoir or autobiography is what we have forgotten or chosen to forget. What are we hiding and why?