In my book Writing with Pleasure, I describe a playful project that I undertook at a time in my career when I was struggling to balance my research and teaching load with the demands of a busy academic leadership role.

Over a two-month period in early 2016, I drew hundreds of tiny color-coded mosaic tiles along a winding paper path that I called the Email Trail. Every week I chose a different set of colored pencils and a different theme to focus on, with each tile representing an ingoing or outgoing email message. My mission? To transform my daily task of clearing my email inbox — which took, on average, two hours per day — from a stressful activity into something more pleasurable and engaging, or at least less burdensome.

Last week, I found my 2016 Email Trail notebook wedged amongst a stack of old journals, its eccentric hoard of workplace data still intact and, until now, unpublished.

I invite you to join me for a walk along the Email Trail.

Enjoy!

Weeks 1-2

January 2016 got off to a slow start, as reflected by my relatively light email workload in the first two weeks of the year. Between January 1-15, I sent “only” 95 outgoing work emails, which I color-coded in my notebook according to the gender of the recipients: purple for women, green for men, and blue for mixed groups or for individuals whose gender identity I didn’t know.

What I learned: Nearly two-thirds of my email conversations were with women, many of them working in administrative or service roles. As a senior female academic who has been socialized all my life to be friendly and accommodating towards other people, did I spend more time responding to routine transactional emails than my male colleagues typically did? (I never investigated that question further but have my suspicions!)

Week 3

By the third week of January, the pace of my email exchanges started picking up. In the 7-day period between January 16-22, I sent out 62 emails to colleagues within my own university and 56 messages to external email addresses. Notably, I was preoccupied that week with organizing an international conference panel, which almost certainly skewed my ratio of external to internal emails.

What I learned: Although most of my day-to-day electronic communications remained internal to my university, there were periods when email became a crucial point of connection and exchange with international colleagues. I resolved to savor those periods of heightened engagement with the wider world, rather than frantically rushing through them to get to the next trivial administrative task.

Week 4

In the fourth week of January 2016 I went completely off-grid, hiking the spectacular Milford Track. When I returned the following week to find 144 new emails in my work inbox, I decided to track how I handled each one. Thirty-three messages (red) could be deleted without reading (this number didn’t include all the junkmail that had already been triaged by my email filtering service!) I quickly skimmed through and deleted a further 39 emails (green). But 21 messages (indigo) required careful scrutiny followed by a reply and/or action, and I read and filed a further 31 emails (purple).

What I learned: I was handling a lot of email every week with attention and care — no wonder I so often felt stressed! Some of my processes were quite efficient (such as filtering and deleting spam); however, I realized that I was wasting a lot of time meticulously filing away messages that I would never look at again.

Week 5

In the first week of February — a short work week due to a 3-day holiday weekend — I tracked the status of my outgoing emails, which numbered 74 in all:

• 32 messages (blue) started a new email trail.

• 24 emails (green) replied to a new email trail started by someone else.

• 18 emails (orange) contributed to an existing conversation.

What I learned: Perhaps I could keep my inbox clearer by initiating fewer new conversations and bringing ongoing exchanges to a close?

Week 6

Week 6 was another 4-day work week. Of the 67 emails that I sent out that week, 43 messages (orange) contained fewer than 50 words; 16 (violet) were between 51-99 words long; and 8 messages (magenta) exceeded 100 words.

What I learned: The shorter emails were mainly transactional and could be clustered and cleared fairly quickly. The longer ones, by contrast, were often linked to chunky writing tasks such as administrative reports and reference letters, which required from me an entirely different kind of focus and time commitment. Anything over 100 words isn’t just an email any more; it’s a project!

Week 7

When I tracked the number of people to whom I cc’d each of my outgoing messages, I was surprised to find that well over half of my emails — 57 out of 92 — were addressed to only one person. Around one third of my messages (32) reached groups of 2-8 people; and only 3 emails that week went to recipient lists of 9 people or more.

What I learned: Most of my email consisted of one-to-one exchanges. Maybe I should pick up the phone more often?

Week 8

Week 8 was relatively mellow; I sent out only 46 emails. The topics of these messages were fairly evenly distributed among the categories of research (14), teaching/supervision (14), and administration (12); plus there were 6 emails of a more personal nature that I coded as other.

What I learned: Research-related tasks took up a larger share of my email than I had realized. When I started to count that “email time” as “research time,” I became less stressed about the perceived imbalances in my workload, which felt heavily skewed towards teaching and administration.

Week 9

In my final week of tracking my email, I scrutinized the purpose of each outgoing message. It turned out that I spent much of my time and energy simply greasing the wheels of human interaction:

• Arranging a meeting (red - 12)

• Thanks/acknowledgment (dark orange - 18)

• Question/request (light orange - 18)

• Response to a question/request (blue - 18)

• Other (yellow - 19)

What I learned: Writing and responding to email can feel monotonous and impersonal. But every email exchange — at least until the chatbots take over completely! — represents a human interaction. By picturing the person at the other end of each email and imagining myself actually communicating with them, I found I could make the whole endeavor feel much more meaningful and human.

The end of the trail

The Email Trail petered out in March 2016, as I realized that my experiment had increased rather than decreased the amount of time I was spending on my email — which rather defeated the point! The lessons I learned, however, have stayed with me. For example, I now make a point of writing transactional emails more quickly, taking frequent breaks from keyboard and screen, and picking up the phone for conversations that called for the warmth of a human voice.

Looking back, the Email Trail helped me to see my weekly email load through new eyes (or, if you will, through mosaic-colored glasses) and to reframe my attitude toward what I had previously regarded as a menial and often meaningless task. Each week, as my hand-drawn tesserae accumulated and the winding trail through my notebook grew longer, I was able to recognize in a visual, visceral way just how much I had actually accomplished that week—a striking change from the “inbox zero” approach to email management, which aims to sweep the trail clear.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

---

Helen's Blog RSS

A metaphor is like . . . a double-decker bus careening wildly through the air while its passengers sit calmly inside?!

Well, I guess that’s as good a metaphor as any for the way metaphor works. Derived from the Greek words meta (over) and pherin (carry), metaphor is a figure of language that draws unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas; it carries us over from one conceptual space into another. Most of the time, the journey is so smooth that we don’t even notice how high we’re flying or how far we’ve travelled. But every now and then, when a metaphor stretches our senses or lurches out of control, we may feel a sense of vertigo.

Metaphors aren’t just frivolous froufrou, the rarified domain of literary scholars and poets. In Metaphors We Live By — one of my favorite books on metaphor — philosophers of language George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all language is deeply metaphorical. The vocabulary of embodied experience is (metaphorically) hardwired into our brains, which explains why we tend to talk about abstract concepts such as time (“the hours are slipping away”) and intellect (“I’m gathering my thoughts”) as though they were material objects.

Still not convinced? I challenge you (whoops, challenge is a metaphor!) to write a whole paragraph on any abstract topic without employing (whoops again) any metaphorical language. Chances are that you won’t get very far (whoops again) — or if you do manage to come up with more than a few metaphor-free sentences, your writing will be as bland as dry toast without butter or jam.

For me, metaphor is a magic bus that I plan to keep riding for as long as I keep writing. It’s been quite a journey so far! I’ve published a number of articles and book chapters on the explanatory, generative, and redemptive powers of metaphor, and that bus is still a long way from running out of gas. Below is an omnibus (pun intended) of lightly adapted excerpts.

Enjoy!

Show and tell (2012)

The fact is, that in the primeval struggle of the jungle, as in the refinements of civilized warfare, we see in progress a great evolutionary armament race. . . .  Just as greater speed in the pursued has developed in relation to increased speed in the pursuer; or defensive armour in relation to aggressive weapons; so the perfection of concealing devices has evolved in response to increased powers of perception.

H. B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (London: Metheun, 1940), 158-9.

Cott’s “evolutionary arms race” analogy — animal species are like nations at war, heightened perception is like a weapon, camouflaging devices are like defensive armor — belongs to a long list of analogies that scientists and scholars have used to help us make sense of our world.  Computer programmers “boot” their hard drives (the term derives from the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”); linguists who study metaphor and analogy speak of “conceptual mappings.”  Some of these analogies may be misleading: for example, so-called “junk DNA,” which denotes non-coding portions of a genome sequence, has turned out to have more important biological functions than its throwaway name would suggest.  Many scientific analogies, however, are so effective and compelling that they have entered our cultural lexicon and perhaps our very consciousness.  The programmer who first slapped familiar office labels onto various computer functions — “desktop,” “file,” “folder,” “control panel,” “recycle bin” — certainly knew something about human psychology and our hunger for language that invokes the physical realm.

---

from Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012)

Metaphors to write by (2017)

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On Style,” 1914

If you want a golden rule that will fit every thing, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” 1919

If editing is akin to infanticide, what other acts of violence and sacrifice does our writing demand of us? Arthur Quiller-Couch’s murderous metaphor has been quoted, misquoted, and misattributed by numerous authors, but seldom with any commentary to the effect that its morbid view of the writer’s craft might cause far worse damage than the demise of a few overblown sentences. What if we were to replace Quiller-Couch’s “practical rule” for writing with William Morris’s “golden rule” for living, which teaches us that practicality and beauty can be soul mates rather than enemies? What happens when we invite positive emotions and language into our writing practice — and encourage them to make themselves at home?

from Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Mining the language of metaphor (2018)

In my research on the background, habits, and emotions of academic writers from across the disciplines and around the world, I found metaphorical language everywhere. How do academics learn to write?

By the seat of my pants.

Sink or swim.

How do they get their writing done?

Fifteen minute jam sessions.

My writing comes in waves.

How do they feel about their writing?

Writing is like going to bed as a child— I resist it constantly.

The road to satisfaction is paved with less enjoyable emotions.

Each of these phrases contains shadings and highlights that get flattened out in the conceptual glare of abstractions such as anxiety or pleasure. Even apparently positive metaphors nearly always reveal a negative face, a “shadow side” that lends them dimension and meaning:

I love to immerse myself.

(But immersion can lead to drowning).

I always know I’ll get to lift off.

(But until you do, you’re stuck on the ground).

The most complex and productive metaphors chart an author’s progress from blockage to breakthrough in ways that acknowledge both the challenges and the pleasures of the process:

I enjoy being lost and hacking away the bush and branches to reach the clearing,

[It’s] akin to a really good cardio work-out.

Some respondents even convey the intricacies of their ambivalence in phrases that have the sonorous ring of poetry:

I walk my thoughts together in the forest.

It feels like jumping into a river.

Words are like gold.

---

from Helen Sword, Marion Blumenstein, Alistair Kwan, Louisa Shen & Evija Trofimova, Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set (Qualitative Inquiry, 27:4 (2018): 499-508)

Metaphors of frustration (2018)

When I asked a group of colleagues at a writing retreat to come up with metaphors that describe their frustration as writers, their words (paradoxically?) flowed freely. Frustration, they told us, resembles a physical blockage, like constipation or being unable to sneeze. Frustration is an impassable obstacle, like coming to the edge of a cliff. Frustration is an expenditure of energy that gets you nowhere, like running in a hamster wheel. Frustration is a self-imposed hindrance, like painting yourself into a corner. Frustration is a road paved with broken glass: “Whichever way you go, it’s going to be painful.” Frustration is performance anxiety, like getting on stage and forgetting your lines. Frustration is a heaviness, like being weighted down by stones. Frustration is slow progress, like a snail inching its way across a playground. Frustration is fear, like a dream of having your teeth fall out. Frustration is the distance between you and your destination, like a light at the end of the tunnel that never seems to get any closer. Frustration is an exercise in futility, like playing an endless game of Snakes and Ladders or winning a pie-eating contest in which the prize is more pie. Frustration is the panic you feel when you are in an impenetrable wilderness and find out that even your guide is lost.

Three months later, I prompted the same group of colleagues to “re-story” their metaphors of frustration into redemptive tales of effort and accomplishment. Some found ways of conquering frustration by enlisting other people to help them:

If you’re afraid of forgetting your lines, you can make sure there’s a prompter in the wings of the theatre.

Sometimes when I feel that I’m sinking in a swamp, all it takes to save me is a lifeline thrown by a friend or colleague.

Some invoked metaphors of patience:

When you’re being swept out to sea by a riptide, there’s no point fighting it; you just need to stay afloat and swim sideways until you’re free of the current.

It’s like those Biblical stories of walking through a dark place but knowing you’ll survive: transformation requires faith.

Some called on magical thinking:

In fairy tales, if you find yourself trapped underwater, you’ll sprout gills and turn into a fish or a mermaid.

When you come to the edge of the cliff, just fly!

What all of these solutions have in common is a shift of attitude: what one colleague called “crossing the bridge from the can’t to the can.” Metaphor, as this exercise reminds us, can become a tool not just for describing frustration but for refashioning it, rerouting it, and finding a way beyond it.

---

from Helen Sword, Evija Trofimova & Madeleine Ballard, Frustrated Academic Writers (Higher Education Research and Development, 37:4, 2018)

The feedback loop (2019)

Metaphor can exercise a powerful “feedback effect” on our psyches, shaping how we think and act:

In all aspects of life ... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By ).

My own “aha moment” in this regard occurred when I was working on a book about the writing habits of successful academics, a project that inevitably prompted considerable self-reflection. I wanted my book to inspire academics to write with greater confidence, craftsmanship, and care. However, an early reader of the manuscript pointed out that I described my own confident, craft-focused, careful compositional style as finicky, snail-paced, and pathetically slow. The negative feedback generated by my choice of words, I realized, was at odds with the positive image of the writing process that I aspired to project. Thanks to my reader’s gentle intervention, I replaced pathologizing verbs such as fuss, fiddle, and tweak with craft-affirming alternatives such as adjust, tinker, and polish — and from that moment onward I resolved to take greater care with my metaphors.

---

from Helen Sword, Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing (in S. Farquhar and E. Fitzpatrick, eds., Narrative and Metaphor: Innovative Methodologies and Practice, Springer, 2019)

The mosaic path (2022)

I love collecting objects that have been discarded or passed over by others – stained glass offcuts, chipped crockery, river stones, seashells – and assembling them into new works of art, creating unexpected juxtapositions of color and form.  When the intricate mosaic walkway that I had spent seven years designing and grouting into place was bulldozed by autocratic university administrators and replaced with a straight and narrow footpath, I understood their motivation: my joyfully meandering pathway was too non-conformist, its colors too rich, its energy too vibrant, to suit their dehumanizing neoliberal agenda. But a mosaic, having been created from fragments, can be reassembled in new configurations even after having been blown apart. I now spend my days on a beautiful South Pacific island laying out another crazy paving, this one even more colorful and playful than the last. (It’s called the WriteSPACE). This time, however, the pathway runs through my own property rather than the university’s; never again will I risk having my life and art consigned to a dumpster by philistine landlords.

The mosaic metaphor has helped me recognize my former role as the director of a higher education research centre — indeed, my entire scholarly career — as a creative practice that, like all art-making, is richly fulfilling but fraught with risk. I do not mean to suggest here that metaphorical language can always pave over pain, nor that beleaguered academics should respond to all administrative abuses of power as I have done in this instance, by retreating to an island (literally as well figuratively) and giving up on institutional activism. My decision to start my own business as an international writing consultant, building new pathways into writing for scholars around the world, has come towards the end of a long career spent fighting in the university trenches for causes such as gender equity, cultural inclusiveness, and student-centered teaching. 

If I were ten years younger, a different set of metaphors might have inspired me to gird my loins emotionally and return to the fray. (Rest assured, however, that I would not have persisted with the military trope for long; its shadow side is too dark to dwell in, even if academic life does sometimes feel like a war zone.) Either way, redemptive metaphors have helped me find my way forward. Indeed, the very process of writing this essay has accelerated my transformation from a self-perceived victim of circumstance to a maker and shaper who has taken my future into my own hands. 

---

from Helen Sword, Diving Deeper: The Redemptive Power of Metaphor (in Julie Hansen & Ingela Nilsson, eds, Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia, Brill, 2022)

The SPACE of metaphor (2023)

A well-turned metaphor can be a source of pleasure in its own right. But metaphors can also amplify our pleasure in writing, casting light into the darkest corners of our WriteSPACE and helping us negotiate its challenges. By rendering abstract emotions concrete, metaphors give shape and substance to our fears, hopes, and desires. At their most generative, they become the emotional touchstones that we return to again and again, the guides and mentors that lead us onward and inward to new discoveries and deeper truths about our writing.

---

from Helen Sword, Writing with Pleasure (Princeton University Press, 2023)

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

---

Helen's Blog RSS

On October 17, I invited criminologist David R. Goyes, a senior researcher at the University of Oslo, to join me for a lively conversation on "Writing and Risktaking". 

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, David and I discussed the benefits and (of course!) the risks of defying disciplinary conventions to produce bold, engaging academic prose. David recounted his own journey into a more stylish way of writing and shared some examples of pushback and (mostly) praise from co-authors, editors, and readers. In the second hour, we co-led a hands-on discussion and workshop for WriteSPACE members, guiding participants through some risky writing experiments of their own.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This Special Event featuring Helen Sword and David Goyes offered a provocative entry into the world of risky writing. Breaking free from the straitjacket of academic prose is by no means an easy task; it takes a lot of courage to dismantle imitative writing habits, broaden your mindset, find supportive colleagues to back your ideas, and stand firm about the creative elements into your academic work.

Seems like a lot of obstacles, doesn’t it? But by the end of the session, Helen and David had convinced me of the great opportunities and joy to be found in risky writing.

Some memorable quotes from David in response to Helen’s questions:

• Q: What is risky writing?

  A: Risky writing could be going against the stream, challenging conventions, or using tools that others don’t use. It is risky because you think, ‘If I deviate from the academic standard, I won’t be published, I’ll be criticised, or I won’t be taken seriously.’

• Q: Is it harder to take risks when you’re not a native English speaker?

  A: Writing in your second language can make you a better writer. It’s risky, but it challenges you to achieve clarity and depth.

• Q: Doesn’t risky writing lead to pushback from editors and peer reviewers?

  A: It’s a myth! I would say that 95% of peer reviewers appreciate risky or creative elements. More often, it is the co-authors who generate pushback, or maybe it is even self-disciplining.

David and Helen spoke about imitative writing: Are we learning bad habits from our colleagues? It’s not uncommon for early-career scholars or academics in highly conventional fields to find themselves trying to imitate the writing style of their disciplinary canon. Early-career academics can also be the strictest peer reviewers because they feel the need to reproduce the harsh comments they received for their own first publications. It’s easy to feel trapped into thinking “This is how academic writing is done. I must speak and write in a certain way, and teach others to do the same.” A vicious circle indeed, and an unnecessary one.

What are some ways to break the cycle, you ask? Here are three common routes:

1. Social influence: Seek out likeminded risktakers and creatives in or beyond your discipline.

2. A crisis: Something just isn’t working, so you have to drastically devise a plan B.

3. Education: When you read a book or attend a course taught by an expert in the field, you’re exposed to new ideas that in turn encourage self-reflection (“Is this really the only way to do it?”). By reading this article, you are already well on your way towards becoming more aware of and empowered by risktaking!

(For more on how imitative behaviour molds culture, Helen recommends Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson).

David showed us praise-filled reviews for his “riskiest” articles, which draw on techniques such storytelling, poetry, personal narrative, conversation, dialogue, and melodrama. Check out these articles by David and colleague for some excellent examples of risky writing that paid off:

1. For storytelling, see the introduction ‘Sour Milk’ of Goyes et al., “‘An incorporeal disease’: COVID-19, social trauma and health injustice in four Colombian Indigenous communities”, Sociol Rev, 71:1 (2023): 105–25.

2. For personal narrative, read David’s own dream research log in Goyes & Mari Todd-Kvam, “Dreams and Nightmares: Interviewing research participants who have experienced psychological trauma”, in Ethical Dilemmas in International Criminological Research (Routledge, 2023).

3. For dialogue, listen to interviewees’ personal voices and singing in Goyes & Sveinung Sandberg, “The soundtrack of criminal careers: On music, life courses and life stories,” Theoretical Criminology, 0:0 (2023).

4.  For poetry, see the ending of Goyes, “Latin American green criminology,” Justice, Power and Resistance, 6:1 (2023): 90-107.

David posed us a challenge: We must look at risk with new eyes. Something may be safe despite looking unsafe. He remembers going to a prison in Bolivia to conduct research; nervous about entering a high-security prison to interview murderers and other serious offenders, David was surprised when his scariest interviewee started crying and confessing his loneliness. We often erect boundaries and suffer from fears that have been taught to us or reinforced by others in our discipline. Unless we learn to push against these boundaries and scrutinise these fears, we can end up locking ourselves in our own kind of prison, a space where there is no creative licence to be found.

*************

In the second hour of the event — the workshop for WriteSPACE members — we delved into practical problems faced by academic writers. David provided his insightful expertise as an academic who has received both negative and glowing responses for his “risky” (aka stylish and creative) academic articles and discussed how to respond to negative feedback while remaining firm on your ideas.

As one participant noted in the comments:

Academia is, subtly perhaps, a very hierarchical environment. I'm grappling with how to establish myself and push the conventions of writing while ensuring I am taken seriously at the same time, despite being an early career academic.

To address some of the questions raised in the first hour, Helen and David guided us through several creative experiments, which I would encourage you to try right now. Grab yourself a pen and notebook and find a comfy space to do some freewriting:

• 5-min Prompt: Think about your current project. How can you bring risky writing into your work? Perhaps you might consider some of the following: Story, poetry, personal narrative, conversation, dialogue, melodrama…

• 5-minute prompt: Imagine Reviewer #2 (the grumpiest or most conservative gatekeeper you can imagine) responding to your risky writing. What do they say about it (and you)?

• 5-minute prompt: Now imagine Reviewer #1 responding positively and with high praise to your risky writing. What do they say about it (and you)?

For some of Helen’s articles that encourage risktaking in academia, see:

1.  Sword, The First Person. Teaching and Learning Inquiry 7:1 (2019): 182-190. Republished in the Good Writing Gazette, 2020.

2. Sword, Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing, in S. Farquhar and E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Narrative and Metaphor: Innovative Methodologies and Practice (pp. 39-55). Singapore: Springer, 2019.

3. Sword, Marion Blumenstein, Alistair Kwan, Louisa Shen & Evija Trofimova, “Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set,” Qualitative Inquiry, 27:4 (2018): 499-508.

4. Sword, “Seven Secrets of Stylish Academic Writing,” The Conversation, 13 July 2012.

A big thank you to David and Helen for this interesting and inspiring Special Event, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your comments and engaging questions.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can now watch the recording of the full two-hour in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

---

Helen's Blog RSS

We’ve been “making stuff” in the Creativity Catalyst all this week, which has inspired me to lean with extra energy and attention into making the paper collage that heads up today’s newsletter.

I approach the process differently every week. Sometimes I already have a topic in mind, so I let the title or theme dictate the design. Right now, for example, I’m mulling over the collage options for my upcoming WriteSPACE Special Event on Writing and Risktaking with criminologist David R. Goyes. Should I create a recognizable scene — a mountain climber scaling a cliff, for example, or a ringmaster placing their head in a lion’s mouth — or use abstract images to invoke an emotional response? Will I incorporate words amongst the images? What does risky writing look like, anyway?

More rarely, I start with the collage and let the writing follow. Perhaps I’ll begin with a word or image and build the collage from there. Or maybe I’ll pull out paper and scissors and glue and just start playing around: cutting pictures from magazines and books, juxtaposing colors and textures, waiting for the moment when the collage show me where it’s taking me. I love this part of the process, which never fails me. Bit by bit, under my moving hands, a colorful conglomeration of images takes shape — and as it does, I’m thinking about how and what I’ll write to go with my new collage.

Below you’ll find my visual-verbal narration of how this week’s image came into being. I’ll end with a few writing/collage prompts that you can try for yourself.

Enjoy!

The Simplon Pass

Many years ago, when I was a PhD student in comparative literature, I read Wordsworth’s masterpiece The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind in a graduate seminar on Romantic poetry. Our professor pointed out the famous scene — sometimes published as a free-standing poem called “The Simplon Pass” — in which the young poet experiences a kind of sublime epiphany, a perception of divine Eternity in the ever-changing features of nature:

The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

But shortly before this revelation, Wordsworth narrates a scene of bitter disappointment, almost as though the former required the latter for its release. Having become separated from the rest of their group while crossing the Alps between Switzerland and Italy, the poet and his companion attempt to scale a lofty mountain, get hopelessly lost, and have to backtrack. Eventually they meet a local peasant who points out the route to their destination, which leads inexorably downward:

Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant's lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps.

The mountains of the mind

Using italic font in several different sizes, I printed excerpts from the “crossing the Alps” stanza on collage paper of various shades and textures, pondering as I did so the central question of Wordsworth’s poem: What does it mean to cross the Alps unknowingly, missing out on that key moment of summiting? If you undergo a major life transition without noticing it, can you really count it as a milestone?

Opening myself to the wisdom of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls handmind, I started cutting and layering the paper, trusting my hands to tell me what to do. Before long, I noticed mountains forming:

My collage, I decided, would depict a mountain range criss-crossed by tracks of text. My placement of each “mountain” was dictated — no, that’s too strong a word, it was suggested — by some ineffable combination of color, pattern, texture, and text. Some of the words ended up upside down, or they slanted sideways like layers of sandstone shifted by ancient earthquakes:

I decided not to use the pink sheet on which I had printed out the poem’s key message in bolded, extra-italicized text, as it seemed a bit too in-your-face:

But I did make sure that the phrase “we had crossed the Alps” appears in a prominent position on the white mountain in the foreground of the collage:

And when my composition was all but complete, I capped that white mountain with another iteration of the same phrase, carefully centering feelings at the peak of the mountain and crossed the Alps just below:

All that remained for me then was to photograph the finished collage in better light and play around with the color mix in Photoshop, so that the finished artwork glows on your screen as though backlit by bright mountain light:

Have you ever fixed your eyes on a real or metaphorical mountain and, in doing so, lost sight of the path you’re actually walking on? Have you ever looked back on a transformational moment in your life and realized that you failed to notice it at the time because you were focusing on the wrong things? Like Wordsworth’s poem, my poem chronicles the challenges of looking, travelling, noticing, aspiring — the central themes of any writer’s life.

Coming down the mountain

If you’d like to try this writing-and-collage exercise for yourself, here are a few prompts to get you going:

1. Choose a short passage of text to work with: for example a poem or song lyric, a paragraph by a favorite author, or a piece of your own writing.

2. Copy or print the text out on sheets of colored or patterned paper, using different fonts and font sizes if you wish. As you do so, think about why you’ve chosen this particular text and what you can learn from attending to it closely.

3. Cut or tear the paper into scraps or shapes and start arranging them on a piece of cardboard — anything strong enough to remain stiff even when you covered with wet glue.(I use square 15x15 cm pieces of canvas or card stock, but any size or shape will do). Think about what you’re doing and why as you make your decisions about composition, imagery, and form, but don’t overthink.

4. When you feel ready, start gluing the paper onto the cardboard using white glue or a glue stick. Don’t worry if you make mistakes or affix things in the “wrong place” (whatever that means!) Mistakes can lead to serendipitous flashes of insight.

5. To finish off, you can frame and display your collage, or glue it into a notebook, or photograph it and post it on Instagram — or not! In collage-making, the process matters as much as the product.

6. Don’t forget to write! Before, during, after the collage-making process — in your head if not on paper. Your handmind will tell you what to do.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

---

Helen's Blog RSS