TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Writing is a process of discovery. When I’m working on a poem or an essay, I don’t know what I might find, and that sense of discovery doesn’t end when the piece is finished and published. Sometimes readers will point things out that surprise me. Sometimes I’ll be reading a piece aloud in front of an audience, and something will strike me differently. Our writing isn’t static, because we’re not static.

I’ll give you one example of a connection I made very late in the editing of my memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. By a certain point in the process, you’re just supposed to be editing for typos, and to make sure that the last round of changes were made. Production frowns on authors deciding to significantly revise text, add material, or make any other changes that would cause text to reflow across pages. I know this, but during a late round of edits, I surprised myself by making a new connection. I’d been using a shark — the shark Jaws, from the movie, specifically — as a metaphor when talking about my divorce. I contend that the scariest parts of Jaws aren’t when we see the shark, but when we don’t. We have this sense of dread.

I was editing a passage about my white dishes, the ones I registered for when I got married, the dishes my kids and I still use every day, and it suddenly hit me: the name of those Pottery Barn dishes. I went to the kitchen cabinet, pulled out a plate, and turned it over. There, stamped on the bottom, were the words GREAT WHITE. My wedding dishes share a name with a shark. With the kind of shark that Jaws is.

Yes, I made edits to the book to acknowledge that connection. How could I not? It’s never too late to see something new.

Today’s poem made me think of those dishes — and of the discoveries we make when writing.

My Shark
by Ellie Black

Every day I invent a shark
to follow me around. This part isn’t hard
if you’ve met enough sharks. But when

I look behind me he isn’t always there—
that would be too easy. My shark
is smart. He’s waiting underneath.

I want my shark to want something
besides me. The raddest thing I can imagine
is to be left alone. Nothing looming

in the waters behind you. Still,
I make him up every day, dangling
my legs off the side of the boat,

daring him to take a bite. I think
maybe if I make this easy 
we can get it over with.  But

he always comes back. Of course—
he’s mine. I asked him to. And honestly
I love the part where I get to start

over, and the part right before,
the moment I realize he’s back, which
is to say (ugh) I’ve done this to myself

again, and when he drags me under,
I love to watch the swirl of my own blood
in the water, the bubbles encasing 

my scream—how, predictably, though
I know how this goes, I always try
coming up for air.

"My Shark" by Ellie Black. Used by permission of the poet.