Can you see the intensity in those wise-beyond-her-years eyes? Yes? I thought so. It’s impossible to miss. And that beauty and intensity is immediately evident in Elizabeth Eslami’s writing. She has a gift of drawing her readers into her stories—stories that ask us to dive deep and think. And feel.

 

From her short stories, to her essays, to her novel, Bone Worship, I have always enjoyed reading Elizabeth’s words. I was hopeful that she’d have time to be a guest here on Brava, and I’m delighted that she said yes!

 

Please help me welcome Elizabeth and enjoy reading her very personal essay about writing!

 

Head Above Water

 

I could tell you I started writing because it felt natural, a water birth, the words slipping out like a thick-limbed infant, and that would be true, up to a point.  The urge to write grew like a fingernail, and I did not question it.  But I can’t explain what happened after, when it was time to pull a story or a book to dry land.  Lay it on the sand, see if it could open its lungs, untangle its lashes, spit the salt from its lips.  See if the thing could survive.

 

With a water birth, they say the baby knows not to breathe, it even swims a bit, arms and legs wiggling on the current of lost memory. A natural swimmer. There is a theory, universally derided, that some of our ancestors came from the sea instead of the trees, either to escape predation on land or to find food among the kelp and reefs.  That we learned to walk upright to keep our heads above water.  Some nights, struggling to tell a story, this theory doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.  For even if we aren’t natural writers, what else could it mean when the words wash into and pull away from us with lunar force?

 

Perhaps the God of writers is the moon.

 

Your story, your book, your poem is a life, whether its origins are benthic or terrestrial. You can call it a child if it helps, though I’m not sure why it would.  It will be dear to you from conception, the germ of it an embryo in your brain. But it is not your child, and that is an important distinction.  Once you expel it, even before it becomes something with fingers and toes, it stops being yours.  Sometimes, yes, it will stay the afternoon with you, squeezing its way into your arms.  You will look around at your family, your friends, and say to everyone, “Isn’t this just the best thing in the world?  Each one of these words was born in a splash.  See how I made this precious life?”

 

But more often, the child will escape and run to the sea, leaping into rogue waves, diving down among box jellyfish and lionfish, scouring the floor for poisonous crates.  Digging up things you’d prefer left undisturbed.  You can stand at the shore for hours, waving your arms, calling your story back, but when it returns to you, all breathless and sun burned, you won’t recognize it.  Go ahead and yell. Hold tight to its arm.  Remind it of the sacrifices you’ve made, ask it why it disobeyed you, why it isn’t everything you hoped it would be.

 

When you are finished enumerating your frustrations and thwarted plans, you’ll realize you no more own this thing than you do a stranger in the street.  The very best you can do is dig a big enough hole for it to grow into what it wants, like the tide filling the letters of your name in the sand, erasing them, only to write new words in the contours of dunes half a mile away.

 

When I write a story, it is a little like looking for the end of the ocean, or catching a clam before it bubbles under the sand.  Which is to say, it almost can’t be done.  And yet it happens, and I am not completely responsible.  I listen to what it tells me, even if it isn’t what I want to hear.

 

My whole life, no one has ever asked me: How do you write?  Everyone thinks they know, like the baby holding his breath under water.  They ask, how do you get published?  Where do you begin?  How do you find an agent?  How long does it take?   They always imagine a gatekeeper.

 

“Have I got a story for you,” they say.  Sometimes hundreds of stories, loose, like stray pennies that have slipped into the floorboards. “I should tell you my stories, and you can write them.”

 

But I can no more write another person’s story than they can record my thoughts or give birth to my child, speak in my voice.  I know it’s scary, I want to say.  But you have to do it yourself.  I’m saying that to all of you now, reading this.  Listen.  Don’t wait.  Just look at the moon and start writing.

 

How do you write?  If someone asked, I’d take them out to the sea and point to the waves.  One and then another.  One and then another.  Write a word and then another, I’d say.  Keep writing them until you have an ocean.

 

Keep writing until it’s alive.

Please visit Elizabeth’s website HERE.