INTO THE WEEDS

Thinking about creativity.

Essayist, translator, and fiction writer Davis contributes to Yale’s Why I Write series, based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, with a recursive meditation on motivation and process. The enigmatic question “why I write” proves more difficult for Davis than the question “how I write,” which she answers by revealing the experiences or ideas that evoked several of her stories. The death of an elderly friend, for example, resulted in a story about Davis’ lifelong project of improving her German, even though her knowledge of German will die with her. When it comes to why she writes, she finds it easier to talk about why she doesn’t write: “I don’t write to convey a message, and I don’t write stories to achieve any particular purpose,” she asserts. Nor does she write for any particular audience, or to move someone. Instead, she writes “for the pleasure of it”: the discovery of material, shaping it, seeing it in print, and sharing it. Admitting that her stories are inspired by “something outside coming in,” she writes “to figure out something I don’t understand.” As she circles around the question of motivation, she turns to other writers: George Sturt, for one, author of the richly detailed The Wheelwright’s Shop; Knut Hamsun for his memoir On Overgrown Paths; and poets John Ashbery, John Clare, Walter Raleigh, and Russell Edson. She considers writers who risk being tedious or strange, such as Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Finally, she reaches a conclusion: She writes, she says, to relieve herself “of the burdens of strong feelings, by taking them out of myself and putting them in an objective form, a form that can also be shared by others out in the world.”

Intimate revelations, delicately conveyed.