Finding Language for the Body
A Writing Class from Bellevue Literary Review
Thursday evening at 5:45 pm, I cleared off the desk in my home office. I relocated traces of work and journaling to the top of the IKEA organizer that lives behind my chair. I filled a glass with cold water from the fridge and opened the Word document that I created to record notes and writing from Writing Illness Onto the Page, a three-week virtual writing class from Bellevue Literary Review. I’m still trying to figure out what is going to fill the hole that the closure of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival left. Nothing beats an in-person workshop-style class, but virtual offerings provide the nudge that I need to put words on the page. I was curious how writing about illness might differ from other types of writing.
I may be more organized as a student than I am as a teacher, although all classes lend themselves to an easy structure - a regular cadence, a predetermined list of topics and readings, a definitive endpoint. For this class, I had already copied the general course information for each week into my Word document - objectives, assigned readings, and the Zoom link for the course. I had downloaded the readings as PDFs, highlighting them and adding marginal notes as I marveled at the authors’ ability to find language for the body.
In “Close to the Bones,” Amy Nolan reflects on her life with anorexia. The piece is layered with specific details, images that linger in my mind’s eye. Nolan captures how she saw the world at 15, the challenges of shifting her eating patterns, and the psychological shifts that had to occur to make this possible. But our focus was on writing that stays close to the body and physical experience, so we analyzed passages like this:
As I slipped below 90 pounds, I began noticing my bones more prominently, as if they were new developments in my body. My period had long ago stopped, and I wouldn’t receive it again until I started college. My pelvic girdle began to feel as if it were situated outside my body, insect-like, as if I were “wearing” it.
I do not have direct experience with anorexia, but a girl on my floor in college went home halfway through the first semester to find time and space to recalibrate her relationship to eating. I wish this piece had been available then. I still wouldn’t have known all that she was going through, but I would have had more insight.
After analyzing essays that transported the reader inside the body and mind a person with experiences unlike our own, we set out to represent our own bodies on the page. Our first “sprint” writing prompt was to write a scene of illness or health using all five senses. Our instructor set a five-minute timer.
For many writers, writing whatever comes to mind in a limited amount of time helps them get words on the page. The idea is to remove the pressure to write perfectly. Once you get started, you’ll be amazed at the gems and insights that come out. I understand the theory behind this. I really do. But perhaps my perfectionist tendencies are too deeply woven into my being. When a timer starts, I freeze. I try to play the game, but often after five minutes, I am left with only a few sentences that do not even meet the constraints of the sprint.
Perhaps our instructor knew that, because after a second “sprint,” she invited us to return to one of the two pieces (perhaps more appropriately called “piles of sentences”) we had written and add what we had left out. We left the constraints of the prompts behind and filled in the story.
Here is what I wrote:
“Could other people see it?” I wondered, “The slight tremor in my jaw?” As a professor in 2020, the Zoom screen had become my classroom. The students were lined up neatly, contained in small squares. I missed the way they took up space in my tiered classroom, bags and water bottles and laptops spilling across the desks, the smell of protein bars and sweat and youth filling every corner.
I missed taking up space too, using gestures for emphasis and walking up and down the stairs to direct a question to a quiet group. But my Zoom square had become my refuge. It hid the tremors in my hands and the stiffness of my gait. Despite the amount of time I spent staring at my own video feed, I was almost able to forget that I had Parkinson’s disease.
Until now. Zoom magnified my face. I hoped the students had not switched their Zoom settings to speaker mode, which caused the person talking to take over the entire screen. The wrinkles, scars, and dry skin were visible despite my best attempts at studio-quality lighting. The Zoom filter did its part, but it lacked magical powers. My 48-year-old face was center stage.
So, when a tremor crept into my jaw, we could all watch it take over, like a twitch on repeat. I clenched my teeth together. This made the tremor slightly less noticeable, but also made it hard to talk, a necessary skill for a professor. When I relaxed my jaw to talk, the tremor returned. I became distracted by the shapes that my mouth makes to produce different sounds. Like a flight attendant pouring drinks during turbulence, I was fighting an uncontrollable force, trying to force my mouth to operate despite the tremors. I listened to my words, usually a completely unconscious process when I’m teaching. (I’ve heard it all before.) My voice trembled a little too, like it did when I first walked into a classroom twenty years ago.
I searched my students’ faces. They were not looking at me with alarm or disdain. In fact, most were not looking at me at all. I tightened my grip on my smooth ergonomic mouse and sent them into breakout rooms. The gallery of faces was gone. My face took over the whole screen, the tremors in my jaw magnified, with no one left to see them but me.
I added most of the fourth paragraph during the second sprint, forcing myself to really think about how to explain a jaw tremor to someone who hasn’t experienced one. I’m still tinkering with it. Finding language for the body challenges me in a way that writing what’s in my head does not.
Do you have favorite essays, books, or short stories that stay close to the body?
Your reflections on “finding language for the body” remind me of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant for the way Donaldson treats illness as something that shapes both identity and perception. Covenant’s struggle with leprosy forces him into an acute awareness of his own body: what it allows, what it refuses, and how others respond to it.
What always struck me is that his illness becomes both a limitation and a lens, distorting at times, clarifying at others. Reading your piece, I was reminded how writing about illness can do that too: help us see the world differently, sometimes more sharply than before.
Thank you for sharing this.
Also, if you come across a good in-person set of writing workshops this summer, let me know. I think I am ready for one.
Talk about vulnerability? In so many ways. . .And reflections on class settings - yours and the "Language" class in which we share. The matter of time too, and our times in education - Time is a sense that we all share but exists outside the 5. I mean, in reference to the reading, that something like anorexia existed in our youth and most of us failed so desperately in our understanding. People still sadly suffer with it, but maybe less now? We understand it now to be an effort to take control in a way that one may, in a world where we are powerless. And all of a sudden I wonder how many kids will start restricting food in these times we now live? How many may choose this response to now? And that prompts me to think, better to spin these thoughts out into my own writing, now. Get to it. Thanks again Professor.