On Dreams & Creative Work
how to bring the unconscious to the page + new offerings
Over 130 of you have signed up for my free Environmental Op-Ed Workshop on September 17, 12-1pm EST - I can’t wait to spend an hour together talking about how to create and pitch this meaningful work.
“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” - James Salter
I always tell my students: repetition is a form of insistence. When we read and write, we’re trying to build or unlock meaning. As authors we leave clues, and as readers we find them.
To that end, I’m always fascinated by my recurring dreams - the meaning my subconscious apparently leaves for me to decipher.
I also tell my students: dreams are fun and indulgent to write. Dreams are rarely fun to read. Now - don’t tell them - but I’m going to break one of my cardinal rules and write about a dream.
So much of what we create and write is a mashup of gathering, planting, reaping, noticing, absorbing, reckoning. I think our dream life is the same, only the magpie at work is less inhibited and resides deeper within.
I’ve come to believe my dream life and creative life are tangled, like creative rays extending from the same subconscious base. Your richest opportunities as as artist may lie in the same material from which your most insistent dreams spring. We may find we are circling ideas - that the idea or image itself has become insistent, asleep and awake.
I often dream of this cottage in East Hampton, which I have never seen in person - yet the sensation of this recurring dream lives within my fiction and non-fiction.
The first time I saw the image of the East Hampton house, I recognized it from my dreams. Perhaps I saw it there first.
One of my recurring dreams always takes place in a dimly lit white-tiled room. In this tiled room I am lost, filled with dread, and trying to escape.
Last year I was flipping through an album from my college semester abroad, and realized the location of my recurring dream was actually a horrific historic landmark I visited in Europe when I was 20. Decades later and this landscape-based horror still follows me in the form of a dream when life is heavy. I can’t save myself, and I can’t save others.
Another recurring dream I have is the sensation of standing or sleeping in a house with water views. The dream begins with a feeling of satisfaction - I love that I am here with a view of the sea. Suddenly, I have the sensation that the scene is too good to be true - too close to what I want. The house is overtaken by water. Water rushes underneath the house, which is on stilts, and then the house collapses into the sea, lopsided and disjointed, and I am fighting for my life.
This is, of course, too obvious of a stress dream for an environmental writer who grew up in the coastal south, but sometimes that’s how it works - completely on the nose.
Dream researcher Deirdre Barrett, who works in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School says that “Recurring dreams are likelier to be about very profound life experiences.” Others say recurring dreams signify unmet needs or complex grief.
Climate change, for me, is definitely a catalyst for complex grief, and it’s the sort of grief that’s triggered by the news, global disasters, an overly warm day, news about feeding starving people with elephants, or even the beauty of a landscape I know is destined to change. It’s an existential heaviness that in 2024 never leaves, and at this point I doubt that heaviness will lighten again.
What if one of the effects of living in this era of compound crises is that ambient stress winds its way into not only our waking and working life, but our dreaming life as well?
Twelve years ago, McSweeney’s Magazine asked me to write a cover story of Shirley Jackson’s iconic 1948 story “The Lottery” for their Cover Stories Issue. It’s an awesome issue which holds up - including work by Lauren Groff, Roxane Gay, Meg Wolitzer, and Kiese Laymon.
When writing my homage to Shirley, who lived just around the corner from me in North Bennington, I knew I wanted the reader to feel climate change pressing down on the story’s characters. I imagined a scenario where oil executives and people who had committed “crimes against the environment” were intentionally marooned on an island colony and forced to fend for themselves.
When I pictured a crucial scene in the story - later included in my second book, Almost Famous Women - I always pictured the real-life East Hampton cottage as part of the setting - a place where nature had the edge, where life was precarious for humans.
Later, in How Strange a Season, I set a story - “A Taste for Lionfish” - in eastern North Carolina, where the stilted houses appear again. The main character is an activist struggling with self-righteousness, and telling a beleaguered community how to manage the invasive lionfish - e.g. it tastes like chicken! Just wear Kevlar gloves, etc.
As my character in “A Taste for Lionfish” comes to recognize, we are often farming out the labor of solutions to those who never committed the original crime.
Stilted houses appear in many of my recent climate journalism pieces -particularly in a piece for The Guardian on the precarious infrastructure of the Outer Banks, and in a photojournalism essay on the Inner Banks for Southern Cultures.
Two weeks ago I came across this video of one of North Carolina’s stilted Outer Banks homes falling into the sea. It looks as if the house is falling to its knees. I watched the clip over and over again, noticing the way the house shifts, sways, and breaks down, as it has always done in my dreams.
Stilted houses are eerie to me. The architecture is anticipatory, leggy, spider-like, regional, a little bit realistic and a little bit Baba Yaga.
Stilted houses are not unlike bridges and America’s aging infrastructure. This week the NYT reported that “climate change can cause bridges to fall apart like tinker-toys”:
“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the effects of climate change on infrastructure. “These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.”
Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.
I’m fascinated by the heartbreaking and compelling aesthetics of collapse, of architectural response to extreme weather.
It is never just the collapse of a structure, but also the collapse of a life, an aesthetic, a tradition, a sense of security, a dream.
Below - some additional notes on how to find your work in this world, new offerings, documentary updates, and op-ed workshop signups.
xo
MMB
What’s Mine to Do?
A thinker and coach, Alexis Sanford, recently shared the following notes with me as a way of thinking about answering the burning question: "what is mine to do?"
I’m sharing her words here because I think a lot of my readers are asking themselves this question during this election season and fiery time of public dialogue. Lex advises the following:
Hold Space: Don’t jump to predictions or certainty. This is a time of loosening, holding the tension while things crack. It's a time for letting the feelings surface: anger, grief, confusion, fear.
Imagine the Possible: Once things loosen, we must hold a belief in what can be and attune to the future that wants to emerge rather than allowing fear to take us hostage.
Fortify: ourselves and our beloved communities. This is about rest, meditation, dancing, singing, whatever it is that fills us up. Much will be asked of us in the coming weeks as we cohere and answer to what is highest and best. It's going to be hard work, but I want to be ready and not depleted when it's time to put my shoulder into it.
Manuscript Consultations
I rarely offer Manuscript Consultations, but I’m self-financing a conservation documentary on Sandy West, and I’m directing the money I earn here in that direction. So, if you want a manuscript consult and to simultaneously support my work about honoring women in conservation, reach out. I’m only going to offer 4 consultations across the next 6 months.
Here’s what you need to know about my manuscript consults:
I’m taking on novels, short story collections, essay collections, memoir, or reported nonfiction.
Pricing starts at $2500 for 60,000 words.
What you’ll get as part of your consultation:
Line-by-line comments and suggested edits. (No copyedits: this is a developmentally-minded consultation.)
A letter that lays out a revision plan.
An hour-long Zoom call addressing your questions.
You can learn more about my qualifications here. Reply to this email with questions or to book.
Documentary:
The documentary I co-produced about the Olympic mountain biker Lea Davison, will be showing at the Crested Butte Film Festival, Bend Film Festival, Women’s Adventure Film Tour, and Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.
I’m proud of this work centered in equity, and playing a part in sharing Lea’s compelling story - I hope you find a chance to see the film!
Remember, you can join my free Op Ed Writing workshop on September 17 at noon. Sign up here and I’ll send prep materials and a zoom link your way. I’m against boring zooms, so let’s maximize our time, have fun, & be engaged citizens together.
xo
M
