This Encyclopedia Will Organize Your Life

consider surprise as a place to begin

A photograph of a transfer in progress, from my paper arts studio (which is really just a room)

I was speaking of true stories in the form of encyclopedias. I was—this was a Craft Talk—suggesting an abbreviated history.

Amy Krause Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life: alphabetical entries designed to please, with an emphasis on entertainment and word play. (“Butterscotch: I love butterscotch but rarely think to seek it out.”)

Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index: the author’s attempt to imagine, reckon with, render her father’s decision to take his own life, an index that enables Wickersham to write toward the ultimately inexplicable.

Rebecca Solnit’s The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, in which she writes: “Calling this anthology an encyclopedia was a way to call attention to its range and maybe imagine these almost thirty essays as entries in an extremely incomplete encyclopedia. Essays explore; they also define; every essay is an entry in the author’s personal encyclopedia.”

Will Dowd’s Areas of Fog: chronologically organized entries on weather that quickly envelop so much more (Mark Twain, Andrew Wyeth, Bleak House). Weather as a springboard for the exquisite mind of Will Dowd.

Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight: alphabetical entries that are gorgeously integrated and self-referential, offering a personal history on sight, as well as a broader introduction to braille and other ways of seeing and knowing.

The encyclopedia as a way to begin, I said. The encyclopedia as a framing device. The encyclopedia as fractured autobiography (Rosenthal) or memoir (Wickersham) or essay collections (Dowd, Solnit) or a memoir-in-essays (Cohn). (I didn’t mention, for I was teaching creative nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks’s A Fool’s Alphabet, an “A to Z [fictional] exploration of one man’s odyssey through the late twentieth century.”) Each entry a place to begin. Each structure or form a choice to make: How might you organize your life?

It was an idea I’d had just days before the program (long in the planning) was set to begin. An idea that came into focus, slowly and at once, after I encountered Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia for the first time and knew, just knew, I had to share it. For what can you do with sentences like these but make certain that other people hear them?

… I grew up in a nest feathered with words, texts, and books. I am made of words, the organized chaos of text, ant colonies of characters streaming over paper, each letter coalescing into ever greater meaning with its sisters. I am made of words, of the syllable-song of speech, the badminton of argument batted back and forth over the remains of dinner across that round Formica table of childhood.

The thing is this: I did not know, would never have guessed, that Naomi Cohn was listening to this Craft Talk. Not in that moment, but later, days later, to the replay version. I don’t know Naomi and couldn’t imagine that she knew me (I never imagine that anyone knows me), but somehow she had signed up for the class, and somehow she was listening, and somehow an email arrived in my bin—her notes on how it felt to hear me read her work aloud.

A note that moved me to tears.

I am a not-famous person living a not-famous artist-writer life. The sort of person who was recently introduced at a talk I gave as the “most taken-for-granted writer in the region.” I’ve dared to hope for homes for the words I write, the art I make, the thoughts about craft that I wish to share. (Oh you in this Substack community, I adore you.) I’ve dared to celebrate out loud, and loudly, the people and work that I love. But Naomi’s note, received just the other night? I’d not dared to dream of it.

Perhaps I shall write an Encyclopedia of Surprises. Perhaps it will begin like this.

*

In writing my novel Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, I was, in many ways, seeking to spend more time in the company of my long-gone grandmother. When I shared that story with the readers of Pennswood Village, I experienced a different kind of otherworldly embrace. I tell that story here, at Oldster Magazine.

I have written numerous books on the art of writing and of living a literary life. All can be found here.

My handmade journals, booklets, cards, and paper art are offered here, at the Bind Arts Etsy shop.