By Stuart Phillips
Editor’s note: It’s been 5 years and just over a week since I published the first story here at Reckon, “Country Roads” by Stuart Phillips, so it feels particularly fitting that Stuart is sharing his thoughts with us this week. Back then I wasn’t sure that anyone wanted to read stories about real rural life, or from writers who didn’t live in NYC, or who weren’t attached to a fancy MFA, or whether people were going to trust me with their work. But when I put out the call, and got “Country Roads” in my inbox, it gave me the confidence to push my plan forward to create this lit mag baby. That Stuart, such a thoughtful and accomplished writer would believe in my vision, meant the world to me. Stuart has since graced us with 10 essays, and while we’ve seen lots of changes over the years, but I am still so proud to know and promote all the writers here, and hope that these essays will find readers for years to come. – Meagan Lucas, EIC
Upstate New York is blanketed in snow. Looking over the fields that seem to end only at the Adirondacks you understand why so many poets have come from here. Frankly, it irritates me a little.
My Mississippi roots lie in the soil, from five generations of farmers to a mother who spent every Saturday landscaping our home. Now, I am in that interstitial period where dirt is marbled white a foot down and all the plants sleep under beds of straw and leaves. The season has well and truly ended.
Thankfully, I suppose, that forces me to turn my attention to the interior of the home. One thing you quickly learn about a 200-year-old house is that there’s always something. And the next project revolves around me stripping wallpaper and skimming the walls of our “new” sitting room.
But still. I chafe a little at the end of my soil time. So, as I thought about this particular column I naturally began to think about endings. Obviously, every story has a beginning, middle and end (unless your fancy MFA taught you structure is passé or bourgeois).
Aside from your stories, the very life of a writer is as cyclical as a cartoon of the sun and the moon chasing one another around the sky, beginnings and endings following one another as ineluctably as the night follows the day.
I took a workshop from Chinelo Okparanta once, and her words resonated with me: “The beginning and the end should be in conversation with one another.” It’s true in life. It’s true in writing. And, it’s true in your writing life.
You begin a workshop, you end the workshop. You begin an MFA, you finish the MFA. You begin a story, you end the story (then, you revise it until you actually end it). And then?
The ending of one season does not stop time—it just means the beginning of the next. So, you begin writing afresh with the grains of knowledge you have gained from each mistake made, each problem overcome, each success achieved.
But how can you do that in the winter of your discontent?
Try treating your writing as seasons. A season ends with you finishing a short story or a draft of a novel, and you move to something completely different, yet complementary. Maybe it’s now the season to write poetry. Or it’s the season to work on your tools by reading broadly, by taking a workshop, or by just taking naps for a week.
I look at how this has worked on my homestead, and I see progress. Three rooms renovated. The attic insulated. The 6 foot cherry tree is now 12 feet. And although for every project I’ve finished I have at least three more lined up, each new project is informed in some way by the ones I’ve completed.
So, I start my next draft with the promise of a new season, of a new beginning, of the ability to take lessons from one end and use them in the next beginning. That is what I hope you take away. And with that, a sense of peace, even of excitement, at the inevitable transition.
Go embrace an ending. And a beginning.
Note: In February, Stuart will be teaching a workshop through The Consequence Forum on using “place” in your writing. You can sign up at: https://consequenceforum.org/workshops/
Read more of Stuart’s work here.
Stuart Phillips is an expatriate Mississippian, former Army officer, and recovering lawyer who now lives and writes in the Mohawk Valley of New York. A graduate of Ole Miss, Pepperdine (JD) and Fairfield University (MFA), Stuart is slowly driving himself mad with revisions on The Great Southern Novel. You can follow his descent at stuartphillips.work or on Instagram @deltawriter12.