Jonathan Rylander
I’ve been trying to wake up earlier these days, and I take certain strides to make it happen.
“Alexa, set alarm for 6 a.m.”
My partner, Chris, hates me for doing this. He also hates the phone alarms that go off in the middle of the night, that I forgot to delete because I honestly can’t remember how many I actually set.
“Jonathan!” he’ll say. “For God’s sake, why do you need to be up that early on a Saturday?”
And I’ll say something along the lines of, “I want to get a jump on some work” or “I need to write.”
But what I haven’t exactly admitted to Chris is what I’m really trying to do. What I’m really trying to do is re-see my craft as a writer, and to do so I’m trying on new methods or strategies of authors I admire. Take, for instance, Toni Morrison. I once read that her early morning routine involved making coffee and writing while—keyword while—it was still dark outside. The beauty in the moment, for her, must have rested in the sort of inspiration that could only emerge as the first speck of dawn broke through the crack of her eye, or how the first warmth of morning sun settled into her skin.
In waking earlier, I’m trying to follow Morrison’s lead. Surely, she did something right.
In my composition course this spring, I’ve turned to Morrison again in assigning her 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture as one possible text that students can rhetorically analyze for their first paper. If you haven’t read or listened to the speech online, it’s moral lesson essentially boils down to this: language is fragile and what we do with it is ultimately in our hands.
Of course, the speech is much more complex in the way it engages issues of oppression and violence, and of how it employs such beautiful imagery to do so—such as this fragile bird, one that symbolizes language and that sits in the hands of young children standing before a blind woman.
Indeed, Toni Morrison gives me hope. Other writers give me hope, and listening to their craft, to how they do it, matters. Such listening enables me to re-see my own work, to re-shape words as they rest within the pen I hold or the keys I type.
My partner and I argue a lot. When it comes to political matters and philosophical debates, we often clash and fail to meet eye-to-eye. Without doubt, we will continue to argue. But when Chris tells me to stop worrying about setting all these alarms, maybe I need to stop arguing and listen more carefully to what he might really be saying. What he might really be saying is this: when it comes to your writing, when it comes to your words, what you do with them is ultimately in your hands.
Jonathan Rylander is a Guild member and Assistant Professor of English at UW-Eau Claire. He also directs the Center for Writing Excellence on campus. When he’s not writing or teaching, he enjoys exploring the north shore of Minnesota and seeking out the newest, hippest dog park with his partner and Beauregard Lee—their Bernese Mountain Dog.