experience
About things that happen, things to see, and things to do.
On writing the same word over and over again
Notes from a prison workshop on numbness, wakefulness, and the refusal to retreat from reality.
These days, I am interested not so much in writing but in the state of being awake. Not the kind of awake that is merely the opposite of physical sleep—nor “woke” which seems to be mostly about filtering people in and out of a political identity—but the positioning of being alive, receptive, and responsive to the world. Of being willing to see what is actually there, of refusing to drift through life at a distance. Of feeling oneself to be inextricably a part of everything.
This is a state I have been striving for all my life. I suspect it is most of what I write about.
*
It seems to be a lot of what other writers talk about, too.
As in William Stafford’s poem “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”:
It is important that awake people be awake
Or John S. Dunne’s paraphrase of Wordsworth:
What is required for a loving that is knowing, for a knowing that is loving, is the quiet eye.
Or how Joan Didion described the artist Georgia O’Keeffe as someone who was “open to what she sees.”
She meant that Georgia was someone with an awakened eye—an eye that looked honestly, prepared and willing to see what was actually present. From which eye Georgia saw so many things, bloomed so many bruised flowers, painted a sky—startlingly blue—through an old hip bone. The bones and the sky had been there all along; mundane, startling, decomposing in silence—but only Georgia was willing to receive them.
I am talking of a positioning that is utterly necessary for writers and artists—one that can only happen when, as T.S. Eliot says, “the ears of my ears awake,” and “the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
*
This has all come up recently because I spend my Tuesday mornings in prison, with a group of writers who are not allowed to leave the 1,803 acres they inhabit in the watershed of the Lower Big Darby Creek. It’s a strange position for any kind of artist—being entrenched in one place while being profoundly alienated from it. These writers are not allowed to walk down to the waterway, or to sit by the new oaks growing across the street. Once, when I mentioned a nearby small town, one of the writers snorted and said, “There’s a town out there?” Everyone laughed. They’d been brought in via transport, in official vehicles with bars and darkened windows. They’ve never walked through the town they live beside. These writers do not move; instead, they are the moved.
A topic we have been probing is the question of how this situation makes them different than that of other writers. Or, as one writer, Kitab, put it, “What are we missing in here?”
In terms of writing, the answer should be nothing. Great work can happen anywhere—in the midst of war and heartbreak, deprivation and despair, and, yes, in incarcerated spaces. Writers on the outside, in fact, spend a lot of money and professional energy at writing residencies, trying to replicate at least a few of the conditions of prison. In writing residences, writers confine themselves mostly to a small room where, removed from the horrors and impositions of daily life, they will finally be able to birth their great work. The implicit idea being that it is actually everyday life and its limitations that keeps writers from their work, and that you can do better writing when you remove yourself from all of it, strip away outside distractions, sit in an empty-ish room, and flagellate yourself on the page.
That Tuesday, I said as much. “In theory,” I said, “You’re not missing anything.”
But this is, of course, very easy to say.
*
Earlier that same day, another writer, Wes, had given me a few poems to read. He was sheepish about turning them in because when he reread them that morning he’d realized something.
“They’re all the same poem,” he said, “When I get out of here, I can write different things, but whenever I’m in here”—he shrugged—“It’s all the same thing, over and over. Might as well be the same word.”
It is this that has stuck in my head for weeks. Might as well be the same word. The same word. The same word. It has the cadence of a dream; or, if you live in a prison, something more of a nightmare.
*
So here is what I’m thinking now: It is not so much the loss of liberty that is the problem for writers in prison. It is the sandblasting of the senses. The walls in the Programs Room are blue-gray, have been blue-gray, will always be blue-gray—world without end. The pipes rattle above your head, and the lightbulbs buzz, and the fans turn their slow revolutions, and they all say the same thing:
You will always be here; You will always be here.
That tree is the same tree; that door is the same door; this sky is the same sky. Same commissary, same people. Day in. Day out. Faces morphing slowly, slow enough that even different faces begin to feel the same.
Nothing here is special; nothing here is worth noticing. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see. Nothing to see. Save yourself. Retreat. Retreat. Retreat.
The sameness is systematized, weaponized, altogether too much. It is designed to dull your senses; it is designed to put you to sleep. The obvious choice, I think, would be to succumb, to let yourself be turned into an object, moved about; to withdraw your senses from a world that is too utterly boring to bear.
*
But the men in the prison cannot retreat. They are writers, and the job of a writer is to endure reality, to remain open to things. Not things as they might be, but things as they are, in their subtle nuances and differentiations.
The job of the writer is to remain awake. This is also the job of a human.
*
Tony Hoagland, in the poem “Gorgon,” speaks of an onslaught of a different kind of boredom, one that sets in—
“Where the corporations run the government / And move over the land like giant cloud formations.”
One where “the information winds howl.”
In other words, he is speaking of a general numbing, of a managed retreat from human senses into a system which turns everything into a number or a dollar sign. He is speaking of the kind of prison in which everything you see or think or understand is managed for you; where you never read anything a corporation doesn’t want you to read; you never feel anything a corporation doesn’t want you to feel.
He is speaking of the kind of prison where you are not supposed to know you are in prison. He is speaking of Right Now.
At the end of the poem, Hoagland tells us what he thinks we ought to do about this situation.
Your job—he says—is to watch and take notes, / To go on looking.
Your job is to not be turned into stone.
*
How is it possible to live right now and not be turned to stone? This is an open question that I don’t know how to answer.
How often have I myself dwelt in malaise, unwilling to let my senses engage with the world? How often have I dulled myself out to escape the pain of being alive, surrendering to my phone, or to Netflix, or to my own nihilism? How often have I retreated from my responsibilities to my neighbor, saying to myself, I just can’t think about this now. I just can’t look.
How often, as a writer, have I been so encased by my own fear, my own self-doubt, that I retreated from the truth, numbed myself out, wrote sentences so safe that they may as well have been the same word over and over again?
All of these are capitulations to the part of me that does not want to see, or sense, or respond. It is the part of me that is exhausted—utterly exhausted—by the world. It’s the part of me that would rather be turned into an object than to look at what is.
*
How is it possible to live right now?
I have no answers—for you, for the writers in prison, or for myself. Instead, I ask questions, over and over again.
I ask: Are you willing to open your senses again—right now—in this moment? Are you willing to have your heart broken by the world? Are you willing to be broken by what you have made of the world? Are you willing to be brokenhearted by what you have made of yourself?
Are you willing to open your eyes, to see what is present, to feel grief and despair? Are you willing to be alive?
Are you willing to be amazed?
(This essay has been read and approved for publication by the incarcerated writers who are mentioned in it. All names have been used by permission.)
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How to host a story dinner (and why it might be important)
Creating connections with other humans feels more vital than ever. Here's a DIY guide to a process I found surprisingly successful.
IMPORTANT: This piece started out as a simple explanation—intended for a friend—of an unusual approach to human dialogue and peacemaking. It then grew to encompass much more: Origins, personal anecdotes, and a sort of rubric for holding a story dinner event yourself.
Because of all that, this article is nearly 3,000 words long. But you don't have to read all of it! I’ve divided this thing up into sections and recommend the following strategies:
Keep in mind, too—this piece was written in the summer of 2016, before Donald Trump was elected to his first term of office. When posting this article (February of 2025), I nearly edited out any mentions to that zeitgeist. They seemed almost quaint in retrospect.
But I ultimately decided to leave all the references in—unchanged. If anything, I find them a reminder of how important this work is, how much we have left still to do, and how much I need to recommit myself to it.
Okay, let's get into it?
1 | The Beginning
The premise of a story dinner is simple: it’s a time for a group of diverse humans to gather around a common table to eat food, drink something delicious, and tell their stories — not the job interview versions, but the real ones: the ones that involve failure and doubt and uncertainty and, maybe, a few moments of glory.
Weirdly simple, right? Despite that, it’s proven to be monumental in my life, and, in a time when we all desperately need practice listening to our neighbor, it’s an idea whose time has come.
I stumbled on the whole thing accidentally.
One afternoon, deep in the heart of a midwestern winter and exiled to a place I’d never wanted to return to, I realized I’d been lying to just about everyone, including myself, about some very vital things. For years, I’d been maintaining a facade of a belief system that I no longer really held, had people-pleased to the point that I no longer even knew myself. It was making me miserable. I decided to stop, take off the mask, and be myself, whatever that might cost and whichever relationships I might lose.
And, as soon as I realized I’d been lying, I also realized the problem: there was almost nowhere I’d felt comfortable being honest. There was no community, no place to express doubt or uncertainty — at least, nowhere I wasn’t also scared I’d be preached to, where people would shame me or try to change me into something I wasn’t.
So, impulsively, I started a Meetup group for doubters, religious refugees, and ex-fundamentalists and created an event I called “Beer and the Truth.”
I described it like this:
“Let's meet at a common table, have a drink or two, be human beings, and tell our 5-minute ‘misfit stories,’” I wrote. “Come to tell your story. Or come just to listen, laugh, and hang out with friendly people. No pressure or judgment.”
Come to tell your story. Or come just to listen, laugh, and hang out with friendly people. No pressure or judgment.
I clicked the post button, scared to death.
But then the event filled to capacity within forty-eight hours, all strangers. It was our first story dinner, and it was one of the most holy and profound and human experiences of my life.
3 | Why tell stories?
I’ll state the obvious: we’re not exactly living in a time of reasoned and respectful discussion. Everyone is yelling, all the time. In the echo chambers of our internet feeds, on the radio waves, the blue and red boxes on television sets, we’re all yelling at each other, as if across a chasm, voices raised, ears closed.
You are right, and they are wrong, and if you can just say it loud enough, long enough, and cleverly enough, those idiots over there will stop their foolish ways and start behaving.
It’s obvious something’s wrong, but there seems no good way to change it. Small voices are lost in the cacophony. If you want to accomplish anything, you need to make noise, establish a brand, tweet out a zinger. We’re connected in every possible way and profoundly disconnected on a human level.
Clear-eyed prophets have been warning of this for years, but the danger they spoke of is becoming increasingly less abstract. The dystopian hypothesis of Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves To Death has found human and ideological embodiment in the person of Trump, the celebrity candidate of 2016, a TV exaggeration come to life, who yells at everyone, who listens to no one, who deals in shame and ridicule, in stereotypes and cartoon characters, who traffics in Jerry Springer-esque one-liners.
We are stunned. But we also eat it up, because it’s kind of entertaining. We’re too wise, too mature, too smart to yell with Trump, of course, but it’s cathartic and pretty fun to yell at and about him...and at and about his followers. Why don’t they get it? Let’s yell louder and maybe the morons will hear us!
It’s a big, complex problem, and it’s not obvious how we fix it, but it is clear how we don’t.
“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors,” says Brene Brown. Why? In her book, I Thought It Was Just Me, she goes on to say that “[s]hame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
In other words, you will never convince your irritating neighbor to change his mind — or even to see your point of view — by belittling him. You will only succeed in making impossible for him to do so. But pouring him a glass of wine and asking about his life? Well, that’s something to try.
You will never convince your irritating neighbor to change his mind—or even to see your point of view—by belittling him. You will only succeed in making impossible for him to do so.
“Even if my neighbor doesn’t understand my religion or understand my politics, he can understand my story. If he can understand my story, then he’s never too far from me,” says Paolo Coelho, in his introduction to The Alchemist, “ . . . There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end to our history of clashes.”
Or, as Brown puts it, “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story.”
If we ever hope to fix the rifts between ourselves and other people, to heal the disconnects we humans are constantly creating and aggravating, we have to be able to talk to each other, to resist shaming. We have to re-humanize each other, to dismantle our caricatures and assumptions about others and begin to view them as complex beings with histories and loves and hurts.
One of the most efficient ways to do that is to sit with your “other,” look them in the eye, and hear their story.
3 | The Story Dinner
Here’s what happens at a story dinner:
We gather around a table, order food, introduce ourselves, fill up the beer glasses. Someone makes a joke about awkward social behavior. It’s a big table, but not too big; we keep it to maybe 10 or 11 people. Many are nervous, and it’s understandable: this is distinctly out of the ordinary and no one knows what to do with it.
When everyone is ready, whoever is leading the festivities welcomes everyone, and then gives what we’ve affectionately named The Spiel:
#1: “This is a place to tell your story.”
“This group was formed because we wanted a place to talk, honestly, in safety. We wanted a place to express doubt, belief, frustration, happiness, joy, to say the words, ‘I don’t know.’ We wanted a place where it was okay to be human, to talk about your thoughts, your decisions, and your inconsistencies without having to justify them.
“This is that place. You can take off your mask here.”
#2: “What is said here, stays here.”
“To ensure that this remains a safe place, don’t discuss anything you hear tonight with anyone else in any other place.”
#3: “Please honor every storyteller.”
“Some may say things that surprise you or make you a little bit uncomfortable or, you feel, are just plain wrong. Please respect them by not reacting in a way that would make them uncomfortable.
“Remember that you are hear to listen, not to judge.. Give each person the same respect you want them to give you.”
#4: “Say as much or as little as you like. There’s no test.”
“There’s no pressure, and no checklist you have to check off.”
#5: “Keep it to around five to eight* minutes or so.”
“Remember that there are many people around you who also deserve time to speak.”
“Be aware that I’ll keep an eye on the clock and that I may have to cut you a little bit short in order to ensure time for everyone.”
*Time allotted can change, of course, with the number of participants.
#6: “Please give each storyteller your full attention.”
“Feeling truly seen, truly heard, is rare. We so often divide our attention. We half-listen to whatever is going on.
“At this dinner, we want to intentionally give each person our undivided attention.”
#7: “Don’t interrupt during the story or attempt to analyze it afterwards.”
“Sometimes it’s tempting to ask a question or make a comment in the middle of a story, or to break an uncomfortable silence. We try not to give into that temptation here.
“After everyone has told their story, you’ll have a chance to discuss things, if you like. But until that time, we’ll be going straight from story to story, without discussion.”
#8: “Please ignore your cell phones.”
“Turn ‘em off, silence ‘em...whatever you have to do to ensure they don’t
distract you or the group. Tonight is about the people in front of you.”
#9: “We toast each storyteller when they’ve finished.”
“Yeah, it’s corny. But it takes courage to tell the truth, and that’s worth honoring.”
It takes courage to tell the truth, and that's worth honoring.
The leader asks if there are any questions.
Then we settle down in our seats, order another round, take a deep breath, and begin.
4 | "Wait, does this story dinner thing actually work?"
The whole rubric was cobbled together from my longtime crush on L’Abri, a passing familiarity with the rules of The Ungame, and a love for Alcoholics Anonymous theology that was pretty irrational, given that I’d never attended a meeting in my life.
It was also absolutely untested. I took my little handwritten list of guidelines, marched into the pizza place, and confronted a room full of strangers.
Three hours later, after laughter and tears and about ten small pizzas, they were my dear friends. The night, far from being awkward, was intimate and moving and powerful in a way I could never have expected.
The bonds we formed that night held, too; we formed a community, went on picnics, texted inside jokes, hosted more story dinners with new people. We continue to meet in various configurations. And, for the most part, we are pretty good to each other.
As one of us put it, “It’s kind of hard to be mean to someone once you’ve heard their story.”
It’s kind of hard to be mean to someone once you’ve heard their story.
5 | Guidance & Practical Tips
So, if you want to host one of these yourself, how do you keep it running smoothly? What should you keep an eye out for? We’ve picked up a few tips.
A good theme can go a long way.
Consider providing a focus for the night to give people a direction for their stories.
Our story dinners focus on people’s spiritual and religious journeys, with the central questions something like “Where am I spiritually and how did I get there? What’s my church refugee story?”
Other themes might be, “How did I land where I am politically?” or “How has the race conversation played out in my life?” or “How was I parented and how I do struggle as a parent now?” or “What things have I left behind to get to where I am today?”
Hold the dinner in a quiet, private place.
Find a place where you won’t be interrupted. A neutral location (a restaurant with a private room, say) works great for us. But so could someone’s home, if that level of comfort is there.
If you decide to hold it in a restaurant, do give the waitstaff a clue of what you’re up to so that you won’t be interrupted by countless check-ins and offers of refills. Ask the server to put refill pitchers on the table, and tell them you’ll give them a sign when you need service again. Tell people to have their orders and requests ready so that you don’t waste the server’s time when they do show up.
Treat the restaurant and the waitstaff really well.
Inform others to do the same. Generosity and goodwill set a great tone for the evening. (Plus, if it’s a great venue, you want them to like you.)
Don’t let your group get much above ten participants.
Eight is great. Ten is workable. Twelve is really pushing it. Anything over that, and, considering time for breaks, ordering food, etc., you’re in for a long, long evening.
Keep in mind that, aside from the time factor, it takes considerable mental resources to listen attentively to other people, especially when they’re telling you real and sometimes uncomfortable truths.
After about nine or ten stories, I find I’ve reached the limit of what I can process, and just want to sit back and enjoy chatting with everyone.
The leader starts the storytelling.
It’s tempting to assign it elsewhere, or demure and ask if anyone wants to start, but the truth is that the leader sets the tone and model for the evening.
I’ve said some difficult things about myself during story dinners—things I’ve never actually said anywhere else. Bad things that have happened to me, things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. My first story ended with with something like, “So...uh, I just don’t know.”
If you are vulnerable and open, others will feel that freedom, too.
Don’t forget breaks.
On such a vulnerable evening with no established etiquette, it can be awkward for participants to know how and when to excuse themselves. Make it easy on everyone and call breaks at appropriate intervals.
The leader initiates the toast — and uses it, too.
Toasting each person at the end of their story is a lovely gesture of affirmation and support.
And it’s also a gentle and efficient way to step in if someone is overstepping their allotted time by a significant margin. I’m not religious about time-keeping, but sometimes, out of respect for others, I occasionally do need to help someone wind their story down.
Stepping in with a toast is a winsome and respectful way to do that.
Alert your guests in advance regarding the nature of the event.
It’s a bit jarring to go to what you think is a normal dinner party and, halfway through, find yourself next to a person sobbing convulsively over their crippling struggle with substance abuse.
Be intentional about who is at the table.
Disclaimer: Every story dinner I’ve held has been populated primarily by people of diverse backgrounds and opinions who don’t know each other. In a way, that adds to the safety of the evening.
So, if a significant portion of your group is coming from your friend/family set, be especially wise about who you invite (and the theme of the evening). That’s not to say that you shouldn’t give people a chance to surprise you, but I would be wary of inviting, say, both halves of a recently ex-ed couple.
You might also consider a few extra directives to ensure that personal storytelling doesn’t become an exercise in gossip or underhanded digs at anyone else. A simple “I know we all have some history together, so do your best to be kind and to focus on your story,” might suffice.
6 | In Closing
Look, take none of this as gospel. It’s just one set of ideas. There’s no perfect way to fix our cultural communication problem, to calm down all the yelling. But I’m firmly convinced that we must try. Even if we don’t know what the outcome will be, we still, as Chinua Achebe put it, have the “obligation to struggle.”
Recently, I attended a political discussion with the same group of wonderful rascals who attend the story dinners. We circled the big questions, round and round, but then the conversation settled a little and came to rest on something vital: that politics are made by people, that real change happens in small, local ways when ordinary people commit to see each other as human and to work together to clean up their corner of the world.
Real change happens in small, local ways when ordinary people commit to see each other as human and to work together to clean up their corner of the world.
You may not be able to calm down partisan mayhem. But, by God, you may be able to get a two very different people to sit down at the same table and listen to each other. And this is a worthy work, the seed where change can start.
It’s easy to get caught up in sweeping, complex problems and forget that we, too, have a corner of the world which desperately needs our attention. We have to fight apathy and find the courage to build bridges to each together, whatever that looks like, and however small the effort seems.
We must tend to our corner. Because we cannot give up on each other now.
What we talk about at 12:23 AM on the Amtrak train.
The train at night is unsettling, but there are plenty of strangers to talk to.
Second night ever on an Amtrak train and—wonderfully—I am no longer violently, gobsmackingly ill.
What I am is: Wondering whether I can sleep.
Where I am in time is: Late. Probably after midnight.
Where I am in space is: Stuck in the observation car, avoiding my assigned seat.
(Need the sonic backdrop? Play this in the background.)
I like the observation car during the day. In it, you are almost completely surrounded by windows—glass on both the sides as well as the roof—with sunlight pounding on the corners, lighting up the booths and the observation chairs and the hats of the Amish people. It’s a communal space, a whole enclosed terrarium of people—every seat is taken during the pretty parts of the trip! You can eavesdrop with abandon. Sitting in the observation car during the daytime makes me think of the part of that Arlo Guthrie song The City of New Orleans where he describes the people hanging out in the club car:
… the sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpets made of steel
At night, though, the situation changes. The light draws in around the train and disappears from the outside world and the experience of riding on the train fundamentally changes. The windows, which are so darn cheerful during the day, so full of vast and distant and benign landscapes, grow ominous as the dark thickens, as reflective and unknowable as the eyes of wild animals.
It’s an eerie and unsettling thing, sitting between them, hurtling through unseeable scenery in your little pod of abrasive light. It’s like being on a spaceship, or in the Edward Hopper diner, if the Edward Hopper diner was going 80 miles per hour across Arizona.
I guess an easier way to say this is that the train is a little bit scary at night, which is probably why the few of us who are left in the observation car start talking.
“I actually feel like I’m high on some drug,” Patrick tells me. He’s a music producer who has been steadily tapping away at a laptop in the adjacent booth. He’s taken off a massive pair of headphones to talk to me, and now he shakes his head at the windows.
“It was fine before. But this,” he says, “This is fucking weird. We're just so separate from the dark on the other side. Isolated from the landscape by the glass. It’s like a very spiritual experience with none of the profundity.”
He’d wanted to visit some pals in LA and had decided to take the train for the experience. His home base is Philly. He definitely (“definitely!”) plans to fly home.
Noah got on the train in Albuquerque and is heading to Los Angeles for a wedding. He’s a few booths away and soft-spoken, hard to hear above the sound of the engine. He’d moved from LA to ABQ a few years ago for a litany of reasons he seemed not to fully understand himself.
“I just felt it was time to move — Albuquerque seemed interesting — I needed — I don’t know — some kind of change —”
He trails off. He talks as if he is reluctant to talk, and it’s hard to tell whether that’s because he wishes to be alone or because his small talk has gotten as rusty as mine.
“It’s been hard to meet people,” he admits, finally, “COVID. I’ve gotten kind of used to not talking.” He will, eventually, be the first to leave the conversation.
Before that, Patrick asks me what I think of being on the train, and why I think it feels so strange, and I tell him I’m not sure yet. I think it has something to do with time, and the lack of escape. There’s so much darkness out here that we normally just fly over. Now we have to acknowledge it—really feel that it’s there—
We talk until one of us asks a question no one feels like answering. It’s 2 AM and makes no more sense to talk.
I can’t bring myself to climb over my seatmate, so I move myself and my possessions from the dining booth to one of the little two-seater couches, where I curl up in the fetal position and try to rest. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s very bright. I sleep in fits and spurts all night long, and whenever I open my eyes the blackness of the windows stares back at me. The constant din of the train, the hum of it like the hum of deep space—the constant invasive light—the constant unknown—
This is the experience of nothing, I think, suddenly, waking up during the night, It’s almost as if I am nothing! That’s why it’s wonderful!
Though when I wake at 6:12 AM with an ache in the middle of my neck, the thought does not feel like an epiphany so much as an experience that’s neither spiritual nor profound.
