Joy-Writing

Devastation has been trending. How do we write about joy?

How do we write about joy? About kindness? About the goodness on this planet, this green & blue orb with its oceanic trash cyclones but also its redwoods, its cirrus clouds? It isn’t easy to write about anything, but it seems easier for some writers—me included—to hover their microscopes over the tough stuff of life. I don’t knock this. Making art is about reflecting the full spectrum of the human experience—including what’s heavy, hard, confusing.

But what about joy, peace, delight, even… happiness? Those bright notes on the emotional spectrum? How do we write about these? And how do we do so in such a way that they don’t come off as pat, or sentimental, or easy? As though we’re burying our heads in the sand? I’ve been thinking about this lately.

If you know Ross Gay’s writing, you know he offers brilliant examples. His essay collection, The Book of Delights, has become a favorite to every writer I know, and his most recent book, Inciting Joy, came out in October of 2022. I devoured it quickly, bought it as Christmas presents, and recommend it to all. Unfortunately, we can’t just imitate Ross Gay if we want to write about joy. (Nobody can write quite like him, with his meandering, wild, big-hearted stye, full of generous asides—he is delightfully detour-ific.) But if you spend just a few minutes with Inciting Joy, you’ll learn his philosophy: writing about joy doesn’t have to mean eschewing its opposite. His opening essay describes a boisterous, raucous, celebratory party in which everyone brings their sorrows. Their “sorrows” are personified guests.

“I’d like you to meet my sorrow!” we holler to each other, dipping the flatbread into the hummus. Or eating the kimchi with our fingers because the forks are long gone. “Good to meet you,” we shout, smiling and nodding at the sorrow, who also smiles and nods, and half shrugs and raises their eyebrows.

Another writer who often keeps his focus on “the light,” as you might say (and by that, I don’t mean the opposite of heavy, but the bright, the illuminated) is poet James Crews. He offers a light-giving poem each week, along with a reflection. (If you don’t subscribe to his short Weekly Pause, I recommend. James also has a new book coming out, Kindness Will Save the World, which you can pre-order, and I’m so looking forward to it.) James, who I’m honored to call a friend in real life, often turns his gaze on life’s seemingly small moments, from which he gleans tenderness, gratitude, and peace. Here’s the start of his gorgeous poem, “Winter Morning”:

When I can no longer say thank you

for this new day and the waking into it,

for the cold scrape of the kitchen chair

and the ticking of the space heater glowing

orange as it warms the floor near my feet,

I know it’s because I’ve been fooled again

by the selfish, unruly man who lives in me

and believes he deserves only safety

and comfort….

You have to read the rest of the poem! (Go here & scroll down.) If you do, you’ll notice how a poem that will ultimately end up being about gratitude begins with its opposite. The ungratitude. The selfish stirring and preferring we all know on a cold morning.

These past few months, I found myself living through (or remembering) moments of joy, delight, unabashed love, and trying to write about them. I still find it tough. But I’ve published two super-short pieces of flash memoir, both of which I wrote alongside my students (thank you, students!). The first, “Origin Story with Porcelain Duck,” is about my very first memory—a fun prompt if you’ve never tried it. The second piece, “I Feel As One in Sex But Also,” is about a quiet moment of marital fatigue, and watching Ted Lasso (hello, joy!), and then recalling a laughably bad moment with an old boyfriend. Like Crews and Gay, both pieces contain opposites.

How to write about joy is another way of asking, how to live more fully with joy. How to honor joy—and delight, and gratitude, and kindness, and goodness, etc.—with our attention to it. How to help it grow. In Inciting Joy, Ross Gay mentions a professor who once challenged the idea that writers should ever embark on such a project.

“When all of this is going on”—he held his hands up as though to imply war; famine; people all over the world in cages or concentration camps, some of them children; disease; sorrow immense and imperturbable; it only getting worse and worse and worse (dude had big hands)—“why would you write about joy?” The implication, of course, is that joy does not have anything to do with everything in that guy’s big hands.

I feel like devastation has been trending—probably because the world is on fire, always, somewhere—literally as much as figuratively. But the world is also always tenderly aglow somewhere, too—as when a dad just got his preteen daughter, who just endured a terribly world-ending moment at a middle school dance, to giggle. As when some lucky soul first caught glimpse (after we long thought it extinct) of the “fantastic giant tortoise” of the Galápagos, or the nickel-sized Fender’s blue butterfly, or a very tiny clam only known from fossils, and this soul got to shout from the rooftops, “This species is still alive! Still with us!” As when a group of friends now gather around a table of candles because the power went out on their taco dinner party, and they’ve started telling stories about their very first memories.

Gay goes onto say that joy-writing is often “considered ‘unserious’ or frivolous.” But isn’t goodness, and all its flavors, the thing we live for? What could be more serious than that?

If we want more goodness—in our lives, but also on this planet—shouldn’t we practice savoring it? And writing, at least for me, is one way of savoring. We do this—or try to do it—not to deny the difficult, not to dishonor the awful, not to turn our backs on heartbreak, but to live more fully with all of it, in balance.

And I think this practice could give us the fuel to help expand the goodness, to help the light grow.

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Have you figured anything about joy-writing? About joy-savoring? Do you have a favorite piece of writing or music or art that is unabashedly joyful? I’d love to hear from you.