On the Not-Rightness of Things
and art as response
Hello, Slow Take readers! I’m poet and essayist Heather Lanier. This is my occasional newsletter about the strange beauty of being human. It’s a space where we lean into the invitations that help make us feel more human. Think of it as the opposite of a boob-implant billboard or an AI-generated “thank you” note. There are only real thank you’s here. Welcome! And thanks for reading.
Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. I tell my writing students this all the time. It’s probably the best advice I know for writing and art-making. It’s the reason journaling, slow walking, and other mindful practices help in the creative process.
But paying attention to what you’re paying attention to is not easy in a world where everyone’s supposed to be very busy. (At a poetry celebration recently—the Wick Center’s 40thAnniversary—poet Naomi Shihab Nye said that she likes to make large crowds of people turn to their neighbors and declare: “I AM NOT BUSY!”)
Last fall, I found myself paying attention to the not-rightness of things in my community. In particular: my neighbor’s preschool-aged son was kicked out of school. He’s autistic, and the district said they couldn’t handle him. So, they prohibited him from entering the school building his parents and grandmother (and I) paid taxes to maintain. The district told the family they should call around and find another school. No other schools had openings. Meanwhile, the district sent a teacher to the boy’s house for 90 minutes a day, where he learned alone. Away from his peers. “Baby jail,” his mother called it. He was four.
I was steamed. What do you do with the not-rightness of the world?
Meanwhile, it was September, and then October, and tomatoes kept growing outside my office window. Cherry tomatoes, mostly, but also some very blighted weird heirlooms that cracked in spirals. In a month or two, the plants would stop producing fruit. But for now, they just kept on sprouting shiny green orbs that turned red in the sun, like no one told them summer was over.
I got to thinking about tomatoes, and the seasons, and the cycles of abundance and scarcity. I thought about the “rhetoric of not-enoughness” in school budgets, and disabled kids whose IEPs aren’t fulfilled because of “funding,” and the IDEA Act that guarantees kids like mine—and kids like my neighbor’s—have the right to an education, even though Congress has never fully funded it. I thought about this sandy Jersey soil I live on, and how it was once occupied by the Lenni Lenape, who did not believe land could be owned.
I thought about so many ways the world is not right. And what this not-rightness might ask of us.
The result is an essay called “The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down.” It was published by Electric Lit. In true Slow Take fashion, it took six months. Today, it looks all official with a lovely font and layout. “Memoir Land” named it a top ten essay of the week. But at one point, it was simply a mess of scraps and notes, born from a simple reaction I had to one quote by writer
: “God didn’t make the world straight up and down.”Does writing matter? It can be easy for a solo artist to doubt. But I mentioned the poetry gathering I attended last week. In Kent, Ohio, a few hundred poets and poet-lovers gathered for two and a half days to hear people read their poems. People read about loss, love, gun violence, gardening, Gaza, babies, Ukraine, and so much more. Wick Director David Hassler and Founder Maggie Anderson both affirmed their belief that speaking poems into the air—for a room of listeners—can change the world.
Doubters might say, but how? The conference room was big but windowless. How could it reach beyond its own gathering?
But after listening to so many poets, who paid attention to what they were paying attention to, I think I know. How could listening to the world not change the world?
Calling out what’s wrong, giving voice to our grief, naming what we long for, even praising our joys—all of that matters. Just like my neighbor’s education matters. And a single cherry tomato, popped into your mouth off the vine, tasting like candy, matters.
What do we do with the not-rightness of the world? We name it. We shine light on it. We sit with it, ask what next, and then listen as we let it answer.
Below is an excerpt from the essay, “The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down.” I hope you’ll click on over to Electric Literature and read the whole thing!
If there is a God who brought all of creation into being, then this God only made the world slanted. And this God brought humans to this slanted world. The justice, I think, is up to us. Maybe this Maker slanted the world so that we have to reach for each other. So that our abundance of tomatoes must be shared. So that we sometimes need, and cannot ever, any of us, go it alone.
If that’s the case, these silos we’ve built are offenses in a battle against our tenderness. They are lies against our gift of mutual need. The world is not made straight up and down: we’ve responded with a pathology in how we treat each other. In our architecture of border fences and budget formulas, we’ve responded with a pathology of independence and scarcity and disregard. Which means we need to knock on each other’s doors. Offer our jars. Become more entangled. Oh, but we need so much more than that. We need to rewrite ourselves an ethics of care.
Many thanks to the Wick Poetry Center community for becoming a place of abundance, connection, and care.
Tidbits & Things
Local Folks! I’m reading poetry at the Collingswood Book Festival in Collingswood, NJ, at 12:50pm this Saturday, October 5th. Come see me, or not, but maybe just come to support all the amazing writers and books in south Jersey! Click here for the poetry line-up.
October 1st is the deadline to apply for a scholarship for the Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, sponsored by Murphy Writers in Atlantic City, NJ. The getaway is from January 17-20, and there are a lot of great writing workshops to choose from. Wanna study voice in creative nonfiction with me? Or song writing with Bob Evans? How about fiction or poetry? Apply for a scholarship!
This is a gorgeous essay and I’ve been thinking about it all weekend.
Celebrating the fact this essay is in the world!