On Tuesday October 19, the WriteSPACE community was treated to a conversation on “Writing on Beauty” with esteemed special guest and genre-defy writer Professor Douglas Hofstadter.

Doug has always been “a strange loop.” His book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the National Book Award in 1980. He is a more-than-transdisciplinary thinker who teaches cognitive science and comparative literature (among other things) at Indiana University. Doug is also Director of Indiana University’s Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG), where he and other FARGonauts pursue the creative analogy-making holy grail of “fluidity.” Doug’s enduring passion for languages, music, and the sciences blends seamlessly with his ongoing discursive explorations in poetry, translations, script-inspired “Whirly Art,” and wordplay - all of which keep him writing and “perpetually in search of beauty.”

In the first hour of this WriteSPACE Special Event, Doug and I discussed how his intellectual autobiography informs his writing and his concept of beauty. Doug told us about some of his childhood experiences and influences - one of the most prominent being his mother’s beautiful handwriting - and how these early encounters informed his later work. Doug shared pieces of his writing and pointed out various curiosities, such as layers of inherent ambiguities, strategic uses of conceptual, lyrical, and formatting wordplay, and playful examples of self-referential sentences. He also compared two different English translations of the same Pushkin poem to show how they differed in patterning, meaning, and aesthetics.

 Quote of the hour (Doug’s definition of beauty): “Beauty is a unity of things that come together in some unexpected, special, natural and powerful way.”

In the second half, Helen ran us through two Hofstadter-inspired word play activities. First, we wrote a description of an object without using the letter ‘e’ and then in small breakout groups, we used the prompt ‘write a self-referential sentence’ to see what emerged.

 Quote of the hour: Sentences that implode!

The full video of this spectacular session is available for members in the WriteSPACE Library.

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Original collage by Helen Sword

When my children were young, we used to scour the beach together for sea glass, which we would take home and sort into jars and bowls: burnished browns, textured greens, clear glass etched to a misty white. Occasionally we might find a nugget of red, blue, even purple glass -- precious treasures to be rubbed between our fingers and held up to the light.

Those fragments of glass, I told my children, started out as something useful: a bottle or container, a part of a whole. Eventually those containers got emptied, smashed, discarded; the broken glass lay sharp and angry on the ground, a hazard for tender feet, reviled as trash. But some lucky pieces found their way into the sea to be tossed by the waves and scoured by the sand. Weeks or months or years later they washed back up onto the beach, their jagged edges now polished smooth.

Writing is like sea glass. Sometimes the words flow from us like running water or leave our hands in shapely sculptures. But more often our sentences need to be broken up and churned around by the ocean swells until, like the missing father of Shakespeare's Tempest, they undergo "a sea change / into something rich and strange."

Writers, too, are like sea glass. We start out as empty vessels, filled only with potential. We end up polished by time, textured by the waves, more precious and beautiful than before.

Tumble down to the tidal zone
and beach yourself here beside me
where vision and substance meet:
where the earth flattens and floods
and smashed beer bottles
wash up at our feet
disguised as amber jewels.

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WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.

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Original collage by Helen Sword

Years ago, when I stepped into a university leadership role, a wise colleague gave me some advice.

“Every day,” he told me, “people will walk into your office with monkeys on their back, and they'll want to hand their monkeys over to you. Your job is to help those people as much as you can – but make sure they leave your office with those monkeys still firmly on their own backs rather than on yours.”

These days, most of my monkeys are of my own making: writing projects to push along, YouTube videos to script and film, online workshops and Stylish Writing Intensives to run for other over-committed writers (like you?)

The 800 pound gorilla that had been crushing all the other monkeys on my back until recently – a major book manuscript – has wandered off into the jungle now, though it’s bound to come lumbering back from time to time to be stroked and fed.  Meanwhile, the smaller monkeys keep chattering away.  In fact, I suspect that they're breeding back there.  Every time I shuffle one monkey off my back, it seems that two or three more arrive to take its place.

What writing monkeys are clinging to your back, and how can you carry them more gracefully?

The first step is to acknowledge your monkeys, give them nicknames, maybe even dress them up in a comical clothes.  I learned this trick from Mark Bryan and Julia Cameron's wonderful book The Artist's Way at Work, which contains an exercise called “The Forest Environment”:

• Describe your business environment. What kind of forest is it? A jungle? A maple forest? . . . . Name the dangerous predators in your forest. Give them animal identities. Any bullying grizzly bears? Cunning sidewinders? Wily faxes? Deadly scorpions? Which are you? . . . . Name and describe the beautiful elements of your forest. Any waterfalls, meadows, bushes heavy with berries?

The next step is to teach your monkeys to ride lightly.  Have you ever carried a toddler in a baby backpack? If yes, you’ll know that children feel much lighter when they’re wide awake, sitting up tall and shifting their weight to match yours; only when they start squirming or fall asleep do they throw you off balance.  It's exactly the same with monkeys. You want them to ride lightly on your back, not to distract you with their antics or hang there like a dead weight.

Monkeys need lots of exercise; they’ll whine and wiggle unless you give them a regular chance to romp.  Try freewriting in a notebook about how all those writing tasks are coming along, or talk about them with a friend over coffee.  Monkeys thrive on fresh air.

Monkeys also need plenty of rest – and so do you.  Do you have a secure play area where you can leave your monkeys while you’re exercising, relaxing, sleeping?  You don’t need to carry them on your back all the time – that’s no good for you and no good for your monkeys!

Writing a weekly newsletter for thousands of subscribers sometimes feels like quite a heavy monkey to carry around.  But it helps for me to picture myself as a leaping leopard or a jaunty parrot parading through the jungle with a well-fed, curious monkey on my back rather than a grumpy, screeching one. 

Isn’t the human imagination a wonderful thing? 

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Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.

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