Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

By Jenny Boully

“Powerful” essays exploring the experience of the writer—and the nature of experience itself (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Award in Nonfiction Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterize falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy—making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt-and-Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live. “[Boully’s] prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis’—spare, elliptical, unexpected—and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein’s . . . Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.” —Kirkus Reviews “Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way.” —Ander Monson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781566895187

Book preview

the future imagined, the past imagined

In the writing life, an occasional glance sometimes out of windows where clouds scuttle and the sky is autumn blue, but somehow one is not a part of it; in the writing life, an occasional glance sometimes into the mirror where the body and one’s possessions are caught, but somehow one is not a part of it. I keep meaning to but never do throw the thoughts of the outside out. In the writing life, a continual desire to make manifest something known, to somehow be a part of it.

Sometimes, I harbor a strange paranoia that although I keep visiting and having visitors to my desk, nothing is getting written, but I think that what I do is write. I think this because I have fragments all around, and I am sure that I have not written them, yet they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do turn them into something. I refuse to see that the mirror too is glass, a window, a glass with a thin sheet on which I am written, a sheet that keeps the inside in. To be a part of it is to be apart from it.

How is it that seasons change? Do they change so slowly, so creepingly, because we so rarely break away from whatever it is we are dreaming to notice? What the season brings us to suffer (because seasons, no matter how lovely, will bring us to suffer), it brings when we are not looking. I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there. It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it: the leaves shivering then falling about as if to remind me that somehow, despite leavings, there is some magic, some beauty there. I tell myself I don’t want it: the mountain view, the shimmer of summer rain, a trout-filled creek. How is it that I came to be here this way, with the wind a suggestion that it was, indubitably was, autumn (already and again)? What I want was in bed; he kissed me and said good-bye. And at three o’clock in the afternoon, the world takes on a stormy look.

Sometimes, I think that maybe I’ve been on antidepressants and antianxiety medication for the past three years and somehow am not aware of it. I think this because there are medicine bottles all around, stamped with various dates going back three years, and I am sure that I have not been taking any of the pills, but nonetheless, they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do throw them away. I must like to keep them there for the just in case.

The present tense is all about immediate feelings, about wanting and lack. The present tense is about things that you don’t notice until you can’t help but notice them. The present tense is for when you are in your living room crying and the person you love is somehow a part of that, and suddenly there are two possibilities, and the present tense is telling you that you have to choose. The water in the teakettle is boiling. Your tea is ready; either you drink it or you don’t.

As a child, I used to love the future tense: I will be going and I am going to.

With dreaming, we speak differently. We use the past tense. Dreams are about the past, but we want them to be about the present, the future. That is, we will make them mean something. I was standing over a cliff, looking down on a raging black river. My childhood home drifted in the river. There were no sounds; there was only blackness and stars. Maybe the dream wants to tell me that I have detached myself from something I love; maybe the dream wants to tell me that I will detach myself from something I love. Maybe the dream wants to tell me that despite my wanting otherwise, what I love has detached itself from me, has already begun a journey to make itself live apart from and far from me. What separates me from my childhood home is three hundred yards of falling. To join what I love means to risk dying.

There is a certain kind of daydreaming that can foretell the future. There is a certain kind of daydreaming that only concerns bad futures. In this type of daydreaming, we sink and sink until somehow somewhere inside that dream something loves us again; something or someone says sorry for something that is being talked about in the past tense.

It could happen this way: my mother is still twenty-eight, and she’s sewing me dresses and teaching me how to crochet baby blankets for my dolls. If I finish one too soon, she tells me to pull out the yarn and begin again. It could happen this way, being transported back to this very unraveling, and like characters in a movie or story who are jolted out of a quagmire simply by waking, I too will realize that I am not living here, that I am still this very small child learning at the hem of her mother. If not a dream, then it could be that my life thus far has merely been an intense daydream. Or perhaps I am presently living a daydream that I dreamed previously. At what point is what I dreamed mine and then not mine?

At what point are you mine and then not mine?

This summer, I drove through Wyoming with my father. I had never been to Wyoming, and I certainly never did think I would ever be driving through Wyoming with him; more surreal: it was July, but it was thirty degrees. I was suffering from an attack of shingles, and every once in a while, a bolt of nerve pain would start from my spinal cord and shoot through me. This is all past tense. In the future, I will think back to Wyoming’s prairie grass and want to tell others how beautiful it was, how the sky, a deep crystal blue, was reflected in puddles within that grass, how the wind, furious and fast, thrashed the grass about until the whole otherwise-bleak landscape became something else, something mythical and existing momentarily, hills of sleeping dreams. I remember thinking that I loved my father and wanted to tell him. I told him instead that the sky was so beautiful in the puddles, that the grass looked as if it were alive and full of sparkling stars.

At what point do we let go of the past and enter the present? Wyoming quickly turned into Colorado, and there was a whole other landscape to contend with, a sharper world of peaks and blades, whiteness and grayness, and a sky that was not so deep but a shallow gray-blue. Along the roadsides, there were stones and boulders that once were mountains, which have recanted into another slumber, a slumber that will last for many future years. At what point is a boulder no longer a mountain? And despite the many Beware of Falling Rocks signs, I never saw one fall.

At what point are you mine and then not mine? If I follow you into your dreams, then_____________. This is a conditional: if, then. You and I together then, we come together to form separate dreams where something could occur, might occur, should occur, would occur, could have occurred, might have occurred, should have occurred, or would have occurred. We call this the conditional tense, although some grammarians do not believe in it, suggesting instead that these conditionals are merely the past or perfect forms of can, may, shall, and will. But I know the difference; I know they aren’t the same. Because the former is about dreaming and the latter is about having, or another form of having. Pregnancy could occur, might occur, should occur, would occur, could have occurred, might have occurred, should have occurred, or would have occurred vs. Will you . . .? I will. You may, but choose not to. At what point do our dreams depart? At what point do we stay

Reviews for Betwixt-and-Between

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life from Jenny Boully is that wonderful collection of essays that fulfills the promise of the word 'collection.' So often collections of essays are collections only in the sense that the essays have, indeed, been collected into one volume. Many times this is quite sufficient. Yet here collection is to be taken as a single entity with various parts, not simply a collection of parts. This volume is a whole, comprised of essays, collected into a volume.The writing itself is remarkable. I enjoy essays and many make me think, and many make me feel. These make me think and feel, then think about those feelings. By the end I had come to "know" Boully, at least to the extent she allows in this book. And it certainly seems at times to be intimate. The beauty is that the intimacy appears, to me, to be for both her benefit as well as ours. She may have reaped many of the rewards when she first wrote the essays but we are reaping our rewards now, and likely again when we reread them (which I have every intention of doing).This is not just about the writing life in the sense of what it is like to be a writer, but also about writing life, which is a type of writing we all do. It is in this relationship that we as readers gain the most insight. Boully wrote her life into her writing, whether explicitly or implicitly. This is not uncommon among writers, even those who are less fully aware of it. Yet the process of writing also helped to make her life what it was and is. We all do the same things. We write our lives, as in what has already passed. In writing the past part of our lives we influence how we will write the remainder of our lives.I would highly recommend this to readers of personal essays as well as writers.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.