I did not know when I moved to Minneapolis for grad school that I’d live a 13-minute bike ride away from a beach. In the warm months, I’d often head to the nearby lakefront with a can of seltzer and whatever I had to read for class. After swimming, I’d drape myself across the toast-colored sand and eavesdrop on the stoned, hula-hooping teenagers and sarong-draped octogenarians. Soon, I’d tell myself. You’ll be productive soon. And so the afternoon would pass.
One September day, while reading and rereading a paragraph of critical theory, I became aware of a young woman scanning the shore with the beeping snout of a metal detector. Dressed in quick-dry hiking pants, she moved methodically, her expression unreadable. Every so often she stopped to examine something then toss it back. She did this with very little visible exasperation. She knew her process. I do not remember if she pocketed anything, but her pants had many pockets. One of two things seemed true. Either the beachcomber was searching for one thing in particular—a fallen earring, a misplaced ring—or she was searching for anything that would make the machine sing.
It’s a relief to admit, now, that I will never succeed at reading anything dense at the beach. My instinct toward observation—some would call it spying—is just too strong. It would be wrong, though, to say that my days by the lake were unproductive. I was in grad school to get my MFA in creative nonfiction, which meant that I was trying to learn not only how to write essays, but how to think essayistically. My engine was curiosity. I wanted to write things that oscillated between self and world, making visible both the friction and the porousness between the two. It wasn’t until that day, watching the woman sweep the sand for treasures, that the path of my own writing process clicked. Sometimes I did research because I wanted to find particular evidence or facts, but often I just wanted to wander the shore. If I once thought this phase was inefficient, a waste of time, I now cultivate the patience of the beachcomber. I give myself permission to pick up anything that might be shiny, and hold it to the light. Training myself as a writer means learning when to pocket something, and when to set it down and walk away.
*
When I tell teenagers that I’m going to teach them “researched nonfiction,” many will grimace. This is a look I know from summers spent leading outdoor trips—the same face teens make when approaching a big hill. Students tend to learn research as a form of necessary labor. Facts, they are told, are good for plugging holes in arguments, confirming details, gluing essays together with statistics and quotes. That’s all true! I tell students. But research can be fun too! They squint at my enthusiasm, embarrassed to see an adult turned to a cartoon rat, gleeful about a pile of trash. I ask who among them likes to go thrifting. A few hands raise. Then you know how to sift.
Research can be energizing in ways we don’t often give it credit for. We shouldn’t just see it as a pedagogical tool, but a generative one. Why was it not until my twenties that I understood how a new fact could spark a poem, provide texture in a memoiristic flashback scene, or fuel associative brainstorming? Or that the act of learning about a subject I know little about requires such a humbling of self—a return to childlike wonder—that it can shake loose the chattering doubts of writer’s block?
Part of viewing research creatively means viewing life as research. Perhaps when I say “research” what I really mean is moving through the world like my neighbor’s golden retriever, who plods down the street with a wide grin until some invisible cue pulls him, nose-to-the-ground, in investigation. Research can be a Reddit forum, or the zoo with your niece, or Google Street View, or listening to the sounds of forests from around the world, or a playlist of foreign music from another decade.
The research that ends up generating creative inquiry, for me, is not always the gleam I have gone out searching for, but the pebble I have plucked along the way. Essayist Brenda Miller describes writing as a process of “standing on a porch decades ago, the heavy lid in my hand, rummaging and rummaging [in a box], until some unexpected thing winks at me, tells me to pick it up, examine it for what story it can tell.” To find the winking thing, you have to bear the estate-sale dust of sifting. Research like this requires muscles of both discernment and good faith. You have to know not all rabbit holes lead to secret worlds, but also you have to trust that some will.
*
The years I haunted the Minneapolis beach were the years I began wrestling with how to write about wolves. I had written my undergraduate thesis about the controversies around wolf repopulation in my home state of Oregon, and though I wanted to carry the research further, I was unsure about the form. So many people had written smart books about wolves. What else could be said?
My vision of what would become my nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, crystallized after two unrelated nights. First, while walking to my bike one evening after leaving a brewery, I heard quick footsteps behind me and turned in time to see a man I did not know throw his arms around me. Though a bystander intervened and I escaped without physical harm, the attack rewired my experience of moving through the world. Anticipating threat behind every corner, my brain snagged on the legacy of Little Red Riding Hood and did not let go. What were the stories I had internalized about who could be predator, and who could be prey? I felt my own body ensnared in the same rusty narratives that trapped the wolf. Later, my agent would refer to experiences like this as moments of lived authority. I had not meant to do “research” that night, but the thing I learned exerted a gravitational pull on my reading and writing, and now I couldn’t look away. I had become an expert in my own fear.
The second evening that jumps out to me was a night I ignored the whine of homework to go to the Walker Art Museum for a screening of Do Not Resist, a documentary about police militarization. At some point the screen filled with footage from a “sheepdog seminar,” an officer training which sorted citizens into “sheep” and “wolves.” Phone under the seat, I started taking notes. If I had first approached my research methodically—interviewing people about their impressions as they observed captive wolves, requesting old storybooks of Little Red Riding Hood in the archive—I soon understood that to parse the cultural taxidermy of an animal I had to open myself to culture. Research meant riding shotgun down the highway and snapping a photo of snarling wolves on an RV. It meant searching “wolves” on YouTube and eBay, and also at historical societies and in old newspaper archives.
I did not want to look at the flesh-and-blood Canis lupus without acknowledging the “shadow wolf” of Western folktale and Americana lore. What did looking at that wolf reveal about cultural narratives around power and violence, fear and freedom? Too often we are trained to push aside the subliminal associations our brains make, but I am drawn to writing that lays them bare, pins them to the page, lets us trace their shape and decide what to carry forward. To see the real wolf, I wanted to consider how I had metabolized the symbolic one.
My research—into the wolves that walked through ecology, media headlines, psychology, literature, songs, metaphors, idioms, anthropology—was teaching me plenty, but it was also populating my brain with various nodes of fact. How would they fit together on the page? I didn’t know yet, but in this stage of generative, creative research, I didn’t have to. That would come later, when I sat down to write. When, between the nodes, a crackle of static electricity would appear.
*
In her book-length lyrical essay At the Lightning Field, museum director Laura Raicovich writes about Walter De Maria’s infamous land-art project in the middle of a New Mexico desert. The book also includes a memory of a boy waving a flag in her native Bucharest, high school calculus, and a 1960s computer called The Royal McBee, all the while quoting both Gertrude Stein and Vladamir Nabokov:
In the process of recalling The Lightning Field, I locate
intersections of memory and external associations, effects
they promote
and thoughts they evoke. They describe an arc of experience.
As these phenomena
agglomerate, time skids and solidifies
at once, embedding an unruly set of parallelisms into the
resulting text.
Raicovich describes walking among the 400 towering spikes that De Maria had drilled into the ground and watching the glimmer of light and sky and desert and self stare back at her in the reflections of the stainless steel poles. She visits the field a number of times. The sky is always changing. Different things are always in her mind. Just as no two viewers would have the same experience even if standing side-by-side, so Raicovich’s own visits are never the same. Reading her book, it occurred to me that the text, with its clanging “intersections of memory and external associations,” was its own sort of Lightning Field. Maybe all my favorite books of nonfiction—the ones that swivel between self and world, home and history—are lightning fields too.
*
Few things delight me on the page as much as a well-tuned metaphor or simile, the easter egg in an otherwise ordinary sentence. At its best, figurative language becomes the hanger on which I drape my understanding of the thing itself. Years ago, when I was interviewing the novelist Tony Tulathimutte about the importance of fresh language, he mentioned that an “unlit cigarette smells like a big fat raisin….and it makes your fingers smell like soy sauce afterward.” The association was so propulsive that it carved highways in my brain, such that I cannot now see either a cigarette, a raisin, or soy sauce without thinking of the other two. Short of smelling pantry items for inspiration, how does figurative language hinge on research?
In her memoir Recollections From My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit writes about coming across a book with photographs of gold mines. The book is accompanied by an essay which quotes a writer who had spent eight seasons in Antarctica. From this—a quote nested inside an essay nested inside a photography book—Solnit learns that sailors deficient in vitamin C will fail to produce collagen. “In advanced scurvy,” wrote Jason C. Anthony, “old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.” It’s a gasp-worthy image, and Solnit swiftly churns it into metaphor, writing that just as “damage is not necessarily permanent, neither is repair.”
A page that has begun with Solnit writing about “cyanide-laced water poured through the dust to leach out the gold” becomes a more intimate reckoning with the “expanding and contracting” of grief itself. I’ve returned to this page again and again as a reminder that a well-placed fact can teach a reader about the tangible world—how can I look at an orange, now, without thinking of how it’s helped stitch my scars?—but also the intangible one, giving new language to tides of grief and love.
There’s something about witnessing a scurrying mind, the spinning of a web between one subject and another, that gives me the tingle of being in good company. Perhaps it is because, as in Solnit’s case, the researching writer is always talking with a person or idea beyond themselves. I think of my favorite kind of conversations, the ones that unspool at dinner parties and on long walks with good friends. One person mentions something they ate the other day, and it reminds someone else of a story they heard on the radio, and then that thing the movie star said, and pretty soon everyone is talking about a new thing entirely. Eventually somebody laughs—How did we get talking about this?—and it’s a good question, but nobody cares. Everyone has combed the beach, and now they’re standing in a circle, rummaging in their pockets, showing one another all the gleaming things they’ve found.
