TOAF

This weekend I had the pleasure of reading Renee Gladman’s TOAF. Originally published in 2008, it was republished in 2024 by the Dorothy Project. It is a lovely book that everyone who cares about writing should read.

The best thing that someone can say about this book is this (and Danielle Dutton refers to this in the introduction, so I’m not the first to observe how great this line is!):

“One can say ‘big and long’ and be talking about a small book. Does everyone know this? No I don’t think so.”

This is a big book even if it is only 75 gentle pages.

(Today is my writing group day so it makes sense to start my day thinking about writing).

The proposition that Gladman puts forward is that writing makes us exist between realities. There is the reality that we write about (which for someone like me is pretty dry and bound up in the style and forensics of academic argument) and the reality where we live. These two ways of seeing the world intersect in our consciousness. In other words, we regularly (and, let’s say, alternately) become aware of one and then the other way of seeing the world. 

When we try to reconcile these ways of seeing the world we inevitably find ourselves conflicted. If we make our writing too much like the world that we experience, we’re likely to make a mess. After all, many thing happen all at once, it’s often difficult to discern what is most important, and even when we figure that out, it is something hard to remember or to order the sequence of events that make one thing more prominent than another.

Obviously, when writing, we like to produce things that are more tidy, more linear, clearer. But Gladman’s book makes it pretty clear that letting your writing life leak over into your daily experience can be confusing. It is of course, inevitable. 

When I write, the epistemologies and ontologies that structure my writing seep over into my daily life. There are moments of confusing clarity and order. A daily walk becomes an opportunity for data gathering and a conversation becomes an exercise in constructing an argument. Reading a novel can produce critique rather than pleasure.

I think this is pretty common. The conversations in our writing group often center on where and when we write. It got me wondering whether our need to control our setting and timing is as much about preventing the seepage between our experiences and those things that we write about. In other words, we may think that we’re creating space to write, but Gladman’s book reminds me that we might also being creating barriers to ensure that our writing doesn’t creep into our everyday lives. 

There is much more in this book worth learning and even more worth savoring. Gladman’s style is remarkable for a simplicity and clarity which belies her ability to trace the edge of coherence. If you’ve read her Ravicka series you know that she can show both a reverence for narrative and an ability to defy its conventions. At first, it may feel like her narratives are unrealistic or even fantastic. When I read TOAF, however, I suddenly came to understand that her narratives are profoundly real. The disconnections, non sequiturs, the gaps, and the stumbles in her narratives — the blurring of time and space — reflect our lived experiences in a way that the cool forensic detachment of our formal arguments or the tidy resolution in the narratives promoted in the media do not.