Janice Greenwood

Maggie Smith’s inspirational book, Keep Moving, has its genesis in an idea that came to Smith in the aftermath of her divorce. The idea sounds simple in theory, but is deceptively difficult to accomplish in practice. After her divorce, she set herself the task to write down a few sentences each day and post them on social media. The sentences seem drawn out of thin air, written on the fly. But Smith makes clear that writing is a process. Her book is as much a lesson on the art of self-revision as it is a lesson in how to write and revise one’s work.

I have an inherent distrust of writing created for immediate consumption and disposal as is often the case with writing posted on social media. Often, when such work is translated into print, especially into a book, it fails to live up to the permanence of the form. This is often true of many Instagram poets, whose work resides in the ephemeral realms of social media. When subjected to the solidity of life outside silicone’s cool glowing halls, it flickers into obscurity like a cave painting seen under a dying flare.

Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving is no such book. Many of these words are stronger for being placed in a more solid, more permanent form, as if they were bricks finally being set into a building with proper mortar. She writes: “Stop straining to hold the door to the past open, as if your old life is there, waiting, and you could just slip right in. Stop wasting your strength, because you can’t go back.” These are the sentences Maggie Smith found when she set herself the goal to write a couple of sentences a day.

The goal to write a few sentences a day may seem small, but many writers fall short of it, and it is a goal that many young writers would be wise to set for themselves. I’m certainly inspired, and wonder what would happen if I forced myself to post a sentence or two every day on social media. I think such writing would have to be public—to keep the element of risk and adventure high. Scribbled notes in a journal seem almost too easy, too easily buried. The speed at which thinking changes; the speed at which life changes is what ephemeral media, like social media or journaling, manage to capture.

Joan Didion wrote, in The Year of Magical Thinking: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.” Maggie Smith, and anyone who has experienced life-changing tragedy, knows how quickly life can change—how every well laid plan can suddenly go awry, how the ocean is always there, always able to erase the path you’ve set for yourself.

It is in these moments that revision is paramount. Smith’s writing on revision is some of the poignant writing in the book. She explains that when writing and revising, she creates multiple drafts, but “something’s gone awry” if she reaches draft sixteen or seventeen or beyond. While revision is integral to the process, she explains that the magic and wildness of what sparked the writing in the first place can often be edited out of the revision process. I’ve seen this happen in my own work. I love Smith’s three-draft rule. I think I might start to practice it myself.

Keep Moving is a kind of therapy for the writer. I remember shortly after I got divorced talking to my therapist about how scared I was. I’d just learned that because I was separating from my husband, my visa was no longer valid and I’d need to leave Canada, where I’d lived and built a life for five years. I worried, telling her how afraid I was I’d have nothing left. She said, “Janice, you love adventure. This next step could be the adventure of your life.” It was. I was terrified to begin. All good adventures are terrifying in the beginning. But I began. I’m grateful I began.

It’s easy to forget how painful it can be to exist within the transition. But “we can’t skip ahead to healing because we’re tired of grieving, or because it’s taking too long.” And because “The past isn’t a place we can live,” we often have to live in the uncomfortable painful present for longer than we’d like.

When tragedy strikes, sometimes ritual is all that is left. But rarely is life dismantled so completely. Even when I found myself divorced, homeless, living out of a car in Kentucky behind a pizza shop, there were still things I had left, things I had spent years building. My writing practice was one. It sustained me. It still does. I think about Maggie Smith writing her two sentences every day and I am incredibly moved.

There are moments of great beauty in Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving. She writes, “Don’t wait for your life to magically come together—it’s your work to do. Every day, every moment, you are making your life from scratch.”

Moving on and moving forward isn’t a process where one puts on a happy face and pretends the pain is gone. No. It is a process of existing in the messy present moment and trusting that all will be well all will be well in the end. In the space of loss, Smith writes, “Throw away what you think you know. Throw away the old blueprint for something that will not be built. Instead, rethink that space. Now it can be anything: What will it be?” This is excellent advice—in life and in writing.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Last Friday evening I entered a new circle of poetry hell when Caitlin Kelly’s new poetry book, The Words I Wish I Said led me down the Tik Tok poetry rabbit hole. When I first discovered the poets of Instagram, I remember feeling a little like how I felt after I read the end of Dante’s Inferno, particularly the part where Dante and Virgil basically pass through Satan’s shit hole to get to Purgatory. The whole thing is a little gross but occasionally interesting. Never again would we have to sit through a bad poetry slam. We could now doom scroll through our feelings in the peace, quiet, and privacy of our dark bedrooms. Tik Tok poetry offers no such hope of redemption. When I discovered that Caitlin Kelly rose to the top of the Amazon poetry bestseller list by promoting her book, The Words I Wish I Said on Tik Tok, I was intrigued, but instead I found myself face-to-face with so much teenage angst, I think I might have started sprouting acne.

I didn’t really understand how Tik Tok worked. It turns out that Tik Tok is basically a video version of Instagram, and it’s basically the domain of teenagers. (The highlight of my descent into the Tik Tok vortex was when I discovered a video created by Dr. Phil in which he stares into the screen like a hostage, pleading with viewers to stop calling him ‘daddy.’ Okay, actually, that video is the reason why everyone should probably download Tik Tok right now; I don’t have the words to describe it: the spacey galactic music, the moment when Dr. Phil explains that “your real daddy is probably getting his feelings hurt;” the bulging-eyed opening seconds…I digress.)

Tik Tok has become the new digital teen diary, and because writing using the keyboard has gone the way of the dodo, pen and paper, and Blockbuster Video (can someone please explain to me all the videos of Japanese girls dismantling their keyboards and replacing them with Legos?), Tik Tok poetry exists as spoken word poetry spoken into the void of the digital confessional. Scrolling through the poetry videos on Tik Tok is a very frightening and vertiginous experience.

There’s one video where a girl recites in robotic voice exactly how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds she’s been alive. Another girl plays the piano and tells us what kind of boy she wants. Someone else (a little older) reads from a high school journal, crying with pain and delight. Others recite poetry with their puppies. There are parodies of Avril Lavigne. Actually that one was pretty good: “he was a boy who never / posted on Instagram, she / was a girl who spammed / her private story, could I / make it any more obvious?” Lightly edited.

I think I finally understood something, though. COVID-19 lockdown has led to levels of loneliness that the world has never before seen. I often complain about how we use social media instead of talking to one another, but I think that Tik Tok has pushed social media existential isolation to its extreme verge. Where is there room for dialogue and conversation when you’re just staring into the camera, reciting your journal for the world to see? Do teens talk on the phone for hours like I did when I was younger? Or do they read their journals aloud to the world, hoping against hope for connection in their message feed?

The worst part about the Tik Tok poetry phenomenon is this: the poets of Tik Tok are inspired by the poets of Instagram. We have reached poetry Cocytus, a frozen land where Count Ugolino is frozen in ice to his neck, forced to nibble on his enemy, Ruggieri’s brains; only this is Tik Tok and Instagram, where the poets of Tik Tok live frozen in the cold circuits of cyberspace, slurping down the Instagram leftovers of their bad poet influences.

Doom scrolling through Tik Tok poetry leaves one in a kind of Anxiety of Influence that I’m grateful Harold Bloom never had to witness. Bloom was mostly concerned with how William Shakespeare dealt with the anxiety of his poetic precursors—poets like Chaucer. The poets of Tik Tok are following the lead of Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace, and because they are following poets who are only half-formed, the poetry that results is derived from work that is half-formed at best. Look, I often try to find the bright side of things, but this is really bad.

I’ve written about this problem elsewhere. When mediocre poets are unleashed onto the world without editorial oversight (and look, I’ll forgive the first book, but when a press publishes a second or third book by an Instagram poet, I feel it has a responsibility to help the poet create better art, and when it fails to do so, it is doing a disservice to poetry and its own work). Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace are hardly original poets and their work is not very good. But when this work becomes the source of influence for a newer generation, we find ourselves looking into a mirror darkly that is covered in soot from the gold mine cash cow of the best-selling Instapoets.  

The Words I Wish I Said by Caitlin Kelly is deeply inspired by Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace. This is deeply troubling. I can’t in good conscience review this book, other than to say everything I’ve said above, which should serve as a review enough. Maybe I’m not too different from Dr. Phil, trapped in Tik Tok hell, with galactic music playing in the background, crying out into the wilderness of cyberspace, begging Caitlin Kelly to please, for her sake and mine, go get thee to a Sylvia Plath, a Rilke, a Sappho; go get thee to some Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou… Muses of contemporary poetry, help us all.  

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Look, I’m not some big Justin Bieber fan; I don’t love Justin Bieber—correction, I didn’t think I loved Justin Bieber. But now I’m not so sure. Before I explain my partial conversion to Belieberism, I think it’s important that I disclose my prior encounters with the phenomenon. When I finished graduate school, my first job was to teach twelve-year-old Beliebers in Canada how to measure the hypotenuse of a triangle (I was an SSAT tutor). I took to incorporating Bieber into my math word problems. It worked. If Justin Bieber’s stage is a triangle-shape with one side 3 feet long, a second side four feet long, and the front of the stage is its hypotenuse, how many Beliebers can safely stand in front of the stage if each person needs one foot of space? (This is a word problem that could only exist before COVID-19, and yes, many twelve-year-old Beliebers informed me that no Justin Bieber stage would ever be that small). I know (and still only know) maybe one song of his, and I can’t even think of the name of the song as I write this essay. Incidentally the song brings up memories of driving to Rockaway Beach to surf the waves in the winter when I lived in New York City. My van didn’t have a CD player or Bluetooth, so I’d listen to the radio—and at that time, Justin Bieber was pretty much the only thing on the radio. All I could think about was how cold the ocean was going to be when I jumped in and how sad I felt for Selena Gomez, and how mean Bieber was for writing a song like that about her, even though the song wasn’t really about her, because no song or poem or piece of artwork is really about anyone. I digress. When I think of Justin Bieber, mostly I think about Selena Gomez—or at least, when I thought about Bieber, I mostly would think about Gomez. But this has changed. Now I think about Billie Eilish. And that’s strange to me. One of the most fascinating and beautiful, and dare I say, moving moments in R.J. Cutler’s brilliant documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is when Eilish meets Justin Bieber for the first time.

First of all, let’s just take a moment to let this one sink in. Billie Eilish is a Justin Bieber fan. Her mom explains in the documentary that Eilish was so obsessed with Bieber that “as a little kid I considered taking her to therapy.”

Enter Bieber, after the intermission. (This, in itself, is worth noting. When was the last time a movie had an intermission? The intermission divides the moment in the film when Eilish goes from a largely underground singer to a household name.)

The scene opens with another crowd of adoring fans, screaming at Eilish, a scene we’ve grown accustomed to since the movie began, a scene that becomes increasingly more and more extreme as Eilish’s fame grows and the film progresses. This gives the viewer a strange kind of vertigo. On the one hand, isn’t this something we’ve all imagined, to be surrounded by so many adoring fans? But R.J. Cutler manages to film this adoration from Eilish’s perspective, offering viewers a real sense of the claustrophobia such crowds engender. The guard rails keeping fans out also become a kind of cage in which the celebrity exists. The film puts the viewer in this position; we’re going along with Eilish for the ride. And because Eilish is so young, I can’t help but feel fairly protective of her. I feel like she could be my little cousin and I don’t want her to get hurt by a tossed iphone or mean comment. Her mother later tells the camera that she doesn’t understand how any young artist goes through this kind of “trajectory” without a parent. And indeed, I think the role that Eilish’s parental support plays in her success is largely underplayed in the film and worth further study.

But back to Bieber. When Eilish sees Bieber for the first time, she and Bieber are in their celebrity cages, surrounded by hundreds of screaming fans filming them on their iPhones; when she sees him, the camera focuses in on her, first recoiling, but then staring at Bierber. Her face is filled with such pure love. It’s overwhelming to watch.

It is overwhelming to watch because we so rarely see expressions of pure love anymore. By this I mean, when was the last time you saw someone openly adoring another human being, without cynicism, without irony, without an agenda? I can’t remember.

And here’s the thing that makes me love Justin Bieber a little more. When we do see such vulnerability, such openness in a stranger, our first instinct might be to turn away, to move back a little, to self-protect. But Bieber doesn’t turn away, or move back, or turn his head. He watches her. He sees her. And his face is free of cynicism and irony and all the terrible things we have yoked to love, and fandom, and popular culture.

When was the last time you looked into a stranger’s eyes and understood exactly what they were going through, without the need for words to qualify anything? When was the last time you observed two human beings in a moment of perfect understanding? When Billie Eilish looks into Bieber’s eyes, and when Bieber looks into Eilish’s eyes, we observe two human beings, living an experience foreign to most human beings on this planet (they are surrounded by hundreds of fans with iPhones, filming them, after all). They understand what it means to be adored by so many, and yet, here they stand adoring each other. And, if that isn’t the stuff of opera, I don’t know what is.

R.J. Cutler has provided us something truly precious: a moment of recognition. Maria Abramovic tried to artificially create something like this in The Artist is Present at the MoMA. I went to the exhibition when it was showing in New York and sat for a couple of hours watching Abramovic watch strangers, and while I have seen moments from the performance that are rather moving, my experience sitting beside Abramovic at The Artist is Present was mostly underwhelming. At the very least, I felt nothing close to what R.J. Cutler has achieved in this meeting between Eilish and Bieber. I imagine this feeling was what Abramovic was reaching toward (and occasionally achieved).

There’s something incredibly humane in watching Bieber see Eilish, even as she enters a world of fame that paradoxically leaves her adored by everyone but truly known by so few.

Eilish is an original, a true poet and artist. I never got the same feeling about Bieber. And yet, there’s something quite remarkable and moving and true about watching Eilish sing along to Justin Bieber in the car, or watching her get a call from Bieber after she sweeps the Grammy’s.

Eilish’s mom says that now is a scary time to be a teenager. Indeed. We live in a planet that may be unlivable by the time Eilish can receive Medicare. Our political leaders lack real courage to make changes. And to top it off, teens are living through a pandemic that further isolates them while living in a society that was lonely and isolated to begin with. Now indeed is a scary time to be a teenager. Scarier because it isn’t clear when we’ll all be able to sit together again listening to music we love, sung by someone we adore, who can bring the room to tears.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

When I was first learning how to surf, I didn’t understand something essential. When big waves hit the sand, the force is known as shore break, and it can kill you—or seriously injure. I was 30 years old and learning how to surf in Miami, of all places. One day, I found myself at the beach on one of those rare days when the waves in Miami are perfect—for experienced surfers. For me, with my foam surfboard still trying to learn, the waves out in the ocean inspired in me a special kind of terror. No worries, I thought, I’ll be safe, I’ll just surf by the shore. This was a mistake. I surfed right into the sand, and got pretty bruised up. I was lucky. Shore break can kill. Six years later, I found myself facing the same issue. This time the surf spot was Waimea Bay, and the waves were bigger. Much bigger. The shore break was also much bigger. No worries, I told myself. I’ll just paddle out past the shore break and sit in the channel. I knew better than to try to paddle out to the lineup where those big waves were actually breaking, but I wanted to feel the energy of the ocean in my bones (maybe I wanted it in the bones too much). After watching the ocean for about an hour, I finally paddled out, timing my entry. I sat in awe of the waves that rolled in, and then, when I’d had enough, in between sets, I paddled in. I was lucky. I didn’t break any bones. Adam Grant writes about the humility of the beginner and overconfidence cycles in those who are more experienced in Think Again. I’ve been thinking a lot about Adam Grant lately.

Specifically, Grant writes about the Dunning-Kruger effect. The researchers “found that in many situations, those who can’t… don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.” The person with beginner’s mind is never overconfident. When I was learning how to surf, I knew better than to try to catch waves out in the lineup. I stuck to the whitewash and had a great time.

It is when we finally gain some competence that we become dangerous? Grant believes so. I know so. There comes a point in my learning curve where I enter a phase I’d like to call “maniacal overconfidence.” Or “dangerous competence.”

When I first learned how to surf, I remember bargaining with the unruly ocean. I promised the ocean that if it let me just stand up on the surfboard, I’d be happy and ask for nothing else. I watched the surfers way out there, sitting out in the water near the horizon, a place that terrified me, catching these steep waves, and it never occurred to me that I’d ever be able to do that. When I started surfing, I underestimated my ability to improve. It took me three months just to learn how to stand up. I am terribly stubborn, and I refused to take lessons, so I kept making the same mistakes over and over. (I kept putting my feet and hands in the wrong place over and over.)

Eventually, I learned how to stand up, but only after giving in and watching an instructional video online. If you’re trying to learn how to surf unbroken waves and finding yourself struggling, I highly recommend Surf Simply’s tutorial on Catching Unbroken Waves. That man is a genius. He helped me to realize that the feeling of falling forward on the wave would result in the instinct to put my hands forward. I kept eating shit because I kept putting my hands forward and the only way for me not to eat shit was to recite a little mantra in my head that reminded me to keep my feet and hands back.

Within a few years, I’d find myself surfing winter waves in New Jersey and New York, tucking my head under frozen lips of black water on freezing cold winter days. And then I’d visit Puerto Rico and paddle out on head-high days, and sometimes bigger days than that, facing mountains of water like nothing I’d ever seen in my life, in awe of the power and beauty of the ocean. I thought that was my limit. I paddled out on a rising swell, and had the fear of god put into me.

And then I moved to Hawai’i and started driving to the North Shore in the winter, and I found myself seeing the ocean behave in ways I’d never before seen it behave. And I thought, maybe I can catch those waves. And that’s how I found myself, about six years after learning how to surf (I learned to surf at 30), sitting on the shore at Waimea Bay, thinking that I might have reached a level of dangerous competence.

Adam Grant, in Think Again, writes: “It’s when we progress from novice to amateur that we become overconfident. A bit of knowledge can become a dangerous thing.”

I’ve been there before—when rock climbing, trying climbs far above my ability level too soon. Getting myself into scary situations without ropes. So, as I sat on the shore in Hawai’i watching the waves, that feeling of having been here once before crept upon me. I knew enough about how the water behaved to paddle out to the lineup. But did I know enough about how to catch those waves once there? And more importantly, did I know enough to not be a danger to myself and others out there? Every year, in Hawai’i, North Shore lifeguards have to rescue hundreds of people out of the water. I don’t ever want to have to be rescued while trying to surf.

“As we gain experience, we lose some of our humility. We take pride in making rapid progress, which promotes a false sense of mastery. That jump starts an overconfidence cycle, preventing us from doubting what we know and being curious about what we don’t.”

Guilty and guilty.

What is to be done?

Grant writes that our willingness to learn, and a willingness to doubt ourselves is the key. We can ask ourselves “whether we have the right tools in the present” while remaining “confident” in our “ability to achieve a goal” in the future. He writes in Think Again that we should all strive for a state of confident humility.

So, rather than blindly paddling out into the ocean on big wave days, I thought about some of the areas where I already knew I was weak. For one, I couldn’t hold my breath for long. If a wave dragged me under, I’d need to be able to hold my breath longer. I started training to extend the time I could hold my breath. I also recognized that there was much I didn’t know about safety, so I signed up for the Big Wave Risk Assessment Group’s online Surf Responder Online Course. Like Adam Grant, the instructors talk about unconscious competence. I realized I’d need to find a mentor, someone who knew more than me, who could help me better assess my abilities and limits.

Sometimes we need to ignore fear to push ahead and succeed. But sometimes, we need to listen to fear, to listen to the questions it wants us to ask. Adam Grant writes about successful people: “Although they have faith in their strengths, they’re also keenly aware of their weaknesses. They know they need to recognize and transcend their limits if they want to push the limits of greatness.”

The lessons about humility I continue to learn from surfing and rock climbing, I apply in other areas of my life, too. But nature is not as forgiving as other people. It helps to be checked from time to time by a force greater than oneself.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Perhaps the best thing about Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, the excellent documentary directed by R.J. Cutler is the fact that it is bookended with scenes that offer viewers a glimpse inside Eilish’s journal. Early on, the camera moves down and we catch a glimpse of the lyrics to “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go” written out in big block letters, the line “I want to end me” crisscrosses the bottom of the page, as if Eilish was banishing the idea and striking it from the record even as her hand asserted the relentless existence of the very thought. (I have to admit that I paused the documentary several times here. I spent hours at the Met when DaVinci’s journals went on display, and there’s something truly moving about seeing the creative process at its earliest and protean stages.) This is art being made. In the scenes that follow, we’ll watch Eilish and her brother Finneas work through that very song and struggle with it. Later, the documentary, which has in many ways been a video journal of Eilish’s rise to stardom, ends with a look back at those original journals. The return is poignant. They are the source of everything that followed: the stratospheric rise to fame, the tour, the interviews, the reason for the film itself. Eilish reveals herself, opening her journals to her fans and viewers, showing a poem in which she describes cutting herself. She says she didn’t think she’d live so long. Earlier she had gone live on Instagram for several hundred thousand fans, but the most intimate moments in the film are not there, but rather where Eilish opens her journal and shows us at her most private. I almost wish she held some of it back, kept some of it just for her. The creative process isn’t easy. Eilish complains, explaining that she hates songwriting. Her mom hears the lyrics to one song and the dialogue that follows is worth transcribing in its entirety:

MOM: “You’re going to go that dark with this song? Are you seriously implying that you’d jump off the roof? Do you feel okay about a song like that? You don’t worry about that?”

Eilish, who is often confident and defiant, looks thoughtful in this scene, and a little taken aback (her parents go with her for the ride and don’t seem to question her artistic decisions often; when her mom speaks up about her art, it’s clear she takes note).

The question of Eilish wanting to jump off the roof hangs for a minute. Finneas pauses to think, too. But Eilish quickly regains her composure and answers: “This song is the reason I don’t.”

Her answer is perfect. Art can be the reason why we don’t jump off the roof.

When I first heard Eilish’s album and song, “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go,” I was astonished. The writing is stunning and the music is exquisite. Eilish manages to perform the next wave of feminism, a tough girl aesthetic that is at once brutal and soft.

The fact that it came from someone so young only impressed me more. There’s a little of Rimbaud’s wonderful enfant terrible in Eilish, but not just that, there’s also a self-consciousness and self-awareness that I think could only arise from someone who grew up with social media. And that fact is what makes me all the more impressed with her work.

We are a culture that cares most about the finished product. So many social media feeds are carefully curated to perfection; some so precisely designed that the pictures need to match a color theme or aesthetic. I’ve heard of people who won’t post pictures from their real lives because don’t fit in with their Instagram “aesthetic.” So it’s particularly refreshing to get a glimpse of Billie Eilish just as she’s becoming the famous musician we’ll recognize, and it’s especially fascinating to get a look at the five-Grammy-award winning album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go” before it was even an album—when it existed as an idea in Billie Eilish’s journals, when it existed in loops on the home computer.

In the opening scenes of The World’s a Little Blurry we see Eilish performing at one of her early concerts. The album that will win her five Grammy’s has yet to be written. Her concerts are packed, but they are intimate. And in the blue light of the concert hall, R.J. Cutler’s camera captures Eilish being captured by the dozens and dozens of iphone cameras held by the concert-going teens. With Instagram and TikTok, and other forms of social media making it possible for teens to document every moment of their lives, do they even keep journals, I wondered. Why write anything down when you have a phone to capture it all for you? I remember coming home from a Bright Eyes concert when I was in high school wanting nothing but to write in my journal; had I been able to capture it with my phone, would I have been so thrilled about journaling?

And then, Eilish opens her journal for the director, showing him her sketches. Self-portraits, hairy vaginas, pages which appear to be completely covered with intestines. Eilish explains that she wants the album to be called When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go. The words are written under arches that have been colored in with her pencil. A monster lurks in the keystone. She turns to a page filled with monsters she has drawn. This is a visual depiction of the song, she explains. She adds that she wants the song to be a representation of the monsters under her bed.

This is why Eilish is so remarkable. Her music is the kind that can only be written in the twilight of childhood, in the darkness one begins to sense as one moves into awareness, while holding onto the innocence that can still depict childhood fears so accurately as monsters under the bed.

We get older. We get scared. The filter comes on. We observe Eilish in The World’s a Little Blurry calibrating her filter, finding her voice. The camera pans to the wall over Eilish’s bed. Amid the poetry written on the wall, I glimpsed the lines: “I just need to talk / and have the world not hear.” Where is Eilish’s space? Where can she be and the world not hear? Her openness, her willingness to show the notebook is remarkable, and a little unnerving. She writes “no matter what happens I will always love” but then “love” is crossed out and “always be broken” ends the sentence. The beautiful part about it is that I know she won’t always be broken. She will grow. She will change. Eilish is so beloved by her fans because they see themselves in her. I see my younger self in her.

Eilish shines a bright light into the darkness we all have within us, but have in us most brightly when we are young. I know when I was young I had my days where I wanted to jump off a roof. But we don’t jump. We sing into the sound cloud, we write, we post the poem, we paint the monsters under the bed. The art is the reason we don’t jump.

If you have been having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 wherever you are. Call 1-800-273-8255 or visit the lifeline’s website from the link above to chat with someone online or learn more.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I want to start this review of Dusk, Night, Dawn, with a caveat. I love Anne Lamott. Her book, Bird by Bird is one of the best contemporary books available on the craft of writing. If you’ve never read Anne Lamott before, start with Bird by Bird, lest you find yourself disappointed. When I learned that Anne Lamott had released a new book, Dusk, Night, Dawn, I was thrilled, and looked forward to reading it. Unfortunately, Dusk, Night, Dawn fails to live up to the high expectations of Bird by Bird, and I found myself whispering “OK boomer” into the margins of her book so many times, that I couldn’t help but feel like I was being a little unkind. But when a writer opens her book with the UN report on climate catastrophe, I expect a little more than to read a book filled with re-told Bible stories (to offer messages of hope) and glossed-over praise of Greta Thunburg. Lamott says her generation has money and has successfully engaged in activism before, but she doesn’t offer a vision for how her generation’s money or activism can be used to prevent the climate catastrophe she so frets about in the opening chapters. She writes about a generation’s lost hope, but offers nothing short of faith as a solution. I may be wrong, but I demand more of writers, especially popular writers, tackling the topic of climate change. At the very least, I expect more than just fear and trembling. And while I can’t disagree with Lamott’s request that we all be a little kinder to one another, she failed to fully clarify how all this relates back to climate change, or how kindness will solve our rapidly warming planet. I think Lamott missed an opportunity. She certainly has the platform.

Lamott opens the book with the reality that climate change will likely be the undoing of humanity. She’s right. If we do nothing, we’re looking at destruction on a global scale. One million species are likely to go extinct. To make matters worse, I just read an article in the New York Times about the weakening of the Gulf Stream; the article is terrifying. In short, the Gulf Stream, a current of hot water that follows the paths hurricanes take from the west coast of Africa towards Florida and then north towards Iceland and beyond to Britain and the North Sea, is breaking down. This is a big deal because it means the breakdown of a global transfer of energy that keeps colder regions of the world, like Britain and Europe, warmer than they would otherwise be. The New York Times reports that in the past, when the Gulf Stream shut down, parts of Europe were plunged into temperatures that averaged 15 degrees Celsius cooler than they are now. And the Gulf Stream didn’t just affect North America, South America, and Africa. Reports indicate that the effects were felt as far as China. Because of melting ice in Greenland, a “blob” of cold water is impeding the flow of warm water toward Britain, and the blob even sometimes drifts downward toward New York. We don’t know the threshold at which the Gulf Stream will break down. It is too early to tell.

All of this ties back to Dusk, Night, Dawn, because Lamott makes clear in her prologue that she understands the gravity of the problem. The full title of Dusk, Night, Dawn is Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage. But courage isn’t just facing a problem or fear head-on. Courage means understanding the exact nature of the problem, and then facing the problem head-on with that understanding. Lamott may be facing the problem, but I don’t think she’s worked out a solution, or at the very least, her place in the solution.

Lamott writes that “stories can be our most reliable medicine” and I agree. She writes that she believes that the solution to these problems will “be local, grassroots, and it will be magnified as more people wonder whether maybe they can help…Look around and see whom you can serve.” She trusts that science will save us, but I think that the time for patiently waiting is over. And I expect more from our leaders and writers. At the very least I expected that she might urge her readers to conserve energy, think about walking and biking more, and maybe recycle.

The book is just scattered. The center does not hold. Lamott writes about women who got sober. She writes about herself getting sober in “the darkest summer of my life” and much of this writing is quite moving. She writes about self-forgiveness by telling a story of a woman who killed a pedestrian while drunk driving. She writes about the healing power of helping other people. The fact that Lamott is capable makes this book all the more disappointing.

The first half of the book is actually quite good. She writes about the “disconcerting” effects of intimacy, “how devastating the potential for loss that’s inherent in it.” She writes honestly about hating her husband and loving him so much she often panics that he’s going to get a cancer diagnosis and die. As someone who suffers from anxiety that flickers in and out like a candle in the wind, I can relate. As someone who always imagines the worst possible outcome, I found myself nodding along when Lamott writes about waking up to find her kitten missing and quickly assuming the worst. Spoiler alert: everything turns out all right in the end. If only this were just a book about intimacy.

Lamott writes beautifully about how we can live with evil, and ugliness, and yes, pollution, when she describes how she takes her Sunday school class to clean up a beach. They take the garbage and treasures they have found and lay them before the altar, to admire the garbage and the wonder, all gathered up at once. She finds a nautilus shell, how the spiral of the shell is a wonder, how “if something is allowed to grow the way it was designed to, it works…” and the marvel of its shell is marvelous but the “life inside” is “what makes it sacred.”

The first half of the book, while scattered, kept me reading. It was the second half of the book that made me want to put the whole thing down. Greta Thunburg reminds us that our house is on fire, but rather than reaching out to Thunburg (I imagine Lamott as someone who might have the connections and the pull to make this happen; I could be wrong), Lamott’s choice is to tell the story of Elijah in the wilderness, which, yes, is a wonderful metaphor about the importance of taking time to listen to nature and receive its wisdom, but falls a little short of a solution to me. I’d much rather read about Thunburg, or the many heroic teens trying to save the planet, than some old Bible dude in the wilderness. Of Elijah, she writes: “He needs time alone—in silence, in the desert, on the mountain, on the beach, beneath the stars…” She adds: “The best we can do is to help the poor, get some rest…” Yes, we need to help the poor, and yes, we all could use a little extra rest. But this is where Lamott loses me. We’re not going to solve climate disaster by getting rest. And while we all could do well for ourselves to spend more time in nature, this is not the “best we can do.”

And so, I whispered okay boomer, over and over. Lamott complains about how the young are angry at “us” but “the scientists, public health doctors, moms, grannies, and high school kids are on it.” Really? They’re on it? Someone else? She explains: “I have a doctorate in morbid reflection, and a grave anxiety disorder, which is not ideal for our times as we join hands to turn climate change around.”

How exactly, are we joining hands to join climate change around? So far, I don’t see a clear answer in Dusk, Night, Dawn. But I waited, patiently for one. The answer never came.

Many of the essays that filled the second half of the book would have been better left out. We’re forced to sit through a crappy performance with our essayist (literally and metaphorically)—maybe Lamott succeeded at what she was trying to convey? The essays serve the platitudes that fill them, rather than the other way around. They either cover ground that has been covered before, or could have been more easily folded into other sections where Lamott writes about anxiety and its personal toll.

This may be less a book about activism and more a book about how to live resigned to a dying planet: “You discover everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.”

Okay boomer, I think we need to make the damn tea and maybe think about how we’ll use our platforms to better serve the causes we care about.

I don’t want to be resigned. I don’t want to rely on faith alone. If you’re going to write about climate change, I think you need to do more than just hope that the high school kids will figure it out.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I suppose the 1968 equivalent to being rejected from every college one has applied to, is Joan Didion’s essay “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice.” It is easy to forget that when Didion applied to college, there was hardly the idea of “first, second, and third choices.” There was just one choice: the college of one’s choice. The essay “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice” is Didion’s beautiful essay from her latest book, Let Me Tell You What I Mean.

A child of seventeen or eighteen has hardly had the chance to experience a great deal of rejection or true failure (though given the advent of social media, I might have to revise this statement), and for many young people the college rejection will be their first true encounter with failure and disappointment.

At any stage of life, how one handles failure defines one’s character, but how we handle rejection when we are young is even more important. It sets the template for how we’ll handle failures going forward. Do we try harder as a result, or sink into a state of learned helplessness? Do we develop grit? Do we remember that, as the great film director Werner Herzog once said, “Things rarely happen overnight?”

Being rejected from the college of one’s choice or even being rejected from every college doesn’t need to be the end of the story. I know of people who went to community college, got straight As, and transferred to Harvard.

When I was applying to colleges as a high school student, I came pretty close to being rejected from every college to which I applied: my high school record was hardly stellar, though I’d later go on to get virtually straight As in university (see, there’s always hope for an academic comeback!). I was rejected from every college to which I applied out of high school, but was accepted to two alternative programs: the summer program at the University of Florida and a special program at NYU. Actually, I didn’t have the grades for NYU, but the dean liked my admissions essay (this was before the days of college essay consultants); he wanted to give me a chance. I couldn’t afford NYU, so it was off to the University of Florida for me.

Being rejected from almost every university to which I’d applied didn’t discourage me. Instead, it helped me to see firsthand the gap that had formed between the person I wanted to be (someone who could get accepted to universities) and the person I was (a middle-grade high school student). Not being able to afford NYU and attending the University of Florida put me in the mood for redemption. From the day I walked through the doors of the University of Florida, I was determined to get straight As (I missed the mark with one B, in a math class), and was determined not only to attend graduate school in creative writing, but to get into Columbia University’s program in creative writing. I put a picture of the Columbia University libraries on the ceiling, over my bed, so when I woke up every morning I’d see it and know what I was working for.

As I write these words I know I also speak from a place of immense privilege. No one in my family had a particular interest or stake in where I went to university or college. Neither of my parents had graduated from college or university, and therefore saw no personal commentary on their own fitness as parents by my rejection from this or that college. In fact, the way my father approached college was with a kind of trepidation and warning: it’s okay if you fail; college is hard. (He’d tried to study computer science at the local community college when I was an infant and the combination of caring for a small child at home and the lack of academic support resulted in him dropping out after just one class.) For my mother’s part, she wanted me to have nothing to do with college. She wanted me to stay in Miami, get married, and have lots of babies. Like Didion, my sense of failure at being rejected from this or that college was my own, and not my parents’. Like Didion’s situation “Their idea of their own and my worth remained independent of where, or even if, I went to college.” When Didion tells her father that she has been rejected by Stanford, he offers her a drink. When I told my father that I’d been rejected from the University of Florida (initially, and then later accepted by the summer program thanks to a kind guidance counselor to whom I owe my life), he told me not to worry about it, that they were a bunch of “good ole boys” anyway. Well.

The fact that all my friends got accepted to the University of Florida in the first round didn’t help me feel any better.

Didion writes that the college admission experience is much more difficult for children now (when Didion wrote the essay, now was 1968). Now, the real now, 2021 now, it is even worse. Didion writes about children “whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps.” She writes about parents trying to get their children into elite Kindergartens. When I lived in Canada, I worked as a tutor, helping high school students with their college admissions applications, and witnessed firsthand the impossible pressures put on teenagers and children far younger to do everything perfectly and to achieve goals that are increasingly becoming more elusive as competition grows. I worry deeply for the children whose rejections today are very public, and made further painful not only for the private felt disappointment, but also for the sometimes very vocal disappointment of parents who had merged “their children’s chances with their own, demanding of a child that he make good not only for himself but for the greater glory of his father and mother” to quote Didion.

College has become its own form of conspicuous consumption. A child attending Yale is not just a child attending Yale, but the parents’ earned right to put the Yale bumper sticker on the car and wear the sweater. Didion writes that “none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures.” In our hyper-competitive late capitalist society of 2021, I don’t know if this is entirely true. Though I grew up in a low-income family (my parents slept on a bed in the living room most of my childhood and I got free and reduced lunch most years I attended school), I think it did make a big difference that I was able to go to school, and graduate school at Columbia University. For the poorest children, admission to an elite school or even a state school can be a real ticket to true social mobility. For the wealthiest children, I think Didion is right. It hardly matters at all. Parental connections at this or that firm, or a good word for the right internship or out-of-college job can make much more of a difference then where one attended school. Sure, the brand from an elite institution can’t hurt, but nets of privilege extend far wider than the alumni pool.

So what are you to do if you’ve been rejected from every college?

If you’ve gotten rejected from every college, I still think Didion’s advice is good. She went to a junior college and earned the credits she needed to transfer to university. If you didn’t quite make it out of high school, that’s okay. Go to the community college and get straight As. Or maybe try another unscripted path. Go to a coding school, graduate in a few months, and make six figures. Get a job, save money for a year, and start your own business, or make your own movie, or write your book. Werner Herzog actively encourages aspiring filmmakers to make films instead of going to film school. Take a year off. Who knows what greater lessons you’ll learn.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

When Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show stopped live taping in the Ed Sullivan theatre, Colbert renamed his ongoing “Meanwhile” segment to “Quarantinewhile,” and has since taken to opening each segment with some stunning Homeric similes. For anyone who has had to sit through an eleventh grade English class (and forgotten), the Homeric simile (also known as Homeric metaphor, epic simile, epic metaphor, or extended metaphor—depending on whether the author used “like,” or “is”) was a literary device used by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey, often to compare the human world to the wild world, or as a technique to yoke the unfamiliar to the familiar. Homeric similes are essential world-building constructs, used by epic poets like Homer, but also Dante Alighieri, John Milton (Poetry Foundation has a beautiful example from Paradise Lost on their website), Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare, to name a few.

Homeric similes seldom appear in contemporary poetry because very few contemporary poets write in the epic form. Poems are just too short these days. And so, when Stephen Colbert brings a dying form to a popular medium like The Late Show (last I checked each Quarantinewhile segment gets close to a million views on YouTube), I think it’s important to take note.

What’s most striking about Colbert’s Homeric similes is that they are damn good, and also incredibly funny. They are incredibly funny because they incorporate another literary technique you probably learned in English 101: the anti-climax. Each Quarantinewhile Homeric simile begins with an elevated description of some luxury item, quickly followed by a stunning deflation of the previous description.

Let’s look at a recent example:

Stephen Colbert explains that he spends most of his days “lovingly juicing the day’s ripest stories, sifting out the unnecessary pulp with my state of the art topicality filter, pouring it into a fine chilled baccarat glass, and topping it off with a healthy pour of La Marca prosecco to give you the effervescent $16 Bellini that is my monologue, but sometimes, I wake up after a bender in a compost pile, scrape whatever eggshells and cucumber peels, and coffee grinds are stuck to my shirt into the blender I made out of a discarded garbage disposal, splash in some moonshine, then plug my nose as I serve you the bootleg hootch smoothie that is my segment: Quarantinewhile.”

First of all, I have to credit the absolutely brilliant pun on “pulp,” with pulp of course being the slop you want to get out of your orange juice, but also the lurid, often tasteless, and sensational material that often ends up in every Quarantinewhile segment. In this particular Quarantinewhile segment, for example, we learn of a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic mouse that has been discovered in a landfill “in grim portents of the horrifying decay that awaits us all.” The mouse, Colbert further states, speaks to the “duality of our age”  where the eyes are downcast, but the mouse himself remains “upright in the face of an indifferent universe.” 

In a Quarantinewhile segment that includes the latest Taylor Swift gossip, Colbert goes on to describe the “Victorian era sweetheart locket of stories that is my monologue” followed by this: “but sometimes I snap awake in a cold sweat forgotten that Valentine’s Day is coming, rummage through the pantry for a box of noodles I bought to stock up for Hurricane Sandy, hastily trim them into shape with some rusty garden shears and string ‘em onto the blood stained shoelace from a boot I salvaged on the highway to create for you the accursed Macaroni necklace of news that is my segment: Quarantinewhile.”

Stephen Colbert’s Quarantinewhile monologue is indeed filled with “the accursed Macaroni necklace of news” that is life in quarantine. The very structure of the Homeric simile speaks to our current condition. We sit isolated in our homes, waiting for the news that will finally tell us this madness will end, only to find ourselves staring into the void and dead eyes of a discarded Chuck E. Cheese mouse. Every day we refresh the load button in the hopes that it will finally produce a different outcome—the appearance of a vaccine appointment for our elderly parents, only to stare into the malfunctioning void of an error message or worse, a screen unchanged, all the while, Facebook continues to make billions off its sophisticated algorithm that may or may not have destroyed democracy as we know it. We watch in horror as Texas freezes, its grid gridlocked, while the Mars rover lands on an alien world.

Colbert’s The Late Show offers us a mixture of high art and low art, lovingly blended into a pastiche that is at once comedic, and also apt commentary on American life. Our art, in order to succeed, must eventually look to a common denominator, and in a world so fragmented by the internet and social media, often the only thing that binds us together are our discarded coffee grounds, the salvaged dregs of common news that somehow reaches us all either through virality or absurdity.

What I gather from Colbert’s Homeric similes is that he and his writers aspire to high art and craft. And yet, they understand their medium well. Like Shakespeare who often repeated himself, thus allowing his plays to both contain words like “appurtenant” and “pertinent,” Colbert and his writers pack the Homeric simile with commentaries on late capitalism, high art, and curatorial taste (his Quarantinewhile segment has been compared to the pyramid of Kufu, a fancy Bellini, a Victorian locket), followed by the comparison, the common coffee grinds we all throw away, the cat litter covered burial hole, the cheap beer we all drink.

And then there’s this one: “Folks I spend a lot of time hewing the finest topical news stones from the nearby information quarry, hiring the most cutting edge architects to employ a complex series of ramps and pulleys to delicately deposit them with inch-perfect precision to create for you the epic, awe-inspiring pyramid of Kufu that is my monologue, but sometimes I like to just grab a shovel, dig a hole in a culvert, fill it with roadkill, bones, old bicycles, and yesterday’s coffee grinds, then top it off with some used cat litter, powdered lime, and quick-drying concrete to seal the ramshackle burial chamber that is my segment: Quarantinewhile.”

“Dig a hole in a culvert” may or may not be a play on Colbert, but I wouldn’t put it past the writers to pull that one off. Stephen Colbert’s Quarantinewhile does more than make me laugh, he brings a little slice of comic epic poetry to mass media. Day after day. And they keep saying poetry is dead. It is not dead. It has just found other forms.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.