Janice Greenwood

Grief operates by its own logic. When my grandmother passed away, I wanted her so badly to visit my dreams. I believed that if she came to me in a dream, it would be proof that she was okay. One week passed, then another, then another. I had no dreams at all for weeks. And when I eventually started dreaming again, the content was so inane that I decided then and there that consciousness was nothing more than the somewhat orderly spasms of neurons triggered by salt rushing in and out of neural pores. I felt in those weeks, my grandmother’s complete absence, her annihilation from this earth absolute. The best books of poetry can remind us of things we have pushed away, pushed aside. While reading Andrés Cerpa’s The Vault, I was reminded of how desperately I wanted my grandmother to visit me in dreams after she died, of how I took her ongoing absence for proof that god didn’t exist. How I took her absence personally, and as empirical proof for the nonexistence of the soul. I wouldn’t have remembered any of this, had I not read The Vault, by Andrés Cerpa. Toward the end of his luminous new book of poems, Cerpa writes about his deceased father finally coming to him in a dream, and I felt a shock of recognition so complete it gave me goosebumps: “And when I asked in the first dream / why he hadn’t come sooner–/ You have to travel first to return.”

The key to the success of Andres Cerpa’s book of poetry, The Vault, is in the writer’s ability to marry the grief of unspeakable loss to the thrill and vulnerability of early love. The fragments in The Vault arrive often in the epistolary form, but are too fleeting to be true letters. The poems seem to want to be stories, but are too rent to hold a single narrative. Cerpa makes it feel so easy, to evoke a whole narrative in fragments and lacunae, but don’t be deceived. This is difficult work.

The presence of grief is palpable from The Vault’s opening, which shows us “the fog that forms like a father disintegrating in a purple chair.” The image struck me as important, and not just because of the echoes of T.S. Eliot. The father appears early anecdotally. Later, we learn the father is dead, and the father disintegrates into the purple chair again. How Cerpa made an unimportant image resonate is a mystery to me. Modern poetry is often illogical, often riddled with mysterious images, and symbolistic flights of fancy. But something about Cerpa’s writing told me that this particular symbolistic flight wasn’t accidental. Perhaps its Cerpa’s ability to anchor his images so firmly in the real world, that made his more surrealistic moments resonate so fully.

In The Vault, grief itself is not named directly, which honors the nature of grief, but also builds a tension. If you’ve read much contemporary poetry, one of the things it often fails to do is create narrative tension. I found myself thrilled to find this here, and compelled to read on.

Of course, the absence of answers (who died? How?) is less to serve a narrative purpose, but more accurately a reflection of the psychological state of the speaker. The grief is so great as to be unspeakable. Cerpa writes: “a year where I wouldn’t let him enter–/ not this book or the book of the dead.”

Loss that cannot be named directly leaves the reader without anchor, and this book of poems would be another aimless elegy were it not for the moments of life that root the reader deeply in something real. This “something” is the speaker’s new relationship with Julia. “Today I woke next to Julia after a simple & resonant night / slowly / we are saying things / leave a toothbrush see me on your bad days too.”

We come to know ourselves through other people. Cerpa writes “who am I without my clothes & friends” without a question mark at the end,  the line meant to be read as a statement and not a question. A young man comes to know himself through fashion and through seeing himself reflected in others.

Even as Cerpa’s speaker keeps asserting that his theme is loss, death, decay, and addiction, the real theme beneath the theme is love and its particulars. Cerpa writes: “but let’s get right down to the subject / the drinking.” I don’t believe him. This is not his subject. Drinking is incidental. Cerpa keeps reminding us we are in elegiac territory, but these moments pass through the reader like holes in a tapestry. The tapestry itself is Julia; the tapestry is love: “I wish I could feel the particulars / more particulars / how Julia asked me to stop repeating my fear that she’ll leave me / so often like you’re trying to plant the seed.”

Poets rarely reveal themselves nakedly through their work, often veiling themselves behind the distortions and clarifications of metaphor, analogy, allusion, symbolism, and bare repetition. And yet, there was something refreshingly naked about Cerpa’s work, something that made me worry for him. I found myself desperately invested in wanting things to work out with Julia, even though I feared they wouldn’t. Cerpa’s ability to push me into the mental space of narrative without letting the poems become “narrative” poems pleasantly surprised me.

Things might not work out with Julia: Cerpa writes: “just the sun going down is enough to obliterate everything I love” and “we drove in the dark & missed two exits as spoke.”

The speaker so desperately needs to connect, and when human connection isn’t found, alcohol and pills also serve: “dear Gregorio… you left this world as if there were others / it happened / it happens in fractions & cirrhosis light / in silence / I hold Julia.” These lines would pass unnoticed were it not preceded by this: “the flock moves through the sky like ruin & I am only the man I am today… on my third beer.” The deceased arrive as a kind of warning, a prefiguring of things to come for our protagonist. There’s the “cirrhosis light” which we unconsciously attach to the deceased who “left this world as if there were others” (if I could write a line like that today I’d call it a good one). But I can’t help but read the “cirrhosis light” as a foreshadowing, which makes me worry for the speaker on his “third beer.” And later, I worry more. The fragments give the reader just enough information to be alarming: “three days into a bender… I don’t want another drink.”

If active addiction is the feeling “like I’ve only been alive today,” its opposite would be living for the future. If Julia reflects the aliveness of a potential future, the present means going “home to an empty apartment / have another as I run my hands through the few strands left.” One cannot help but hear Eliot here “I grow old… I grow…They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’”

Poetry is poetry when a single line can say multiple things at once. The speaker watches his reflection in the passing trains “as if I were a ghost or had wings.” To grieve is to be split apart, to be rent. The polysemous word manages to capture the poetic impulse in a single unit. When Cerpa writes: “dear Julia / what it means to me to become a man is to hold you in the place I rent,” we are to imagine his apartment, but also his grief, and the gaping hole it leaves in the heart, and how grief makes even home alien.

The poetic act is itself a kind of addiction. Cerpa writes about “doing lines alone” and how “The pills are waiting / to dissolve the day / into a bearable likeness.”

Things don’t look too good for the speaker and Julia. Cerpa writes: “when I imagine myself / I am always leaving” and later he writes “dear Julia… forgive me… I’ve come to your door as a stranger.”

“I planned to overdose in the ocean in a foreign city,” Cerpa writes, and I believe him. The ocean has always been a receptacle for hope and despair. Edna Pontellier swam into the sea until it swallowed her up. On darker days, have had such fantasies, too. Grief is a vault into which we put our darkness. We open the vault not without danger.

When prayer arrives in this book, it arrives as desperation: “Take me, / dear lord, if you’re out there / to the end of the end / of us…” 

I learned something about how to write poetry from Andrés Cerpa, something about how a narrative can be held through what is withheld, some potential that still resides in free verse between what is spoken. Cerpa doesn’t write the word “overdose” until almost the end, but the thought was everywhere and in every poem.

I felt like these poems could have been pulled directly from a journal, but Cerpa subverts even this reading by making the artifice clear in brief moments: “Notebook—“I’ve been sleeping late. Well into the afternoon or longer, / waiting for darkness to open my eyes.” Of course, even all this could be artifice, too. After all, the best way to hide artifice is to reveal it directly. It’s an age-old technique as old as Chaucer, but one not often used so directly or skillfully.

Finally, finally we get the real letter to the deceased (all along I thought we were reading letters to the dead). “Dear Dad, / You are nowhere I’ve ever been / rebuilt.”

Love is powerful. Grief is a wave that can drown you. Sometimes, grief hides love behind its vault, to protect us.

My grandmother returned to me in a dream at last. It had been almost a decade since she’d died. I had flown to Puerto Rico alone for Christmas. On Christmas day, I surfed the waves of Rincon. The current sucked me out past the big rock at Jobos Beach in 12-foot seas (on a day I really had no business being in the water). I paddled out and couldn’t fight the current. But I saw a sea turtle rise up over one of the waves, and felt my grandmother’s presence for the first time in years. I knew I would be okay. I didn’t fight the rip. I let it take me out left past the rock and I caught a wave back in, riding the cycle. Someone on the beach stole the money I had tucked into my shorts and towel. That night, I heard the coqui frogs for the first time. When I had been a child, my grandmother would tell me about them, how they filled the night with their song in Puerto Rico, and how she’d told me we’d go one day. We never went together, but there I was. That night, in my dreams, I stepped foot into her old house for the first time, and found her sitting on the couch, waiting for me, as if she had been waiting there all along.

After Puerto Rico, my grandmother visited me often.

Sometimes, it wasn’t her. Often, it was just her house. The strangler fig tree she had loved still out front (not chopped down like in real life). I’d climb it. Or I’d wander through the house opening closets, finding the things there I expected to find: her clothes, stuffed animals, books, kittens. And then, my grandmother herself, sitting on the couch.

I only see her when I’m wasting my life—hopped up on some new obsession, addicted to some new thing when I should be writing. She usually doesn’t say a thing, just gives me a look.

I wake up. Try to do better.

The Vault by Andres Cerpa at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

The Vault by Andres Cerpa at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

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.

Suzanne Simard, in her new book, Finding the Mother Tree (which I review here), writes deeply about connection: “It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse.” I’d argue that all of nature has become the object of our abuse. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how vulnerable and connected we are to nature and to each other. In the months we sat at home in quarantine, nature healed. Nature has given us a warning and a second chance, but I don’t think we’ll listen. Have we learned nothing about our need for connection to each other, and our connection to the natural world? I watch the world “return to normal” and wonder what calamities will await us next, if we don’t choose a path of radical change.

Simard’s research explores the interconnectedness of trees in the forest. She theorizes that in every forest, there are elder “mother trees” that share resources with their offspring, and also with other young trees, even those of different species. Through her research, Simard has shown how trees communicate with one another and share resources through fungal networks in the soil. Simard has revealed how a forest thrives when it is connected, and how trees and plants struggle when they are not connected to one another. Humans are the same. We thrive when we are connected to family and community and to one another. We suffer and struggle alone.

Simard writes: “I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from my own culture… Of knowing that we are tied to the land—the trees and animals and soil and water—and to one another, and that we have a responsibility to care for these connections and resources, ensuring the sustainability of these ecosystems for future generations and to honor those who came before. Of treading lightly, taking only what gifts we need, and giving back. Of showing humility toward and tolerance for all we are connected to in this circle of life.”

The understanding of our connection inspires reverence for all living things, and also commands respect.

Simard explains that “if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is the mistreatment of all.” Perhaps our gravest mistreatment involves our mistreatment of one another. The original sin of colonialism was to mistreat native peoples, and as a consequence of that, to destroy entire ecosystems.

Simard’s argument, in Finding the Mother Tree, is that we heal through connection.

When Simard was diagnosed with cancer, her doctors explained to her that her chances of healing would depend upon exercise, sleep, eating well, and reducing stress, but above all else, her healing would depend upon the strength of her relationships. Connection to family, to a healing community, and to friends helped Simard heal. It’s a lesson we might be able to bring into our own lives, a gap I perceive in my own.

Perhaps we should start our healing by honoring our connection to each other, and our connection to nature?

Simard writes: “There is no moment too small in the world. Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose, and everything is in need of care.” Perhaps we heal the earth not with grand gestures, but with small ones performed on a daily basis. It’s the trash picked up from the ground, the attention we pay to the birds and trees around us, the kindness we show to the ones we love–and to passing strangers. Nothing is too small.

Good decisions compound into greater change. In life, we only make meaningful change by making one good decision after another, day after day.

A tree grows into its full glory over many, many years. You can’t directly observe a tree’s growth. It happens so slowly. In life and in communities, growth may be similar. The good we want to see often takes a long time to manifest. It involves hard work day after day. Eventually, a tipping point is reached, but you wouldn’t see it in the middle of the work, or in the midst of the growth. Nature demands patience. Think of the smallest sea turtle struggling across the beach. It will be many years before it is big enough to return.

Trees cut off from each other suffer, get sick, and die. People do too.

We must learn how to build our lives with long-term goals in mind. We must be brave enough to know ourselves and listen to ourselves so that when the time comes to speak up, we can do so loudly, clearly, and with conviction. This is the only way we can authentically connect, the only way we can begin to change the world.

Simard writes: I was afraid to stand strong with my conviction, fight tooth and nail. But isn’t this what my trees were showing me too? That health depends on the ability to connect and communicate…”

Nature doesn’t lie to us. If we pay attention and listen, it gives us the answers we need to hear.

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

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.

If you’re reading this on paper, a tree had to die. If you’re reading this online, on a phone, or on another device, oil, the likely fuel source that ultimately powers your device, was once an ancient tree. Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is a fascinating story about one scientist’s exploration of the secret life of trees. Simard’s area of research, to understand the interconnected web of communication between trees and how this web sustains a forest, is not one that is easily tested using the scientific method. Yet, with ingenuity and grit, Simard manages to reach robust and sound conclusions, building upon indigenous knowledge and prior research. In Finding the Mother Tree we learn that forests and natural systems are intimately connected.

The scientific method, when performed properly, hardly offers up the kind of drama that makes for compelling storytelling. In fact, the proper performance of the scientific method is at best a tedious crawl toward discovery, and at worst, a long wait after which nothing happens. Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree does an excellent job of showing the painstaking work that goes into designing a successful scientific experiment, and her memoir would be boring were it not for the careful way she interweaves her personal story with the slower story about how good science unfolds. After all, Darwin’s discovery of evolution can be summed up in one sentence romantically enough today, but I imagine five years on the Beagle involved more sea sickness than thrill.

Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree offers a feminist reading of nature and natural selection. Through careful research, Simard has discovered that ancient forests are populated by elder trees, or “mother trees,” who send nutrients and water to younger trees, helping them survive and thrive when they are most vulnerable. Her research even suggests that these elder trees, when facing their imminent deaths, will dump their nitrogen and nutrients into their offspring through fungal root networks beneath the ground, giving their last resources to the next generation in their dying gasps.

Simard’s work is wide-ranging, and honors the voices of indigenous elders who have been telling colonialists for decades that nature is not a zero sum game, and that cooperation, not raw competition is how we need to manage our farms, our ecosystems, our conservation projects, and yes, our lives. Darwin’s interpretation of natural selection was a story of war, capital, and competition. Simard offers an alternative. Hers is a science that suggests that natural selection has another side, one involving cooperation and nurturing. Her research shows that “mother trees” provide nutrients to their offspring seeds nearby through root and fungal networks. 

Simard’s work draws from other researchers and from native knowledge about the interrelationships between trees and plants. Native agriculturalists have been planting the “three sisters,” corn, legumes, and squash, together for centuries knowing that these three plants help one another thrive. Elders in the Pacific Northwest have long seen the forest as connected, and have long spoken about elder trees. Unfortunately, policy and practice hardly follow from wisdom, and it often takes sound science to change the most misguided of policies that called for clear-cutting forests and planting only “profitable” trees, viewing all others as weeds. Simard’s work does just that. Over decades of research, Simard soundly revealed how trees in the forest communicate with one another, sharing not only nutrients and resources, but also sending signals to communicate impending threats so neighboring trees can raise their defenses.

Simard’s discoveries have been written about widely, but like a game of telephone, journalistic interpretation can sometimes distort the more cautious, and less sexy, scientific conclusions. The New York Times notes that Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees covers many concepts Simard presents in Finding the Mother Tree, but the Times notes that “Wohlleben was met with considerable criticism from the scientific community for drawing conclusions beyond what the data showed.”

Simard is more careful. The problem with the careful conclusion is that it isn’t always as likely to go viral. In reading Finding the Mother Tree, we are asked to be patient, to discover the connections the forest soil hides within, the way Simard does: slowly, painstakingly, achingly slow and with great uncertainty.

Part of the joy of reading Finding the Mother Tree is the marvel of watching Simard’s brilliant mind at work. Her questions are far more compelling than the unfolding of the experimental design (though her experimental designs are also themselves brilliant). After all, the experiments involve the mind-numbing tedium of putting plants in plastic bags, filling the bags with radioactive air, and then using a Geiger counter to see if the plants nearby are radioactive. The description and unfolding of this process fills up about a chapter of the book. Other experiments involve the slow process of pruning back trees, painting pesticides on pruned stumps, and carefully labeling tree plots, another whole chapter not for the faint of heart or easily bored. And then there’s the process of grinding up roots and plant matter to be sent off to a mass spectrometer for testing… 

Simard’s questions are far more sexy than her conclusions, but her conclusions are always backed by rigorous science and experimentation. Finding the Mother Tree should be required reading for any student with an interest in experimental design, if only to offer a warning to aspiring scientists about the importance of sound design, especially when results face scrutiny from the establishment. Simard’s experiments were not flawed, but they faced incredible scrutiny from policymakers and other scientists, and it appears Simard spent about as much time defending her conclusions as she did finding them.

Despite Simard’s rigorous methods, and the fact that her work built upon indigenous knowledge and earlier research, her findings were not immediately accepted. Not only did her findings throw into doubt the Darwinian idea that competition is the drive of evolution, but her findings also showed that the Canadian forest policy to regard trees that were not profitable as weeds, was misguided. Not only were Simard’s findings scrutinized for these revolutionary conclusions, but she also struggled with misogyny in forestry, a field that was male-dominated when she began.

Perhaps the most remarkable story of all is the way Simard weaves her personal story into the tale. Finding the Mother Tree is as much a story of scientific discovery as it is a story of what it means to live the life of a scientist. Simard unflinchingly shows how her marriage fell apart, her husband unable and unwilling to play the role of “Mr. Mom.” She writes about the exhaustion of raising children while also “buried in teaching courses, applying for research grants, building a research program, enlisting graduate students, being a journal editor, writing papers.” Her husband, “Don did the rest: picking the girls up from daycare, buying groceries, making dinner, working in between.” But in this role that many women will find familiar, Don was unhappy.

Throughout the book, Simard is asked to choose between ambition and family. She chooses ambition, driven in her mission to change misguided Canadian forestry policies through research, but at a high personal cost. This is a personal cost that will feel familiar to many women, myself included, who have often struggled with the tough decisions of pursuing personal ambitions or saving a marriage or relationship. (After my MFA in creative writing at Columbia University, I had to make the choice to either stay in New York and commit to the life of a writer in the city or move to Canada and get married. I chose to get married… It didn’t go well for me, or for my writing.)

And then for many women, the decision to have children isn’t trivial. It often means choosing between career and family. Simard tries to juggle it all, but she openly writes about the exhaustion it entails. She hits a deer while driving to visit her family late one night after a long week at the university.

The metaphorical juxtapositions between a scarred Douglas fir mother tree and the author preparing for her mastectomy land with pitch-perfect precision. In many ways, Simard is as precise a writer as she is a scientist. The writing may not always be thrilling or imbued with mystery, but it transmits her story with exactitude. The life cycle of a tree and the world of the forest offer many metaphors for the course of a life. Simard’s life is fascinating and not without deep tragedy. The link between the natural world, the inner world, and the course of a single life are the engines that drive this book.

Part of the challenge of doing scientist in a complex world is the fact that the scientific method requires a simplification of the very systems the scientist wants to study. Simard argues for another path, something she calls “complex science.” Slices of a human brain hardly explain human consciousness. Science that limits itself to reductionistic pursuits will fail to grasp at the larger questions we want to answer. Simard writes: “complexity science can transform forestry practices into what is adaptive and holistic and away from what has been overly authoritarian and simplistic.”

Simard wonders whether the mycorrhizal networks that link trees together in the soil could be comparable to a neural network. “Is it possible that trees are as perceptive of their neighbors as we are of our own thoughts and moods? Even more, are the social interactions between trees as influential on their shared reality as that of two people engaged in conversation… Could information be transmitted across synapses in mycorrhizal networks, the same way it happens in our brains?”

Simard’s work offers great hope that we have only begun to explore the web of interconnections in the natural world. If the trees are so connected to one another, what about the trees and us? Simard urges her readers to befriend a local tree. I think I’ll take her up on that. As Hamlet once said in the middle of a play, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

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.

“Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception,” wrote Joan Didion in her luminous essay, “On Self-Respect” (available here in its glorious entirety at Vogue). The problems of self-deception, honesty with oneself, and self-betrayal are as old as time and literature. Look no further than Hamlet to see a character weaving a web of self-deception in figurative language. Dr. Nicole LePera, in her new book, How to Do the Work finds a new language to describe the same problem. Didion called it self-deception. LaPera calls it self-betrayal. It comes to the same in the end. Self-deception may be one of the more important forms of deception when it comes to white collar crime, and other types of criminal behavior. Ann E. Tenbrunsel and David M. Messick in “Ethical Fading: The Role of Self-Deception in Unethical Behavior” write that self deception “involves an avoidance of the truth, the lies that we tell to, and the secrets we keep from, ourselves… We are creative narrators of stories that tend to allow us to do what we want and that justify what we have done. We believe our stories and thus believe that we are objective about ourselves.” One of the ways in which language and storytelling can shape moral behavior is through the use of euphemisms. Tenbrunsel and Messick show how euphemistic language like the idea of “collateral damage” in military campaigns, obscures the moral impact of what’s really taking place: civilian deaths; and they show how business terminology like “right sizing” to describe layoffs obscures the human cost. As a legal content writer I often encounter scenarios where the nuances of language matter. In everything from personal injury law to divorce law to criminal law, how you tell the story matters.

I had to look closely at my own storytelling while reading Dr. Nicole LePera’s book. I have to admit that Dr. Nicole LePera’s How to Do the Work is the type of book I’ll hide in another book jacket because I don’t want people around me knowing I’m reading it. The source of this embarrassment is something worthy of exploring. After all, Didion wrote “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.” One can just as easily clothe LePera’s book in the skin of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and call it a day.

I am not alone in admitting this desire to hide certain types of self-help books under the jackets of more acceptable, intellectual fare. It protects the ego, after all. But perhaps we could all benefit from a little humility.

While euphemism may facilitate certain forms of self-deception, facility with language in itself isn’t a defense against the most damaging forms of self-deception. As Shakespeare showed us with Hamlet, intellect and skill with words are hardly charms against self-deception, and actually, the more skillful one is in wielding these tools, the more easily one might deceive the self. Self-betrayal is easier when you have the ability to argue both sides of a decision equally well. How often have I seduced myself with my own syllogisms, while literally falling off cliffs? I climbed rocks for over ten years. This is not a metaphor.

How to Do the Work isn’t some Henry James deep dive into the essential self, nor is it an Oliver Sacks meditation on the mind. It offers readers a kind of Cliff’s Notes introduction to mental hygiene and attachment theory.

Attachment theory is the idea that our earliest relationships in life, the ones we form with our parents when we are infants, have the capacity to shape our attachment for the rest of our lives. There are basically four different types of attachment: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Those who are securely attached generally feel safe in their relationships. They explore the world, and return to the safe base of their attachments, knowing that people are there for them and that people care. Anxiously attached people cling to other people, and don’t feel comfortable exploring the world on their own. They fear the loss of other people. Avoidant people tend to be extremely self-reliant, and express anxiety when a relationship gets too close, or when loved ones expect more from them. And disorganized attachment is a mix of avoidant and anxious, and often involves a mix of alcohol and drug dependence (the replacement of connection with addiction). The attachment styles formed in the first couple of years of our lives, can follow us for the rest of our lives.

LePera does a good job summarizing the attachment styles, and helping her readers explore which type of attachment style might play a role in current relationship patterns. The book offers its readers simple and humble exercises that LePera claims worked for her and for others. The fact that I couldn’t bring myself to complete these simple writing tasks speaks volumes about me.

Perhaps my desire to hide How to Do the Work stems from my lack of humility. It takes great humility to accept help and to seek it. It can take courage to be so humble.

LePera’s solutions are simple in theory, but they are incredibly difficult to actualize in practice. She writes: “To truly actualize change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day.” Sounds easy enough, but try building new habits or breaking bad ones and tell me how it goes. The simplest solutions are often the most difficult to implement. Tell Hamlet to forgive Claudius. Tell him to run away with Ophelia and admit his love. Tell him that he’s creating false dichotomies when he frames the choice as one between suicide or murder. Tell him that he can let it all go. Tell me how that works out.

The same holds true in business practice and white collar crime. As Tenbrunsel and Messick explain, the “slippery slope of decision making” can occur when a company assumes that if past actions were ethical, current similar actions are also ethical. Illegal practices, practices that damage the environment, and practices that damage other people can become routine or even considered acceptable within an organization. “…when a practice has become routine, it is ordinary, mundane, and acceptable.” As behavior moves closer to criminality, a person or organization may not be able to see “the incremental steps we take down the road of unethical behavior.” Even as I write this, the toxic products of billion-dollar companies are being sprayed near schools.

As for me, I actually knew most of the tools I read in LePera’s How to do the Work. Have I implemented them? To be or not to be, was always the question, was it not?

In “On Self-Respect” Didion wrote: “In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind or moral nerve…character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” LePera gets at the same thing, but in different words: “This acceptance of choice in our health and well-being is the first takeaway that I hope stays with you as you continue forward in your own journey.”

It’s sounds seductively easy, does it not—to accept the fact that one always has a choice, that one always must accept responsibility for one’s own life. Try doing it for one week, though. Try not blaming other people for your poor choices. Try taking responsibility.

In corporate culture, this kind of failure to take responsibility also works the same way. When the focus is on profits and shareholders, it’s easy to pass the responsibility on to the shareholders. If an executive does something in the best interest of the shareholders, and it turns out to be unethical or even criminal, the decision-maker can all too easily blame the shareholders for his lapse of judgement.

But what follows from these insights? Didion wrote that it comes down to discipline, “a habit of mind that cannot be faked.” LePera puts it more simply: “You cannot eat better, stop drinking, love your partner, or improve yourself in any way until you become transparent to yourself.” Didion would probably add that you should be “willing to invest something.” She explained that a person with self-respect “may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.” But Didion was quick to note that discipline that isn’t in service to one’s higher values or goals, isn’t discipline at all. Rote exercises are just that. One needs to know oneself before putting discipline to a desired end. An arrow shot from a bow without a clear aim will land just about anywhere. To get any good, you’ll need to aim.

But how does one develop “aim?”

LePera calls it intuition. She advises her readers to “Learn how to spend time alone, to sit still, to really hear your intuition and witness your entire Self—even, and especially the darkest parts you’d most like to keep hidden.”

The value of this work is everything and the fruit of this labor is to have everything, Didion explains. “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is to potentially have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”

The consequences at failing at this task are immense. Failing at the task leaves us empty. We become hungry ghosts wandering the world. Didion writes: “ If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.”

In business a company in thrall to its shareholders may lose its moral compass. In business and in life, value is not found in the bottom-line alone.

Self-respect stems from authenticity that comes from within, not from performative actions that arise because we want to please others. In “On Self-Respect” Didion is ultimately writing about boundaries that arise from authentic self-knowledge. LePera’s How to do the Work calls for the same, but with more words and with a little more guidance.

In opening her chapter called “The Power of Belief” LePera writes, “It’s been said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s a direct Didion quote, but LePera doesn’t credit Didion. Maybe she forgot the source. I didn’t. LePera’s book is infused with the spirit of Joan Didion. Maybe I didn’t need to hide How to Do the Work under my Slouching Towards Bethlehem jacket after 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.

There is a particular type of literary journal, review, and online magazine in America that doesn’t pay its writers. It claims to offer its writer something else. Exposure. Publication credits. Connections. The attention of agents. Maybe something to brag about in an MFA cover letter or essay. That these reviews, magazines, and journals are glutted with mediocre work that few people read is not surprising, but what surprises me more is that good writers also are willing to submit their work to these venues.

Unless you’re trying to promote a book or get free PR for a book (think book excerpts, Q&As, and interviews), you should never write for free. Writing for free, or for pennies, kills the soul, drives down the value of (your) good writing, and hurts not only you, but writers in general.

The literary journals that offer actual exposure, prestige, and the kind of publication credits that will get you noticed, all pay.

New England Review pays its writers. The New Yorker pays its writers. The Atlantic pays its writers. Ploughshares pays its writers. Subtropics pays its writers. Any literary journal and review worth your time will pay you. The ones that matter most for your writing career, for building your audience, and for gaining you exposure, all pay.

The rest really don’t matter.

The problem with writers is that they don’t value their work nearly enough. And they submit to places that don’t really value their work, either. It makes me dizzy how writers will give their work away for free to websites, reviews, journals, and online magazines, which may themselves make steady revenues from advertisements. Other upstart magazines use the free content writers give them to build the very audience they claim to offer their writers as a perk, eventually gaining the momentum they need to command ad dollars, subscribers, paying customers, donors, and the like. Some journals and reviews have the audacity to not pay, and also to demand reading fees from submitters.

Good writing creates value for someone. You should always value your work, and you might as well create value for yourself. Launch your own platform. Let your writing work for you. Command your own audience. Bring in your own advertisement dollars. Start a Patreon. Anything. But don’t give your work away for free.

Look, I get it. When you’re starting out, you’re a little desperate. I was there.

I spent years submitting my work to places that didn’t pay. But then I stopped. I stopped because I found myself homeless and no longer able to afford to do work for free. I started writing for the private sector. Good writing has real value. It makes people money.

Don’t think your writing is good enough? If you’re trying to be a serious writer, you shouldn’t be putting out bad or mediocre work. Hone your craft. Get feedback. Take a workshop or two. And then look for paying magazines, online venues, or companies that are willing to pay you for your writing. Yes, companies. Writing for a company doesn’t automatically cause your fiction or poetic abilities to wither away. Writing talent isn’t the Wizard of Oz. Taking off the ruby slippers, putting on some boots, and writing in the trenches won’t take away your magic, I promise. It might actually make you a better writer because you’ll be able to work on your craft on a daily basis.

Take the example of Luvvie Ajayi Jones, who spent ten years working on her own online platform. Today, she claims she makes $35,000 from one hour of work, has a New York Times bestselling book, and has built a strong following. Not everyone can do this, I get it. I know I’m not there.

But she didn’t get to where she got by writing for free for some literary journal that wouldn’t pay her. Spending hundreds of dollars in submission fees a year sending work to literary journals that wouldn’t pay her was not something she listed as being important in her roadmap to success. No. She built her own platform. And now she hangs with Oprah.

In Professional Troublemaker, she writes: “People LOVE offering us exposure for payment. But exposure is not currency I can use to pay my mortgage or support my shoe habit. I be wanting to say, ‘Expose deez nuts’ sometimes. I know I don’t have nuts, but the sentiment stands. As someone who started my entrepreneur life as a blogger, I know what it’s like to be offered exposure as a serious form of payment from people who didn’t know they were being useless.”

By letting people use our work for free, we allow the systems of capital to continue to abuse us. Your writing is your capital. Don’t give it away. Don’t give your words away so someone else can build a bigger audience and attract advertisers, while you struggle to make your art.

Value your work so much that when you write for free it’s because you are donating your writing and time to a good cause (like the Sierra Club or to the homeless), or a not-for-profit you believe in, or because you want the PR because you’ve just launched a future bestseller, and want to promote your work. But don’t write for free because someone convinced you it would further your career or get you exposure.

Also, don’t write for pennies a word. People in India deserve more, and so do you. Value your work, because most writing on the internet is making someone money.

As Luvvie Ajayi Jones wrote, “People who want to pay us pickle juice for champagne work have to get used to hearing no.”

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.

To call Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour an angry breakup album is to do it a disservice. There’s enough angry breakup songs here to warrant the moniker, but there’s also so much more. Rodrigohas a wide emotional and musical range. Listening to her album is like taking a tour of pop music in the last 30 years. She’s too young to be this good. She was born in 2003. I graduated from high school in 2003. I’m so fucking old.

Everyone who is anyone has been writing about Olivia Rodrigo lately and comparing her to Taylor Swift, but I have to vehemently disagree. Yes, there’s the influence of Swift in this songwriting, but there’s also something more. The angry breakup songs in Rodrigo’s Sour remind me more of Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and Phoebe Bridgers’s Punisher than they remind me of Swift. Taylor Swift is pure pop music, Rodrigo is something else. What she is exactly is more difficult to define. She seems to have taken the pop music cannon of the last 30 years, mixed it up in her head, and put together something entirely original. This is art-making at its finest. In Rolling Stone, she’s been compared to Swift, Lorde, Billy Joel, and Billie Eilish. Others have compared her to Fiona Apple and Avril Lavigne and Hole. I haven’t seen an artist compared to such a wide range of musical influences. It’s stunning.

But there’s so much more than pop reference here. Rodrigo is a new type of feminist singer that doesn’t need to push her feminism too hard, because she embodies it so purely. She lives it. Rodrigo taps into female rage, something I’m pleased to see more often expressed in pop music. But, alongside her anger, Rodrigo is also able to express remarkable vulnerability as well. She’s heartbroken, but won’t tear another woman down in her rage and grief. Damn, she’s so much more mature than I am. I’m so fucking old.

Vulnerability is anger’s foil. We get angry to cloak our grief. Beneath the rage there’s always an exposed heart. Listening to Rodrigo’s songs feels a little like unwrapping the bandages on a wound, and finding the truest truth beneath all the scar tissue. Vulnerability seems to be in the air, and not just because Brene Brown wrote a book about it.

When Rodrigo released “Driver’s License,” it became one of the most talked-about songs of the year—and for good reason. The song is accessible and poppy, but also tips its hat to Phoebe Bridgers’s emo vibe. I have to agree with Rob Sheffield of the Rolling Stone: what’s especially stunning about this album is its command of the entire pop culture lexicon. There’s punk, there’s Billie Eilish’s alternative indie, there’s Bridgers’ emo, there’s a little of Swift’s pop—there’s everything.

In the second, and possibly best, song on the album, “traitor,” Rodrigo sings about sexual betrayal: “It took you two weeks to go off and date her, guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor…” While the song begins in a totally emo place (another track I thought I’d save for my “cry myself to sleep playlist,”), the song kicks into a higher gear toward the end. It gets angry, offering listeners real catharsis. Rodrigo raises the volume when she sings, “When she’s sleeping in the bed we made don’t you dare forget about the way you betrayed me.”

I couldn’t help but remember Alanis Morrisette singing: “Are you thinking of me when you f*** her,” in You Oughta Know.

Rodrigo taps deeply into teenage anger in Sour, an emotion that Swift only dabbles in. Swift gives us bubblegum with a little pop now and then for emphasis; Rodrigo puts the gum under the desk and scratches the chalkboard. So, while I understand the comparison, I think Rodrigo’s range is far wider than Swift’s.

In “traitor” Rodrigo sings about a boyfriend’s gaslighting. You could cry along, but you’ll have more fun punching a pillow while singing the song at the top of your lungs. There’s a complexity of self-analysis that that Swift and other pop stars never quite approach in their lyrics. Breakup songs are quick to blame the spurned partner (Justin Bieber, I’m looking at you), but Rodrigo is too smart for that. There’s a brilliant self-awareness in Sour. Rodrigo doesn’t choose easy anger. Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio writes that in songs about an ex’s new lover, Rodrigo “resists the urge to tear their new partner down.” I found myself similarly impressed by Rodrigo’s songwriting emotional maturity. Not even Alanis could pull that one off, and I love Alanis.

Rodrigo’s mom is a therapist, and that’s probably why so many of the songs have the feeling of someone who has really worked through the emotions fully by the time she’s sitting down to write the songs. In “favorite crime,” Rodrigo sings about her part of the breakdown, “I let you treat me like that. I was your willing accomplice, honey.”

Listening to Sour is a little like looking at a piece of ore with all these different veins going through it. There’s crystal and quartz and streaks of sediment, and maybe even a fossil or two. Rodrigo draws in what is necessary to make the song work.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable of all is her ability to appeal to such a wide range of women (and men). I’ve read reviews written by women in their late twenties who love her just as much as aged music critics. Is it that Rodrigo is able to live a kind of feminism so many of us could only imagine when we were 17? Is it because she brings us back to being 17 so powerfully? Is it because she can finally say all the things we thought when we were younger, but couldn’t quite say because we didn’t have yet a language for our experience back then? Has she tapped into a particular kind of nostalgia with her ability to evoke so many influences on one album? Perhaps Rodrigo’s Sour does all these things. What I know for sure: I love it.

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.