from Carl Phillips' "My Trade Is Mystery"

Thoughts on the trade of writing.

from My Trade Is Mystery

I think that’s all art is, a record of interior attention paid. Is this what Horace meant, about poetry being like a picture? I think so. The pictures are various—a picture of what no one else can understand, or more often a picture of what others do in fact understand but can never understand quite as we do, through the personal lens of our own individual experiences of the world, which is to say art presents the world both all over again and—even if only slightly, sometimes—anew, made strange.

How—oblivious to my watching it from my window—the red-tailed hawk tore open some sort of rodent, a vole, maybe, and ate it alive.

How in ancient Greek the word for “to see” is the word for “to know.”

How I’ve mistakenly, romantically, thought I’ll miss this world when I’m dead.

The dead don’t miss the world. They can’t. The dead don’t miss us.


from My Trade Is Mystery (Yale University Press, 2022)

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Over the past just-over-a-month, I’ve been teaching a multi-genre class titled “Rewriting Your Life,” where we have read a bunch of writers writing across genres—Heather Christle, Ross Gay, Eula Biss, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Lydia Davis, Lucia Berlin, Phil Levine, John McPhee, and more—and have tried to talk more about what unites these approaches to distinct genres rather than separates them.

For my final assignment, I asked students to do the following:

Directions: Attached you will find two excerpts, one from Carl Phillips' book My Trade Is Mystery, and then, the preface from Dorothy Gallagher's Stories I Forgot to Tell You. Both excerpts detail each author's approach to a life of writing -- what it means for them, how they encounter language, how they frame and reframe the stories of their lives.

For your final writing assignment, I'd like you to use the title of Carl Phillips' book as a guide: My Trade Is Mystery. And I'd like you to write your own approach-to-writing essay, titled "My Trade Is [fill in the blank]." What is your trade as a writer? Is it mystery? Is it truth? Is it beauty? Is it something else? Write your own "My Trade Is" essay.

As I told my students in our penultimate class, I would engage in this same assignment with them, and use this space to write an essay modeled after the title of Carl Phillips’ book, an excerpt of which—from his essay, “Silence”—is included above as today’s “poem.”

Before I begin, I’d like to say that Phillips’ My Trade Is Mystery is one of the more profound works of writing on writing I’ve read. That’s a genre I think is hard to get right, as it sometimes—I don’t want to say often—veers toward the prescriptive, and perhaps my only prescriptive writing advice is to avoid most prescriptive writing advice. My Trade Is Mystery is a book that feels more about the practice and attention of writing, which is to say: the practice and attention of life. It gets at something that I think people sometimes shirk away from—the notion that how we make art reflects how we live. I don’t simply mean politically or whatever, which perhaps is where our minds go when I say how we live, though this is true to an extent. I mean that how we live our lives—what we obsess over, what we choose to pay attention to, what we sacrifice, what we are drawn towards, what we grieve, and what we love—dictates, in almost every way, how we make our art.

Phillips’ My Trade Is Mystery feels more in conversation with another book of a similar style I adore: Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and Lemon (“the still life,” Doty writes in that book, echoing Phillips, “resides in absolute silence”). It’s no surprise both books are written by poets.

My copy of My Trade Is Mystery is littered with dog-eared pages and annotations, things scribbled in the margins. Its entry in my book of commonplace spans pages. Here are a few passages from it that I adore:

To acknowledge limits to what we can know about a thing—to acknowledge mystery—is not, to my mind, an admission of defeat by mystery but instead of a show of respect for it, and to this extent—I mean this as secularly as possible—it's a form of faith.

I don't want instruction—didn't want it when I started, either; I want companionship, a partner in speculation, a reminder in my alonest moments that I'm not alone entirely.

For there's an art to pretty much everything, from digging a trench to changing a diaper to tree climbing.

It helps to remember that urgency doesn't have to mean crisis.

A piece of writing...is only as interesting as its capacity for surprise.

The poem is a map, but after the fact: not a way of getting somewhere, but a record of having been lost.

Striking, right? And beautiful. I love that this book uses that word trade in its title, a word that owes its origins to something more like tread, like track. It gives the idea of work a sense of dailiness and movement, and makes art-making feel more like path-making, like people looking at a wide expanse of trees and deciding the trail they want to cut through it. Put me next to any of you—in fact, line us all up on the border of where we are and where the trees begin—and I guarantee that we will all make different trails through the oaks. That’s the beauty of it, and the joy. And the joy on top of that joy? When you are done making that trail, walk backwards and return to where you began. Look around. And then walk forwards on someone else’s path. That’s reading.

In this moment of my life, my trade feels more and more like fragility, frailty, humility, and brokenness. I think that brokenness—or our capacity for being broken—grounds the way in which I view the world. It took a serious surgery five years ago for me to even realize—later, perhaps, than many, and earlier, too, than many—that I was then and had forever been at risk of being broken. And it took that surgery’s recovery for me to come to terms with such brokenness: the slow walk with a cane to the subway, one step down with my weight on my good knee, both feet meeting on the same step, one step down with my weight on my good knee, and repeat. And then the long walk to the park I had once run to. The album I have in my phone of every day’s slow, painful effort to bend my leg just a little more. An inch one day, a few centimeters the next. The first minute-long run after over half a year without it. I found grace in the slowness that such brokenness offered, but I also found rage. I found despair, and I found hope. It transformed me. I spent my youth thinking I would run forever, and then I spent the rest of my life knowing I would not.

In his book, This Life, Martin Hägglund writes:

Even if a defining purpose of my life breaks down, the breakdown matters to me because I am striving to have a purpose…I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be.

That’s what I mean by fragile—not weakness, as culture might suggest, but rather the bounded limitations that give purpose to our lives: our mortality, our temporality, the very fact that we are so close, at all times, to being gone.

Taken as an approach to writing, the centering of something like fragility or brokenness feels more permissive to me than it might seem. For a long time, I struggled with the idea that I had only one chance to tell a story, and one chance to tell it right. For someone whose obsessions revolved around the same thing, it made coming to the page feel like a high wire act, as if I had a single opportunity to do a single story justice. But now, I think of what I mentioned earlier about the word trade, and how it echoes a word like tread, a word like track. If writing is a kind of map-making of the heart, a kind of path-making through the forest of a life, then it might be more generative to realize how big that forest is, and how many paths we can carve through it, how the possibilities within even a single story in our life take up a massive block of land in that tree-lined thing we call a soul. The story we end up telling, though? Just a wandering line through it. And the next story? Just another. It’s forgiving to know we can always make another path, or walk backward out of the path we have made. The writing we make of our lives serrates the wholeness of our lives; it makes a jaggedness out of our completion; when looked at from above, it resembles all dotted lines and edges. We make fragile coherence out of a completion we can never make sense of.

I don’t write, then, to put myself together, or to tell something perfectly. I write knowing that I am partway scattered, not all the way gone just yet, a bit scrambled and searching, trying and trying and trying. This doesn’t mean, though, that I shirk the endless possibility of revision; rather, it is the very fact of acknowledging my partwaysness, my almost-there-kind-of-brain, my halfway-broken, fixer-upper kind of self that allows me to treat revision as grace. Oh, good, I say. I am still here. Let me revisit myself; let me revise.

In a culture that valorizes the smooth, frictionless efficiency of being done rather than the wonky and laborious ongoingness of doing, centering fragility means centering the possibility that one’s journey toward being done might never quite finish, or might take on a different ending than imagined. It might pause; it might get sidetracked. And most of all, I think: it is dependent. It is dependent on the friction of our life and the friction of our needs and the friction of our time and the very good friction of our friends: those who sit with us and read our work and who offer to help complete what we are dependent on others for such completion. So much of what I have written would not have been written if it were not for friends of mine helping me hold onto whatever it was I was working on. Helping me believe. Helping me realize. Helping me see what was worthwhile in my own self. If I thought I was not fragile, and that I was not frail, and that I was not ever in need, I would have never asked, and then I would never have written.

I thought of this when I was sitting in the NICU this past week, looking at my just-born son. A worldview grounded in brokenness might easily, and understandably, be confused with a worldview grounded in despair, but I think understanding our capacity for being broken also centers in us our very capacity to heal. In that moment my son was whisked away, my wife and I abandoned every certain thing we thought we knew for sure. We abandoned the birth plans and reddit posts and must-have’s, skin-to-skin’s and golden hours, and entered a world where our love had to be tended by other people. That’s a world of healing, I think—a world of giving oneself over. It’s a hard world to enter, sometimes fucking impossible, and often the last world you ever want to be in, but there’s beauty there. It says and you thought you knew, and then you realized you didn’t, you never did. And so you look again. And now, sitting here? I remember starlight on the just fallen snow, the whole city in the window out below. I remember the calm, vast silence of witness. I remember the big hearted warmth I felt upon seeing someone adjust my son’s swaddle so he wouldn’t get caught in the wires. You prepare for what you prepare for, but in the end, you give yourself over to whatever is.

Over the past week or so, out of some strange fixation I had before the birth of my kiddo, I have been reading Moby Dick, sometimes out loud while my son is swaddled with me. It is a far more playful and tender book than I remembered; there is a wellspring of common love at the heart of it. At one point, Melville writes:

Heaven have mercy on us all…for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

It is something like mercy that is on the other side of one’s admittance of fragility. Grace, too. And certainly wonder. God, I, too, am cracked about the head. And I certainly need mending. But I know that I love, and I know that I need love. And I know that there is a space between where I am right now and whatever will happen to me in this next second, and the next, and the next. And though I don’t know what is in that space, I know about it. I know that I may not know what will happen, but I know that whatever might happen has the capacity to surprise me, move me, break me, hold me, fill me, and more. And so I don’t fight it. I don’t pretend at certainty. I walk right into it.

When I write, I write into that space, too. Into that space between where I am writing and wherever the period falls. I write not knowing exactly what will happen, but still allowing for it. I write that way because we are too fragile to claim to know it all. Too mortal, too fickle, too broken, too temporal, too much, too not enough. Perhaps that might make you want to hold on to whatever you do know, and hold it tight. But why would I, knowing only what I know: myself. Small, broken thing, I am, lovely and mortal. And so: to have a chance to be surprised by something I had not known? To be alive, right now? In this moment? And maybe, even, the next? Call it grace. The impossible-to-name thing that says you can have another chance, and another breath, and another word, and another sentence. You can have it now, and now, and—

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1. In the wake of the attacks on Iran, I recommend turning to this piece by Kaveh Akbar, written last year, worth revisiting over and over again, for as long as those with power wield violence and then manufacture our acceptance of such violence. I condemn it all. To allow for it is to allow for the worst: the strike against a girl’s school in Iran, the “record pace” of violence.

2. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

3. The word ceasefire seems to be just a word. As news outlets report, Israel has violated the terms constantly, and, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted awhile ago, the language of ceasefire does not mean a language of peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it certainly does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.