Haunted Space Exploration: Jieyan Wang
Astronauts perform some strange superstitions before they shoot off into orbit to explore the vast expanses of space. NASA commanders play cards with the tech crew the night before a launch, continuing until the commander loses a hand. Russian cosmonauts pee on the right rear tire of their transfer bus on the way to a launch. These are strange quirks, but they are crucial for these space-explorers to feel comfortable before and during a mission.
Writers also have rituals that must be performed in order to shake off bad vibes and get into a zone where they feel comfortable putting words on a page. When we read a great book, we only see the final product, and not the obsessive care put into the work environment that allowed for its creation. In SPACE EXPLORATION, our goal is to demystify writers’ environments and explore the ways in which they’ve been created and curated, and how they affect the mental spaces of the authors who inhabit them.
We asked writers to tell us about their necessary spaces; the physical spaces as well as the desired headspace to write. We asked about their rituals— special meals that have to be eaten pre-writing sesh, only writing in purple ink, lucky pieces of clothing that may have once inspired a particularly powerful passage. We asked them to engage our senses and tell us which aspects of process must be deliberate and what is arbitrary. These are the spaces they shared with us.
This is the one of five features from select authors in our HAUNTED issue, this time featuring Jieyan Wang, whose story “Rain & Rain” will appear in HFR 67.
Most of my writing life has taken place at the desk in my childhood bedroom. The desk—which I sometimes like to call my “everything desk”—is usually chaotic. It’s filled with loose leaf paper, textbooks, and pens. Not all of it is from writing; many are from assignments and projects I had to complete in high school. From freshman to senior year, my writing and academic life have intermingled on my desk: short stories on top of lab reports, stray poems tucked with notes from U.S. history class.
In high school, my days were often crammed with college applications and schoolwork. However, I managed to carve out an hour a day to write at my desk. All I needed was a pen, a laptop, and a closed door. The door to my room always had to be closed. A closed door meant peace to me. It meant that my room was a special space now, one for creative expression and forgetting about the worries of my busy life.
I turned eighteen and graduated from high school recently. Instead of going to college right away, I’ve chosen to take a year off from school, a “gap year.” I’ve been spending the fall of my gap year doing conservation work, living on a farm, camping, and generally appreciating nature. Since I’ve been living in outdoors spaces and completing outdoors tasks, my writing space is now less of a space and more of a collection of objects. I only carry my laptop and notebook with me, and I write whenever my schedule allows. Sometimes, I find myself sitting in my tent, jotting down descriptions of the rain outside. Other times, I am in a grass field, thinking about how the field looks like the one I saw in my dreams the night before.
In a sense, my writing space has become less ritualistic. I don’t always have a door to shut when I want quiet. And, I don’t set aside a specific hour in the day to write anymore. I write when I feel the urge to reach for my pen, and spill words to my heart’s content.
It’s hard to say, though, which space I’ve enjoyed more. On the one hand, I love the freeform, nature-based one I have right now. There’s an unspeakable joy in seeing a goose flying overhead and putting its movements into poetry lines. On the other hand, I do miss some of the focus I had during the school year. The “special hour” I made for myself, the enclosed space, the intensity of it all—it made me excited for words, for a new story.
I don’t know how my space will change when I enter college next year. Maybe it’ll revert back to my academic-writing mess of my high school life. It might turn into something entirely different. Whatever happens, I’ll embrace the new space and life I’ll have. I welcome stories, both ones from my past and ones that will be told in the future. Because, no matter where I am, there is always a place for words. There is always a place to take out a notebook and sing praise to the world.
Jieyan Wang is a writer and rising college freshman at Harvard University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Hayden's Ferry Review, CutBank, and elsewhere. She is also a reader for The Adroit Journal.