Solid Objects: Jenne Hsien Patrick
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Jenne Hsien Patrick. You can also read her work in our Revolutionary Forms issue.
I am trying to write this during a waxing moon. I can’t stay at my desk long enough to complete more than a sentence at a time. The moon is pulling me away, in levitation towards the sky. I feel my fluid state in movement, a rising wave.
The shell is a bleached cave, half dagger, half crater. Its surface is creased like skin, covered in little folds caused by the water and sand that battered it underneath the waves. Once whole, now less than half, a sharpened void, its flesh body lost to the water long ago.
The sea appears, unbidden, over and over again in my work. I can't help it. I also need to physically go to the water, regularly, once a week, to check in. Who am I today? What am I doing? Where is my body? Often if I can't find what I am looking for in writing, the only place I can answer this is at the shore.
I once dreamt of a structure half embedded in sand and water. So large that I could walk into the mouth of its nautilus spiral, curved upon itself, grown out of by a long gone soft bodied creator. Inside was everything I needed, sealed room after room of salt, rice and sugar. If I needed more I only needed to chip into the next chamber. My daily living and consumption moved back through archeological time. I understood somehow that if I stayed in that shell long enough, I could pick-axe all the way to the beginning. I could work back towards opening up that first cavern that holds all of the myths, see the truth with my own eyes.
I remember the water was up to my shoulders as I was half swimming, half walking upon the seabed. At nine years old, I knew how to swim, but in the current-filled ocean I preferred to keep in contact with the sand on the bottom, digging and pushing my way through the waves. I made my way to where my curled toes could still just reach and clutch the sandy floor when one of my big toes felt a sharp point. I dove down, wet braids swaying like kelp in the waves, and dug out the rest of the shell. I held it above my head, out of the water up to the sky, an emptied mollusk half broken and cracked through. I could see its tough inner spiral, count its interior revolutions, all open.
Oceans are themselves bodies so vast that they have always been an easy metaphor for writing. One must plumb the depths, says a common idiom of nautical measurement. My gesture lives closer to the shore, anchored in the sand and water and waves incoming, arms outreached in a merging that can only happen from this in-between place.
I found the shell again a few years ago when I visited my mother. It was in a dusty basket, filled with other shells, on the glass topped coffee table in the living room. Things excavate themselves like that at her house, something I hadn't seen in decades will suddenly have a place of honor on the mantle. As soon as I picked it up and cradled the broken tooth in my hand I remembered my toe encircling the spiraled point, and secreted the shell in my bag to bring home with me. It now sits next to me as I write, an unintentional paperweight, keeping tiny paper fragments of writing still while the fan whirrs in oscillation behind me.
“In the I Ching…. water is not an assemblage, but rather, a force - ‘water flows to what is wet.’ The water trigram helps to highlight that everything is in motion and that each moment is unique” - Arthur Sze
I can't be certain that this is the same shell, though it likely is. It is true that I might be writing upon this shell a memory of the original shell, long lost in the depths of my mother’s house. It doesn't really matter as this toothed shell is now surrendered to my daily life on my desk, washed through with this particular memory. In the present when I am writing it is this fusing and release I trust will keep me returning. Thought to text, memory to shell, of water upon my body, feet in the sand, over and over again.
Jenne Hsien Patrick is a writer and artist based in Seattle, WA. She writes poetry, comics and text/image works. She was a scholarship recipient to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and is an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Jenne's work has appeared in publications such as wildness/Platypus Press, and Honey Literary among others.