Solid Objects: Tatiana Ryckman
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.
Our final edition is written by Tatiana Ryckman.
First there was a sweater. Thin and grey and, with time, a little pilled. It was the ugliest thing on a sale rack at a time when I was mailing my first drafts to J.D. Salinger. The manila envelopes always came back unopened, but I was convinced that the sweater could imbue me with a seriousness even famous old men would recognize.
Much later there was a desk, which was not especially important until the day my first book came out and I took the desk to the curb with a resolute despondency. The sweater went to the thrift store around the same time.
Now, I do not write. Not as a rule, but as a practice. It’s a trick to write without acknowledging it—to memorize paragraphs while running through an unfamiliar neighborhood. To scrawl a few lines on a receipt at a stop light or mid-conversation with a sister; while waiting for a flight or teeth cleaning.
There is perhaps nothing more creatively crippling than sitting in one place with the familiar objects to which I am attached. So, the ritual has become the dogged absence of ritual. But that doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of objects in any of these spaces—life is littered with solid objects. The curiosities other people leave by the road, the itchy nap of waiting room chair upholstery, the rosary hanging from my rear-view mirror wrapped in an elaborately-folded dollar bill, the notebook that has permanent residence in my purse and the one on the nightstand, the extra-thick sharpie I always end up using in the car, frustrated I can’t find a pen.
What I’m trying to say is that I think we all want a piece of advice or object—a spell or talisman—to make trudging through our own thoughts a little less arduous. But while I have devoted myself to objects and people in an attempt feel smarter and more interesting, or to sate a whining desire, nothing seems to make writing (or living, if this is a metaphor) any easier.
The best I can do is to cultivate a blind spot that prevents me from seeing whether or not I’m writing, and to be reassured that not seeing it coming means it could happen at any moment.
Tatiana Ryckman is the author of the novel The Ancestry of Objects and a novella, I Don’t Think of You, Until I Do. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, 100W and the Western New York Book Arts Center. She can be found in Buffalo, NY and at tatianaryckman.com.