EMILY STILLMAN

working out the kinks 

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About a year ago, sitting over empty plates at the kitchen table, my grandfather reached into his wallet and handed me two items. The first was a photograph, taken in 1951, of my grandfather as a young man, smiling into the camera with a cigarette in hand. The other was a photocopy of a newspaper clip from about 1978, when my mom was just eight years old. The headline reads “Working out the kinks” alongside a photograph of my grandfather running near 9 Mile Road “taking advantage of an indian summer.”

Sitting there in the kitchen, I was overcome with something— respect, maybe, awe, nostalgia for a life I hadn’t lived. I would come to realize that the artifacts my grandfather had just handed me meant more to me than I could have ever imagined.

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For as long as I can remember, writing has been a constant challenge, a debate, a war, a relief, an outlet, a simple joy and a complicated experiment. So, when I began my experiment cycle for the writing minor, I was posed with a dilemma: what direction should I go in? I’d just taken English 325 and spent the semester exploring several places I call home. I’d written, workshopped, reviewed, revised… I’d thought long and hard about people, places and events I’d stored away, and started to excavate the complex mine of my personal experiences (and writing material).

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Eventually, I decided to turn back to the basics. As I rifled through old papers and essays, I landed upon one in particular that caught my attention. It was, in fact, a college essay, one of many I wrote in fall 2015 as I applied to colleges my senior year of high school. This essay was for, fittingly, the University of Michigan, and it answered the prompt asking to describe one community to which I belong.

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I had written about running: about my cross country team, my favorite course, and most of all,  about my grandfather and our linked history as runners. This essay reminded me that three years ago, piled under college essay prompts and the hustle of senior year, I had started to uncover something much larger than I’d realized. What had started as just one more task checked off my list in the college application process had somehow morphed into somewhat of a confession, almost a poem about family and history and the sky and my body and the sport I love. I had tucked it away into the archives of iCloud and went about my life.

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Nearly three years later, and I’ve finally taken the time to explore this topic.

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As I began my first experiment — a challenge to run daily — I conducted an experiment within an experiment. I began to look through some old papers and files in pursuit of inspiration. I had the article clip my grandfather had given me tacked to my bulletin board, and tucked the photo away deep inside my drawer. As I revisited these items, I knew instantly that my grandfather was a crucial and fundamental piece of this story.

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In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami writes the following:

 

"Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as whole. "

 

I discovered this book during the early research stages of my first experiment, and this idea of living life to the fullest, out of the fog, as Murakami writes, stood out to me. So much of my childhood, so much of my growing up, has been shaped by the clearness of the sky at an early morning track practice, by my grandfather and cousin’s long winded accounts of marathons run across the country, by the words we understood better because we know what it feels like to be breathless and finally able to breathe at the same time.

 

But maybe you don’t need a word for that, just a shared glance and a familiar ache in the calves.

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With this in mind, I launched into my second experiment hoping to explore how to portray more with less words. As a writer, I tend to be very wordy. I love to weave sentences together, find ways to express places and people and feelings that are hard to explain. But as I began to consider running, I thought that maybe I could capture this sentiment in a more concise way. I wanted to challenge myself to capture feelings without the comfort of flowery sentences. As a result, I decided to create a photo essay. I collected photographs from my weekly runs or that I felt associated with my family history, challenging myself to write short captions to supplement the photographs.

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For my third and final experiment, I wanted to do exactly the opposite of what I had tried to emulate through my photo essay. I wanted to experiment with a genre I’d never really touched on before, that I felt lends itself to my knack for wordiness. With that, I launched into the prose poem. This one required some internet digging: I ended up familiarizing myself with a man named Russell Edson, the so-called “godfather of prose poetry”. Edson’s poems are puzzling and delightful, and I found myself enthralled with the mysterious simplicity of his work:

 

“A hand lifts of a cup of coffee out of the planet’s gravity to the face; it proceeds.”

—“The Indefinite Article”

 

“Two monkeys on my back. One real, the other, not. Which one is, and which one’s not, is hard to say. And so there are two… Sometimes I almost know, but then they move.”— “The Addiction”

 

I experimented with my own prose poetry, and found it to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I poured every emotion I could think of onto the page and managed to pull together something.

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And now we’ve arrived at my final project: a collaboration, you could say, of these moving pieces, of these separate parts of my soul. I set out for a seven day experiment where I ran to different places, capturing a photograph of each, and journaling afterward about what was on my mind that particular day. My daily life, especially lately, has been stressful. I’ve found more often than not that I’ve been lost in the fog. There are two monkeys on my back... and I’m going to keep running.

 

After all, I’m just trying to work out the kinks.