Did any of you have an Ed Emberley drawing book called Make a World as a child? (You can see someone flip through it on YouTube here.) Emberley broke down hundreds of everyday objects, animals, plants, buildings, and bodies into component parts beginning with the simplest shapes. By paying attention to each part and its relation to the other parts, you could learn to draw all kinds of things. I loved this book. I loved looking at all the orderly grids of shapes becoming animals or castles or furniture. And I loved that I could go to the book with something I didn’t know how to draw and learn to see it as pieces, put those pieces together, and then know how to draw its basic form. Ed Emberley’s book taught me to improvise, and it taught me about seeing, and it also taught me that images are made by people. As a person, that was an important lesson: there is no image made that isn’t made by a person, and so you, too, can make images. It never felt, using Make a World as a reference, that I was intended to make a perfect copy of Emberley’s drawings, although I sometimes tried (because those neat little rectangular deer were so charming). Instead it felt like Emberley was just showing me that it was possible to draw things, that drawing wasn’t something out of my hands and reserved for Real Artists but was instead very much in my hands, in every sense.
Every page in the Ed Emberley drawing book was covered in dozens, even hundreds of drawings, all of which I could make myself (and make my own), as many times as I wanted. And every other reader could, too: the adult across the table, the sibling to my right. Firetrucks and cows, apple trees and suspension bridges: we drew them all, and multiplied the world at our fingertips across sheet after sheet of mimeograph paper my dad brought home from work.
On the other side of the table, where the adults sit with their newspaper and their notebook, there is a different kind of accounting, and the world does not present itself as quite so multiple. For example, there is only one set of Pulitzer Prizes given each year. One set of Ruth Lilly Awards. One set of Guggenheims. Getting onto the New York Times bestseller list is both unlikely and byzantine, and the spots are limited each week. The NEA goes to twenty or twenty-five writers each year. The Cullman Center Fellowships, the Whiting Awards, the Stegners; Arts Council awards from your state, region, or nation; the Pushcart Prizes, all go to just a few writers each year. The most competitive MFA programs take five or ten or fifteen people a year and give them two or three funded years to learn to write. In the first quarter of 2020, Publishers Marketplace reported a total of 14 ‘deals’ (sales of manuscripts to publishing houses) over $500,000. The math of that side of the table is a math of slim chances. It’s the math of the lottery ticket, but a lottery ticket costs a dollar and a life as a writer costs a whole life, however you spend it. Those statistics about what success looks like in the commercial world of literary publication are quite a lottery to hitch a writing life—meaning a human life, a life of making things, asking big questions, thinking with others and alone, being in the world—to. But how else?
It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of attention to what’s in front of us to make what only we can make. It takes a lot of time and patience to take in the world around us—the world of shapes and forms, traditions and norms and habits—and to make something of it that really does what we are; that, in Hopkins’ words, “selves—goes itself”, that “speaks and spells” itself.
The world of public acclaim and awards, the world of pressure to publish poems and stories and essays and books and and and (wait—can we ask why, first?)—the world of status as a Writer, or as a good writer or as the Best Writer, is like a sun. It is so massive that its gravitational pull acts on us even, maybe especially, when we aren’t aware of it. And, like the sun, sometimes it gets between us and the thing we are doing, the human thing we are meant to do—make art, write—and because it is so large and bright it’s hard to see around it. Publishing and awards are out there at the center of the solar system, and we float around them, drawn by their gravity, until what we produce finds a way toward the center, often along well-established routes of access, privilege, power, and money. And so it can seem like the thing we are meant to do is to publish, or to win awards, or to receive acclaim.
But wait—that’s not what Ed Emberley’s hand says.
What Ed Emberley’s hand says is: you can make a world, not you’re going to get a book deal, and what it says is look at what you’re doing—there’s real pleasure there! Maybe it says, Shakespeare said “present mirth hath present laughter” or maybe it says, Robert Herrick said “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” and hey, here’s how you draw a rose. It definitely doesn’t say your life is a game of chance and you should only make bets that look like winners from the start. But okay, it’s a talking hand; you might be disinclined to take its advice.
Sometimes I forget that at the end of the line of shapes on the page (let’s say these basic drawn shapes can be a metaphor for all the ways we learn about writing—the practice we get with received and organic forms, how we learn about style, what we receive from a tradition in this or that genre, our awareness of the kinds of books that make money or get reviews in the New Yorker) there is a drawing that could only have been made by Ed Emberley. And when I make those shapes, no matter how carefully I look to his model, naturally my hand transforms what I make into something only I could make. And that that is the right outcome: not a replica, a transformation.
Something else I loved about the pages of Make A World—actually, I still love this—is that they were full. There is no page where there are not a dozen things happening. Often there were little visual jokes, like the moment the seal gets a red ball, or the top view of the turtle, or the baby skunk, or the backhoe dumping out gravel. You can almost see Emberley having an idea in those drawings. Those moments of play seem to me not like invitations to copy but invitations to invent and imagine, and models for how to have ideas that don’t end with a copy that can be checked off but end with me drawings things that aren’t even in the frame. The drawing doesn’t end at the end of the row of shapes; it begins there, because that’s the point where your hand takes over and figures out what comes next. I loved that the pages were so full of possibilities and that the possibilities all seemed to point to more off the page. There is no end to imagination. You just keep going, all your life, and that’s how you make a life, and an art. It’s kind of the opposite world, if you think about it, to the world of waiting for awards and prizes and acclaim and publication with a Big Five house (or with Faber, or with Graywolf, or whoever is your ideal publisher).
The world of Ed Emberley’s Make a World is open. You take a running jump off the end of the page, and there you go, making your own world. You start by learning to draw a seal, and then you imagine the rocks, the ocean water, the seaweed, the barnacles, a sea kayaker, their helmet, gannets or oystercatchers or puffins, weather blowing in from the west….
Now what could a writing world like that look like? Starting with the things you learn to make by reading but that, in making, is so transformed it could only be your own, and growing from the word toward the world—not the publishing world, grateful as we may be for its existence, but the world of our invention and our shared relation with everything that lives? What would a writing world look like where we could see writing (a poem, a book) not as the end of our imaginative work but as the start, a point from which to begin making everything that touches a poem or a book?
I think such a writing world would be full and busy, not scarce or scanty. It would have to feel endless in the way the drawings made as a child felt endless—more always possible. It would occupy our time and hands and minds as well, and in doing so I think the very doing would make us happy, the kind of happiness one gets when one is making something with thought and care. It would probably have to be close to home, in full or in part, and be of a scale that could involve us directly. It would have to be relatively small—not in idea or in scope or in imagination but in terms of production and material, because things need space. It would have to be made of materials we could get our hands on, with equipment we could use ourselves.
There are very real pressures to take part in the public side of the literary world (by which I mean the system of prizes, fellowships, awards, and publication that is for the most part driven by an economics of scarcity, made precious by how few make it to the center). And even those of us who have been published or won awards still experience the discomfort that comes about when those awards or publications enact their gravitational pull on us: wondering what the point is of writing, or why we do this work when finding readers is so hard and the odds are so slim. In my line of work it’s basically de rigeur to publish, and I wouldn’t have gotten my job if I hadn’t published books with a major literary nonprofit press in the US. I’m very grateful to a professor in the final year of my MFA program who took me at my word that my “publishing strategy”, which we had to outline for a class project, was to print a dozen copies of my MFA thesis and leave them on buses around the city; that professor sent my manuscript to Milkweed, and that resulted in the publication of my first book. Without that professor and that kindness and that book, I would not be where I am.
But I would still, I am absolutely sure of it, be writing. And I would definitely be making books, because making books is something I’ve done since I was a very little person, looking at Ed Emberley’s drawings and making my own. Making books is something we can all do, right here at the table between us, and it’s a first step toward a second, third, millionth world made by hand to live alongside the world of commercial publishing and to remind us that writing is not the end but the beginning—that writing teaches us, step by step, to make a whole world.
To me bookmaking is also one of the most immediate ways to remember that we can refuse to compete; we can treat the logic of the competitive system we live within as optional. We can divert, invent something else. After all, aren’t we ‘creative’ writers? Doesn’t that mean, to make something up? If we can make a poem, we can make a book; if we can make a book, we can make a room for that book and others’ books; we can make a reading or an event series. We can begin to see and name the structures and norms we live inside, and we can follow that other ordinary writer in saying, sometimes, that we would “prefer not to”. Making the text is just the first shape on the page, and then our imagination can say—go!
Publishing is a joy; it’s a pleasure and a real honor to join with others who think and have thought about writing and who write or wrote; with those who read and those talk about ideas. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be read. It is so, so special and it is also so, so normal—it is so human to want to make things, including language-things, and to share them with other people. The trick, to me, is remembering that the people whose work is made visible within mainstream publishing and prizegiving’s economy of scarcity are not the only people who write, talk about ideas, think about books. We all can. And the people who can make publishing possible are not only in the well-known houses in New York or London; they are also right here, sitting across the table from us. Pass the scissors. Pass the thread.
If we want to see one another, let’s see one another. If we want to be seen, ourselves, let’s make a space in which—it doesn’t matter if it is small or humble; that seems very natural and neutral to start and also to go on—we can be seen by one another, and in which to see others’ work.
Redirect. To your fingertips. My fingertips.
If scarcity is the engine that orients our imaginations toward structures that mostly leave most of us out, then muchness must be part of the reply. Availability. Right-here-ness. The images above are a right-here technique I often use, that I’ve been using since 2007 or so and that has alleviated much of my worry and also much of my loneliness in writing. Make a book of your own. Right now. With whatever is to hand, about nothing much at all. Then make one of your friend’s work. Then make a dozen copies of your friend’s book: now you have a press. Now there’s one more place that can publish other people.
You want to be published? You want your friends to be published? Make the world in which that’s possible. Use the copy machine after hours. Save up and buy a printer. Get friendly with your local offset and digital shop (they probably do a lot of ad printing and will enjoy taking your jobs on). Get a few friends in on it if you don’t want to or don’t have the skills to do it all alone. You don’t have to wait for Hachette or The Song Cave or anything in between to see you, though they may well and how wonderful if they do: in the meantime, which is your life, you can see you. You can see the ones you love. You can make the books to hold the things you’re thinking and seeing. You can make them now, with your own hands: as pamphlets, or as posters wheatpasted to the sidings of construction sites, or as postcards mailed to anyone who’ll pay for a stamp, and, doing so, you’ll be in a rich tradition, still ongoing, of people who’ve looked at a book and thought, well, I can do that. And it’s not one or the other, if you make a book of your own: who knows what else is possible for that writing? But right now, if you have the choice between longing to be published by someone else and making a book of your own or a friend’s yourself, I’d say make that book.
You can make a world.
About as often as a nonfiction teacher reminds their students that “essay” comes from the French verb “essayer”, which means “to try, to attempt”, a poetry teacher reminds their students that the word “poem” comes from the Greek verb for “to make”. And that’s the point, isn’t it? In the end? Not to win, but to make; to be part of the made and making world, to make things? To refuse, even, the terms by which some of us might be ‘winners’ and the others—not? The point of writing poetry is that the poem leads us, as Ed Emberley’s drawings do, not to a single end but to the edge of the page which we are meant to leap off of, toward the whole world, also ours to make alongside everyone else. Make poems, yes. Make books, make magazines, make newspapers; make postcards and posters, make classrooms and residency spaces, make kitchen table conversations and make walks where anyone can join. A world. The poem doesn’t end at the end of the line; the ‘aim’ of writing is not the bestseller list. It’s here: your hand holding the pencil as your mind suggests the horse’s mane not hanging but flowing, and the legs, then, not standing but running. And the grasses, then, and the wind bowing the grasses down so that they resemble the mane of the horse; and the flowers among the grasses, and the pollen invisibly flying from them, and the wide open sky under which everything is possible.
Thanks for reading. See you in a week!