"The Song of the Lark" by Willa Cather, the Lure of Impossible Things, and the Desire to Create

I recently found myself on a plane, heading from Boston to Detroit and once more from Detroit to Lexington, Kentucky.

Living in central Kentucky, LEX is a convenient airport for me to travel out of. It’s a short thirty-minute drive from my garage to the airport’s short-term parking lot, and since it’s a fairly small airport, parking isn’t too expensive.

The downside is that I rarely have direct flights to my final destination. Working for a Boston-based company, I need to head to New England a few times yearly. I think I’ve had a direct flight on one occasion, and that was only because I decided to make the two-hour drive to Cincinnati for a flight that took just a few minutes more than my drive had.

My point in all of this is that I’ve developed an interesting relationship with airplanes, airport lounges, and even the dreadful rows of uncomfortable pleather seats in airport terminals (do I sound too out of touch if I lament the fact that I can’t always await my flight in a cozy lounge?). I hate mindlessly scrolling on my phone, so when possible, I prefer to use my time between (and often during) flights to do something more rewarding. I’ll crank through a few work emails, open my bookstore and think about rebuilding it, decide my internet isn’t strong enough to handle Shopify development work, and then set my sights on whatever fiction project I’ve got brewing at that moment.

In my most recent travels– mainly as I was in the air between Detroit and Lexington– I opened my typewriter and started a new document.

(Aside: no, you’re not reading that wrong, and no, I’m not trying to be overly twee. I like to use the Freewrite Traveler to write on the go since it’s distraction-free and more manageable to balance on flimsy tray tables than my full-size Macbook.)

As my fingers lingered over the keys, I was unsure what to write. I have a fiction project I’ve been working on for a few months, but I’ve hit a wall with it and want to take a break. A big part of the plot hinges upon a romance that feels increasingly contrived the more I write about it. I’m not even into the second act of that manuscript and I feel ready to shred it and start again. Besides, I was tired and a little hungover and didn’t feel like putting in the mental energy to disentangle my protagonist’s sordid love life.

So, I decided to start something from scratch– something that would scratch the itch of wanting to write but which I wouldn’t have a mental and emotional quagmire to wade through as I wrote.

Simplicity was my goal, but I was still frozen. Having no clear path ahead, my wheels spun. With my manuscript I’ve been working on, at least I have a sense of where things are going, and I can manage to talk myself into powering through the horrible forced-romance era to get into something more substantive. With a blank document in front of me and nothing but a vibe rattling around in my fatigued skull, I was adrift and had no idea how to proceed.

As a kid and as a teenager, I used to open up a document and just start writing. Whatever came to me is what I put down. There was no planning or concern about coherence, character growth, or clear plot progression. I was able to regurgitate words onto the page until I felt I had reached the end– resulting on more than one occasion in manuscripts well over the 225-page mark.

Now that I’m old enough to have been called a DILF (a term I find both insulting and flattering), I must have outgrown some of that blind willingness to write by the seat of my pants. I’d like to think it’s because I know enough now to understand the mechanics of story and want to be thoughtful in approaching my craft. Maybe it’s just because I still hear Lisa Cron’s voice preaching the gospel of story each time I sit down and write.

Forgive me, Mother Cron, for I have sinned– I haven’t done a single Story Genius rewriting exercise for my current WIP.

But I think there’s something more than that. You see, these days, I view writing as a way to explore my worldview, and I want what I write to reflect who I am as a person and how I want to show up in the world. That puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of a hobby– of something I view as fun.

These days, I’m particularly invested in exploring themes of childhood, solitude, and secrecy, and I find myself repeatedly drawn to Appalachia and similar locales in my work. The burden of navigating life in the Appalachian foothills as a queer kid and always feeling like you’re teetering at the edge of losing everything is one that I have carried. As much as I want to play with that sense of a lost childhood in my writing for my own katharsis and hopefully a similar glint of recognition and healing my readers, at times, it feels a little too close to home.

I feel like I don’t yet have the skills to give the story I want to tell its due.

Part of this, I think, is compounded by the fact that I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which is one of the best and most beautifully constructed looks at life in Appalachia that I’ve ever come across. It’s also a punch in the gut and, at times, hard to read. Demon could be my cousin– he’s undoubtedly a dozen someones I grew up with.

And so I found myself staring unwisely at the fact that I am no Kingsolver and sure as hell won’t write as good of an Appalachian novel as Demon Copperhead.

Yet I wanted to write and refused to let a good two and a half hours of writing time (minus a few “just a water and a Biscoff, please” breaks) go to waste. Forcing myself to embrace my once-routine approach of just writing, I decided to abstract the setting a bit, opting for a rural mountainous region like a hybrid between Appalachia and the Alps. I’ve wanted to play with the motifs of sons and fathers misunderstanding each other and the enduring echoes of childhood friendships throughout life, so I set up the scene with a father who loses his temper when he drinks and a son who can’t seem to live up to what he thinks are his father’s expectations. In that plane ride, I made it to the point in the narrative where viewers have a vague understanding of the father and his connection to the family farm, and the son who is about to start school for the first time, where he’ll meet the boy who is to become his best friend.

Since arriving back home, I’ve been thinking about this story and where it’s going. Having grown up in the Bible belt, I remember feeling like the flames of Hell were always just about to consume me. Back when I prayed, I used to pray to God that I would die while still a child– still innocent– since my previous prayers of being made straight had gone unanswered and I didn’t want to pay the price of growing up gay. So, I took a look at this primordial soup of a story and played a game of what if?

• What if my protagonist is literally on the cusp of being consumed by the flames of the hells?

• What if my protagonist makes a deal with a devil (not the devil of Christian tradition because I have no interest in wading into those waters) because he thinks it’ll smooth things over with his dad, but it only makes things worse?

• What if that childhood friend that my protagonist is so afraid of losing does reject him because of who he becomes? Worse, what if my protagonist accidentally hurts his friend in an effort to prove himself worthy of love?

• What if my protagonist begs some god or the devil he made a deal with for release only to be told no?

The deeper I dive into these what-ifs, the more I feel like this story could have legs, and the more excited I am to continue diving into it.

At the same time, writing this story feels scary. Even with the layer of fantasy and the abstraction of setting, it feels very close to home and touches at that part of myself I don’t like looking at directly for too long. Still, it’s a story I want to tell– the story I know I need to work my way through if only for myself.

Caught in the tension between desperately wanting to write this story and feeling like it’s impossible to tell well, I find myself reflecting on The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (one of my all-time favorite novels) and Heather Love's essay “The Lure of Impossible Things” about Cather’s transition from a corporate office to the literary world and the parallels between her arc and Thea Kronborg, the heroine of The Song of the Lark.

In Love’s article, there is a beautiful excerpt of a letter Sarah Orne Jewett (another amazing late 19th and early 20th-century writer) wrote to Willa Cather. I’m going to include the excerpt in full because I think it’s worth representing in its entirety.

Love then writes, "With a remarkable homing instinct, Jewett put her finger on Cather’s own ambivalence. Cather was caught up in the world of the office and at the same time she longed to escape– her ambition still drew her to ‘impossible things’ and to the dream of writing ‘to the human heart.’”

In referencing Cather being drawn to “impossible things,” Love is making a connection between Cather’s creative desires at this point in her life and a line of dialogue in The Song of the Lark in which Thea Kronborg is speaking with Dr. Archie, a friend and mentor figure, about what she wants in life.

In the scene, Dr. Archie confides in Thea that he wants to strike gold. Literally. He has invested in mines all over the Great Plains and out to the West, and his primary ambition is for these investments to pay off and grow his wealth. As part of this conversation,he asks Thea what it is she wants to get out of life. This comes at a point in the novel where Thea has already reflected in other situations that money is a limiting factor in what she believes she can do, so Dr. Archie asks if its money that she needs or is seeking out.

That’s when the two of them have this exchange:

Over the course of the novel, Thea relentlessly pursues impossible things through her pursuit of art and music. The impossibility she refers to in this passage could be thought of as a type of grandeur– the impossibility of a poor farm girl rising to stardom as an opera singer, which is something she successfully does by the end of the novel.

But I think it goes a bit beyond that. We also see Thea wrestling with what it means to be an artist and to create art throughout the novel, struggling to understand what it means to create and be devoted to her craft. In spite of this, it is when she is performing and dissolving in the music that she is most whole and satisfied.

I think the latter is the impossible things Thea refers to– to create and perform and find herself at one with the art she longs to create. The potency of art is a motif that runs throughout the novel and follows Thea through her childhood and into her adulthood. There’s a famously striking scene later in the novel when Thea is out west in Panther Canyon, Arizona and she goes out into the stream nearby to bathe.

Cather writes,

This revelation represents a sort of turning point for Thea in which her perspective on the role of art in her own life shifts, and it’s not long after this scene that she starts to have major breakthroughs in her career as a singer. In her acknowledgment of art as a means of capturing the fleeting beauty of life, it’s as if a superpower awakens within her, and she acknowledges what she can do when she sings.

To selfishly bring this back to my own manuscript woes, I find myself in a predicament where I, like Thea, long for impossible things– being able to tell the story I wish to tell with a sense of confidence and clarity. Yet, like in Jewett’s words to Cather, I haven’t yet allowed myself to see my experiences from the outside, and undervalue the perspective I can bring to my work. Jewett’s letter to Cather also serves as a forceful reminder to get out of my corporate bubble more and devote time to writing alongside others who challenge me to grow and do better.

It’s a theme that has often come up on the Inkwell Insights podcast. Just about every guest I have spoken to has highlighted the importance of finding a writing community to be a part of in some capacity, and the value that has for pushing you outside of your comfort zone and expanding your skillset as a writer. I shouldn’t be surprised that someone as perceptive and often ahead of her time as Sarah Orne Jewett would also echo these sentiments forward to me via Cather via Heather Love many decades later.

After all… what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?

1  Marcus, G., & Sollors, W. (2012). A new literary history of America. Harvard University Press.

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