I used to think writers needed intense life experiences for their work to be valid. Surviving childhood trauma, death of loved ones, grinding poverty, violence, or illness was necessary to produce lasting, meaningful work.
Now I think this is BS. First, sadness and joy come with being human—like fries with a BLT at a roadside diner. Maybe a young widow’s sadness is not on the same level as the sadness of a child who has lost a favorite stuffed animal, but both feel a sense of profound loss at never seeing their special one again.
Second, many impactful writers have not lived particularly eventful lives. Emily Dickinson, for example, lived 57 out of her 58 years in the little town of Amherst, Massachusetts. She never married, never traveled, never even did manual labor. Yet her poems have a deep humanity and beauty that still touch lives today.
Unfamiliar setting, familiar stories
Bailey White is a little like Emily Dickinson. She’s lived most of her life in the same place, a small town on the Georgia–Florida border. For several decades, NPR invited White to read her stories aloud for its Thanksgiving program. I imagine that NPR kept asking her back because readers across the US (from Maine to California) felt a universal fondness for her location-specific stories.
Reading White’s collection of essays, Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living, was both foreign and familiar to me. The descriptions of the boggy southern landscape, with alligators in the backyard ponds and year-round sleeping porches, were unfamiliar. We don’t have alligators in Minnesota unless they are in zoos, and if you have a house, you sleep inside it because the weather is (mostly) freezing.
But the underlying tones in the stories were familiar, like a fondness for quirky family members or feeling awed by nature. Here’s a selection from White’s story “Buzzard,” where she finds a bald eagle on the road:
I turned the car off. I thought about that glare he had given me: What are you doing here? It had said. When I got started again, I drove slower and felt smaller. I think it does us all good to get looked at like that now and then by a wild animal (p.157).1
The appeal of White’s stories is not grand narratives or intricate plots (although quite a few stories have unexpected twists and turns) but that each story touches the common elements that all humans share. White writes small but deep.
Christmas parties and crushes
In “Shining Stocking,” White describes a Christmas party at the school where she teaches first grade. White goes to the party thinking this might be the year she hits it off with her crush, the media teacher, but she doesn’t even get to talk with him. The party is a total snooze because all the teachers and staff are exhausted. Maybe next year, she’ll order those shiny stockings from the magazine and make an impression.
Nothing exciting happens at the party, but that’s the point. Expectations don’t align with reality far too often, something everyone can relate to. And find comfort in the fact that they are not alone.
I found this story so familiar even though I’ve never been a teacher or thought buying new tights would initiate a steamy relationship. When I was in elementary school, I had a long-standing crush. If we were assigned to sit next to each other or put in the same reading group, or (especially) if he picked me for his flag football team, I thought I saw a spark of love in the air.
Because White doesn’t just say, “This guy I liked was there,” but narrows in on the anticipation she felt for the event and the little things that didn’t happen, the story becomes highly relatable. I ended the story not with a sense of being known and heard.
Writing can say, “I see you”
Vibrant life experiences—happy or sad—enrich writing. But what makes writing impactful is the author’s ability to capture intimate truths in words. I keep coming back to James Baldwin in these blogs because his idea of writers being tasked with bringing the dark things of the soul to life got to me. To make a difference, writers must do the hard work of looking inside and capturing the essence of something, even if it is heartbreakingly painful or remarkably uneventful.
Many famous writers, like Ernest Hemingway and Maya Angelou, experienced trauma. But what makes their work excellent isn’t the depth of their experiences but that their words serve as a conduit of those experiences to the reader. Writers observe, think, and synthesize our every day into words.
The world is a better place for all the Ernest Hemingways, Maya Angelous, Emily Dickinsons, and Bailey Whites who write their hearts onto the page so the reader can feel known.
1White, Bailey. Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living. Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Writing Aloud 