Editor’s Note by Martha Nichols
Let's Embrace Our Circles of Hell
It takes a certain kind of eleventh grader to fall in love with Dante's Inferno. I make no claims for youthful agony or genius (I also loved movies like Tales from the Crypt). But stuck in my Bay Area high school in the 1970s, Dante's vision of, say, flatterers sunk “in a river of excrement” thrilled the outcast in me.
In humanities class, we read poet John Ciardi’s translation. Along with "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," it includes this fabulous opening:
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
I didn't grow up a Catholic or in thirteenth-century Florence. I've never been a real sinner. Yet when I first read it, Dante Alighieri's allegorical trek utterly seduced me. His graphic and satirical catalog of sins (opportunists in hell’s vestibule, gluttons lying in a garbage-infested ditch in the third circle, hypocrites trudging under heavy golden robes in the eighth), allowed my imagination to fly—straight to the kind of excess that's necessary for good storytelling.
If human beings were perfect, there would be no stories. Most narratives derive their tension from somebody making bad decisions or ending up in a scary place. But how can you overcome something if there’s nothing to overcome?
Whether writers belong in one of the lower rings of hell or just vividly imagine what it takes to get there, they need to wrestle with demons—overwhelming desires, hatreds, temptations—in order to write. This is not news. Through the ages, writers, saints, and artists of all stripes have described going mano a mano with their personal failings.
Yet, a funny thing happened when we began conceptualizing “Seven Writerly Sins” for TW’s Sept/Oct 2012 issue. We editors had fun generating list after list of sins that bedevil authors. But although we initially planned to include most of the classic seven deadlies, we found it took awhile to create the right mix for contemporary writers.
Medieval lists of the deadly sins were fluid, too. Some included acedia, which has been translated as apathy, sloth, or melancholy. Spiritual writer Kathleen Norris even focuses on it in her 2008 memoir Acedia and Me. "I have come to believe that acedia can strike anyone whose work requires self-motivation and solitude," she writes.
Still, while we did opt for sloth—every writer’s initial pick—we decided not to go with melancholy, angst, or anything akin to a mood disorder.
Ditto for self-pity, guilt, cowardice, superstition, distraction, or multitasking—all writerly problems suggested by TW contributors. However stultifying any of these are, they don’t seem to fall entirely under one’s personal or spiritual control.
In the end, the writers for this issue defined much of our final list. Bianca Garcia grabbed “Vanity: My Favorite Sin.” Foodie Emily Toth gleefully decided on “Gluttony: The Good Eater."
Jeremiah Horrigan staked a claim on the noonday devil first, nodding to the medieval monk who coined that term (as Norris also does). Yet, in “Sloth: The Slyest of Sins,” Jeremiah makes clear that couch potatohood is not a “safe” sin.
When it comes to confronting personal demons, writers and artists do plenty of slogging through Dante's Dark Wood of Error. Ann Lightcap Bruno's "Envy: The Beautiful Monster" looks hard at a feeling that few of us care to voice aloud. In “Wrath: The Tiger Inside," I address why restraining my own anger has so often undercut my work.
Karen Ohlson’s “Hoarding: The Flesh House” takes on a sin—storing up too many ideas—that may not be classic but is surely a whip-toting devil for many of us.
It’s not all darkness and fifty lashes, of course. In “Lust: The Literary Courtesan,” Lorraine Berry recounts her amusing stint as a paid writer of erotica (and, yes, a bit of playful whip).
Columnists Steven Lewis and Fran Cronin reflect on pride and procrastination (another close cousin to sloth and acedia) with their usual witty style.
Regardless of whether writers embrace or bewail a sin, the pieces in this issue cut to the heart of why such internal tussles matter to creative people.
As Talking Writing enters its third year, I’m proud of the rocky places TW contributors have traveled. And I'm delighted that Talking Writing now feels like home to so many. I’m awed by what we’ve conjured out of dreams and hubris and a far-from-allegorical river of writerly sins.
After all, we need our devils to write like angels.
Table of Contents for Sept/Oct 2012
Publication Information
- The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, originally written circa 1300 and part of his Divine Comedy, completed just before Dante’s death in 1321. The translation quoted here—“a verse rendering for the modern reader”—is by John Ciardi (Rutgers University Press, 1954).
- Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2008).
Martha Nichols is editor in chief of Talking Writing.
For more about Martha's struggles with anger, disappointment, multitasking—and other writerly challenges—see her blog Athena's Head.
“There are many reasons in this world to stand up for yourself, to demand change, to not just smile nicely when others are far from nice. But often anger is a cover for thornier feelings—fear, sadness, grief, soul weariness—all the decidedly unsparky emotions I’m grappling with now.” — “Anger, My Old Friend, Where Did You Go?”
