Notebook Navigation: The Substance of Worldly Things

Let's hit the (note)books and do some writing. Notebook Navigation is a series of creativity prompts and exercises to spark the writing process

In this installment of Notebook Navigation, we will engage with the objects around us and allow them to connect with our imagination.

The Notebook Navigation series is intended to be reminder to write something in your notebook today, a quick refresh for your creative writing process. Today, writer and editor Crystal Cox joins us to offer this prompt.

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In his book, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty writes, “To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work — and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas, is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

For this writing exercise, first observe the objects around you. If you’re at your desk, take a good hard look at your notebook, your knickknacks, your chair. If you’re on a bus, then consider the backpacks leaning against the seats, the coffee cup your neighbor is holding — any inanimate material will do. Describe these objects from your POV, but don’t change how you’re interacting with them. Allow the objects to remain static. If you’re looking from across the room, then only describe what you can see. If you’re already holding the object, then describe it from only that position in your hand or lap.

Next, consider: What attachments do you have to this object? What memories are attached to it? How much of your own emotional residue gives this object meaning?

Then, dig deeper — imagine that these objects are instructing you to do something. What would the backpack want if it could express a desire? What would the coffee cup want you to make for breakfast? Where would the bus take you without a driver behind the wheel? Give these objects agency in your imagination and follow where it leads.

Link to a Sotheby’s image gallery, “Still Lifes Through the Ages”: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/still-lifes-through-the-ages.

Lastly, consider how becoming intimate with an object connects you to its “highest value.” What could that mean? To be inside the object, within it? To be the object itself — or perhaps to “interbe” with it?

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Crystal Cox was born and raised in mid-Missouri. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shō Poetry Journal, Tiny Spoon, Phoebe, The Shore, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. With seven years of literary publishing experience, including as the former Editor in Chief of Fugue Journal, she serves as co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal. Website: crystalcox.online / Instagram: @crystalxcox.

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