The Container of Your Books

Back home + some thought exercises.

Hi friends.

I’m back in New Orleans after a beautiful three-day drive through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. (I wrote a wee bit about it and posted some pics here.) I am happy to be home, in my small house, even with the overgrown yard and the unread mail and the empty cupboard waiting to be filled. Everything looks brand new in my eyes. The coming back can be just as important to our creativity as the going away.

Walking through the neighborhood this morning I was noticing all kinds of new details. Like I can’t even believe there is a stool in front of this house after YEARS of there being a perfectly good chair. Nearly felt criminal.

I gasped. I spent some time trying to find pictures I had taken of the other chair, which was wood, and had some dead weeds on it which made it look haunted. But I have messy photo archives, and the photo app doesn’t really let you search for “haunted ghost chair” (though it should) but trust me, there was another chair there for a long time and now it is gone and replaced with this seating in a minor key: a stool.

Anyway, have you noticed anything new in your neighborhood? (Are you as obsessed with yours as I am with mine?)

Another question: has anyone been reading the Calculation of Volume books? I raced through all four of them and found myself chewing on them deeply for the last two months. I don’t want to give anything away but one of the threads in the series is about how time is a container, and also how containers work in different contexts.

As I kept thinking about it, I became occupied with how books (or writing projects) are containers for writers.

Even just faintly musing about it this morning I thought: Oh, they contain so many things that feel physical to me. Miniature buildings we construct in our minds, characters we can place wherever we like as if they were dolls. Sentences can feel physical to me when I start moving words around in them. Secret feelings have a warmth and a heft to them. Books hold the majestic castle of a story but also a toy box full of moving parts. And outside of the book you hold (or contain) the tool box you need to construct all these things.

Then I started to visualize how the book appeared as a container, what its exterior manifestation would be beyond what we think of as what a book looks like.

I have a few projects I’m working on, so I took on each one individually. I brainstormed one as being a slim, gorgeous, efficient leather valise. Something that could be transported easily. Maybe even one that could even fit neatly inside a bigger bag. You could carry just what you need in this valise, if you were OK with traveling light.

I brainstormed the next project as being an oversized wicker basket with handles. Maybe you would carry it to a picnic. It’s something that’s overstuffed with everything you need to feed a lot of people over the course of the day. When you have that basket with you, you feel secure, and as you pack it, you fill it with care.

And finally, I’ve been working on a few shorter pieces, and for them I thought about those beautiful little paper sacks used for roasted nuts you find at street vendors in big cities. The most satisfying containers in the world.

For all these projects, I thought about how they all might feel in my hand, the heft of them, their stability (or their fragility), how far I could carry them on my own, how they might look seated next to me on a train or a bus or on the table in front of me. What does this book look like? I thought. I can design it however I please.

Anyway, it was just an exercise. But it allowed me a different approach to my work after a few days on the road of just thinking, thinking, thinking, about the directions on the map on the screen in my car, the rules of whatever airbnb I was checking into, where I was going to get dinner that night in a strange town, and of course, all of my life choices, because that’s what road trips are for, right? And it made me feel OK about my work because even though I wasn’t necessarily filling the container in the moment I was still describing it, considering it, and tending to it.

So I’ll leave you with this: What does the project you’re working on contain? And when you close your eyes, what does that container look like?

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.