Illustration of Man Whose Head is on Fire Surrounded by Stacks of Papers

One Thing Leads to Another

Joyce Dyer

I used to think that my task as a writer was to form a piece. To shape it. To give it any meaning and chance for beauty it might have by allowing paragraphs and a story arc to determine its direction.

But I was wrong.  It was exactly the opposite. A piece of writing, in fact, often forms us. Our work shapes us, not the other way around. We need to return to our “finished” work as if it were a calibrated compass showing us where we ought to go.

I used to think the point of an essay was to finish it, and then move on. Publish it, and set it aside, maybe on a high shelf, the way you would a pretty vase. But those were the days when I also thought that writing consisted of only words and paper, not of codes and signals linked as deeply to psychology as to art. The days when I thought the final pages and paragraphs of an essay marked the end of something, not the beginning of something else.

An essay is always a little ahead of the writer. This is difficult to explain, but writers know it intuitively. We just forget the lesson sometimes. Writing forces questions and disclosures that might not otherwise appear. James Baldwin called it “The Creative Process,” this need a writer has to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

Writing exposes us, as well. Not just to readers, but to ourselves. And not always directly, but aslant. We need to return to our own work—after it’s “finished”. We need to explore it more thoroughly, the way a cartographer might the grooves of a map, or a therapist, the chambers of a heart or the folds of a brain.

Where are the lies? The exaggerations? What have we perhaps left out—telling ourselves there wasn’t space for it, but knowing, really, that it was insufficient courage we lacked, not space at all? What does the moral position we’ve worked so proudly to assert require of us next—in our lives, or in our work? What promises have we made with ourselves or with others that we are bound to keep?

“Pallbearer,” which appeared in North American Review in 2006, sketched the story of my uncle Paul, focusing on his funeral and my role carrying him to the grave. Recounting my final trip down Grant Street on the way to his plot in Holy Cross Cemetery, I realized that there would be no more stories about Goosetown, the strange neighborhood in Akron, Ohio, where my uncle lived his life. He was the self-proclaimed Mayor of Goosetown and knew every inch of the place he loved. Now the stories would all lie below the ground.

ACapturet the end of the essay I found myself recording a memory of Uncle Paul making dark ink out of black walnut husks. A nice image to end with, I thought at the time. But the longer I stared at it—after the writing was over—the more I realized there was something else to pay attention to. The essay’s final line, which found me “dipping in my quill,” was like a starting gun. That loaded pen contained all the thrill and danger of the difficult race to get my uncle’s stories down. I had already begun to sketch a few, but without the promise to my uncle that I’d tacitly made by picking up the pen at the conclusion of “Pallbearer,” I’m not sure I would have finished. In 2010, my memoir Goosetown was published. I dedicated it to my uncle Paul.

Knowing what work asks of us next is not always easy to discover, not always announced in images as visible as quill and ink.

In 1995, I published my first memoir—the fractured, crazed, difficult story of my mother’s time living in an Alzheimer’s unit. The entire book—In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey—took place within its walls. Whenever I returned to its words, I felt they brought my mother back. But a few years ago a prick of conscience unsettled me when I opened its covers and noticed for the first time that the story I told of Annabelle Coyne was badly incomplete. I had recorded only the Alzheimer’s years, and left out the rest of her life.

When I thought about this further, I realized that by focusing on the Alzheimer’s years I had not done what was most courageous—even though people said it must have taken great courage to write about the subject of memory loss. In fact, I began to think of my book as not unlike the work of naturalists Alexander Wilson and James Audubon. I had captured my mother, caught her in that unit like a bird I would study and paint. She was mine to invent, because she was now very still—literally tethered at times.

It was my Alzheimer’s book, my own book, that asked (no, forced) me to consider why I had omitted so much. Why I had preferred a controlled study.  Was it just a decision of craft, or something more? Something else? I came to conclude that I hadn’t known my mother very well in her days outside the unit. But what was the reason for this, and who was she? I gradually came to understand my mother as a member of a tribe of women I dubbed the Women Who Seldom Spoke. She was a strange woman who spent most of her time behind her sewing machine and seldom talked to anyone; I was a careless daughter who grew up in her house but didn’t listen closely enough to the sounds of her machine, where her voice was lodged.

In 2016, I published an essay called “My Mother’s Singer” in an anthology—almost twenty years after the release of the Alzheimer’s book. An essay about a woman I loved who lived behind a 1947 Singer sewing machine.

I tremble when I return to old work now. I know I’m still deeply connected to it, and it knows I’m out there. It will inevitably force me to see something about myself (or my writing) that needs to be addressed or corrected.  Needs to be finished—no, continued.  When I read old work again, sometimes I see my own limited imagination of other people; cringe at the narrow lines I’ve drawn around my heart; surprise myself by my failure to pursue a mystery or puzzle that once held for me the power of a hieroglyph; experience the return of hope. Writers are haunted people. We create our own ghosts, and then they come for us.

Joyce Dyer

Joyce Dyer is the author of four books, including In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey, Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, and Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, and the editor of two. Her most recent book, From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines (2016), a co-edited anthology, won Gold Medal in the category of anthology in the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards contest. For eight years she has been working on a book about abolitionist John Brown, the most famous citizen of Hudson, Ohio, the town where Dyer and her husband, book critic Daniel Dyer, have lived for over thirty years.


Eric Piatkowski was raised in Arizona, and after a few years of working in theatre he switched gears and studied illustration at the Pratt Institute. Now in Des Moines, he splits his time between drawing, drawing, and more drawing. Give him a call, he just might be the perfect man for the job. Prints of artwork featured here and elsewhere are available through Etsy at Eric Piatkowski Art.