April 2023: On Writing ✍

The book I wrote with Eleanor Bowen over the last 3 years came out on 1 April. The Hysteric: Outline of a Figure is a drawing of a specific form of suffering, tracing what affects it and how, through the containers of body, mimesis, mystery, disappearance and voice, each of which is the title of a chapter.

Eleanor and I write in a hybrid form called fictocriticism, a hybrid merging fictional strategies and critical theory to study selfhood. The process of our writing is a dialogue: I write a short bit and then fold it for her to continue the narrative, like the surrealist folding game the Exquisite Corpse, where a group of people draw a body in a folded paper without seeing what has gone on before. The consequences of this are echoes, repetitions, fragmentation, interruption and wandering. Imagine a collage or a film montage where things are cut or torn and then attached, stitched, taped or glued together. The overall aim of the book is to change the questions that are asked of the hysteric.

We learned a lot in our process: about our friendship, writing itself, the dialogue form and collaboration. In our acknowledgements, where we thank others and most importantly each other, we write that ‘this process of creation is one of constant trust and learning, something we have only found with each other. How lucky we are. When one of us is the river, the other is the riverbank’. We learned to contain and channel each other, allowing for the directed flow of what needed to come out from us. Remember we did all this work at a distance, during a global pandemic where so much was going on and emotions were heightened. It has hard not to become hysterical.

Just as the book was in production, I was asked by Take Me Somewhere in Glasgow and Centre de Création O Vertigo in Montréal to be part of a project titled Pen Pals in which they would pair me with an artist in Canada and we would correspond on the topic of wellbeing and artistic practice. I was so lucky to find Marie Claire Forté at the listening end of my image-and-word experiments. She is kind, generous, an incredibly precise observer, a lover of nature and anything that is alive, a wonderful dancer, a critic grounded in care and just a very beautiful person.

I have always been fond of the letter form. I love the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, and I do have a favourite text by Sigmund Freud, hard as that might be to decide. It is A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, a letter he wrote to his friend Romain Rolland on the occasion of his 70th birthday. When Neil went away to a 10-day vipassana retreat and I could not reach him, I wrote him a daily letter and I bundled them all at the end of our journey apart, giving him a full, unanswered correspondence, an asynchronous connection that also transcended time and place. I like addressing specific people. Even the conclusion to my doctorate was a letter. I could not see how to wrap up the emotional and long work of a PhD without handing it over to someone, even if they were fictional. I have, over the years, held several pen pal relationships, of which L’Oeuf Linda and Peter Landis are the ones that changed me profoundly (and now Marie Claire too). In a letter to someone, I understand myself better.

Writing with or to someone, becoming intimate in the space a page provides, can be deeply therapeutic provided a framework for listening is also embedded in the relationship. This framework goes beyond words and pays attention to inflections, things that repeat and come back, little gestures of the pen or the keyboard, and tone. Listening to what is being communicated fully, not only through the grammar and syntax of language.

In both my processes of writing with Eleanor and with Marie Claire, this listening has unravelled my writing, un-doing it and liberating it from the constraints of form, giving rise to my own voice. This voice, although often and still very embedded in the world and its rules of engagement, has a sound that is at times closer to truth, briefly touching it. And I am reminded that in Indian thought there are four levels of speechone can chose to engage with. A good addressee will invite connections beyond the gross level which tends to originate in the mouth. We can think of this as words or chit chat. With Eleanor and Marie Claire, I go into the subtle and causal realms. The subtle realm of speech is in touch with the pranic world of energy and the breath, and the causal realm comes from awareness is where revelations occur. This is writing from a heart that not only beats but is also connected in every direction.

Laura x

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Many writers ask me for advice or enquire about my process. How do I manage to write, especially in long form? As a start, I send them in the direction of Henry Miller’s work schedule. It contains 11 commandments for a writer to follow and they have been a steady guide for me through my three books, many chapters and even more numerous conference papers and articles.

I feel Miller’s invitations are also applicable to the yoga mat. After all, writing is a practice and, like yoga, it needs to be done over a long period of time, uninterrupted and with devotion.

My Yoga Moves Glasgow classes run at the Arlington Baths until the end of June:

Yoga (Mysore) | LIVE |
Tuesdays, 07.15 – 09.00
Thursdays, 07.15 – 09.00

All classes are open for booking here.

Pranayama at Yoga Rose in Blantyre on Saturday 27 May and Saturday 24 June, 10-11.15am. Book here

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland classes take place during term time.
For staff: (generally) Tuesdays 1-2pm. Contact HR for details.
For students: Fridays 1-2pm. Get in touch with Meg Baker at RCS Sports for details or check out the RCS Sport instagram feed.