Writers Lab Exercise #7 Notebooks Part 2

and Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall

Welcome new Lab Coats! Welcome Everybody! The ‘bellies. :>

Good day-after-US-tax-return-filing-day, Lab Coats. I walked into my study at 5:30am this morning and blinked: it’s as if everything in this room got drunk last night and passed out, after vomiting piles of paper everywhere. Yikes. But… it is done, finished, for another year. How’d you do, if you are here on American soil and must file a return every April 15?

If you were done in January, or last week, like a rational person files taxes, please don’t tell me. I live for the illusion that we are all, collectively, pulling out our hair on the night of April 15, looking for that one piece of paper we need in order to finish filing. This fantasy justifies my disorganization. Or should I rename it “my creative genius.” hahahahaha. (Madness, more like it.)

Having got that heave-ho out of my system, let’s get down to business.

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Lab Coat

Becca Rowan

, who writes the lovely Substack “Notes From the Path,” provided my inspiration for this week’s Writers Lab assignment. Thank you, Becca! We are still working with notebooks and writing by hand through April, still gathering material in our notebooks in whatever fashion suits us (see CHAT for my examples over the week), and this week we’re branching out with those notebooks.

Becca wrote a post on Friday that included an excerpt from poet and writer Donald Hall’s The Best Day the Worst Day. The excerpt:

What we did: We got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn’t ring all day. Three hundred and thirty days a year, we inhabited this old house and the same day’s adventurous routine.

It’s a list of sorts, eh? It’s written in a circle, beginning-middle-end, a day. It possesses the qualities of poetry, and yet it is written in very plain language, very simply, nothing flowery or overwritten or full of shimmering imagery. Hall doesn’t need that, to tell this story. Declarative sentences, that was his choice here, declarative sentences put together in such a way that the rhythm rocks you gently through the description of the day. Ah, to have such days! They are such a gift.

The tone of that excerpt and the way Donald Hall listed the simple yet elemental moments in that day reminds me so much of Hall’s book for young readers and their adults, Ox-Cart Man, illustrated by the fabulous Barbara Cooney, published in 1979, and winner of the 1980 Caldecott Medal.

I have read this lovely book dozens of times to my own children, and I want to share it with you. A quick look at YouTube gave me this reading by Lorne Greene (!) which is originally from Reading Rainbow. The images are grainier than I’d like, but I love the reading so much (and the way the art moves from time to time), this is the one I chose for you. I would like you to think about your listing, notebooks, writing in a circle, writing longhand, the simplicity of living, and a life well lived as we investigate this book and this week’s work together. Have a listen/watch:

It’s masterful, isn’t it? A beautiful, meaningful package, the words and the illustrations together. Here’s the logline (remember loglines, from our very first Storybelly Digest?): A lyrical journey through the seasons and passing years of one New Englander's family evokes the feeling of historical America.

Well, that’s one way to put it, and just one look at historical America (New Hampshire to be exact) in the 19th century. We might craft a different logline for today’s more encompassing views of historical America, but for the purposes of this book (and the current assignment), I want to appreciate this book for all that it is; it has a lot to teach us as chroniclers of our everyday lives, turning personal narrative into fiction, writing poetry, memoir, vignettes, and all the tools that go into these endeavors.

This book grew out of a story passed down in Hall’s family that became a poem Hall wrote and published in The New Yorker. It was also called “Ox-Cart Man.” Listen to him read the poem here. Notice how different is the poem from the picturebook:

What do you notice? The original poem is here.

In this 2018 essay at Slate, written by Johanna Winant and titled “Rereading the poet Donald Hall’s beautiful children’s book Ox-Cart Man in a time of turmoil,” we get a close reading of both the poem and the book, and see how each holds different meanings, both important, and yet how much richer and more lyrical is the revised/rewritten/expanded poem that is the book.

I am assigning this essay as required reading for this week’s assignment. :> Overall, what I want you to remember, as regards your own work, is this:

Ox-Cart Man could be dismissed as patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist in its celebration of a New England yeoman farmer—Hall is not usually thought of as a political or particularly progressive poet—but instead, this book assures me that all our work holds good, even if we can’t see the long-term effects from here.

All our work holds good. I love this, and I believe it, even if we can’t see the long-term effects from here. We just begin. Please begin.

Winant goes on to chronicle how Ox-Cart Man was a poem in The New Yorker and then morphed into a children’s book. Here’s some of what she notices:

The original poem is austere, with five stanzas of five lines each, and essentially no imagery.

and:

In the original poem, though, the man is alone.

and:

The addition of the family changes the poem from one man’s annual toil to a story about what we hope to do for the people we love, and how we hope to alter the future, just a little, for good.

The addition of the family gives the poem/book so much relativity and resonance as well. We write books for young readers in part so they can see themselves reflected in them, and understand their world and the context within which they live. Books for young readers have a different mandate (if that’s what it is) than poetry that is, in this case, meant for an adult audience. But the connective tissue is there, when we look. They are more alike than they are different.

Winant says it better than I do:

The family’s love, which is not separate from duty or labor but part of both, is transformative. It transforms yarn into mittens and shawls, wood into brooms, seeds into food, and feathers into clouds. The original poem of “Ox-Cart Man” denies that anything will ever change and asserts its recurrence. The children’s book shows how just the opposite can be true.

The endless work of living in the world, which Hall details in both the poem and the book, comes alive in a different way in the book, with a richness and hope and warmth and imagery that pays homage to those we love and speaks to our interconnectedness and the longing of the human heart for a kind of completeness and belonging, community. That’s what the book gives us — all of us, not just young readers.

The movement from practicality (listing in your notebooks all this past week) to poetry (and prose) will be part of this week’s assignment.

So! Notebooks to hand, pens poised, and let’s go! If you want to sub to the Writers Lab here at Storybelly, the only paid portion of our site, you can do that here. You can sub by the month or by the year, we welcome anyone who wants to play with words, with their own narrative writing, turning your story into sketches, fiction, poetry, essays, memoir — it’s all good, and so are we; we are here to share and have fun in a space that is welcoming, comfortable, and supportive. See you down below!

THE ASSIGNMENT: