When Your Creative Project Takes Years (and Years and Years)

Exploring the marathon project with Jennie Erin Smith

“You need to anticipate what is likely to happen and think and build a narrative around that.”—Jennie Erin Smith, author of Valley of Forgetting

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 141 with Jennie Erin Smith

When Jennie Erin Smith began researching and writing Valley of Forgetting, she knew the book would be a decade in the making. “With marathon projects, the last chapter might be written years after [the first chapter], and yet the reader needs to get through in eight hours. You are not even the same person after eleven years.” In this episode, we talk with her about how she found her project, how she weaves research and writing, techniques for communicating with her future self while at the beginning of a long project, changing editors midway through, and other practical and nuanced considerations for a longterm creative endeavor.

Jennie Erin Smith is the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and others. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; the Waldo Proffitt Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism in Florida; and two first-place awards from the Society for Features Journalism. She lives in Florida and Colombia.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Poet Robert Okaji, who was diagnosed two years ago with late-stage metastatic lung cancer, has been writing so powerfully about the interstices between life and death. Here are four of his recent poems, shared this month in Vox Populi.

• I was so deeply moved by this three-and-a-half minute video my friend Tam just shared with me … I Trust You. Made in 2016, it feels even more necessary now for us to open up, to trust each other. Such potent acapella music accompanies this trust experiment, performed by the tenor Karim Sulayman, an Arab American who stood blindfolded in front of Trump International Hotel in New York City and … well, you’ll see the rest.

Christie:

• Is on vacation!

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Note to My Future Self

Please don’t tell me what will happen.
I’ve peeked before at the end of a book
and know how one detail learned too soon
can ruin the entire story.
Not that I wish to be patient.
Of course, I want to know what’s coming,
but this story only works in present tense.
Even when it makes me weep,
even when I’d rather put this story down,
even when I’d like to rewrite the last scene,
please, don’t give me even a little hint.
I am not sure I believe in happy endings,
but I believe in turning the page,
in holding the weight of the book in my hands
and racing through the text,
my eyes eager to discover what comes next.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, we talk with Jennie about sharing her work with her creative heroes, the importance of taking a good long break, the art of pushing through, what to do when the words aren’t coming, and why having a “breakthrough” isn’t a necessary part of the process. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. Who do you most wish would see/read/listen to your creative work?

2. What question do you most want to ask a reader/listener/viewer about your work?

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