Blame It on the Heat

Craft Talks: On summer, the senses, and the writing that only burning makes possible.

Last summer, a writer I admire shared on social media that summer had tricked her into losing creative energy and confidence. Many other writers joined the conversation, reporting the same hostile effects of the season. Knowing that I hadn’t been alone at the bottom of the sea made something in me rejoice. Some unusual cosmic energy in the summer months makes writers forget who they are.

I remember the creative optimism I had in June. All the ideas about what I would write under the sun, all the scenes I played out in my mind, all the characters I wanted to keep company with. But when July began, and the sun blazed across my laptop screen, I found myself unable to distinguish the letters, to choose the right words, to arrange coherent sentences. The summer came, and all I wanted was to soak up the sun, see old friends, spend time with my family, and taste every French rosé I could find.

Anyone with a different profession would have found nothing wrong with this. But after a few weeks, the writer in me secretly began to detest the summer leisure. The familiar guilt of procrastination overshadowed the fun.

I blame it on the lack of space, the school break, and the sudden and overwhelming closeness of family. I blame it on the heat, so much higher than in Seattle — the sun that scorches my skull, the ardor that makes me want to peel off my skin after every failed attempt to cool it. I blame it on the heat that is internal. The heat of memories.

Never have I felt such a surge of memories in winter. The cold shrinks my senses. Under layers of clothing I cannot feel; in the low temperatures, my nostrils close to one another, and I cannot smell; my taste buds are anesthetized by too many hot drinks; my lips crack in the wind.

It is summer that wakes my senses: the skin exposed and accepting, the lips bathed in wine, the mind quickened by the tastes and smells of mint and rosemary, cherries and figs, river fish and grilled eggplant.

In mid-July, when my senses were fully alive, the memories rose like waves. And on the swell, reappeared she — whimsical, ever restless, longing for the world she has yet to see; sarcastic, rebellious, deceptively poised but secretly broken. She took over my summer and my pages. She laughed at my characters. She found my thoughts senseless, my writing inarticulate. The stories I had loved only weeks before she dismissed at once, calling them tedious and irrelevant. As simply as squeezing lemons into a pitcher of water, she returned with the heat and crossed out everything I had worked on, so diligently, for the last ten months.

I tried to resist her poison. I did. But her voice grew louder and louder, and more wounding. After weeks of deleting words, tearing pages, starting over — after another week of believing I was nothing but the gloom over the blue July sky — I gave in. I bought more rosé. I reached out to old friends. I let the girl possess me.

It's not about making everything tidy and perfect, she said. There has never been logic in art. She smiled. It's about finding wisdom inside the chaos. It's about opening your heart to poetry again.

But opening to poetry means opening to pain, I objected.

If it doesn't hurt, she said, it doesn't exist. Then she raised her glass and grinned — coquettish, as if she could seduce the whole planet.

I blame it on the heat that spread across the asphalt, making the road sparkle as if it were made of diamonds.

I blame it on the heat that set my red hair aflame so easily, which made my mind boil with too much feeling.

I blame it on the heat that, when it finally reached my heart, made me search for the nearest exit out of my neat, responsible life — the heat that tricked me into dreaming of the Southern Hemisphere and a dark-skinned man who makes wine and dances well.

I blame it on the heat of my hometown. The heat I had so successfully escaped — and fell right back into.

But she kept insisting. You must preserve the heat.

It was midday, and the heat had finally materialized. I was on the freeway, driving. In the distance, the city was rising, a glistening carpet forming over the sizzling asphalt. And inside its glitter, I saw the essence of being, of loving, of writing. There, like a mirage before a Bedouin, stood the poet I used to be — the rebel girl I had chained for my own safety, the woman I still am at the core.

In the long summer battle between what I should do and what I want, I forgot how to write. I forgot why I write. And I missed the obvious truth: that the very conflict tearing me apart was the thing I should have been writing about all summer. That the girl who had haunted me for two months would make the perfect character for a new book.

But no beginning is ever easy. Every beginning is charged with anxiety. I had not even started, and already I dwelled on failure.

So I decided to begin with the truth. I asked myself: What do I want to write about? What do I need to write about? It should be that simple.

I need to write about the heat. I want to write about the heat. But if I am to do it, I will have to let the heat touch me — let it consume me, even, to some degree. If it doesn't burn your skin, it will not get through and under, the poet in me would say. And only what is deeply felt can live on the page. Only what is deeply felt can reach anyone else.

If it doesn't burn my skin, it will not get through and under.

It is that simple.