Artist Series: On Where The Love Lives

On Writing: An essay by Erin Rose Blacque Belair

Every month I am publishing a piece from a contemporary artist I admire. This month, I am thrilled to share an essay by Erin Rose Blacque Belair. “On Where The Love Lives” explores memory and ritual and the imprint those we love, or once loved, leave on our lives. It helps us discover how rituals can ripen into love, and how the rituals of our past make their way into our future, a forever reminder of who we once were and who we are becoming.

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Erin Rose is a multi-genre writer and co-founder of Trust & Travel Writing Retreats. Her focus, regardless of her medium, handles the intricacies of how to live with a broken heart. Her short stories have been widely celebrated, winning awards and publications in Glimmer Train, Narrative, The Greensboro Review, Southern Indiana Review, and many more. Her lyrical essay collection, The Blue Years, is set to be published this year, and she is currently editing her first novel. Erin Rose is represented by Folio Agency in New York. 

Erin received her MFA in fiction at Boise State University where she wrote her first collection of short stories. Erin lives in California and is a mother. 

Before we get into her work, let’s start with three questions. (Erin brought the conversation back to me, ending every one of her answers with a question for me, so this is more of an exchange, a conversation. Enjoy.)

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JE: What are you reading right now?

EB: I am listening currently to How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth. Also, I am (and have been for six months) halfway through Claire Vaye Watkins novel, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Sometimes I will get in a quick short story and right now those are coming from Milk, Blood, Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz.

I used to read a lot. I mean I would put down a novel in two days. I would reread poetry collections over coffee. I would annotate craft books like I was still in college. I love to read. I just don't have the same time I did before and that's been one of the hardest parts of having a baby is letting go of a lifestyle in which I could read. But I am coming around to listening to books while we walk and when I can I'll get in a few pages. But, when I have time I try to get to the page and write. 

EB: When and how do you find time to read?

JE: I try to read at least one thing from the page every day. Digital readers, audiobooks, essays from my phone—it’s all good and it all counts, but for me, the process and ritual of sitting down with an actual book, feeling the words beneath my fingers, the scent of the pages, the weight of the book in my hands, underlining my favorite passages, is sacred. There is a holiness to all of it. 

I try to read when I wake up. I try to get up before my son wakes so I can fit in a chapter or two, a poem, or a short story. Usually, I read the Paris Review or short story anthologies because the pieces are shorter and I can often finish them before my day begins. The feeling of finishing something at the beginning of the day gives me a sense of ease that carries through the chaos that often finds its way into the day as it unravels.

Sometimes, I read while my son naps. When he’s resting, I try to rest too. I do something for myself, and most days, that is reading. I should probably use it to write, but writing rarely feels like rest. I also often read before bed, even if it’s just a couple of pages, just to put words into my brain as I sleep.

JE: What do you do when you’re coming up against resistance and you can’t seem to get to the center of the thing—the writing, the living, the task at hand? How do you get to where you want to go?

EB: I get small. I narrow my focus. I wash the dishes. I clean the sand off the floor. The writing is the same way. You have to get into the sentence level and build it from there. Because thinking about writing something is so daunting. But don't look at the house you have to build, look only at the hammer and nails in your hands. That is all you have control over; what you can do with your hands. There is only one way to get to where we want to go and that is by doing the work. The unglamorous work of actually working. 

Writing is funny like that because it can feel like we aren't doing it even when we are if we are writing something that isn't "the thing". But it all counts and it all adds up. I haven't looked at my novel since before the baby was born but I have written three short stories and I know that when I get back to the page next month (this arbitrary date I've set) that the work I did on those stories will be there with me. I know I am always learning even when I am not doing it. I have to tell myself this because the resistance is real and it becomes stronger the longer you stay away from the work. The only way to get through resistance is to get back to work. Word by word. 

EB: How do you do it? How does anyone do it?

JE: Yes to all of this. You’ve said it all. At the end of everything, we have to do the work. 

There are times when I can plow through resistance and just do the work regardless of its weight sitting on my shoulders, but sometimes, I need to pause, pull back, and go back to what I love about this wildly magical art—the language itself. I go back to reading because I often find that the answer and the relief are in the words, the rhythm, the syntax, and all the ways it makes me feel. When I get out of my own work, my own head, and into someone else’s, the pressure releases. I don’t see reading as a distraction from the work, I see it as a bridge back to the work, to get it done, like you said, word by word.

Also, I want to say how impressed and inspired I am that you’ve written three short stories in this full and heavy season of motherhood. That is an incredible feat and I hope you’re feeling proud and fulfilled. I look forward to reading them!

JE: Tell me about this piece. Where did it come from?

EB: The baby was napping and I have been listening to the Moth Book I mentioned above. I usually sit down to write small prose pieces that I put on my blog which I've had for like fifteen years now. They are always rooted in something sensory and I had just been cooking him lunch and cutting garlic and had the most visceral memory of a boyfriend I had when I was eighteen. I haven't thought about him in ages so I decided to let the memory in. The Moth (so far in the book) is really about figuring out what your story is, and the realization that it might not be what you think. I let the piece lead the way, listening to it as I might not have without the influence of The Moth. I haven't tugged on a memory like that in a while so I really enjoyed the process.

EB: You often write primarily about memories as well that are anchored by a sensory experience in the real world. As someone who does this often how do you decide which ones to actually follow?

JE: I love this question. I find that I follow the memories that bring me at least one of two things—pain or more questions (or both). If something comes to me and it makes me hurt, I follow the pain and the anger and the sorrow until it brings me to a place of understanding, acceptance, or greater questioning. I let the questions themselves lead me. They don’t often lead me to an answer, but they lead me to a place of greater peace.

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An essay
by Erin Rose Blacque Belair

On Where The Love Lives

I am cooking lunch for my son. It’s warm in our apartment, even though all the windows are open, as the summer is hanging on to the last dregs of September. 

I crush garlic with the flat end of a kitchen knife and think about a boy I loved when I was nineteen. I think about the slope of his tan shoulders and the three letters tattooed inside his wrist and how his hair fell in his eyes when we fucked on the single mattress on the floor.

I don’t wonder where he is now. I wonder only about him then. He exists in a singular way in my mind: an old photograph of us in a bar, a pair of shoes near the door, the hiss of eggs frying in the pan.

He taught me to cook that summer, breakfast specifically because eggs were easy to afford and we didn’t have much, but if you stuck your head out the kitchen window you could glimpse the edge of the ocean and that was a lot. He would use the heel of his hand and crush garlic with the flat end of the knife, then peel the paper layers away and dice it quickly. How simple a thing, and yet all these years later this is what I think of. 

He taught me to cook because he loved me too but didn’t know how to talk about it and because his brother was dying and we didn’t know how to talk about that either. We spent that summer in a violent mood swing of settings, moving between the children's hospital and getting drunk on the beach outside my apartment, house parties, and pretending not to cry in his car. 

I think about how we were too young to carry that season but we did it anyway.

Now, in these years when my son has taken the space in my heart where the writing used to live I inhabit the kitchen. I have loved to cook since I loved that boy. It is a peaceful place for me and a creative place. And back when I had time, I would take three hours to make dinner and drink wine. If I can’t write I cook. Sun-dried persimmons baked into cinnamon bread, hours spent stirring morel mushroom risotto, crushing cabbage with my bare hands until it turns to sauerkraut, making marmalade with the last of this season's naval oranges. Small rituals until the sun goes down. 

I show my son how to cook because I have learned, for me, that is where love lives. I tell him everything I’m doing, and narrate the process as that boy did for me. I crush garlic and steam eggs. I pull the thin briny spines from sardines. I let him suck lemon wedges and crush blackberries until his chest is the color of cough syrup. 

I cook because I love him so much that I don’t know how to talk about it. I cook because it fills in the cracks of time and teaches us that making something is worth something. Even if, especially, when you don’t know what comes next. 

At the end of that summer, the boy’s brother didn’t die, and we broke up right after he was sent home from the hospital. He couldn’t look at me without seeing what I had ferried him through. And I couldn’t blame him. I’d seen too much. All of the parts we didn’t know how to talk about, it was easier to keep them unsaid, easier to let the whole thing flame out. 

I suppose what I am talking about is how people are gone but their imprint remains on those ritual-like spaces of our lives. I wonder what, if anything, he remembers about me. I wonder if my son will love to cook and if these small moments are laying some small fossil-like imprint on the boy he will become, where someone will fall in love with him and remember how he cuts garlic in the kitchen.

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Where to find Erin:

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