Everything That Happens Is From Now On
A Craft Essay by Suzanne Grove | Plus fiction readers wanted, what's on deck in the mag and upcoming Write or Die events
For our magazine update this month, we decided to give Suzanne the floor again because she wrote another banger craft essay that needs to be front and center. Enjoy this encouraging piece, and please feel free to comment with your thoughts or responses to her prompt below. Keep scrolling for Write or Die news on upcoming events and what’s on deck for the mag in March and April <3
Everything That Happens Is From Now On by Suzanne Grove
The first time I hear Justin Vernon's voice, I am lying supine on the grass in a neighborhood so calmly suburban it feels primed for insidious violence. Midday, summer. The heat like an infestation. It crawls over the skin.
Before I press play: the constant rev and release of the mail truck; a child's bicycle ticking quietly up the hill. Otherwise, quiet. Empty driveways and scorched pavement. Above me, I watch three hawks carve infinity symbols into the cloudless blue.
My body holds a loneliness that makes me feel timid, and dangerous.
But at least I have Stephen Thompson of NPR's All Songs Considered. I am deep in the podcast's archives, and I slip the headphones back over my ears as he introduces Bon Iver and the song "Blood Bank."
In her review for Pitchfork, Amanda Petrusich shares the first line—I met you at the blood bank, we were looking at the bags—before calling it "the kind of opening sentence most aspiring novelists spend their whole lives praying for."
Later, Vernon sings:
You said, Ain't this just like the present
To be showing up like this?
And I know exactly what he means.
This moment is so clearly etched in memory that I can recall the exact angle of my elbow as my hand cups the back of my head, eyes lost to the sky, the grass a welcome touch as it strokes my ankle, my ear.
*
Later that day, I take a cold shower just for something to do, and I behave like any good obsessive: Reclining on the lonely rectangle of a twin bed, wet hair soaking the pillow beneath me, I scour the Internet for more of Justin's project, named after the French phrase bon hiver and its use on a particular episode of the 90s TV show Northern Exposure. It stands out to me because that spring my younger brother and I institute a nightly rule: Try to speak French—and only French—from 9 PM to 11 PM. I come up with many circuitous, ridiculous ways to talk about the things I want. Mostly food. I am living with my parents while attending graduate school to earn my Master of Science in Education, but I am also deep in a melancholy I cannot shake as I recover from my first post-adolescent heartbreak. I’m dating a hockey player, a Canadian man I do not particularly like, which is entirely the point: I want to be casual; I want to feel nothing after too many years of self-indulgent crying to Sufjan Stevens songs, of relationships much too heavy for the weight of my years.
When I first hear Bon Iver, his lyrics remind me of what it means to fumble through a new language with reliance on tone, body language, context clues. His words offer a surreal specificity, a richness of language that hits once, twice, then right in the gut, phrases you intuit in the body even if the symbols do not form clear signs on the surface. But the puzzling out of these songs also does not seem to be the point. Vernon does not seem interested in playing some poetic game, in vagueness and opacity for their own sake. The meaning is right there, laid bare. You only have to decide how to listen.
I don't know it yet, but I am about to receive a call from a man with a thick Québécois accent. A job offer, a move. I'm about to quit grad school. To meet one of my very best friends. To write my first novel, which I will later unceremoniously throw into a bonfire. To endure hurt—mental, physical, emotional—I would not have been able to fathom in that moment in the summer in the grass.
The cadence of "I Go Back to May (1937)" by Sharon Olds comes to mind: you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, / you are going to want to die. Now, I think, Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. Like the narrator of that poem, I was going to suffer, but I also wanted to live, and Bon Iver would be in my ear the whole time, along for the ride.
*
I don’t think I fell into true love with Bon Iver until I spent enough time with the music to witness its evolution, until I read a Reddit AMA and listened to several key interviews with Justin Vernon, all of which informs the entire point of what I promise is a craft essay.
In response to a Reddit question about his songwriting, Vernon says the following:
“It’s all kind of an accident. It took a long time to develop this way of writing…It really changed when I started listening to Richard Buckner…he allowed me somehow to say the words that sounded good first and then attach wild meaning to it by setting little visual traps, I suppose.”
In another conversation, he shares more insight:
“I was finding deeper meaning in my songs by allowing the words and the sounds to dictate where I headed with what I wanted to talk about. And I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about until I spent that energy, allowing the subconscious stuff to come through just by experimenting with sounds and words. I end up getting really meaningful stuff that way.”
In countless more interviews, he shares the process of building meaning and story around image, around what speaks to him from his subconscious, from the dreamland of his mind. And in the thunderclap of one hot second, I knew my life as a writer had changed.
(Here, I suggest you spend some time going through Bon Iver’s discography to get a sense of Vernon’s song writing, or at least look up some of his lyrics.)
In the past, I spent a lot of time fighting myself—fighting my own phrases and descriptions and scenes; fighting against the inclusion of the random, seemingly nonsensical images and ideas that came to me—because I couldn't properly interpret or explain my own art. I'd spent years and years taking courses in writing and literary theory that forced me to nail down meaning—to prove and explain and show how and why. So many situations, scenes, metaphors, images, and bits of dialogue came in a sort of dream logic, arriving together with a meaning that I felt in my bones but without clear connective tissue I might intelligently spell out for someone else. I had professors tell me I would build a faulty house that way, giving me the old, lazy metaphor (which I’ve probably used in another essay) about building a foundation first, working from the ground up. Telling me I shouldn’t get carried away with a pretty word, a cute turn of phrase. These teachers seemed set on the idea that I start with reality and only then build outward into the poetry, into the make believe of my work and not the other way around. And that every single word on the page had to earn its existence, had to be manicured into the existing framework of narrative.
But my favorite poems and stories—both my own and those belonging to others—often escape overt meaning making. When I write, I don’t want to elucidate on what a certain image means, or explain the effort behind a motif. Instead, I wanted to gesture and make sounds and touch the places on my body where I have been wounded, or felt beatific. I want to use words to evoke a feeling—and by feeling I don't just mean emotion, but rather the kind of surreal, multi-sensory kaleidoscope that nostalgia brings, or maybe déjà vu. I was not concerned with anyone, myself included, being able to demonstrate, for example, why one seemingly benign line in Toni Morrison's Sula made me nearly inconsolable for hours. I wanted to allow the mess of language to arrive and trust it had something to tell me, even if it was speaking in another language. I wanted to construct a story from the pieces, believing I could work this way and still be the architect of something true rather than unsound.
I thought my approach meant I had an intellectual flaw, a problem. That I was a fake, a phony. Justin Vernon helped me to see this methodology not as a defect, but perhaps the appeal of the whole damn game.
So, here is my craft tip for the month: You don’t have to start—or even end—with something easily digestible—with sounds and colors and textures and scenarios that follow some easily interpreted, preordained logic.
For the rest of the month, collect all of the random shit that comes into your brain, and allow it to coalesce into a story or poem or piece of flash fiction without forcing someone else’s rules on it. After all, this is what art does: It puts sound and color and texture to the surreal and seemingly inexpressible inside of us.
It's like Edward Estlin Cummings said:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
Upcoming Events
Ready to Write Your Memoir? Here's How to Begin with Liz Alterman
Saturday, March 22 from 12- 1:30 PM (EST) | $50
Thinking about telling your story but wondering where and how to get started? This class explores the elements that will make your memoir shine and inspire you to begin.
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Land Big Bylines by Writing for Columns with
Saturday, March 29 from 1- 4 PM (EST) | $75
In this workshop, Courtney will explain the crux of popular columns for top publications. She’ll give you 10 targets and generative prompts, brainstorming and drafting exercises for each, and a lesson in how to pitch. You’ll receive a list of potential columns and editor contact information for each, so that you leave with a game plan for landing your best bylines yet!
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BADASS BOO: A Women-Only Screenwriting Community! with
Sundays, March 30 - May 4 (skipping Easter) from 3- 5 PM (EST) | $380
BADASS BOO is the first-ever women-only cohort for writers who have screenwriting essentials* under their belt and want to go deeper! This course is designed to, first and foremost, be a proud community of creative women. Within that community, we will come together weekly to swap creative insights, lean into support, and dive fully into our curiosity around how innovative screenplays take-shape and how a woman’s lived-experience assists her genius!
Magazine Announcements and What’s on Deck
A new nonfiction submission call for our third issue! Subs open Monday, March 24 — Wednesday, April 30, 2025 with the theme: Threshold Reckoning! Amy Lin will be our guest judge to select the final five essays! Details on Submittable and our Instagram are coming soon.
Our first fiction contest! We can not wait to officially announce this contest! Subs will open in April. Stay tuned!
Come visit our table at AWP!—We are so excited to be bringing Write or Die Magazine to this year's AWP conference in Los Angeles. Shelby and Kailey will be holding down the fort at our table and we want to meet you! Whether you are a past contributor, reader of the mag, workshop student, newsletter subscriber or just like our Friday mood boards, we hope you will come introduce yourself! We will be at Booth T1145 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday (March 27-29) Come say hi, enter our giveaway or purchase merch. We can't wait to meet our Write or Die fam <3
FICTION READERS WANTED— Our fiction team is currently looking for 2 readers to join our team. Application is open until March 28th.
We are open for submissions for…
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Send us your short stories! We also have an expedited submission option where you can hear back within two weeks! Bonus: all fees go directly to pay our editors, who volunteer their time generously to make this magazine what it is <3
Creative Nonfiction
We are interested in essays that focus on the writing life and especially love work where the personal intersects with the critical.
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We accept pitches from interviewers interested in covering authors with a forthcoming or recently published book. We are especially interested in featuring books by debut authors and/or books published by indie presses.
↓ Click the button below for additional details about what we are looking for and how to submit it! ↓
this is so great and just what i needed to read right now! thank you.
This is the first thing I read this morning before sitting down to work on a chapbook of very impressionistic (for lack of a better word) personal essays and stories. A tremendous thank you for this beautiful, validating essay! 🩵