Prompt 316: This Living
Amber Tamblyn on how it will belong to you
I’m Trying Something New—
As I navigate a new health challenge, a handful of friends are occasionally filling in as guest hosts of the newsletter. Today, in my stead, you’ll hear from my dear friend and neighbor—the actor, director, and writer
, both in prose and poetry. I’m grateful to her for stepping in and so excited for you to encounter her stunning work.—Suleika
Hi, you.
My name is Amber Tamblyn, and I’m a poet of many mediums: writing, directing, and occasionally acting. I’m also a fellow newsletter enthusiast, as well as a longtime fan of the Isolation Journals and its incredible publisher, my dear friend, Suleika.
As we enter the darkest days of winter, I’m honored to be here with you this week to share a story, a poem, and a prompt on living.
In August of 2021, my life-long writing mentor and the great Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Jack Hirschman, died unexpectedly in his sleep after a brief battle with Covid. Jack was a political poet, a self-proclaimed communist who spent his life translating the works of proletariat poets from across the globe into over a dozen different languages. He was also like a father to me, creatively and otherwise. Jack wrote what I believe to be one of the most important poems of the twentieth century, “Path.” (I even have a sentence from it tattooed on my arm after swearing I would never get words tattooed on my body, no matter how good they were.) His sudden death threw a brick through my life, shattering me in ways I am still processing today.
Several months after his death, Jack’s ashes were returned to his widow, the Swedish poet and artist Agneta Falk, whom I was visiting for the first time since Jack passed. The smell of him—his dusty piles of books, the smokey echoes of his European cigarettes, even the jars of ink for his many pens—was almost impossible to bear. I cried, and Aggie held me, crying too, as we stood there in the presence of his absence. This living, I thought to myself, This living—funny, horrible, painful, always right on time—is going to belong to you, Amber.
Aggie and I stared at the small cardboard box that had arrived containing what was left of Jack’s physical self, and after a moment of sniffling and wiping tears away, she said, “There he is… my Jack in the box.” We both burst out laughing, alternating between laughter and sobs for a while. We made deeply inappropriate jokes about what we would do with his ashes—his or anyone’s, for that matter. Spread them on a slice of toast with butter (disgusting) or use them as dry shampoo for a sweaty scalp (horrifying) or bake them into a pie to give to Donald Trump on his birthday (well-intentioned mischievousness).
Before I left that day, Aggie gave me one of Jack’s pens to take with me. On the cab ride back to my hotel, I used it to write down a line that made me chuckle, inspired by the afternoon I’d spent with Aggie (and Jack, kind of). “It’s going to ruin the cake,” the line began, “when you throw an urn full of cat ashes in your ex-best friend’s face at her baby shower. Do it.”
Over the course of the next year, I would gather many lines like this one that lived unhoused in my head, looking for the home of a fully formed poem. “Little feathers,” my friend, the poet Diane di Prima, used to call them. She’d call me on her landline from San Francisco and say, “I’ve found a little feather in a stack of papers. It’s a beauty. I’m going to send her to you.” And sure enough, a few days later a small piece of paper with one line of poetry on it would arrive in my mailbox. These little feathers of my own—the one written after I left Aggie and Jack’s house and the ones I gathered in the months following—would eventually come together to make the poem “This Living,” which was published in The New Yorker this past June.
The poem explores what life, the act of living, is going to do to you, or going to make you feel, or going to show you, for better or for worse. It’s a choir of experiences. An ode to all the moments that make up our existence. It’s a poem for Jack, but it’s also a poem for every single one of you, and everyone beyond that. It is for Aggie’s Jack in the box, for the marriage you lost, for the feeling that swept you off your feet, for the moment you were finally able to meet that changed your entire life. The poem is for your favorite enemies and your least favorite friends. For your father who called right when you needed him to, and for your mother’s silence all these years.
Today’s prompt will be based on this poem and on your own divine living. Write about what this life, this living, has taught you, how it surprises and upends you, or delights and endears you. Write about what makes you weep with joy or sadness, or how it brings out the best of the worst in you. If you need a place to start, try using the refrain from the poem, “It’s going to…” and list all the ways in which this glorious, brutal, profound life is yours. It is going to belong to you.
Amber
An Item of Note—
This month’s gathering of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers, is happening today—that’s Sunday, December 15 from 1-2pm ET. Holly Huitt will be hosting this time, sharing some thoughts on channeling the muse. Find everything you need to join us here!
Prompt 316. This Living by Amber Tamblyn
It’s going to be a lunar eclipse. It’s going to be critically acclaimed and win none of the awards. It’s going to start as an argument over what’s buried inside the tomb but end in silence over what’s discovered beneath it. It’s going to happen on your birthday in front of the mailman, while you’re receiving the letter for your sister sent by her murderer. It’s going to appear once a week in your back yard for decades without ever speaking. It’s going to ruin the cake when you throw an urn full of cat ashes in your ex-best friend’s face at her baby shower. Do it. It’s going to make you get under the table and drink there. It’s going to explode right there in the dairy aisle. It’s going to make you laugh. It’s going to remind you why you can’t go in mosh pits anymore. It’s going to freeze to death, right there in your arms. It’s going to make all the kids stare out the school-bus window and sing to you. It’s going to rain where he is. It’s going to be impossible for you not to flood. It’s going to hurt for a while. It’s going to have to. It’s going to make you buy all the scarves in his girlfriend’s favorite patterns. It’s going to happen in the wind, during the middle of fire season, while he’s telling you it’s going to have to end soon. It’s going to be hard to end soon. It’s going to wipe out your entire wildlife. It’s going to be remembered fondly, your heart unable to keep its hands to itself. It’s going to be a strong love, but only parallel his lover, never perpendicular her. It’s going to make you unable to quell the bad thoughts of his dainty gull and her inkless quill. It’s going to bring out the best of the worst in you. It’s going to outlast television. It’s going to take the shape of poems left under the doormats of retired generals. It’s going to happen any day now. It’s going to be so good, if it doesn’t kill us first. The way things are going, it’s probably going to kill us first. It’s going to be a nightmare when the Pope gets here. It’s going to change everything. It’s going to make your metaphors make you, even if you don’t want to. It’s going to sound like coyotes killing behind your back, spook like a stallion’s ghost. It’s going to cost you. It’s going to sound familiar: a truck driver humming Schubert. It’s going to have to be removed by a doctor. It’s going to go into too much detail. It’s going to use your daughter against you. It’s going to make you eat everything on all the plates at all the hours. It’s going to fill you with sorrow. It’s going to fill you with relief. It’s going to show you how you got here. It’s going to say something cliché like, It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to hit any minute now. It’s going to leave you speechless. It’s something you’re going to have to carry for the rest of your life. It’s going to get dark soon. It’s going to feel like it just happened yesterday. It’s going to sit well with no one. It’s going to be worth it. It’s going to build you back up. It’s going to get better every day. It’s never going to give up. It’s going to belong to you.
Your prompt for the week:
Write about what this life, this living, has taught you, how it surprises and upends you, or delights and endears you. Write about what makes you weep with joy or sadness, or how it brings out the best of the worst in you. If you need a place to start, try using the refrain from the poem, “It’s going to…” and list all the ways in which this glorious, brutal, profound life is yours. It is going to belong to you.
If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.
Today’s Contributor—
is an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated actress, director, and writer. She is the author of seven critically acclaimed books across genres including the bestselling anthology, Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition, which features essays by powerhouses such as Amy Poehler, Jia Tolentino, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and many more. She is an opinion writer for the New York Times, The Cut, and The New Yorker, writing on such themes as gender inequality and women’s rage. Her most recent writing can be found at Listening in the Dark.
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My Year of Love, a photo essay of the year Suleika thought was the worst of her life, but after revisiting, turned out to be so much more
Studio Visit: Hospital Edition, where Suleika gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of her hospital room turned painting studio and shares how she is using a new creative practice to get through
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It's going to
open your heart
and leave a wound that will never heal
It's going to cover you in the joyous revelry of piles of leaves tossed to the wind and blown back again, leaving you with little leaf bits, laughing
It's going to make you crawl into a ball of tears, you had stuffed so carefully inside and they said, "no more"
It's going to remind you, "Come, come out to play"
And you will,
being all the better for doing so.
One week ago , after 7 years of treatment and surveillance for ovarian cancer, the very well known NYC cancer center that has been treating me, is now setting me free. Not really, but “see you in a year “ free. I feel like a solider who has returned from war. No more “ fight or flight”. My temporary cancer identity has been lost , and I am not sure who I am . So traumatized and physically broken from the “ mother of all surgeries “. This impermanent human life is never easy.