Moated Castles: Why I Don't Write About My Marriage

Some maps you could make of a writer’s work would tell you a great deal about that writer and the life they’ve lived. Other maps you could make would tell you less about the writer per se and more about what they have chosen to leave off the page.

This is what I want to talk about today—but first, a few upcoming events for paid members:

• Write-In, this Thursday, March 5, 11 CT—come write in silent solidarity with a supportive group of writing peers!

• Open Mic Salon, Tuesday, March 10, 4 CT—come share a short reading with in a lively, enthusiastic group of WITDers who know how to clap and cheer!

• See other upcoming events on the WITD calendar here.

• Finally, the April session of Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP sold out quickly, but if you would like access to pre-registration for the summer session (dates TBD), you can join the waitlist here. If you joined the waitlist previously, you are still on it! If you join it twice, no alarms go off and nothing breaks, you just get more than one email when pre-registration begins.

And now for the stories we tell and the stories we don’t.

Mary Oliver, who gave us such generous instructions—pay attention, be astonished, tell about it —told us about the grasshopper and the pond and the geese and the luminous, indifferent sky with its fiery blaze of sun. She told us obliquely, in her poem “The Journey,” about escape. But she kept her decades-long partnership with photographer Molly Malone Cook mostly sheltered from scrutiny until after Cook’s death in 2005. Meanwhile, Oliver’s most important relationship was a private landscape she inhabited with quiet ferocity. Her silence was not hypocrisy; it was sanctuary.

Every writer who has ever written personally knows this feeling: the sense of terrain that is yours to write about, and the sense—equally visceral, equally certain—of terrain that is not. These two kinds of knowing coexist. The latter of the two cannot be reduced to cowardice or simple self-protection. Instead, these two knowings form the complex topography of a writing life—a topography with, as I have come to think of them, little castles. Some are situated on grassy knolls or major intersections with wide pathways and huge open doors. But more commonly, we find castles on hilltops, cliffs, or rocky outcroppings—and while these can