Where thought becomes stitches
At the end of January I read a memoir titled 50 Miles by Sheryl St. Germain1, who was the director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chatham University and the advisor for my thesis project when I graduated in 2009. She is now also a fiber artist, which, coupled with writing, I think is a cool combination of vocations2. In the book is an essay about crocheting over a period of time through sadness and grief while her son was hospitalized for drug addiction. By the end of it I was itching to crochet myself.
… as someone who had spent her life making poems and essays, stitching words, if you will, to speak, the failure of my own words made me feel wretched. I couldn’t console even myself with words; the feeling of what was happening was so raw, I couldn’t bear, then, to try to capture it in words. … if I couldn’t seem to pick up a pen, I could still pick up a crochet hook. I could count rows, stitches. I could bear to think of what my son’s life had become while I crocheted, the murmuring of my counting in the background.
The connection she made to her writing is what hooked (!) me. So much of being a writer is not the act of holding a pen and writing words on the page, or actively typing on a computer; much is about sitting quietly and thinking, or mentally writing when you are doing something else, physically, visibly. Writing may often look inactive to the outside observer, and something that I struggle with is whether I look like I’m doing work or not. I want to look like I’m busy working– for who, I don’t know really. It’s not like I work in a public place. Maybe it’s all about justifying this writing life to myself. What caught my imagination while I read this essay was the ability to be deep in thought while doing something constructive with my hands, having something useful to show for myself if I didn’t have an actual sentence or paragraph or essay.3
Once the pattern was ingrained in my fingers I didn’t have to think about it so much, it felt at times as if I were in a trance, my fingers making the same movements over and over again…
Right after reading this essay in January, I asked a friend of mine who crochets to teach me. And then at the beginning of February, I broke my ankle and found out I needed surgery, that I was likely going to be off my feet (read: not climbing) for six weeks. What a perfect time to learn to crochet! My kind friend came over, brought me the bare essentials to get started– hook and yarn– and taught me a few of the basic stitches– chain, single crochet, double crochet. Then she sent me a YouTube video on how to make a granny square.
Thank you, Bella Coco.4 “Yarn over, pull through.”
When you feel hopeless, as if you can do nothing right, it’s useful to have a reminder that you can engage in an activity that will grow into something of value. …just the hook moving in and out, in and out, reliable, steady, familiar as your breath. The thing taking shape, almost imperceptibly, under your fingers, an object whose colors and design you chose. Crocheting does not offer …oblivion… It requires… engagement. …I may not have written much, but I meditated deeply, partly thanks to the act of sitting down every evening to work with my hands.
I wasn’t hopeless during my six weeks of confinement– my injury was more a hiccup than life-altering– but engaging in an activity that has grown something of value was…. well, valuable. Right after surgery, I stitched through pain and discomfort when constructive thinking wasn’t an option; after that, it got me through some serious stir-crazy-ness. Crochet didn’t allow me to wallow in what my body was going to become without climbing for so long. Also, after a week I was able to make a granny square from the first slip-knot to the last chain stitch in 20-30 minutes, if I didn’t make a mistake and have to rip the whole thing apart. So, multiple times a day, I had a finished product.
Whatever else you might be thinking about while crocheting, you usually must be counting… Counting underlies all your thoughts in crochet, giving them a substance and a song they might otherwise not have had.
Since those days, already over two months ago now, I crocheted over a hundred granny squares in three different colors, and now am stitching them together into a 10×10 square blanket. This blanket is what I imagine everyone’s first made thing is like: it ain’t pretty, folks. Let’s be real– I’ll always be better at stringing words together than stitching beautiful blankets5. Regardless, the skill has given me a new way to meditate, a new way to gather and organize my thoughts, a new way to enter into the writing process, a new way to be in the silence without anxiety. Honestly, a new way to watch TV as well. And I will give away the imperfect fruit of this work, created with love and deep concentration, as gifts to the people in my life who laughed at me when I told them I had started to crochet.
Feel the love!
- These essays are a mother’s reflections on her son’s addiction and death due to a drug overdose. It is heartbreaking, but also beautiful. https://etruscanpress.org/product/50-miles-by-sheryl-st-germain/ ↩︎
- https://sherylstgermain.com/fiber-art/ ↩︎
- Aside: I want to name the fact that I think our society emphasizes looking busy and being productive and efficient way too much, and I am guilty of perpetuating that for myself even though I’m trying to fight against it at the same time. ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmFYap_izdc ↩︎
- IMHO ↩︎
