This week I’m sharing Bearing Witness, the inaugural contribution to The Understory, a new feature that runs at the tail end of each weekly article where we share our works-in-progress, our creative compost, the fertile mess beneath our polished pieces.
Broadly speaking, this is for writers, but I’m wholly inviting other forms of creative output as well.
Don’t expect crowds here. Don’t expect to be wowed. This is more potting shed than amphitheater.
I’ll be populating The Understory with whatever’s currently decomposing/germinating on my desk. Consider this an open invitation — when something of yours feels ready to be seen in its unready state, you’re welcome to share it too.
If you don’t see anyone else sharing, don’t take that as a reason to hold back.
Why share works-in-progress?
I received an excellent bit of advice when I became managing editor at Puerto del Sol: “We don’t look for perfect work. We look for work that transcends its flaws.”
Every submission we received represented someone making themselves vulnerable and submitting themselves to the process. They took time from their life to create something and then took the terrifying step of sending it out into the world, onto the desks of a hopefully well-intentioned editorial team. So we did something basically unheard of in literary journals: we wrote personal notes for each rejection. Real responses from one human to another about why this particular piece wasn’t quite right for us at this moment.
This practice is even harder to imagine happening now, now that the world is So Very Optimized. But that’s exactly why The Understory matters.
The value of witnessing process
This isn’t a critique circle. If anything, it’s about sharing what’s most alive in a piece while understanding it’s still becoming.
A work-in-progress might be a seed waiting to connect to something else. It might be something that comes from hour three of a sustained practice where transformation starts to happen but hasn’t crystallized yet. It might be that messy middle where the real work lives.
For readers, witnessing works-in-progress is good practice too. Learning to see what’s alive in unfinished work, to witness potential rather than judge completion, is its own creative discipline. When we engage with work that’s still breathing and changing, we participate in the creative process rather than just consuming its products.
The best writing happens in collaboration with uncertainty. Here in The Understory, we’re honoring the creation phase. We’re choosing to value process, sustained attention, and the joy of humility.
An experiment in creative community
For now, The Understory lives in the comments (or chat, as you like). If this space starts to thrive, I might move it behind the paywall to keep it feeling like a trusted circle where we can share the vulnerable stuff. But let’s see what grows first.
This week’s understory finding: Bearing Witness.
It’s a piece pulled at random from an old notebook of mine. I made a few minor edits.
Bearing Witness “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946 I wish I wasn’t here the way things sit in the desert after being constructed there asking for air methaddicted pornfiends existentialist poets, same thing those photos of faces after a war it doesn’t work to see them as people "No one bears witness for the witness."* let’s speak to the desert on the beach we can do a painting of each other we can do painting each other we can do each other here on the beach I wish I was here. we can speak with everything and connect all ideas all sensations all dialogue desert bodies in congress are landscapes in congress their disconjunctions rejoindered and cruising and now we are the road the second occurrence of I wish I wasn’t here is passing saguaros, as lines, are the radii of perfect spheres I am dedicated to thinking about how I would feel if you were here. I am glad you are always around as in I want a perfect memory of you across the border I am digging into the dusty castles giving them specific homes in emotions “The full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of the emotion.”* Your funeral pyre become the first creature who listens transparently. If I were dying in the desert, that creature would speak to me. The dog lets you pet it I like conversation that discovers that choice. The mountaineer says to take a dog for your emergency rations; it’s edible and you won’t eat it until you have to * Paul Celan, Aschenglorie, from Atemwende, 1967 ** Stanislav Grof, from The Way of the Psychonaut
If you have a piece or work-in-progress you’d like to share, feel free to include it as a comment or link (or as a photograph using chat).
I’ll see you back here next week with another TMMW article and in The Understory with another piece or fragment or semi-polished ruin to share.