For our beauty issue, we reached out to a group of writers whose fiction struck each of us as being concerned with beauty—its power in presence and in absence, its unreachability, its role in good writing—and we let ‘em loose in Google Docs. 

Among things discussed here: impermanence, face-blindness, Marie Howe, grapes covered in hairspray, aquiline noses, sunsets and sunrises and their attendant demands, Joy Williams, being a widdle baby, squirks, bloody floss, Raven Leilani, awe, some guy named Gil (hot), arms (hot), and Newland Archer (hot). 

We’re grateful to them for their careful considerations of how bizarre, slippery, and instructive writing toward beauty—and against it—can be. 

We’ve edited this conversation from its original form for clarity, flow, and—what else—beauty. 

ON WRITERS WHOSE WORK IS BEAUTY INCARNATE

Garielle Lutz: Central to any notion I might have of beauty is that about the beautiful person or the beautiful thing there needs to be something that defies duplication. My idea of a beautiful writer is Christine Schutt. What she writes is shelved as prose fiction, but it could as easily be reclassified as lyrical narrative poetry as it could be considered to constitute a genre unto itself. There’s nothing else like it. 

Kyle Lucia Wu: Li-Young Lee and Marie Howe come to mind as writers whose work I can read over and over and it can still have that effect on me, specifically with Rose and What the Living Do. The last thing that Newland Archer thinks in The Age of Innocence is a forever favorite line of mine, the greatest ending because of what an entire world it carries in that single line. No spoilers but IYKYK. James Baldwin, obviously: I just reread his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, and one of the lines that I noticed for the first time was the scene where Elizabeth falls in love inside a grocery store. “And she turned and walked out into the streets; not the same streets from which she had entered a moment ago.” Not the same streets from which she had entered a moment ago is, again, such an entire world. [Garielle,] beauty as defying duplication makes me think not of writing that feels beautiful, but objects that do. I love vintage clothes, for example, and central to why I find vintage clothes more appealing than those sold en masse is not that they are necessarily always better-designed, but because there is just one of them. You have found a dress that fits you and there’s only one of them; what a dream! It feels so personal and intimate. I find the evolution of beauty and desirability in clothes especially interesting; often, something that is jarring feels ugly at first (think of any strange runway piece or trend–– big sneakers, cuts of jeans) but then as we see the many versions start to filter down, they become not just normal, but covetable. So how does aesthetic beauty start as surprising and unique, but end at everyone wanting to look the same?

Melissa Lozada-Oliva: I think Raven Leilani is a gorgeous writer, and I feel like I know that I THINK that because when I was reading her book Luster, I was writing a lot of what she said down, because it moved me. Sometimes I cried?? I wanted to feel how she felt writing it down, so I wrote it down. 

Isabel Kaplan: Raven Leilani is a beautiful writer—one of my favorite lines from Luster refers to a can of tuna licked clean. The [writer’s] capacity for intimacy is one of the things I value most in great fiction. There’s such beauty in a sentence that pierces straight to the heart of shadowy, hard-to-convey feelings and experiences. I was trying to think of a sentence that encapsulates my idea of beautiful prose and keep returning to a line from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, when Lily Bart gives “a smile that was like sunrise on a sea strewn with wreckage.” 

Alyssa Songsiridej: When I think about beauty, I tend to think about awe, and the purpose of beauty and awe in making a meaningful human life. Like, when I think something is beautiful, it’s because it’s taken me out of my individual, subjective experience even if only for a little bit. Awe, basically. I have no idea what quality inspires this feeling of awe—sometimes it’s the natural world, sometimes it’s just seeing, like, a surprising piece of trash in a place I didn’t expect. The experience of awe, of beauty, is specific both to the perceiver and the perceived. A writer who made me feel this way recently is Elena Ferrante, in Days of Abandonment, and also the work of Joy Williams. 

Claire Luchette:  Most of my past romantic dalliances now make me cringe— dear god, the list includes someone named Gil— and that’s also true of my relationship with prose. Is this only me? I am humiliated by how certain I once was that certain sentences were unassailable, particularly when I think back on what I wrote and who I wanted to write like when I was just starting out as a widdle baby writer. Sentences I was so obsessed with ten years ago I now think are mostly lush gobbledygook. It’s a lot like when I think back on the denim I wore in the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. These days I like a straight jean and, like Isabel, a spare sentence. I am obsessed now with Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch; the compression is so startling and strange.

ON TRYING TO WRITE WELL AND BEAUTIFULLY

GL: I’ve never set out to write something beautiful or something ugly; what I write probably ends up with a little of both. I might set out to record nothing more than the rain-fraught mood of an afternoon, or the fretful tread of a friend’s departing footsteps after an argument, or the sad gabble of my heart.

MLO: I’m writing a novel right now but I think I will always be writing as a poet, and poets are concerned with passing moments, things that do not last, also known as beauty. Some sentences are so gorgeously formed that you want to read them out loud. A perfect novel has a paragraph that, if spaced out properly, reads like a beautiful poem. I think I love the beauty of the mundane and ugly, when people really go in on writing about blood on floss, a fingerprint on a glass, crust in an eyelid. Disgusting things. Extremely intimate, private things that you feel almost shy reading. I don’t know if our world is dying, or if it is, then it’s dying in the way that we are all dying: as soon as we are born. Writers understand that nothing is forever, and they exist to remind you. 

AS: I’m definitely always trying to drop into that feeling of awe [I mentioned earlier] when I write–it’s probably the driving factor that gets me to sit down and do the work in the first place. Most of the time I don’t succeed. But I think this experience is somehow necessary for people. It opens up some internal resource or capacity. This is why I think it’s also essential for getting into the sharper moments, the “ugly.” I think beauty, and awe, can help you settle into experiences that are more difficult. 

CL: In middle school, my Family and Consumer Science class (they tried to make “home ec” sound more beautiful) watched a tape about how the gorgeous food in TV commercials is prepped. Burgers are made of, like, painted styrofoam and toothpicks. Grapes get misted with hairspray for shine; shaving cream holds its fluff better than whipped cream. They use motor oil instead of syrup; it’s slower to sink into a pancake. The teacher paused the tape after every reveal to say, “Looks pretty! But it’d make you sick!” Now it’s a refrain for me, when I try to be honest with myself about beauty in my own work. When I’m revising, some of my decisions about beauty come from rules I’ve inherited—too many “-ing” verbs are ugly, rhythm is a matter of stressed syllables and dependent clauses. But most of the revision process comes from an intuitive sense of whether I’m trying too hard to sell the grapes.

KLW: [I’m thinking] about simplicity and leanness in “beautiful prose.” Often, beautiful lines have no excess. Isabel said precision can be a type of beauty. Maybe beauty is cleaving as closely as you can to the core. There’s something that Marie Howe said in an interview that I think about a lot. “To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.” Sometimes, speaking clearly about something is actually the hardest thing, to not be able to hide behind metaphor or imagery. But to look closely at things as they are, and to endure them, is a necessary part of the alchemy of it all. 

IK: I love that Marie Howe quote (and I love What The Living Do as well). Brilliant, unexpected metaphors can be so satisfying, but it’s very true that metaphors often serve as a way to avoid the thing itself. Ironically, I’m having a hard time trying to describe my writing process and my quest for precision and beauty in my own work without resorting to metaphors. I just typed out a whole paragraph that was full of boring writing metaphors, one stacked after another in an attempt to build to a point. And then I read it over and thought, no, none of this. Which I guess is reflective of my writing process. When I’m drafting, sometimes a sentence will come to me whole and exactly as I want it to be. Those are the moments I write for and toward! I love when that happens! But it’s usually only one or two sentences per page, and they’re tangled up in more elliptical, digressive, repetitive paragraphs. I’ve gotten better at letting the bad paragraphs sit and trusting that I’ll find precision in revision. I can only be precise once I know exactly what I’m trying to articulate, and I’m a figure-it-out-as-I-go writer, so that often doesn’t happen until the end of a draft. And then I go back to the beginning and revise ruthlessly, and then I do it again. I enjoy lush description in other people’s writing but I have found (and, after many years, learned to lean into as opposed to fight) that in my own work, I gravitate more toward compression and sparing, selective use of detail. When I write, I [do] think less in terms of beauty and more in terms of precision—which, now that I try to articulate this, is maybe a type of beauty.

ON SEEING AND FEELING

GL: As a reader, what I find disappointing is how much description of people assigns a character to a type instead of glorying in the queerest differentiae. So we might get a face pieced out into a strong chin, sensuous (or heart-shaped) lips, an aquiline nose, narrowed eyes, a high forehead, etc.—stock descriptors straight out of a phrase book. I am hardly one to talk, though, because I’ve got some degree of face-blindness, so when I’m trying to take in the totality of a face for the first time or the fifth, the features instantly recede into complexional batter. The face just goes vague.  To recognize somebody early on in an acquaintanceship, my eyes have to fix on something like the disposition of the teeth (though so many people these days pay a small fortune to have their smiles standardized), the formatting of the hair on the head, anything about the arms (the character of the skin [bluff, glazed-looking, rough-reddened, etc.]; the distribution of any hair), even the peculiarizing squirk or dip of a voice, the way a voice can seem to duck out of what it’s saying. When I’m writing a sentence that calls for some description of the human form, the human face, I aim for an individuating specificity that stops short of exhaustive photorealism and that even admits some uncaricatural distortion.

AS: Here’s an anecdote to illustrate my feelings about beauty: once, I was at a residency, and our only duty while there was to do the dishes after dinner. There was this one guy who always ran out the door after the meal because he was fanatical about watching the sunset. He was always like, Sorry everyone, it’s gonna be a good one tonight! And then he’d hop on the little cruiser bikes the residency gave us and ride off down the highway smoking a cigarette. At the time, I thought it was bullshit—I thought he just didn’t want to do the dishes—but then, at one point in the pandemic before we got vaccines, I went on a little post-work from home sanity walk, and the sun was setting. I got to the river, and I looked at the light, and all the tight little feelings I had from days and days online finally just began to unwind, and I realized, oh, that guy was right. I should be going out to look at the sunset. 

CL: I love that sunset anecdote, Alyssa, and will think of it every time I wash the dishes. It reminds me of a letter Annie Proulx wrote in the ’90s. The last line: “I hope you have time to turn around and look over your shoulder at the moon now & then.” Something about the specificity and surprise of “moon” is so tender to me. Also, the ampersand—it’s a gorgeous ampersand. I guess for me there’s a relationship between beauty and surprise: a delightful detail, when it’s unexpected, something I never would have come up with, knocks me over every time.

KLW: When I consider a piece or a line of writing beautiful, I’m usually measuring its effect to evoke an extreme emotion in me––how much does this line slip me out of my body and into a state of awe, transported only by the words on the page? There are those lines that make you put down the book and look out of the window while it rolls around in your head. A beautiful line can be an escape.