By Lydia Wilhelm
I might say: I am working on fifty first sentences.
Or, I am working on a list of titles for the next thing I will be working on.
Really, I am alphabetizing the books that I have moved into the room that used to be my daughter’s room. She is grown now, living in another city. I am removing the nail polish from the carpet. I am working on making her room into something other than her room. Guest room, sitting room. Room for lying on the floor with the cat and looking up at the mobile I bought at an art museum gift shop, orange and yellow and red paper birds rotating around and around whenever the floor vent emits a gust of heat. Small birds connected to larger birds by invisible threads.
-“If They Ask, What Are You Working On?” by Susan Jackson Rodgers (River Teeth 22.1, Fall 2020)
In her beautiful essay “If They Ask, What Are You Working On?” (22.1), Susan Jackson Rodgers shows us that sometimes the best thing we can do for our writing is do the same thing. Sometimes the best thing isn’t fancy, it’s a single phrase repeated over and over again until it becomes like a liturgy, like a prayer for everything. Rodgers’ methodical use of repetition allows the ideas of work and self to take on deeper and richer meanings throughout the essay, and variations on the repetitive phrase allow for moments of strong contrast and an ending that holds everything in tension.
In this essay, the narrator takes a question commonly asked of writers and other artists— “what are you working on?”—and, rather than fish out a single answer about her current work in progress, she resists, casting her net wide in an attempt to catch all the things that are in flux and in progress in her life.
In the first two sentence-paragraphs, we see that she does her due diligence, giving the explicitly writing-related answers the unbodied asker is doubtlessly looking for. But she quickly pivots, the word “Really” becoming the signal that we are entering the deeper waters of what the narrator considers to be her “real” work.
As she casts her net, Rodgers takes repetition to its fullest potential. In ten pages, she uses the words “I am working” an impressive thirty-five times, not including variations such as “I am also working.” She uses the phrase “I am” even more frequently, with fifty-six entries. The pronoun “I” is used no fewer than 145 times, often as the first word in a sentence.
The inference is clear: what the narrator is working on is herself. The “I” is the work of the writer. The “I,” like any written work, remains draftable and incomplete; each time the narrator says, “I am working,” she reveals to us more of that vulnerable, unfinished draft of the self. In fact, most of the things the narrator is working on don’t flatter her. She exposes her insecurity about her weight, her impatience with her aging mother, her drinking habits, and her struggles to reckon with everything from microplastics to God.
One of the most powerful potentials that repetition holds is the potential for the pattern to be broken, something Rodgers takes advantage of to great effect. Having established the pattern of the phrase “I am working,” Rodgers breaks it in about the middle of the essay (page 71) with a variation on the idea, listing a few things she does not have to work on.
“Grace? Maybe I am working on grace.
Though as I understand it, the whole point of grace is that it’s offered, unbidden, it isn’t something you can work on, but maybe you can work on being ready for it. I see no contradiction between not believing in God, but believing in grace. That isn’t anything I have to work on.
I am working on occasionally writing in a notebook.
I am working on looking at the way the light falls on the plants and bushes and trees in the yard. How I love the garden in winter. I don’t have to work on that, either. I just do love it.”
In the midst of all the striving and the working on simply being alive, this break in the pattern of repetition, this moment to ponder grace and love the garden in winter, acts as a respite, given so much more weight because it breaks the established pattern of repetitive language in the essay. When we return to the pattern, we are able to look at this heap of half-finished things the narrator is working on—like a barren winter garden—in a new light of love and patience. The repetitive list has become a meditation. A mantra.
In the end, we encounter Rodgers tying up her ponderings with another type of repetition, the repetition of imagery. We find the narrator in the same place she was at the outset of the essay—in her daughter’s bedroom with the cat. But within the repetition, within the cycling of the bird mobile above her, she has changed. Rather than working, she is reassuring herself in the work she has done painting the room. She is finally allowing herself to sit and rest amid the imperfect and unfinished.
Writing Exercise:
- Spend ten minutes making two lists—one list of things you “should” be working on and one list of things you are really working on. Write as many as you can think of. And be honest!
- Now that you have your lists, find the item(s) in your “should” list that pulls most at you. Start your sentence with Rodgers’ “I am working on…” phrase and write for fifteen minutes about the thing you are struggling or failing to work on.
- Lean into the repetition. Weave the lists together, using the “I am working” phrase as often as possible. You can keep it as a simple list, or you can expand your items into scenes.
- Now, break your “I am working” pattern with something you don’t have to work on. Give yourself the grace that Rodgers talks about. Give yourself a few sentences to talk about what’s going well.
- Return to the pattern for five more minutes. How did breaking the pattern affect your return to it? How did grace change your work?
Lydia Wilhelm graduated from Taylor University with a BA in creative writing and is working towards her MA in creative writing here at Ball State. She serves as an intern for River Teeth and Beautiful Things, and she’s hoping to rack up a few rejections from literary magazines this year.
