For the love of the em dash—
Finding meaning after the pause
I received feedback on a book report I wrote for a class I’m taking, Mourning and Trauma: Theoretical and Historical Debates. The book report was on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking—a book I’ve now read twice and a book I know I’ll read again.
My professor told me not to use the em dash so much—as if I use it too much; it is, after all, a beautiful piece of punctuation—one that evokes such clarity, flow and precision that—as I’ve already explained—deserves far more attention than it receives—and that I should limit myself, if possible, to using one em dash per paragraph—a paragraph being several sentences grouped together—yet here I am, having used it seven times in one sentence—now eight, nine—a sentence the size of a paragraph.
I don’t suppose that was the most legible sentence to read.
Truthfully—while I love the em dash—I don’t disagree with her. She’s a published author, PhD, instructor, and I’m sure many other things I don’t know as well. But she has a point—after all, her writing, her way of finding meaning in the world, is beautiful.
That was three time. Closer, much closer…
I find myself surrounded by so many other inspiring folks, too—folks that motivate me to go forward, not backward. For example, the other day I was helping a dear friend with her company’s marketing strategy. I asked to see her vision board, which was a beautiful sea of colour—magnificently lit sliced oranges on yellow backdrops and tacos with flowers growing out of them. Product photography is something I spent many years doing, first when I lived in San Francisco and was working for a small photography start-up, and later when I settled in Seattle with my husband and we were taking photos for his business.
Seeing all of these stunning photographs sent a knife through my heart. I miss creating, I miss taking photos; I don’t have time to be creating that way, I don’t have time to be taking photos. But I also remember when I took photos how much I wish I had more time to write, and now here I am, writing about the em dash, writing about the folks that currently surround me—writers and researchers and academics—and I keep marching forward knowing photography will come back to me when the time is right. Right now the time is for writing.
I read something recently that said you can tell if something was written by AI if it has a lot of em dashes. How dare they put such low value on the em dash. It’s been around since 1836! And yet that saddens me—to hear that writing, music, art (etcetera) are being placed through AI and turned into masterpieces far better than I could ever write, sing, paint (etcetera). I swear I watched movies about this as a kid that warned us not to do it. WALL-E? Flubber? The Matrix?
The perfectionist and creative in me will always be damned next to AI; but what AI doesn’t have is the ability to feel how intensely I feel when words pummel out of my heart onto a page. It will never understand the heartache or desire that has created so much beauty in this world. It will never understand why I chose to use an em dash in some cases and a semi-colon or comma in others. Perhaps AI will be able to quantify me, spread me out like jam and toast and see all the contradicting raspberry seeds. But it will never be and know the depths of me, including the ache in my back or my increasingly sore throat or how I long to be in bed because I’ve been battling a cold and pink eye from my child’s daycare. And yet despite the logical choice to sleep, I simply must first write. Grammarly ads tell me to Get Pro and Write it just right, but I don’t want to pay an annual subscription because frankly, I don’t care if I don’t get it right. I just want to write.
I began a writer before we owned a computer, in my little Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul journals and I think, as much as getting my thoughts out onto paper was helpful, there was something therapeutic about feeling the way my pen moved on the paper. I also grew up a dancer, and a pen’s motions are much like that of a dancer—flowing, twirling, pirouetting, dotting the i’s. One Christmas or birthday, I received a calligraphy set and spent hours moving my pen up and down, repeating u-shapes that looked like tiny waves across the paper. Had I known being a calligraphist or a typographer was a career, perhaps I would have gone in that direction. Then again, like a dancer changing steps—like the way my pen moves on paper or my fingers tap the keys then hit backspace over and over and over again—I change my mind.
And perhaps that’s what I enjoy about writing, too. It helps me understand my own mind—change my mind, make sense of my mind, forgive my mind, understand the scenario, rewrite the scenario, heal the scenario.
I sometimes think about what will be left of me when I’m gone. What will my kids have left of me? And here, I believe, is why I’ve always been drawn to the arts: the arts are everlasting. When death is finite, creativity lives on—whether through words, paintings, poetry, music, film, books, carved benches or wooden spoons. Something that once was, no longer is, and yet, that which no longer is still lives on through art. There is meaning in art. There is meaning in writing.
And I suppose I’ve always been searching for meaning.
Even in the em dash.
Because I believe the story happens after the em dash—the pause, the breath, the hesitation, the silence that signals that beyond the brown eyes, a galaxy unfolds.
To explore more means gazing through a telescope and seeing Saturn’s rings. Jupiter’s spot. Pluto’s existence.
You want to make sense of all these shooting star memories that unfold across the sky—gone within the blink of an eye. You want to expand the Milky Way so it stretches across the horizon like the Aurora Borealis and realize that there are some things you can only see when the lights go down and you’re standing outside on a cool October evening. You reach your hand to the heavens and your pen crosses the sky adding a brush stroke to Hermes’ hair that sweeps gently across his brow.
I write to see across the horizon as Hermes’ did—any pause, any em dash, as purposeful as Poseidon’s stolen trident that shakes the earth and loosens the hearts of those who care to listen.
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Beautiful💙