on clarice lispector

and writing for multiple audiences

The writers of many (most?) newsletters I follow don’t just write their newsletters—they also work on novels, short stories, poetry, cookbooks, longform journalism. This includes me, as well, I suppose. And maybe some of these writers are multi-hyphenates mainly by virtue of economic necessity instead of a real wish and/or willingness to spread themselves thin across multiple writing fields.

But there’s something to be said about stretching different kinds of writing muscles, isn’t here? The older I grow, the more I think that learning to communicate my thoughts and ideas not just efficiently but well, allowing for conflict, confrontation, doubt, challenge, my own and others’—might be the most important thing I’ll ever learn to do. And for this to happen, I need to practice.

It’s one of the reasons I most appreciate the newsletter—mine, sure, but also as a general concept. As a genre, if we’re allowed to call it such.

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I started thinking about this more intentionally while reading Clarice Lispector’s Learning to Live (in its original Portuguese, Aprendendo a viver, and in the Spanish translation I read, Aprendiendo a vivir), a selected collection of the author’s weekly column, “A Descoberta do Mundo” (“The Discovery of the World”) for Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil. Lispector wrote her column from 1967 until she was fired in 1973, and on those weekly missives she meandered widely on topics like food, insomnia, government, writing, talking on the phone, the beach, and the legal profession, from anywhere to a single line (“I used to be perfect” simply goes: “Being born has ruined my health.”) to, at most, a few pages.¹

I will entertain suggestions of which Lispector to read next! Also, if you read Spanish, I’ll note that I preferred the Spanish translations to the English one I read for Near to the Wild Heart. When I go to Portugal next month, I’ll plan to procure a little copy of Água Viva in the original, I think.