BY KAILEY TEDESCO
While in my M.F.A program, I met many mentors with differing opinions, both about poetry as a whole and of my work specifically. One mentor used to insist that writing doesn’t just come from thin air. Writing is work, he said. It’s something you wake up and work at every single day.
And, I agreed with this. I still do, for the most part.
Another mentor, when workshopping my poems used to say that I do this thing where I channel Emily Dickinson. The compliment, while flattering, wasn’t why this sentiment stuck with me though. It was the word “channeling” that I kept getting hung up on. It felt close to articulating a part of my personal writing process that I did not yet know how to put into words. And, when I came close to putting it into words, I thought about what many of my other mentors insisted: “poems don’t just come out of thin air.” I kept quiet.
In my eleventh grade English class, while reciting a poem from memory, my teacher told everyone to notice how I was looking up during my presentation. At the time, this upset me. I thought it was a critique of my recitation and I was deeply embarrassed. Then my teacher said, “she’s reaching for something beyond herself. Maybe god.” This made sense. I was reaching for something — I always have been.
There’s a famous Spiritualist medium named Cora L.V. Scott who often gets overlooked during discussions of the movement. The Fox sisters and Andrew Jackson Davis come up much more often. But it is Scott who was, perhaps, among the most powerful and prolific spiritual mediums of her time. She discovered her abilities when one day, she fell asleep next to a blank school slate. When she awoke, it was covered in words. She later realized these were the words of her deceased aunt. It was a message for Scott to give to her mother. Her ability grew when, in sleep, others began to notice her hand would move as though she were writing. Her mother caught on, and began putting a pen in her hand and paper in front of her. Words would appear and thus began Scott’s career as a trance lecturer.
I have some things in common with Scott. We are both caulbearers, for one thing. In the past I wrote a piece on what this means, according to both medicine and the folklore of various cultures. The overarching commonality though, is that many believe caulbearers are born with an innate ability to not only peer beyond the veil, but also to feel what exists there. We are, according to legend, often destined to be empaths, mediums, witches. We’re in touch with something many others cannot see.
Of course, it is important to note that this is not exclusive to caulbearers. Or, perhaps it is. So many caul births go unrecognized, so it is possible that there are thousands of caulbearers walking around who simply don’t know it. All of this, though, is a preamble a confession: for me, poems often can come out of thin air. Sort of. I write best through automatic writing practices, or psychography. This, in a nutshell, can be viewed as a psychic ability, like mediumship. Or it can be an intentional, free-associative practice in channeling language onto a page through a lack of conscious thought. At my best, I am a trance writer.
When I share this, both in real life and in my mind, it gets easily misconstrued.
Does it mean that I’m suggesting I’m a Spiritual medium myself? No.
Am I arrogantly suggesting that I don’t have to “work” at writing? That poems just manifest in front of me and I traipse along without giving them a second thought? Of course not.
Are trances themselves something that some can achieve while others can’t? No. Trance writing itself is something that takes effort and practice, but like meditation, anyone is capable of doing it.
Do I believe I have a spirit guide dictating words to me from beyond the veil? In way, yes. But not exactly.
Trance writing, by my own personal definition, is the act of turning off the lights in all the parts of the mind where ego, conceit, doubt, and self-consciousness exist. Sometimes, I can turn the lights off better than others, but in the most successful attempts, I’m able communicate with the selves of me that I do not often interact with. It is those selves that speak to me, and then my fingers on keys and the image of a blank screen trigger a response to free associate and write what those selves are saying. I usually come out with something surprising, but still very familiar.
This practice began when I was about 21 years old. I quit taking my birth control pills cold turkey. I’d been on several brands of oral contraceptives at that point, and all of them had given me a variance of mean side effects — hair loss, nausea, intense muscle soreness and cramping, and worst of all, panic attacks and night terrors. I thought that quitting them altogether would be best for my health. It turned out I was right and wrong. Since I didn’t wean myself off of the pills properly, my body had a strong reaction to being without them.
It turns out that it is somewhat rare for the body to have such a reaction, but, according to my primary physician at the time, not totally uncommon. I suffered racing thoughts, deepening depression, suicidal ideation, and the worst nightmares and sleep paralysis of my life. Sometimes, the dreams were so vivid, I had trouble discerning them from reality. I’d wake up, standing in the middle of my bedroom, holding objects I did not remember picking up. I dreamt voices, mostly babies crying, at all hours of the day. I started to fear sleeping because of the nightmares, so this led to a bout of insomnia, which only made everything even more intense. Then, after months and months, I started feeling like myself again.
During the horror of that experience, I tried teaching myself to meditate. Every time I’d get close to being able to view my thoughts objectively or not at all, strange and sometimes frightening words or phrases would pop in and distract me. It took months and the suggestions of my mentors to practice free association when writing poems, but eventually I started keeping a keyboard under my fingers while I attempted to meditate, or entrance myself.
I let the words and phrases pore from me, and then left them. I’d come back to them moments later to find I had recounted a dream I had several nights before or a painful memory. The poems were not finished or polished or good. But they were poems.
When I think about this experience now, I think of Spiritualist mediums like Scott, and many others, who were marginalized and silenced until given this glimpse of a platform to express their ideas, often involving human rights, even if it meant they must express those ideas through a voice that was ostensibly not their own. Of course, for Scott, this was an injustice.
As a woman in the latter half of the 19th century, her only option when it came to being heard was to lecture in a voice that was not her own. Now though, I think these exercises in leaving our conscious selves out of a conversation in order to explore what we have repressed can be an act of liberation and creativity. The major difference, though, is that I’m not channeling those deemed powerful in society; I’m channeling myself in order to achieve a power of my own.
In trance writing & automatic exercises, I can dissect all of the things that hurt me, and all of the things I fear, and channel that force into words. I can also find the images and archetypes that have informed the selves of me, in both the past and the present. Not only am I creating poems, but I’m also reflecting on all of the things that haunt me. Through these exercises, I’m left with not just a poem, but a means of divination. I can write something for others to read and interpret by reading and interpreting myself. This is my craft.
Kailey Tedesco's books These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press) and She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publications) are both forthcoming. She is the editor-in-chief of Rag Queen Periodical and a performing member of the Poetry Brothel. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart. You can find her work in Bellevue Literary Review, Hello Giggles, UltraCulture, Poetry Quarterly, and more. For more, please visit kaileytedesco.com.