John Simmons and Jonathan Holt

And So We Grow 

A conversation about writing between two Dark Angels 

John Simmons 

Many years ago, in the early days of Dark Angels, I was running a week-long course with a group in the Highlands of Scotland at Moniack Mhor. It’s a place familiar to many writers on Dark Angels and other writing courses – the Scottish National Writing Centre. 

Stuart Delves, Jamie Jauncey and I were developing writing exercises to help our writers, mainly from the corporate world, become more human and creative writers for business. Our belief, vindicated by experience, is that becoming a more creative writer makes you a better writer in any context or genre. So we based our exercises on poetry, fiction, memoir-writing. 

One of the people on that early course was Jonathan Holt whom I’d first met when he was working on the content of the BP website. It was clear from his writing at Moniack Mhor that he was an exceptional talent. On the final evening, as is the Dark Angels tradition, we invited everyone to read out a piece of personal writing created during that week. Jonathan read a poem, Rowan Oak, based on his visit to William Faulkner’s house in the American Deep South. It was imaginative, moving, clever in its use of language and metaphor. What I think of as quintessential Dark Angels qualities. 

Fast forward nearly 20 years and that poem, together with 14 others written since, has been selected for inclusion in the second volume of Dark Angels poetry, And So We Grow. 

Jonathan, that’s a telescopic version of your writing career. Let’s fill in some of the gaps because that will be helpful for other writers. Can you tell us something about the kind of writing you’ve been doing over the last 20 years? And how do you see the relationship between commercial and personal writing? 

Jonathan Holt 

Well, I would say that it’s no coincidence that Rowan Oak, the oldest piece of mine in And So We Grow, is about a place. Places and spaces have been a fascination of mine since childhood. My first paid writing gigs, in my teens and early 20s, were for travel guidebooks and websites.  

The same year as that course at Moniack Mhor, I started a story that would eventually become a novel set between two places: a small, North Carolina town and New Orleans, with a protagonist who wants to be an architect and is himself very taken with places and spaces. If you want to know where the years have gone, that project ran away with a lot of my time. Figuring out how to turn my obsessions with place into a novelistic read was by no means a quick process! Maybe I’d have gotten there years faster and had more success with publishers if my starting point had been sex, lies and family secrets, instead of having to discover those topics very gradually, through the steamed-up windows of a fictitious car.  

Anyway, thank goodness for Dark Angels writing prompts and other excuses to step outside the ‘big thing’ and simply be creative for the sake of it. 

Also, commercially I must’ve written enough words by now to fill hundreds of novels. I consider every word I’ve ever written to be part of the never-ending apprenticeship, even the boring bits about niche subjects. Maybe even especially the boring bits, since they require so much attention to get right. Writing commercially has a completely different lifeforce than writing as art, but they both use the same tools and a lot of the same sensibilities.  

John Simmons 

It all adds up. All those words written for commercial clients are part of an apprenticeship that leads to many other forms of writing – in your case, novels and poetry. I’ve never seen these genres as belonging to completely separate boxes, they’re all part of the same box called ‘writing’. 

Perhaps we’re aiming in all our writing for that elusive thing called ‘truth’. I’m not in that camp that sees copywriters/writers for business as putting the best gloss on untruths. Unless your copywriting reveals a truth, and connects with a reader/audience as a result, it will not work. Writing fiction and poetry is not that different, but perhaps trickier often because the truth sought and expressed is less literal. 

Is this something you’ve found with your poetry? Do people try to read literal meaning into words that might be metaphorical, allusive or even spiritual? I use the ‘spiritual’ word deliberately because I find this quality in most poetry, but it does not need to be about religious faith. I feel much spirituality in your poetry. 

But does that sometimes lead to misunderstanding or incomprehension? Poetry has that problem. Many people see it as a code they have to crack. How would you advise people to read your poetry to get the most out of it? 

Jonathan Holt 

It’s funny you should mention that conception of poetry as being incomprehensible head-scratchers, because I just had an email from a friend who read And So We Grow, who was surprised and delighted to encounter poems in this book that were easy to understand.  

My first thought was a kind of imposter syndrome. You know, maybe my poems aren’t confusing enough because I’m not really a poet! Then I remembered how hard I worked to make them as clear as I could get them. The type of writing I’ve been trying to master for a while now is the kind that’s easy to understand, almost like natural speech, but which also contains subtle twists of meaning, hidden depths, layered metaphors.  

My only advice to a reader of my pieces in And So We Grow would be: don’t assume that the ‘I’ you encounter is necessarily me. In most cases it is, but sometimes it isn’t. This is a sampler. There are overlapping themes and other bits of connective tissue running through the poems, but ultimately each poem should be read on its own.  

Then again, if someone assumes that I literally encountered a cyclist with a busted-open head on a roadside or met a man who’d laid down a vanishing monument across half of the United States, that’s okay too. Because to a very large extent I did have those experiences. In my imagination. The tears that washed through me when I got to the last lines were most definitely real.  

Like Flannery O’Connor, I’m more and more interested in the deeper truths, in what’s happening under the surface, and I think you’re right that those are usually spiritual truths. Of course, by ‘spiritual’, I’m mainly talking about what is felt, what we all feel. And things that are barely there at all. 

John Simmons

I’ve had a few conversations on Dark Angels courses with people, mainly from a heavy corporate background, who struggle to see the point of fiction. They don’t read novels or poetry and can’t quite get – at first – why we are doing exercises based on fiction, trying to develop fictional techniques that can be used in business writing. Surely business writing just needs to be straightforward – as if we’re aspiring to the level of an instruction manual. I’ve never read one of those for pleasure – or even with great understanding.

Your words above talk about trying to master writing that is easy to understand. Your poems certainly sound like natural speech but, of course, simple, clear, natural-sounding writing is a long way away from what generally counts as ‘business writing’. I’m pretty sure that your business writing benefits from your approach to writing poetry.

But if we set aside the ‘techniques’, what you achieve with your writing is an emotional truth that enables us to understand better the subtler, deeper meanings that would be banal if we tried to write them purely factually. Each poem invites the reader to read, absorb, reflect, but not to come up with a precis of what you were meaning to say. All readers will find their own meanings in poetry, and that meaning need not match exactly with the poet’s intentions. Poets might be completely surprised by meaning in their own writing that they had not previously thought, felt or expressed – we write to discover. Readers find their own points of connection and that adds richness to the experience of reading poetry. It’s quite different, though, from trying to find words of such numbing clarity – “does exactly what it says on the tin” – that simply close off further thought or engagement.

Jonathan Holt

I’m reminded of the feature-writing professor I had in journalism school, Chuck Stone, who took one look at our first assignments and said the training we’d been given on how to be factual and accurate in our reporting and editing classes had sucked all the heart and soul out of our work. It was wonderful to be given permission to write more colourfully, just as, later, the Dark Angels foundation course would give me just exactly the creative jolt that I needed to start my freelance copywriting career with a proverbial swagger in my step.

But it was also helpful, I think, to have had an opportunity, in journalism school, to strip the sentences and paragraphs back to their essences, then add flourishes back in. The longer I write, the more I appreciate the role of what gets left out, the little mysteries that can be left unexplored or open-ended, so that a piece of writing will have some life in it and, as you say, the reader can come alive as they read.

I’ve just yesterday finished reading Keith Haring’s Journals, which are an incredible, life-affirming foray into a restless, creative mind that matured rapidly and never got old. Haring’s public work was almost completely visual (those ubiquitous hieroglyphic-style babies and atomic bombs), and it’s so powerful, and it turns out that a lot of its power comes from the fact that he was a poet at heart. One thing Haring says is, “If there is no mystery there is only propaganda”. It seems to me that’s always true, whether we’re talking about a poem or an annual report, although on this particular sliding scale the business writer arguably has the harder job, because in business there’s always going to be someone looking over your shoulder to check whether you’re furthering or undercutting the agenda. In business, the final draft is almost always going to be, to some extent, propaganda, but if it’s only propaganda, that’s not going to work.

You mentioned ‘numbing clarity’, which needless to say isn’t a good thing, except maybe ironically as a satire or something like that, but when I write I’m usually aiming for a ringing clarity, and that almost never materialises without lots of revision. Should we talk about the role of editing? 

John Simmons

I hear you loud and clear. One of the things I’ve discovered about editing or being edited is that a nudge in the form of a reference often works. Your editor points to a particular line – “not sure about that, think about this”. So, in that Dark Angels spirit (much as you’ve cited Keith Haring – must read) I’m going to bring forward a couple of quotations to speak for me next.

First, David Ogilvy, perhaps the greatest writer for business in the 20th century: “I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor.” He means he’s good at editing his own writing, and we all need to be better at that.

Second, Stephen King, a thought prompted by your mention of journalism school. King gives credit to his journalistic training in his book On Writing. He also usefully talks about “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open”. Your first draft is just for you, take risks, no one else reads it. But then you have to become aware of writing for other readers. So you edit with that consciousness, and you rewrite to meet points raised by your own awareness of the attention of other readers. It’s how you get to your natural-sounding language. It’s an edited version of you.

By the way, ‘sound’ is vital in this, as you know from ‘natural-sounding’. The first requirement in the editing process is to be aware of what your words sound like. So read them out.

Of course, opening the door to a constructive editor can also be enormously helpful. I know I’ve benefitted from Thérèse Kieran editing my poetry – with a wonderfully sensitive, creative touch. Small steps become giant leaps. And I think that, in putting together your collection in And So We Grow you had great support from Tim Rich. How did that work for you?

Jonathan Holt 

There’s something really solidifying about having your work edited by someone who’s sensitive to your intentions, whose instincts you trust and who can gently point out things that might need a bit more attention. Tim was and is off-the-charts wonderful on all those counts. He helped me figure out the order the poems, where I could reach for a more expressive phrase, and how to be bolder with punctuation and line breaks – mainly by challenging me to take away as many commas and full stops as I dared, letting the words and rhythms provide their own pauses and emphasis. In short, he helped me to feel more like a poet. 

I like feedback. When it’s good, it’s a gift. Walking away from a gathering of my Goldsmiths workshop group with a stack of marked-up pages in my rucksack used to feel like Christmas Eve. Opening an email with comments on a piece of business writing, by contrast, tends to feel like receiving a court summons on the morning after Boxing Day. But once I get past the grumpy, eye-rolling phase, I really quite enjoy the task of figuring out what the feedback actually means and what to do with it. This type of word play is the only puzzle or game that I’m into.  

Still, the whole ‘edited version of you’ thing – nicely put – that’s my favourite part of the writing process at the moment. It gives me something to hold on to while the world turns. With short pieces or passages that I want to do a close edit of, I’ll copy the text into a note on my phone so that I can work on it easily wherever I happen to be. I’ll then go over it and over it for the next few days, making little adjustments at each pass. The repetition reveals things. Reading aloud reveals even more. At some point, I can’t see any more changes and know that it’s done. For the time being, anyway. Tim and I share a belief that poetic work should be allowed to keep evolving even after it’s been released into the world. Walt Whitman revised Leaves of Grass constantly throughout his life, and I can understand why, although I do think there’s a point beyond which all the parsing of possibilities can become a little unhealthy. Stepping away from that novel I’d spent so much time on has been good for me. 

One thing I hadn’t anticipated with And So We Grow was that the paper itself would be an editor. I’ve never done so much counting, swearing and re-counting of letters and lines in all my life than I did while trying to make sure nothing would spill into the margins or off the pages altogether during letterpress typesetting. That constraint forced some helpful choices into the work, but I can’t guarantee that some of the poems wouldn’t spread out again if given the chance, in some other publication or context, in a future world.

 John Simmons

Your last reply brings to mind something I wrote in the book Dark Angels. Triggered by the example of Paul McCartney producing a new version of ‘Let it be’ decades after the first, I’d given this advice: “Edit, edit, edit – but know you have to stop.” I think we’re in that position with this exchange. It’s been great fun and enlightening but we have to stop.

I can’t go though without referring to the book you gave me when we last met: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Starting to read it yesterday I came across these words that seemed to confirm the connection between us and other Dark Angels writers:

“The word spirituality may not speak to those who dwell chiefly in the intellect or those who equate the word with organized religion. If you prefer to think of spirituality as simply believing in connection, that’s fine. When you’re working on a project, you may notice apparent coincidences appearing more often than randomness allows….”

Only connect. Thanks for this conversation.

And thank you to those who read this and now wish to get a copy of the book that was the centre of our conversation, And So We Grow.

You can purchase a copy of the book And So We Grow, here, or take your first step with a Dark Angels Foundation Course, here.