“The Things We Carry as Writers”: Allison Renner’s Thoughts on The Miro Worm and the Mysteries ofWriting by Sven Birkerts

The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing
Sven Birkerts
Arrowsmith Press (October 2024)
184 pp.

I spent weeks with this book, letting my thoughts wander on Birkerts-inspired tangents, much like he did for other writers he mentions in his essays. It cracked open my mind at a time when I was needing inspiration. Yet even with pages of notes, I couldn’t seem to shape a review. I looked back at some of my reviews for flash and short story collections, but none of those formats seemed right.

I talked with a librarian friend about the issue, saying I didn’t know how to frame the review because my thoughts kept spinning into personal essays sharing my interpretations of what I’d read. She mentioned how the written material informs your response, so what was the book? I said… personal essays. On writing and memory and learning and art.

Suddenly, it felt completely natural to write a review as a personal essay. After all, Birkerts reflects on how Dylan, Borges, and others influenced him, his thoughts, and his writing, just as he has now influenced me.

In so many ways, the book felt like a series of lessons—lessons Birkerts starts but leaves open, inviting us to explore on our own. His essays feed into each other, with many calling back to themes and ideas from those that came before.

Birkerts insists on the importance of detail, in art and in writing. He shares his experience of being “led by the eye—by what was there, rather than what I thought I ought to be looking at.” It’s the idea that details, even the seemingly trivial ones, can carry the heart of a memory or a story. He makes several powerful comparisons between photography and writing, including the idea that a single “telling detail” in a story can make a scene come alive just as much as in a photo.

Birkerts talks about how the very act of writing distances us from what we’re writing about. Memories change when we capture them in words; they become stories we’ve crafted rather than moments we’ve lived.

He explores the tension between art, technology, and memory, especially addressing the disconnect screens create. While they let us create and share art easily, they also risk turning that art into background noise. We’re oversaturated with images and ideas, often moving on before taking in anything. He questions how much we lose by skimming through life this way, which made me realize just how often I do the same thing—scrolling past images that might have otherwise moved me.

In several essays, he addresses the idea of constraints in creativity. Having boundaries to work within, he suggests, can actually spark more ideas, forcing us to focus on what matters rather than getting lost in the endless possibilities. He then shows us how that works in “Ten Broad Swipes at the Problem of Structure.”

Toward the end of the book, Birkerts left me with a line that provided a sense of relief: “I also feel more convinced than ever that the idea of should does not belong in either the making or experiencing of art.” It reminds me to trust in the process of writing instead of being afraid of it. In fact, this entire book is a reminder that “reading the right book, the right author, at the right time, can still… put me inside a force field that is unlike anything else I know.”

Reading this book felt like joining an informal writing workshop where Birkerts himself was the instructor or, better yet, talking one-on-one with the experienced writer—without the pressure of talking back.

Allison Renner’s fiction and photography have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Ellipsis Zine, Six Sentences, Rejection Letters, Atlas and Alice, Misery Tourism, Versification, FERAL, and vulnerary magazine. Her chapbook Won’t Be By Your Side is out from Alien Buddha Press. She can be found online at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Twitter @AllisonRWrites.