Page 47 of The Deepest Lake

The room is silent.

“All right?”

But they aren’t supposed to speak. Except for now, possibly: just in this one instance.

A chorus belatedly kicks in. “All right!” “Yes!”

“Good. As I read aloud, I want you to pay attention to the language. Try to find the common element in everything I read to you. Just take it all in.”

Holding a sheaf of printed-out pages in her hand, Eva begins to read single words and phrases. Some of the gathered participants close their eyes. One woman even reclines on a pillow-festooned bench. Rose can’t do that. She sits at one of the schoolhouse-style chairs with an attached desk, pen gripped in her hand, notebook ready.

“Here goes,” Eva begins.

“Depths of sorrow. Daddy issues. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Rose is tempted to scribble, to try to capture whatever pattern Eva is revealing. But she’s supposed to listen. The common thread seems to be: Emotions? Unhealthy thoughts? Alliteration using the letter D?

Eva continues, “Inferiority complex. Normalized. Reframed.”

Maybe the pattern is psychological labeling.

“Collateral damage. Mutually assured destruction.”

Maybe the pattern is militaristic or aggressive labeling.

“Compartmentalization. Emotional roller coaster . . .”

Rose recognizes the last phrase from the writing sample she submitted, describing a summer with her older sister when their mother was away as an emotional roller coaster. And it was: extremes of happiness and melancholy, confusion and exhilaration. The roller-coaster image would have made sense even to her ten-year-old self, a young girl with little access to complex metaphors.

Well done, you.

In her surprise at being singled out, Rose has missed several words, but she refocuses.

“Benign neglect.”

That was Rose’s phrase as well, used to describe her parents’ oblivious parenting. Yes! Determined not to sit up with too-obvious pride, Rose does the opposite, slumping in her seat, pretending not to notice she has been praised twice. Twice!

“There,” Eva says, setting her sheaf of pages on the stool. She finger-combs her hair, scrunching the damp longer bits at the front. Giving them time to think. But not too long. “I’m not going to make you guess. I’m going to tell you.”

Rose feels her face flush. So, this is how it feels to be in a writer’s workshop, in your forties, having assumed you couldn’t write, having told the world—your daughter, especially—that you had no interest in writing.

“Dead language,” Eva says. “Every phrase I’ve read out loud—from your manuscripts—is an example of dead, abstract language. The kind of thing I don’t want to read in this workshop ever again.”

Tick—the sound of a dropped pen, hitting the floor. Then, silence.

Rose begins to sink, pulling her head low between her shoulders, until her shawl prickles her earlobes.

“But wait,” says Lindsay, her finger in the air. “I mean, even ‘compartmentalized?’ I get that it’s abstract—”

“Dead language,” Eva says. “Overused. Therapy-speak. Dead. No value to any of us here.”

A lock of Eva’s hair has fallen in front of her face. She blows at it with pursed lips, then pushes it back over her ear with an exaggerated gesture. “Are we clear?”

It isn’t easy to tell the truth. It can’t be profitable. Surely, there must be other famous writing teachers who tell their students they all have artists within them. All they need to do is keep going. Shitty first drafts. Bird by Bird. Wasn’t that one of those bestselling how-to-write books Jules was always referring to?

Eva would probably tell some of them that their birds are ugly, or worse. Dead in the shell.

Eva turns back to the stool and blinks as if she’s lost her train of thought. “Does anyone know what time it is?”