Here and there

Can we imbue our "normal" jobs with art?

Hello, and welcome. I’m a writer and public defender who uses this space to explore emotional landscapes, often alongside film photography. You never know what you’ll find here but, I hope there’s at least some good. Feel free to respond and introduce yourself, or for any reason, really. A reminder that paid subscribers can request a custom poem… check it out.

I want to write you a poem

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Lately I’m preoccupied with the contours of creative work. Sitting in a dream group and struck by how similar it is to read and discuss someone’s dream as it is to read and critique their short story. Both give me images conveyed through words and a sense of the limits of language, or perhaps the line between story and truth. Both at first may seem cringe but will draw me in if I sit for a few minutes and let them.

I have an idea for a talk for my colleagues about how concepts from creative writing can be applied in lawyering.¹ How telling a client’s story is not so dissimilar from observing a stranger on a train and attempting to sketch him with words.

Yet the topic feels dangerous to approach. Something about the stereotype of lawyer as failed writer, resentful and ready to wound. I forget that many people may consider art to be frivolous—a thing no serious lawyer has time for.

On the flip side, my integrity pulls me to it. Public defense is a creative field. I’m not sure I could, or would want to, keep doing legal work if someone told me I had to stop all the other work too.

Writing across different media doesn’t necessarily make me good at any of them the way focusing in one area possibly might. But it gives me perspective, the same way I didn’t begin to understand how the U.S. government works until I learned what choices other countries and indigenous nations made for their own.² My brain gets lost when I consider concepts in isolation. Only through comparison can I see each for what it offers.

Creative writing demands reflection, courage, and trust. Allowing the body to set down whatever words come up.

Appellate legal writing begins slightly differently, perhaps akin to academic research. We craft what is hopefully a logical argument and support it with proven, admissible facts.

Once the outline is there, the writing process is similar. We take our readers on a journey that must hit certain stops. Building blocks of the factual scenario that, as we’ve constructed it, lead you where we intend.

That part isn’t so different, in my mind, from writing narrative nonfiction like this. Except here, I’m pulling facts from my lived experience instead of a case record.

The point of this “creative writing meets lawyering” talk is less about drawing the above comparisons, given that they aren’t necessarily relevant to lawyers who don’t also write creatively outside of work. Instead, I imagine evoking The Artist’s Way and asserting that we, as humans, are all creative beings and further asserting that choosing work like public defense means we are that much more inclined than other lawyers to identify with our rebellious, i.e., creative, sides. Creative writing has taught me that we must climb cringe mountain before we can reach what’s beyond. We must embrace our bad writing, including bad legal writing, before we have any hope of making it good.

The goal would be for others to connect with what I’m saying and, dream of dreams, that they see the through line too. To invite more of these discussions and find acceptance for the side of me that’s never been sure how it fits in my job.

I can understand the desire to keep work and play separate. But the longer I stay in this profession, the more I crave harmony. Or if not harmony, at least greater transparency around how I spend my non-work time.

The risk is that I deliver this talk to a roomful of blank stares. People whose brains don’t make connections between seemingly disparate things the way mine seeks to. The risk is being told I am crazy and that I don’t deserve my job. The risk is feeling foolish for attempting to bring art into the cold realm of the law.

Yet, that’s what I do every day. It’s hard not to see my legal work as an extension of the work I do here, and in fiction, and in zines, albeit with a smaller and more specialized audience. Because if a non-lawyer can’t understand at least some of my brief, what good is it? Part of my role is to transmute the harsh world of criminal punishment by giving voice to people who sit within it, while another part is to reach those of us outside who seek to better understand, support, and remember. I’d like to think that improving my creative writing can only help with all that.

What if the writing I do exists on a spectrum, like gender, sexuality, or sound. Sometimes I’m here, and sometimes over there. Each one is perhaps its own reflection of the world I seek to inhabit. The work is to translate that world so ideally, I’m not in it alone.

Welcome to my (dusty) portal between worlds

…And with that, off to work!

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear what you think.

1. Partially inspired by a presentation at the 2023 National Association for Public Defense conference called “Poetic Justice: Combating the Single Story in Pleadings” by Ijeoma U. Eke, a federal public defender and spoken word poet.

2. To be clear, I still don’t, and probably never will, understand how the U.S. government works. Please ask a different lawyer about that.