Developing Your Literary Sense of Smell: Guest Blog by Nancy Lord

This is a guest blog by Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of many books of fiction and nonfiction. Please see the end of the blog for her full bio.

 

Nancy Lord (photo: Stacy Studebaker)

Smell is the most fundamental of our senses, with a direct line to basic brain functions and the emotional memories associated with odors. Smell—or even just a memory of smell—triggers the release of oxytocin, associated with the ability to trust and form attachments. It’s a powerful and underused sense to include in our writing.

In “A Natural History of the Senses,” Diane Ackerman writes: “Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once.”

 

I’m sure it’s the same for you, that certain smells take you right back to powerful childhood memories. It might be the smell of perfume your grandmother wore, coal smoke from your neighbor’s fire, or the wet fur of your beloved dog. For me, whenever I smell a freshwater lake I’m right back at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, where my family spent two weeks every summer when I was small. An instant picture of the boathouse and dock presents itself, along with the sound of lapping water, and then a whole surround of memories and strong, positive emotions. The smell of burning leaves brings me to the taste of baked apples (cored, with raisins and brown sugar added) that we used to wrap in foil and cook in the piles of raked leaves we burned along the curbs in the street where I grew up. I “feel” such smells in waves of nostalgia and emotion, as physical effects.

 

Try looking at a page of your writing and mark each sensory detail—of any sense—but put a bold box around any description of smell…. See if you use any of the senses. Pay special attention to whether you involve one or more smells. Do you see more opportunities to include smell and other sensory details?

 

It’s been said that modern literature has been “deodorized,” especially in North American writing, just as we’ve eliminated or covered up so many natural odors in our modern lives. If you look at eighteenth and nineteenth century writings, you’ll find a lot more smells—especially of bodies, death, coal smoke, etc.

 

Each of us reacts differently to a smell, in life and on the page. The smell of a certain aftershave will mean one thing when it’s associated with a loving father and something else if associated with a child molester. In other words, you can’t count on a certain smell to create a common response in readers—although something like fresh bread smells are probably mouth-watering for all of us, and the smell of decayed flesh is probably stomach-turning.)

 

So, here’s what’s happening in our brains when we smell. Smell is the oldest sense evolutionarily. It goes all the way back to creatures living in the sea that responded to chemicals in the water, even before sight, hearing, or touch. That’s why it’s called a rudimentary sense. Our brains started with smell.  You can say that we think because we smell. Only smell has a direct line to our pre-cognitive brains.

 

My friend Jill McCabe Johnson has said it as well as anyone, in an essay in Brevity: “A writer’s references to the other senses help readers create an imagined facsimile, but with smell, readers just know. Not only can they experience an immediate, intimate understanding, but smell might actually help readers set aside their disbelief and bond with the characters, because smell—even the memory of smell—is believed to trigger oxytocin, and oxytocin has been associated with our ability to trust and form attachments.”

 

Oxytocin is known as the bonding hormone and is what allows human mothers (and other mother animals) to recognize the smell of their own babies, to tell them apart from other babies.

 

We’re more likely to remember details grounded in the senses than non-sensory details.  Another interesting fact: because we encounter most new odors in our youth, smells often call up childhood memories. But we actually begin making associations between smell and emotion before we’re even born. Infants who were exposed in the womb to alcohol, cigarette smoke, or garlic will show a preference for those smells. To them, smells that might upset other babies seem normal or even comforting.

 

Brain science helps answer one more question for us: Why is it so hard to describe smells? It’s easy to sense and recognize them, but to put them into words? This is because, while the smell and memory centers are closely connected, the physiological links between the brain’s smell and language centers are, in Diane Ackerman’s words, “pitifully weak.” She’s written, “When we see something we can describe it in gushing detail, in a cascade of images... But who can map the features of a smell?”

Nancy Lord edited the collection Made of Salmon

Here are some useful words to describe smell: acidy, acrid, antiseptic, aromatic, balmy, biting, bitter, briny, burnt, citrusy, comforting, corky, damp, dank, earthy, fishy, flowery, fragrant, fresh, fruity, gamy, gaseous, heavy, lemony, medicinal, metallic, mildewed, minty, moldy, musky, musty, odorless, peppery, perfumed, piney, pungent, putrid, reek, rose, rotten, savory, scented, sharp, sickly, skunky, smoky, sour, spicy, spoiled, stagnant, stench, stinking, sulphurous, sweaty, sweet, tart, vinegary, woody, yeasty.

Here are examples of great writing about smell:

 

Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whalelight:  “Their guano smells like stale Wheat Thins…” “[The whale] surfaced on the other side and blew a fine mist, which poured over us, smelling sweet, like wet fur.”

 

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: “Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define.”

 

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia: “My grandmother lived in a red-brick house set.…Inside it smelled of church.” (p. 2) “The wind blew the smell of rain down the valley ahead of the rain itself, the smell of wet earth and aromatic plants.” (p. 63)

 

Tracy Kidder, Home Town: “The town is waking up… From several alleys comes the smell of baking bread . . .” “. . . the old Calvin Theatre downtown, a place of sticky floors, redolent with ancient popcorn fumes.”

 

Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: “The smell [after a flash flood]. . . filled the gully to the brim. Heavy, dense, sweet—never has air been so sweet—it was the smell of cedars netted with the roots of sorrel, the piney dark smell of old stone churches at Christmastime.” (p. 54)

 

E. B. White: “The Years of Wonder”: “. . . I viewed much of our future forty-ninth state through the porthole of the fireman’s mess, and the picture has a special smell—a blend of cabbage, garbage, steam, filth, fuel oil, engine oil, exhausted air, exhausted men. It is a smell you get nowhere but in a ship.” (Essays of E. B. White)

 

Sandra Cisneros, “The Monkey Garden”: “And everywhere the sleepy smell of rotting wood, damp earth, and dusty hollyhocks thick and perfumy like the blue-blond hair of the dead.”

 

Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock, The Smell of Other People’s Houses: “I’ve realized over time that houses with moms in them do tend to smell better. If I close my eyes, I can just barely remember my mother’s wildflowers in their whiskey bottles. The very distant scent of my parents lingers in my brain, as they laugh and twirl around the kitchen. Deer blood on my father’s hands tinges all my memories of them—their skin, their hair, their clothes.”

 

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: “The smell of the canvas (it always rains up north in the summer), and the smell of soup cooking for afterwards,  and the smell of damp paper printed with the hymns—that’s what Jesus smells like.” (p. 71)

 

Nancy Lord is a former Alaska State Writer Laureate (2008-2010). She is the author of three short story collections; five books of literary nonfiction, including Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths and Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-changed North; and the novel pH. Nancy Lord also edited the anthology Made of Salmon. Her work focuses mainly on environmental and marine issues. She currently teaches science writing for Johns Hopkins University. Nancy Lord lives in Homer, Alaska, where she enjoys the smells of mudflats and tide pools.  

Nancy Lord’s book include the novel pH

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Be an American Writer, Part 6: Populist Writers: the Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

To continue the thread of the last two blogs, which talked about populist writers Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder, I’m going to discuss other groups of American writers who I’m viewing as gathered under the populist umbrella.

A populist writer is not just one who writes about the United States, but a writer who believes that American life is a source of good, knowledge, and redemption. That’s why I’m not including in this particular post excellent writers such as Jane Smiley or Jane Hamilton, for instance. I think their view of American society is more pessimistic than the populists. I’ll talk about their writing in an upcoming blog.

Among other populist writers, we could add the playwright Arthur Miller, who dealt with ordinary Americans in some of his plays. Miller raised the lives of working people to the level of tragedy, a genre of literature that was formerly the domain of kings. I’m thinking in particular of his plays Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge—the latter play I analyzed in a blog earlier this year.

I’d also include as populists some of the writers of the Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac for On the Road, a book about discovering the hidden beauty of freeway America and the heartland.

I’d include many African American writers as populists, since a number of these authors are also champions of everyday Americans. I’m thinking of fiction writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, for example; and poets Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Sekou Sundiata. Ishmael Reed I'm saving for the blog on satirists—I see his sensibility differently.

The explosion of women’s fiction in the U.S. in the last several decades often has a populist impulse, finding extraordinary truths in the lives of people often considered ordinary. Some examples would be the writing of Ann Beattie, Elizabeth Berg, Sandra Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, and Anne Tyler. Those authors focus on the intimate moments of American life that lead to large epiphanies. 

Ann Patchett

There are some male fiction writers who think along similar lines, such as Raymond Carver, definitely a detective searching for the small moments in American households that resonate deeply.

What’s interesting about the literary populism that has come out of the last several decades is that it’s not always an affirmation of all of American life. It’s sometimes an affirmation of a particular slice of American life, a slice often defined by the author’s race, ethnicity, national origin, class, gender, sexuality, etc. It’s a populism with an edge, a populism that overlaps with the critical approaches to American life that I’m going to discuss in the blogs that follow.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 7: Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros zoomed onto the literary scene in 1984 with the novel The House on Mango Street. Since then, her work has become part of the canon, assigned to schoolchildren, displayed in multiple anthologies.

Somehow that enshrining of Cisneros’s work in a smooth marble niche has blurred some of the most important qualities in her writing. She is a daring author who constantly presents her readers with new vistas, writing books that deserve to be considered classics because they speak to core human experiences in language that shoots electric currents right to the reader’s imagination. Cisneros’s writing is wise, funny, sexy, and thought-provoking, often on the same page.

Nowhere is that truer than in her epic novel, Caramelo, or Puro Cuento, first released in 2002. The reviews were primarily chatty and upbeat, but most of them seemed to miss that this is a great American novel, a book that speaks eloquently to fundamental experiences, both in North America and in human life. Caramelo is the saga of one family on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, stretching over two huge countries and three generations. The depth of the passions, aspirations, disappointments, frustrations, and exhaltations in the book is breathtaking. Each chapter is almost self-contained, a polished turquoise set in silver, but each gem adds to the long necklace of the story.

Cisneros’s use of metaphor in the book is sensational. There are precious few writers who come up with such stellar figurative language on a consistent basis. Here’s a passage from Caramelo where Soledad, the grandmother of the main character, falls in love as a young woman, and the narration follows her thoughts:

In that kiss, they swallowed one another, swallowed the room, the sky, darkness, fear, and it was beautiful to feel so much a part of everything and bigger than everything. Soledad was no longer Soledad Reyes, Soledad on this earth with her two dresses, her one pair of shoes, her unfinished caramelo rebozo, she was not a girl anymore with sad eyes, not herself, just herself, only herself. But all things little and large, great and small, important and unassuming. A puddle of rain and the feather that fell shattering the sky inside it, the lit votive candles flickering through blue cobalt glass at the cathedral, the opening notes of a waltz without a name, a clay bowl of rice in bean broth, a steaming clod of horse dung. Everything, oh, my God, everything. A great flood, an overwhelming joy, and it was good and joyous and blessed.

So much for the doctrine of Original Sin!

To understand Cisneros’s gifts as a writer it’s worth remembering that she started out as a poet when she enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her poetry is undervalued to this day—her book Loose Woman has some terrific poems. That poetic sensibility is the foundation of her prose—she’s a storyteller, but the telling is as important as the outcome.

There are so many achievement in Caramelo it’s difficult to parse them all. Cisneros threads real and surprising historical characters into this chronicle that I imagine includes a lot of her own family history, historical characters such as the ventriloquist Señor Wences; and the siren of Mexican film, Tongolele. Cisneros presents a complex portrayal of Mexico itself, a country with a glorious and tragic history. I enjoyed her command of the look and feel of different decades and their clothing, so all the layers of time seem authentic. Some characters in the book, living and dead, engagingly talk back to the author, asking her to exclude certain episodes or change her account of some events. In the end, the author tells all, more or less.

Yes, Caramelo has some mushy passages, particularly at the very end, but what great book doesn’t have warts? Ulysses has many more. Caramelo is not a page-turner. Neither is Ulysses.

Caramelo contains a lot of Spanish, and it’s impressive that Cisneros draws on the linguistic traditions of English and Spanish fluently. She places the Spanish in contexts that makes it understandable. Well, for the most part.

It’s time to take Sandra Cisneros out of the marble niche she’s been confined to and recognize her as one of the great living authors of the U.S.A.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 4: When Do I Get to Stop Paying Attention to Comments on My Writing?

Do you have to pay attention to the comments of others for your entire career as a writer? Doesn’t there come a point where you can actually edit your own work without any help? Hey, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but almost all the good writers I know rely heavily on friends, editors, agents, and/or family members for critiques of their work.

Look in the acknowledgments of any book you enjoy, and you’ll see that writing is not a solo Lindbergh flight across a vast ocean. Here’s a quote from the acknowledgments of the David E. Hoffman’s book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2010: “Four gifted colleagues at the [Washington] Post provided years of inspiration as well as valuable comments on the book…To my wife, Carole, who read the entire manuscript many times over…profound appreciation for loving support…” Sandra Cisneros, in the acknowledgments for her novel Caramelo says, “A writer is only as good as her editors.”

You do get to the point in your literary career where you have received the same comment enough times that you can remind yourself of that thought, and apply it to your own writing. You make progress as a writer as you internalize only the most astute and useful comments of your mentors and your peers.

I had the amazing good fortune to have as my mentor in college and in graduate school the poet June Jordan. June died in 2002, but I still feel her looking over my shoulder when I write, making her comments, applying her high standards. June always wanted to know if I had used the freshest possible language in what I was writing, without exception. Did I include and speak with respect about those whose concerns are rarely heard? Did I actually excite and challenge the reader? Is the writing sexy? I also remember the praise that she gave me, the very first time I met with her in 1975, when I was an undergraduate at Yale University and she listened so attentively to the poem she made me read aloud to her during her office hours. She squinted at me with that quizzical look she had, with a twitch in one eye, but also with an amused curve to her lips. Don’t forget the praise you’ve gotten from your mentors, either.

To sum up this series of blogs on how to deal with comments from others on our work: I see so many writers, especially newer writers, just shut out most criticism. They assume it’s going to dilute the purity of their personal artistic vision. They fear it will tear apart their new literary identity. But to refuse to listen to the best comments of others, or to listen to them and then basically disregard or forget them, is to doom yourself to the ranks of amateur writers who will never be able to bring their projects to the level of fine art. There’s nothing wrong with being an amateur writer, but I don’t think a single person reading this has that ambition in mind.


Other recent posts about writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer