ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2
12.2
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Jill Christman
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Many years ago, when our daughter Ella was five, she lost her first tooth, and having been solicited by an editor to write an essay about money for an anthology, I somehow decided it would be a good idea to use the assignment to parse the strange economy of the tooth fairy, this trafficking in outgrown body parts that we enact with our kids. Since this was to be an essay about money, I focused on the going rate—$1 to $5 per tooth in those days, depending on the locale. Concentrating on the money also gave me a reason to avoid looking at the dark underbelly, the fact that the tooth fairy, like her soot-covered compatriot at Christmas and her fluffy associate at Easter, use their respective celebrations as an excuse to creep into our houses under the cover of night—in the case of the tooth fairy, right into our bedrooms, up to our beds, under our pillows. And then, in the morning, when the evidence of their home-breaking stealth is revealed—when the stockings have been stuffed, the glittery eggs crammed with candy, the cast-off incisor swept from under the pillow and replaced by a crisp bill folded into an origami tooth (okay, so I lean towards excess)—do we raise the alarm?
Nope. We celebrate. We rejoice. We delight. That sneaky tooth fairy! Before I had children, I had spent more than what I’m guessing is a normal amount of time pondering this genre of parental deception, and then along came Ella—an over-thinker like her mother before her. And in matters of the tooth fairy, five-year-old Ella wasn’t having it. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted someone (some thing?) slipping into her room while she was sleeping and she knew she didn’t want the little sprite absconding with any body parts to use as building material in a creepy fairy castle, but also? She was saving up for doll accessories. To be on the safe side, Ella left a note. Thank you for any cash you’ve got, but please don’t take my tooth. Neither that first tooth fairy exchange nor the essay went well. Ella ended up in hysterical tears because the tooth had gotten lost in her sheets and she thought the devious fairy had taken it despite her carefully crafted note—and the anthology editor let me know, kindly, that my tooth fairy essay wasn’t quite there. __________
Here is a writing exercise. The objective of the exercise is to remember that the biggest ideas come from the tiniest things. The essential tools are close observation and curiosity (which, I should add, are essential tools for all of life).
I call this exercise Writing the Tooth—because on that day, I did. As you know, I still had the cast-out tooth available. I cleared the detritus from my desk and sat down with a notebook, a pen, the tooth, and the self-assigned task to do nothing but write the tooth for thirty minutes. My job was to be with the tooth. I set a timer and I set to studying that tooth. I smelled the tooth. Nothing. I rubbed the tooth on my cheek. Smooth and hard. Color? Ivory. Not a scratch in the enamel. I tapped the tooth against my tooth to hear it clink, tooth on tooth. That did it. Clink clink. I became freshly aware that this was not the first time that little tooth had been inside my body. As obvious as the biological facts may be, this thought struck me as I pinched the teeny incisor between my thumb and forefinger: I made this tooth. With no conscious effort on my part, no blueprint, no earthly idea how to sculpt the layers—root, pulp, dentin, enamel—I had grown this tooth in my body. Isn’t that wild? The cutting edge was barely worn, having known only five years of crunching, and mostly soft, non-choking foods at that, but when I flipped it over, the tooth was rootless, and I peered down into the ruddy hole. A baby tooth is disgusting and beautiful. The bloody bits don’t wash away. I tried to turn the image, reframe the metaphor into magic, as I’d been practicing with Ella: That wily fairy, I told myself, she’s been using this tiny tooth as a fairy goblet for her elderberry wine. But I failed. All I could see was evidence of a battle waged. I lifted the tooth closer to my eye, peering over the top of my glasses the way my artist father did when he wanted to inspect something, and felt grief catch in my chest. The root of the tooth was gone and the perimeter of the tooth, the circle where the enamel tried to cling to the gum was sharpened into a kind of lace. The baby tooth had tried, but the permanent tooth pushing up from beneath was a bully and a thief. The blood of the struggle never washes clean no matter how many times we rinse the tooth under the tap. The baby tooth tries to hang on, but the adult tooth is relentless, absorbing the root of the baby tooth to make itself stronger as it pushes up and up. The adult tooth consumes the baby tooth. It’s like some kind of dental cannibalism. Here was me in the poorly acted role of tooth fairy, and here was Ella hanging on, and here was childhood, gutted and hollow in the palm of my hand, exiled from the enchanted kingdom. Now I understood why I was writing the tooth. This tooth. By the time my thirty minutes were up, I was sitting with Ella’s tooth on my flat palm, weeping. Once I looked closely, I realized—duh—that I hadn’t been writing about money at all. It turned out I’d been trying to write the story of how I felt as a new mother, wanting so dearly to participate in the kind of magic-making that would delight Ella. I had been trying to orchestrate the perfect tooth fairy experience to hold Ella with us in childhood, but when I looked closely at the baby tooth in my palm, I understood that there would be no hanging on. Adulthood would come and decimate childhood. I couldn’t stop it—and of course, considering the alternative, I knew I didn’t want to stop it. I know, right? That’s a lot from a tooth. __________
Now you try.
This exercise works in all phases of writing. Perhaps you’re just getting started on a new project. You have a vague idea that something matters, but you don’t know what or why. You need to generate material. In that case, get your hands on an artifact—some thing–attached to whatever memory or concern or person (or?) you’ve been thinking about. Right after I learned my lesson with the tooth, I tried this with a photograph of a sloth in a cecropia tree (see “The Sloth”). Since then, I have exercised this same technique of close observation and curiosity with Park Service maps and old photographs (see “Paddling the Middle Fork"), Swedish Fish and beach grass (see “Going Back to Plum Island”), spiders in vials and a horse head drawing (see “Spinning Webs in Space”), and (sort of cheating but still wildly effective) videos of Alex Honnold scaling El Capitan (see “Falling”), and all manner of spinning things—so many quarters whirling across my desk!—for the writing of, yup, “Spinning.” Sometimes when I have my students do this exercise, they balk at the amount of time. “Thirty minutes! How can I just look at something for thirty minutes! I’ll run out of things to write.” And summoning my best inner Yoda, I nod sagely and repeat the instructions: “Thirty minutes. No internet. No phones. If you think of something you want to research, make a note. You can do the research later. This is about close observation. This is about using all your senses. This is about curiosity. If you have an agenda, let it go. Just be with your thing.” The practice of writing the tooth is a lot like the practice of yoga, right? Stay in the present. If other thoughts distract you, notice them without interest. You have nowhere else you need to be but here. Now. The whole point of “writing the tooth” is to study something with all your senses until you see something you didn’t see before. This is going to feel a little scary at first. What if it’s hard? What if I write something bad? What if this looking is boring? (It’s okay to be bored sometimes. As my poet husband said frequently to our children, quoting the mother in Berryman’s “Dream Song 14”: “‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.”) Cultivate those inner resources. Keep looking. Stay open to what you might find there—until something surprises you. For example, in that first version of the tooth fairy essay, the one that was trying to be about money, I had started with an idea—“I will write an essay about how and what we teach our children about money through the tooth fairy”—and then I tried all my usual essay-writing strategies. I began with narrative, a time-tested scene sandwich essay. Nope. I tried a particularly good line from Ella’s tooth fairy note—cute, maybe cloyingly so, but it didn’t get me any closer to why I was writing about the tooth fairy. I spent hours reading and researching, everything from parenting tips on how we talk to our children about the tooth fairy to cross-cultural iterations (my favorite, of course, is the skittering French tooth-absconding mouse, but I had nothing particular to say about la bonne petite souris, beyond the fact that I when I lived deep in the woods as a teenager, I was once bitten on the cheek by a mouse as I lay on my pillow and that was pretty terrible). Back in early 2008, writing the tooth was a last resort. Writing the tooth was what I did when everything else had failed. Now, it is the foundation of my writing practice—the root, if you will. Many, many years ago, in grad school down in Tuscaloosa, trying to figure out (in a fiction program) how to write my first memoir, Darkroom, I fell in love with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, a slim book that was both a eulogy to Barthes’s mother and an investigation into the way in which we look at and experience photographs. Barthes introduced me to the concepts of the studium and the punctum, which I recognize now is the theory beneath the practice of writing the tooth. The gist is that the studium is what the photo is about, the subject that draws our eyes and attention to the photo in the first place—what we see within a general sociocultural frame, what we can all see and understand with a glance. Fine, but the punctum is what we’re really after. The punctum is that detail in the photo that “punctures” the viewer. For example, what wounds me when I look closely is the way the baby tooth has been dissolved, the blood that won’t wash away. So writing the tooth is essential for generating new material, but it’s also important for revision. Perhaps you already have a draft of an essay, but you can’t find the center. Or maybe the problem is with the language, the sentences stretching lazily across the page, as flat as the paper they’re printed on. In writing “The Avocado,” I held, sliced, examined, and ate so many avocados. Of course I couldn’t have the avocado, purchased on the street in San Jose, Costa Rica in the late eighties, the green-skinned star of the essay, the avocado that held the story of my shifting relationship to my body, sex, loss, and birth, but I could recreate that avocado from the bin at my local Kroger and that was enough. Actual avocados led me to connections I had no idea were waiting for me inside their pebbled rinds: The flesh inside was perfect, almost too beautiful to eat. Avocado green is not, in fact, the desexed color of 1970s stand mixers but something more complicated, a gradation of shade from buttercream near the nut-brown pit to deep-shade-in-the-forest green at the perimeter where flesh meets frame. On one hemisphere, the clinging brown pit glowed gold, a cross-sectioned woman, heavy with child. On the other side, a hollow, a vacancy, a curvature where something vital had been but was now gone. Before I wrote the avocado, I knew the day-long scene of eating a giant avocado when I was on a mourning trip to in Central America mattered (the whistling men on the street, my lonely room at the pension, the dusty bus ride, the exploding volcano), but I didn’t know how—until I looked closely at separated avocado and saw a woman’s body, my body, waiting inside the fruit. To make art, to make meaning, we must look closely, our senses open to what we might find. When we’ve seen something all our lives, we don’t really see it anymore. These things can become a kind of visual cliché—so just as we push harder on language when we root out clichés in our writing, we look more closely to push past easy representations of the things around us and make them new. That’s where writing the tooth comes in.
Whatever the tooth is for you right now: Put it on your desk. Grant yourself this gift of time, of focus, of looking. What do you see? What wounds or surprises you? Where can you find your truthiest truth? Set a timer. Thirty minutes. Go. |
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Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2026). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (2023 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner), Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF), and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood (excerpted in Longreads andthe inspiration for a play by the same name). Her essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a free weekly online magazine of micro nonfiction). Visit her at jillchristman.com.
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