ARE YOU STILL WRITING? by Sharon White • Cleaver Magazine

A Writing Tip by Sharon White
ARE YOU STILL WRITING?

Friends ask me this all the time. The last time was a couple of months ago — in the heat of summer sitting across from my friend Carmen, whom I’ve known since the 1970s. We were in her kitchen sipping water with crushed lemons. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years. It felt like a century.

I just found out that Annie Dillard died not long ago. I was reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the same time that I first met Carmen. I was twenty. I wanted to go off into the woods and build a tiny cabin and write. In an interview Dillard gave in 2016, almost ten years after her last book came out, she repeated a sentiment she originally wrote in 1989:

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you but only if you look for it. You search. You break your heart, your back, your brain and then and only then it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye, you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way on two white wings. It flies directly at you. You can read your name on it.

Dillard said, at some point around this time, that she had stopped writing but was painting: “I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.”

I finished a long project a few months ago, and since then I’ve been floundering around. Making lists of the birds we’ve been hearing in the woods along the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia or on hikes up the lower flanks of a mountain in Vermont where I spend time. Yellow-rumped warbler. Black-throated green warbler. Ovenbird. Red-bellied woodpecker. Are these lists “writing”?

Am I still writing after all the work I put into the book I just barely finished? I seem to be mourning the loss of that work, a journey with New Zealand artist Anna Caselberg who died in 2004. I struggled with this book. It broke my heart, my back, my brain. This project carried me through four difficult years. I’m about the same age Annie Dillard was when she reported that she’d stopped writing.

Is the warbler some kind of sign? The one who appeared in our little backyard in Philadelphia, with bright black and white stripes, on the way as far south as Colombia from the far north. Or the one in the woods of Vermont who we heard in the spring—pulling himself with his long beak curved at the end up the bending stems of the hydrangea, dropping to the bluestone tiles on the patio and drinking from the plastic saucer dotted with arctic rocks I collected on a time spent there so long ago.

I’ve been reading Matsuo Basho’s book The Narrow Road to Oku from 1689, and his beautiful prose alternating with haiku is leading me back to writing. I have a list now of phrases from the poems: twin pine, three months after, hunters or woodcutters, onslaught, rowboats are pulled to shore. Just these few words at the top of an empty page are enough to coax me back to the sensation Dillard described: “It flies directly at you.”

Perhaps the answer is yes. I am still writing. Perhaps if I could paint (I can’t) I would choose that way of catching the world. But for now I’m still sitting here at my computer typing words on the page.

Sharon White is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her first novel, Minato Sketches, won the Rosemary Daniell Prize and is published by Minerva Rising Press. If the Owl Calls, a mystery, was published in November 2025 by Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW. Recent nonfiction appears in Solstice Literary Magazine, Miracle Monocle, Cleaver, Ways of Walking, Switch, DIAGRAM, The Rupture, and Nowhere Magazine. Sharon White is an Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University.