How the Light Gets In: The Lighthouse

It is no secret that I’m a summer gal. I adore the bevy and bounty of stone fruit and sun-drenched gardens, pool splashes from my teen sons, so much green and bloom and chirp in the thick canopy of trees arched above me. But in a season of shorter days and dark nights when I, too, want to overwinter like bumblebees, brown bears, and wood frogs—I look to my favorite summer creature, the firefly, to help guide the way to a path of renewed inspiration. Electrified, even. I seek out inspiration in gleams and glimmers, in small acts of play and experiment that let some of the light back in.

For me—with six books and another on the way—revision is where the fun and experimentation live, so much so that it doesn’t even feel like work at this point but more like play. However, writing or drafting is the hard part. I still very much fear the blank page, the blank screen, the blinking cursor taunting me. I’m sure that’s part of why I prefer drafting everything by pencil: The shhh-shhh-shhh of the lead on the page and the satisfying scritch of crossing out feels like I’m making something—while the click of the keyboard sounds like high heels walking in circles to nowhere in particular.

As a poet and essayist I have varying ways of trying to bring light into my work, depending on genre (even as slippery as I love genre to be). When I am home in the winter, I light a candle at my desk (these days I’m favoring ocean-scented ones) to signal a bit of calm and call back to summer. It’s a kind of grounding that tells my brain, We are going to make something with words now.

And if and when I feel stuck in a poem—like my “shield,” or scutellum (the hard, triangle-shaped covering on a firefly’s body where the wings begin), is at its most rigid and I’m feeling guarded and overly protective of my work—I might try a new version from the bottom up: I start a second draft with the last line or sentence of my first draft, and it almost always pushes me in strange and new directions.

These directions—no matter how ethereal, like a firefly’s lantern, which emits all of the energy it generates as light—can, however, sometimes turn into prose that feels too heavy or flat. Much like a light bulb, which gives off just 10 percent of the energy it receives in the form of light; the rest is all heat. In revision I always try to dial up the music and soundplay a bit more. So when the music of a sentence seems to be nonexistent, I worry. One easy fix to maintain some surprising music is to simply record myself reading my work on my phone or laptop. Playing it back usually proves illuminating (no matter how much it makes me cringe to hear my own voice), because I can instantly tell where I need to speed up, slow down, use words with staccato sounds, or choose more mellifluous ones.

But one thing to remember is that it is also totally normal to be in a quiet season in your writing. Maybe you are reading or taking in research for later. Fireflies spend most of their brief life as larvae after all, covered up on the ground in leaf litter, gathering food during the winter to gain strength later. Don’t worry if this is not your writing season quite yet. It will come. I am certain of it. During this quiet time in the world of fireflies, in this season of gathering—even though it is considered the “larval” stage—the most important thing to remember is that even then, the larvae actually glow.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four poetry books and two essay collections, most recently, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (Ecco, 2024). She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family, and is a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. She is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

One of the great delights of the camera obscura, which means “dark chamber” in Latin, is its physical simplicity relative to the complexity of the image it renders. Taken to the extreme, a properly punctured shoebox might hold the clear but inverted image of the Taj Mahal. How is that physically possible, and how might this mechanism of illusion be useful to a writer of literature?

To begin with, the magic of our obscure and shadowy chamber derives from light’s habit of traveling in straight lines, obedient to its rule of “rectilinear propagation.” The pinhole in the chamber allows for only certain of those lines to come through: Light bounced off the base of our Taj Mahal is projected to the chamber’s top, and light from the Taj Mahal’s top beams toward the bottom, thus creating the camera obscura’s trademark distortion—inversion. There are other distortions, too, of course: If the aperture is too large, the image can become oversize and hazy; if the aperture is too narrow, the image, while acute, may appear dim.

In terms of writing, the physics of the camera obscura may pose an apt analogue. Only certain lines come through. Isn’t the same true when we’re drafting? How many revisions has your mind already run through before that first line, often to be revised yet again, hits the page? And when we sit down to write, whether lines of dialogue or verse or both, how often do we find our aperture needs adjustment—that what we’re crafting is big and visionary but maybe not quite clear? Or that it is clear, but somehow the scope is too small, not ambitious enough? So we set to fiddling with our perceptual settings, trying to bring into focus a new and challenging possibility.

It seems to me an essential tension between accuracy and distortion defines the scenes a camera obscura produces, and this is arguably what makes its function exciting to us—not that it merely reproduces visual reality but that it alters it in some way. The same might be true for what we write. Consider the works of literature that move you most. What is their relationship to so-called objective reality? How do they alter your perception of what surrounds you when, lifting your attention from the page, the world comes rushing back to your senses? And does some form of distortion—an unreliable narrator, say, or the presence of absence in a sonnet of only thirteen lines—serve to animate the text?

A work of literature that never fails to move yours truly is Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the many exceptional things about this long and dizzyingly intricate masterpiece is that, despite placing us into a fantastical world that traverses death and doubt and myth and even the Ptolemaic heavens, its details are often highly realistic. The huge ambit of its allegory is fortified, in short, by reality, by the tremendous fidelity of its physical and emotional details to those of our known world. Charon’s boat, as Dante boards it, sinks deeper into the river Acheron, the physics of our world haunting the underworld, alarming its chthonic citizenry. Hell, as a whole, even tracks as one dim and prolonged chamber, a dank cone whose light is “infected,” whose skies are starless as any modern city’s, and is nothing if not populated by vivid images—from wind-borne lustfuls and flame-tongued frauds to a shade holding aloft his own severed head as if it were a lantern. Even gravity is turned topsy-turvy in the dark room of the underworld, as the poet-wanderer learns, crawling from the depths to find that down is up and up down.

The camera obscura seems uniquely capable of reminding us, at some cellular level, of light’s essential restlessness, its animating transit: Every image it produces journeys rapidly, over whatever modest or extravagant distance, to reach us, and in so doing transgresses the threshold between “out there” and “in here.” Public and private spheres thus blur in the camera obscura, and its boundary-eliding images warp gorgeously on their journey to our senses: Here are scenes flipped upside down, like Dante’s underworld, like the fragile image that lives on the retina for that lightning-flash instant before the brain interprets it, makes it “mean.” So our apparatus of illusion reminds us of an essential phase in our visualization of reality—of the predecessor, in short, to the perceived “real.”

Perhaps, in this way, the camera obscura performs similarly to creative writing and art more broadly, rendering a representation of the external world as transfigured—but never deciphered—by an interior. Yet the images our shadowy chamber produces don’t enjoy—or should I say suffer?—the duration and fixity of a photograph or a text, and so we apprehend its productions less as an aesthetic claim on our attention and more as incident, a collision of ethereal image with material obstruction—a wave, in essence, hitting a wall.

All this leads me to wonder, how would our own writing change if we saw it, especially in the throes of its creation, as fleeting rather than fixed? How does our sense of permanence and perishability affect our creative impetus and the very nature of what we make? Perhaps the camera obscura, in its sublime transit and transformation, its odd fusion of ephemerality and fidelity, can teach us something about the role of distortion in capturing “the real,” can attune us to the moment, the scene, that perpetually precedes our interpretation of it.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming collection Lazarus Species (Milkweed Editions, 2025). Her writing can be found in Poetry, the Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.