Packet of tissues, broken sunglasses, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, chapstick, reading light, student papers, roll of mints, phone, apple gone bad, office key, house key, two pens, hairbrush. I’ve laid the contents of my bag on the bench beside me in inventory. Over the course of the day, these contents don’t change much: perhaps new essays are added, others taken out, tissues become used, eventually thrown away, a pen may be lost, hopefully the apple makes its way into the bin, Odell’s book is read. But my pockets are another story: empty in the morning, they’re often not by evening—stones, wrappers, twigs, a dandelion, notes appear—some a result of my own pocketing, others, a child looking for a safe place or a lazy litter bin.
“Pockets are the best!” I heard a daughter exclaim to her mother in a coffee shop, awaiting their drinks. In proof, she lifted her hands in her dress’s pockets, a sudden parachute. Despite once being the primary gatherers, women were, until rather recently, pocketless out in the world.
Some have suggested women’s clothing lacked pockets to give a slim figure, but the hoop skirt could’ve held dozens unseen. The more likely theory is that pockets were necessary to bring and collect things out in the world: women’s clothing didn’t need pockets so long as they didn’t go out into the world. And in the house, or within the boundaries of the house, they had aprons. To imagine oneself beyond the domestic sphere, then, was to imagine oneself with pockets.
Thankfully, feminists have been masterful imaginers. While Simone de Beauvoir was writing about women’s oppression in The Second Sex, Claire McCardell was designing women’s clothing for maximum movement. And with pockets. It’s been 80 years since McCardell introduced pockets to women’s fashion, but still a dress or skirt with pockets is something to be acknowledged, just as I witnessed in the coffee shop last week. What woman hasn’t been prone to that delighted proclamation “and it has pockets!”
40 years on, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is also one to celebrate. Le Guin’s essay is based on Elizabeth Fisher’s Women’s Creation in which Fisher suggested that the first cultural device was likely not the spear or dagger or hammer or arrow but a container to hold a mass of items. We are creators of containers—nets of hair or reeds, baskets, boxes, even our homes are containers of us with tinier, nested containers within. And we are, all of us, sloshing around organs and sinew and blood, more container than blade. Yet objects of story which are essential anchors of story—spear, knife, missile, gun—are so often another kind of tool. Not gathering tools, killing tools.
While gathering satisfied 65-85% of diets, hunting took center stage in story, so the gatherers—the protectors of home—were told the stories, not of the stories. Their bags and baskets played little role in the heroic romp. “So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it,” lamented Le Guin. She urged us to interrogate the story whose central concern is conflict, the kind of plot that is urgently “starting here going straight there and THOK!”—hits its target as all thrown spears exist to do.
“Plot the conflicts,” I might've been told in my schooling, I might’ve told my own students for many years. What a reduction: all the nutritious broth evaporates. Increasingly, I find myself wondering, what if the central concern isn’t conflict? And certainly not the easy conflict of heroes and villains and single triumph or single despair?
Last month, I spent five days at Totleigh Barton, the Arvon Foundation’s writers retreat in South West England. Alongside 15 other writers, I read and discussed texts set in nature, each provocations for our own writing. We read Kathleen Jamie, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Giggs, David James Duncan, Helen Macdonald, each of them gatherers of observations, their writing steeped in that slow broth—rich in descriptions of the natural world, letting heroes (if they even are heroes) be the animal world or landscape, each text a refusal of fast, sharp accusation and incident.
Each day after workshopping, I filled my pockets with a book, a pen, an apple off the tree, and with towel under my arm, walked to the river, making room along the way for a herd of cows constantly rearranging itself on the Devon landscape.
The nice thing about pockets, like many body parts, is you usually have more than one. The right pocket for a right-handed person may be the first to hold the day’s treasures: phone, keys, feather, a passed note. But it will soon fill and the left pocket will be necessary. Treasures in the afternoon may be just as good if not better than treasures in the morning. I left the river each afternoon with something more pocketed: pebbles, a stem of meadowsweet, a buttercup.
For my friend Phoebe’s 30th birthday, I pulled out a jacket from my wardrobe that I knew she liked. The major flaw in its design was its lack of pockets. No McCardell myself, I roughly stitched scraps of fabric in as pockets, one for each of her decades. And in each pocket, I put a pebble and a finger-knit keychain from my son.
I share Le Guin’s aversion to too much hero, and I suppose this wariness is part of why I want to write about friendship. It’s not the relationship of supreme conflict nor is it, usually, a relationship in which bill-paying and rent discussions must take place, rather it’s a relationship in which time is elastic, less condensed to minutes of to do’s and needs; it’s a liberated space, one free for gathering: ideas, ways of being, memories, hopes. A place to put my hands and my fears. In friendships, there always seems another pocket to fill and good stuff to fill it with.
Certain friendships become another kind of pocket, too. Berger defines it simply: “A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement."1 He is writing here of resistance. In his memoir about making a home in England, Michael Malay, an Indonesian Australian, writes of this resistance in his memoir: “Pockets are forming—and these pockets are challenging the dominant stories of our time: extraction, consumerism, profit, growth.” And he notes that “the pocket-makers of yesterday, whose efforts may continue to support us in ways we cannot see [...] shelter us, providing us with much-needed sustenance and courage [...] They are havens from the world as well as places from which we might re-engage with that world.”2
Le Guin is a lesson from the past; reassuring me when I read, “there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over.”
Friendship is a lesson for today. It reminds me of pockets I didn’t know I had. A reminder of reserves: those baskets of berries I picked last week, the canning of which will get me through the winter. Friendship isn't about constant forward progress: it’s filled with digressions. How much of friendship is lived in conversations about mutual memories, in periods of silence followed by picking back up again? Pockets empty and pockets fill. There’s honesty in friendship’s refusal to be linear, its refusal to be a sharp point headed for a specific target, not a business partnership, not the demand of a happily-ever-after, not the project of co-parenting, not a child’s need to live up to his parent’s expectation. It's, perhaps, the most anti-capitalist relationship one can have.
What I was trying to say to Phoebe with those pockets sewn in was let’s share this world, you and I, which is so much more than bills and conflict, share stories not just of what is but what might be.
Many thanks to our brilliant Arvon writing tutors, authors Helen Jukes and Miriam Darlington. And to Antonia, Becky, Emma, Faye, Holly, Judith, Lalu, Lottie, Patricia, Paula, Pen, Ruth, and Si, each a pocket of inspiration. And to my friend Stephan, for sending me Le Guin’s essay this summer, an essay I haven’t been able to shake.
Berger, John. The Shape of a Pocket. Vintage, 2003.
Malay, Michael. Late Light. Manilla Press, 2023.
I pocket you and I love you. I’m sewing this essay into my commonplace heart.
I've missed you and your writing so dearly. There was a big orange moon setting upon campus yesterday; I was reminded of our class and hoped you'd caught it, too -- a starfield away. Like Phoebe, I want to "pocket" your stories for life! ❤️