Editor’s note: INTUITION

ALL WE NEED TO KNOW

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

On a cold January morning, Dan and I met for the first time at Café Kindred for coffee. Groan, a first date, a blind date. Yet before an hour passed, I learned how much we had in common: both of us had lost our spouses after long illnesses. Both responded to that great loss by doing something crazy:  we left our homes and all that was familiar to live in foreign cities. Alone. I rented a flat in Paris; he moved to Florence, Italy. Why did we do this? We weren’t sure. We intuited this was what we needed. 

Intuition: a term often bandied about, that instinctive ability to know something without logic or reasoning. A grittier definition: that gut-feeling we trust. Of course, all of us who labor in the fields of creativity depend on intuition to guide our work. Ours is a special type of intuition, a profound, even deeper intuition that the Romantic poet John Keats called negative capability. For creative writers, negative capability is the capacity to pursue a vision of beauty even when this pursuit leads us into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, places I have found myself often.

For years, I have been haunted by a southern folk song called “The Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” about the desperate lives of millhands in South Carolina, many of whom were children. And haunted as well by the fire that tore through a ten-story shirtwaist factory in New York City, taking the lives of young Jewish girls, who worked there as seamstresses. With their clothing and hair aflame, the girls leapt to their death. I have been struggling to combine these two stories about the American garment industry. While I am not there yet, I am on my way. Not that I know when I will arrive. Some days the writing comes at great speed, most days not.

I need the wacky imagination I had as a child as well as patience with myself. And a large dose of negative capability to follow a path I cannot see, to uncover a story I do not know. How glad I don’t have to figure it out. In fact, I shouldn’t figure it out. We writers need only to unchain our imaginations and follow where it leads. With Keats’ words as our guide: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”    

To all of us writers, I say, “happy wandering.”

And thank you to all our writers for making this Intuition issue a delicious, wandering, thought-provoking read. Submissions for our next issue, themed Dawn, open December 1.

–

Ellen Herbert is the creative nonfiction editor at Halfway Down the Stairs.

© 2025, Ellen Herbert