Our scraps cannot sustain us

A friend has been accumulating snippets and scraps over the years—little bits of a book-length essay project she’d like to write when she clears her decks of some other pressing projects.

They’re like hors d’oeuvres, these scraps—pops of flavor, about as satisfying as a cocktail wiener on a pick. They’re good or even beautiful, but their job is not to fill us.

Most writers know what it’s like to have a dream project on the back burner. Sometimes these are things we pursue in pockets of time here and there, but other times we leave them to languish. I’m confident that my friend, also named Karen, will get to hers eventually—she’s the kind of person who does. The Karen who is writing to you now will likely never finish that draft of a romance novel she once began as an office-hours project, but she is likely to knock out the publishing textbook she’s been working on for a few years.

My friend’s project is a travel narrative, probably composed of discrete essays, about her relationship to a particular special place. When ideas occur to her, she writes them down, and sometimes her morning pages or other occasional writing includes observations about the topic that’s so close to her heart.

She suggested I tackle this topic in a post—what do we do with our scraps when we’re writing toward something larger?

My answer may be a little disappointing, because we like to think that the work we do is going somewhere, adding up to something—but most of the time, I don’t think we can paste in these segments and arrive at a satisfying whole. These bits and pieces have done their job by keeping our dream project front and center in our mind. The work itself—those words we once jotted on the gas bill—may not be entirely useful.

My friend and I have both fallen into the trap a busy life poses. With so much happening, there aren’t long days to spend at a desk and noodle, daydream, follow our thoughts to their termini; instead, we teach a few classes, grade a stack of papers, handle some correspondence, roll clay into snakes or build Lego spaceships, cobble together some kind of dinner .... People expect things from us, and nearly all of our time is spoken for.

It’s probably tempting to suggest that we don’t need to read someone a bedtime story, but just try telling that to the someone. We need to work; we need to cook and clean and do laundry; we need to make love and exercise and pray and call our mom. Some of this we can put off for a day, but it’s always a matter of shuffling for those of us who have no independent fortune, no patron.

And we’re left with our paltry scraps. For me, they’re usually indistinguishable from garbage, and in fact they’re often made of garbage. That McDonald’s receipt in the recesses of my purse is actually the start of a poem. Those notes on my church bulletin are loose associations that reflect some early thinking about an essay. They’re what I did with the time I had—the “pull forward while we wait for your fries” time; the lost-in-thought-during-the-sermon time.

As difficult as it seems (and, indeed, as difficult as it is), we owe it to ourselves and to our art to make more time for creating, and until we do, I’m not convinced the shortcuts work.

Imagine you’re my friend, and you’re finally at your desk, with time to sort through scraps—some physical, some digital; some overlapping earlier ideas, some going in a new direction; some exciting, some downright inscrutable, whether it’s the idea or the text that is messy.

Does she have a start? Maybe, somewhere in the mix. But it seems to me that she also has a potential distraction during her precious writing time. We like to preserve what we’ve already made—no one wants to re-do old work. But the act of preserving a snippet requires us to organize our thinking around old ideas. We’re always evolving, and the person who wrote a note, or even several pages, is not the person who is sorting scribbled-on receipts right now.

I’ll be honest; often I can look at the start of a poem and pull it from the fire. Poems are often very small. It’s not the same for me with elements of a larger, more ambitious piece of work. That river we slosh into for the second, third, fourth time is just a mimic of that estuary we remember. We dried off. We’re wet with new waters.

Let’s resolve to give ourselves what time we can cobble together—those weeks when we don’t have grading, those days when fast food will suffice, those nights when one bedtime story will do. Where possible, let’s string those spare moments together into an hour, or two, or five—a workday, a whole day, a weekend. And let’s not start with our own intellectual table scraps. Instead, let’s mix up something more sustaining from the creative pantry.

Aren’t you hungry?

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A Writer's Spirit Prompt #8

You’ve probably been informed that there are things you can’t do. Center a poem. Start a poem with a definition. Start with waking or end with sleeping.

But don’t some poems demand to be written in a way the workshop hates? And isn’t that the pure pleasure of leaving the workshop behind? The people who told you that there couldn't be a good essay on ___, or that no one needs another ___ story, or that there are too many poems about ___—they’re off somewhere, not writing about whatever it is they prohibit, and here we are, left to our devices, free to write about sex or motherhood or cancer or all three at the same time.

Your challenge today—again, a contemplative challenge instead of a poetry challenge—is to write down every rule anyone has ever tried to give you for your poetry. That includes anything you’ve heard outlawed or mocked by professors, classmates, or editors, and it also includes anything you’ve been telling yourself.

Read over your list when you’re done with it. Such a constipated way of thinking about poetry is at least worth a good laugh. Maybe, too, there’s a prompt in it. You could write a poem right now that is centered, or that has a single obvious rhyme, or that contains an obvious bookend, or that uses the word “love” like it’s your turf or something.

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If you like this series of contemplative prompts, offered throughout the month of April, be sure to subscribe to this blog so you won’t miss a single one.

On revision: When enough is enough

Gustave Flaubert, nearly done

“A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.” Poet and essayist Paul Valéry wrote this, and it’s often quoted—but I don’t buy it.

I’ve finished hundreds of poems. A whole bunch of them, maybe most of them, stink up the joint and aren’t worth reading, but they’re done, and I’m fine with that. They’ve been fully worked over to the best of my ability. 

I have some good poems, too, and I’m pretty sure my poetic failures were part of the cost of those. A lot of being a poet is just showing up at the desk—working the seemingly malfunctioning pen until the ink starts to flow. 

There are days the idea never gels and the inspiration never strikes. Poetry is made of both of these—an intellect that puzzles and proposes, and a genial spirit that visits with gifts. I’m of the opinion that fascinating poems can come from either source—the thoughtful mind or the flash of inspiration. But my favorite poems are a true mix. There are long stretches of days where I labor over my writing and try to get the ideas down just right, and then, finally, I take a look back and see … something other, something I didn’t put there.

I don’t think it’s magic. It’s not the automatic writing or psychography of nineteenth century spiritualists. I’m not channeling spirits; my page has not turned Ouija. What I think might happen is that total concentration on my rhetoric distracted me from something fascinating that happened with the much more basic interplay of words. The brain is wired to make connections, and while I’m shoring up a irrefutable rebuttal with my conscious mind, another part of me is building something beautiful.

Nevertheless, on the page, it looks a lot like grace.

I’m having a hard time tracking down the definitive word on this—I don’t think it exists—but I’ve  read that something like 70 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages, most before the pregnancy is even detected. That’s a wiggly statistic, but a good comparison to what happens in poetry. A zygote could divide and grow and manifest and save us all, or we could flush it down the drain, never knowing it was there. All the potential in the world may go unrealized.

In that same way, I’ve had some really wonderful ideas for poems while buying apples, or in a student conference, or while stuck in the car line at school. Sometimes there’s a scrap of paper to save it on, but so often we return to our desks and don’t even remember we have a purse full of scraps. Should we pull one out, it probably wouldn’t make sense to us anyway. That handful of quick words wasn’t the idea—that wasn’t the gift. When ideas come to us and we’re not in the receiving position, often, they fly onward. They tend not to revisit us after they found us unready.

A friend asked me how to tell when a piece has been over-revised. I think we have to gauge its energy. Have we sanded every corner of it? I hope not, because a poem or essay or story needs some splinters, doesn’t it? We even talk about how a particular writer might get under our skin—how her words might needle us.

A piece is overworked when it lacks danger. There is a difference between offering all the information a piece needs and in shutting down every potential question. I find it useful to remember that a poem is only partly mine. It belongs, too, to the reader, who can’t half-create a fully finished piece.

Work is over-revised when it lacks an edge. There really does come a time when a poem (or any other literary work) is finished. Ideally, this time is just before the time when the next one is to begin.

Time to make time

I made a bold start today on a big writing project that I plan to tackle every day until it’s done.

It’s a prose thing, a work of some size, and I’ve had it on the back burner for a long time—after mothering, teaching, writing poems, and blogging.

Since my semester started today and I had to teach at 7 a.m., I got up at 5 a.m. to write for an hour and a half. I live less than a mile from the college, and I’m extremely low-maintenance, to an almost troubling degree, so this is very doable for me. In fact, I was so excited to get started that I woke up naturally at 4:30 a.m. and cleared the electronic decks of social media, e-mail, and the like. Once the coffee was done, I was ready to write.

Yep. I was ready to write … a very big book.

It’s hard to start a haiku. After seventy minutes of false starts, I am here to report that it is nearly impossible start anything of size in a small window of time.

I’m always harping on this—the great barrier our capitalistic society places on the artist, who has to fit creative work in on the side. It’s incredibly affirming and powerful to foreground our art instead, putting the act of creation first and tucking the minutes we need for everything else into the spaces around it.

But there’s a problem with my plan, and it is that the time I’ve allotted myself isn’t sufficient for thinking deeply about anything. That means we sometimes produce surface work that stays at the surface—and often beautifully so—but the surface is not the place of discovery.

A new president will be inaugurated this week, and now is a good time to think about the ways in which our political and economical systems put pressure on our art. This problem is unlikely to be relieved any time soon, if it ever will in the United States.

What can artists do, if putting aside a block of time isn’t sufficient?

Well, we could put aside larger blocks of time. But that means letting some things go—volunteer positions, enjoyable distractions, connection with friends.

Some things are more easily set aside than others. I have a very energetic social media presence, but I have cut back significantly since November of 2016. It helps that I don’t care to read much of what people are posting and discussing.

Likewise, I’ve been a huge newshound most of my life, but these days I don’t watch news shows on TV, and I take it in small doses on the radio. If it’s not on my hour or so of listening to Morning Edition, I allow myself not to know it, for the most part—although I still end up reading lots of newspapers and media posts online. Knowing is important, and staying informed is a hard habit to break.

I also have some hobbies that don’t much serve my art. For instance, I really love cheesy mystery novels—but I’ve been working on Feliz Navidead since Advent. I don’t even remember who navi-DIED, and I’m not sure I care anymore.

Our time has value, and almost every day we have to give it up for some form of commerce. In the next administration, wherever possible, I plan to hold on to it. I plan to keep my time, to maintain my focus, and, when possible and practical, to say no.

These fragments I have shored against my ruin ...

Poetry is rewarding in practically every way but the usual one. While there’s not a lot of money in it, it has other perks.

For example, it’s sexy. I’m an ordinary roly-poly, pleasant-looking woman, middle-aged, some crow’s feet, a chin-hair or two if you’re really looking. But I’ve had the experience of reading certain sexy poems in a dark bar, and suddenly people are buying me drinks, standing close, talking low.

And for another example, poetry gets arranged into skinny books that come to your door in a box and you can pull them out, see your name on them, and measure how they just fit your hand.

But the very best thing about poetry is the scraps.

When busy people write, it often means keeping track of fleeting ideas on scraps—backs of envelopes, wrappers, the palm of the hand.

It’s a foolish habit. The truth of the matter is that whatever ethereal visitor handed us a scrap of language won’t be back. It’s kind of like manna, sent to the wanderers in the wilderness to sustain them, but it had to be eaten the same day, because it would turn spoiled and wormy if stored.

I don’t actually believe in ethereal visitors—or manna, for that matter—but the comparison holds. We do receive poem ideas from somewhere, and they come in a flash. In a best-case scenario, when that splitter leaves the pitcher’s forked fingers, we’re squatting behind the plate with our glove on, ready to receive it. But maybe this comparison is off; maybe the poet is more like the cleanup hitter, who, with bases loaded, sends the ball across the fence, over the back wall, to light somewhere on Waveland Avenue.

Whatever. I’m no athlete. I just know that scraps of poems rain down sometimes, and when we’re not at our desks, we’re compelled to find some way to keep them. After the game is over, though, and the players are home watching Netflix, a ball is sort of an afterthought. It would take a lot of work to get something going, and even if we did, the game would be happening on a whole different level.

I’m looking at some scraps right now. One came from an overhead conversation at a local coffeeshop this weekend, where a woman was talking about her role in a murder trial. “She says a word / like deposition and throws up / her hands” is what I wrote. I can’t go anywhere with that, and the line break that suggests this witness to an attempted murder barfs is not something I can reconcile with good sense.

Here’s another: “Committee, venue, volt, kettle, and wake.” These are group names for vultures—the first three in trees, the kettle in circling flight, and the wake feeding on a carcass. I still like that—a wake. I passed a wake for a deer the other day—all those heads buried deep inside the chest cavity.

And I’ve written the words “mercy in eyes kept blank,” because I was thinking about  the compassion that shows itself in non-attention and non-action. Sometimes someone falls and you help her up. Sometimes someone trips and you pretend not to have seen. You scan surreptitiously; if the person is hurt, you help. But sometimes the most gentle thing we can do is not announce that we are witness.

Many of my scraps are things children have told me. “Keats is sad that we have only one basement,” says one. Or “Keats is said that it’s raining on the spiders.” I remember years ago, my son found a broken fingernail of mine, declared that opaque half-moon to be beautiful, and asked if he could keep it. This wasn’t a set of words, but it was a special moment. I look at the scrap now and kind of wonder where my fingernail is. Of course, it was never about the nail.

Sometimes the scraps are not on paper at all, but in the Notes area of my computer.

     Me: “Does your ear hurt?”

     Keats: “Not yet.”

I’m not sure why, but this little exchange really stuck with me, and while it has all the earmarks of pessimism—that eventually everything is bound to hurt—it didn’t sound that way aloud. Then, he sounded like he felt very lucky.

I’ll admit that these aren’t particularly great scraps—I’m not giving those away in a  blog post. (I’ve found that I can’t write about something I’ve talked about; it kills the energy even more than missing that initial windup and pitch.) I have some scraps that may, against all odds, turn into poems or, more likely, essays. For me, essays aren’t as urgent; in fact, they require time—usually a lot of it.

I really like how these fragments function as the diary of an extremely rushed person. I’m not that rushed—just a little pressed for writing time. It’s the kind of journal a TV depiction of an executive might keep: “Doris, take a memo: committee, venue, volt, kettle, wake.”

Each time I encounter one of these artifacts, I am thrust very nearly back into the original moment. It turns out they are a more honest diary than any other I’ve tried to keep.

A writer considers space

NASA

I’ve spent much of 2017 thinking hard about space.

I’m not talking about Jupiter and Mars and supernovae. In fact, I’m more interested in inner space than I am in outer space at the moment—but I’m particularly focused on the ways in which my lived environment affect my mindset.

Equilibrium is so important for a writer. I don’t necessarily need silence to work; as a reporter for many years, I grew to love the noise and energy of the newsroom, and like many others, I sometimes enjoy the cozy hum of a coffee shop for getting a little writing done.

In my house, too, I can sneak away to a quiet room to do some writing—but the moment one kid hits another, or a glass breaks, or someone knocks at the door, I tend to lose my way. Back in the newsroom, I wasn’t responsible for breaking up fights. My job was to write, and the environment was designed for that. Those occasional interruptions that happened just marked something more urgent to write about.

I suspect the primary need of a writer is simply not to be bothered or pulled away from the page, but it’s clear to me that the place where we settle in to do our writing matters. There is a big difference between the scribbling that happens on the fly—in a waiting room or an airport terminal or the car line—and the writing that we schedule time for, when we know that the house will be empty and we can turn off our phones and work.

A tidy workplace is such a pleasure, and, for me, a rare one. I’m no housekeeper, and that’s putting it somewhat mildly. I went on a trip a couple weeks ago, and my suitcase is still near the front door, right where I dropped it upon my return. Yesterday’s dishes are in the sink—as are those from the day before. The bathroom counter is perpetually scattered with dental floss and mascara and clean swabs and moisturizer. I step gingerly everywhere in my house to avoid the agony of Lego foot.

Right now I’m writing at one of two desks in my house, and this one is piled high with story collections. An organizational project is under way, and about a hundred titles are stacked on their sides, waiting to be shelved. My laptop barely fits among them, and now that I’m here, I realize that the desk lamp is either unplugged, burned out, or broken. The room is illuminated only by a (January 13) Christmas tree and the glow from my computer screen. (By the way, that Christmas tree isn’t a symptom of disorganization or clutter; I just enjoy it in January when it represents a gentle source of light instead of the pre-Christmas frenzy and obligation. I usually take it down in February, and I do so with intention.)

My other desk is covered with papers that need to be sorted—kids’ art, legal documents, report cards, contracts, coupons. Things aren’t always quite this way; the first of the year makes me want to sort and organize, and I’m always in much better shape after a few weeks of this kind of activity.

Unfortunately, I’m right in the middle of my organizational projects, and everything is chaos—with some beginnings of piles to make things even more complicated. Although it wouldn’t be ideal, I could plop my laptop down on a disorganized mess and do a little work, but the fear of upending what little bit of order there is keeps me from approaching that area.

This year I’ve been reading a few books to help me think about space. One is the popular book that outlines the KonMari method of organizing, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Kondo suggests that we hold each item we own and ask ourselves if it brings us joy—and what does not bring joy gets pitched.

I’m also taking an online course from DailyOm called A Year to Clear What Is Holding You Back. The instructor, Stephanie Bennett Vogt, refers frequently to the KonMari method, but takes a less drastic approach. I’m not actually required to hold every item and consult my joy-meter, but Vogt does suggest consulting an inner sense of what is needed and what isn’t.

And I’m rounding my reading out with a few books on creating sacred spaces—something I have a mind to do in an area of my basement that is currently devoted to storage of wholly unnecessary things.

I’ve been thinking of clarity for my writing workspace. I’ve also been thinking of what comprises a sacred space, and whether my desk can be one. Writing for me is a sacred activity. It’s church. It’s meditation. It’s how the Creator replies, or at least where we ready ourselves for the potentiality of that.

That idea of writing is deeply personal, and I don’t expect that every writer feels similarly. But I do think most writers recognize the act of creation as a way to tap into our highest intelligence, our deepest mind, and bring back new insights to share.

I’d like to honor the process by devoting serious thought to space. And when the Creator in me, my deepest mind, offers a gift, I want to receive it formally, in a space that is worthy of it.

Multitasking

I’m beginning this blog post while watching a live broadcast for a class I’m taking. I’m also drinking my morning coffee and occasionally rubbing the back of my sleepy son. I’m taking notes on good ideas that whiz by, and I’m thinking a bit about next steps today—cleaning, planning for a semester of teaching that starts next week, completing today’s book review, finishing two freelance projects, and maybe getting some writing in.

“Maybe getting some writing in” has been the long trailing tail on my list every day this year. And as far as my own creative work goes, I’ve composed half a page of notes toward a poem I’m thinking about. That’s OK; I’m trying to approach my poetry more thoughtfully, and to make each poem the artifact of deep exploration of a topic. Sometimes I write more at the surface, where the scales of the little fish sparkle in the filtered sunlight. Deep below, though, is where the mystery is—it’s where the giant squid stares back up at me with its single unblinking eye.

I worry a little about what my lifestyle means for my writing. I have certainly read the research about multitasking, and I know the consensus is that people aren’t really wired for it—that nobody is really “good” at multitasking, although some achieve a lot that way. I’m dubious about this find; when I was younger, I really could tackle a lot of things very competently and efficiently at one time. And these days I continue multitasking, but not quite as effectively as I once did. I don’t know if my productivity has declined or my expectations have increased. It’s also possible that my apparent decline in efficiency is due to the fact that one or two of my tasks drank from my breasts, and they are ongoing projects—work that is never done, to my eternal gratitude and pleasure.

My class leader just gave an assignment that I missed, so I’ll have to backtrack and see what I need to do. And my sleepy son is up and wants to play with toys upstairs and wants some warm milk, too, but I hold him off with an offering of electronics and the suggestion that we wait until he’s done with his milk before we hit the Legos.

It occurs to me that I’m being too hard on myself. So far this year I’ve written two personal essays for magazines, and these were difficult creative projects—each about a matter of the spirit for audiences that identify with a particular religious tradition. I identify with that tradition, too, but loosely and somewhat irreverently, compared to the mindset of most of my readers—so I had the additional creative challenge of finding common ground that was, nevertheless, honest. I liked how I rose to the occasion, and I found, as always, that stricture is immensely helpful to the creative process.

But there’s stricture … and there’s constriction. Nothing good happens when the latter takes hold.

By the way, my son is upstairs now, counting. “One, two, three, four, five—get up here now!” he hollers. And so I grab my laptop and carry it up to the sketchy hand-me-down Duplo neighborhood on the outskirts of Legotown.

Motherhood is a big subject of mine—something I think a lot about, both practically and poetically. Is playing with my son a type of prewriting, then? Are my multiple attentions that result merely from living my life a way of processing material?

Or, and I fear this is the issue, am I underemployed and scrambling, working many more hours than I should have to so that I can barely scrape by? Am I yet another middle-aged woman who can’t find a firm foothold in the workforce despite obvious talent and desire?

Virginia Woolf had it right. Women need money and solitude to thrive as artists. Yet I don’t know any women writers who have those things—who only write, without a day job or other commitments. We rely on times when our families are sleeping to get our real work done. We write on lunch breaks. We keep a little notebook in the diaper bag to catch an idea before it’s lost.

Speaking of lost, I’m the hero who just found the Spider-Man motorcycle. And now I’m settled in to write again, and the cat, who has plenty of food and water, is meowing. Like everyone, except for an employer, he sees my value and wants a little piece of me. And I know from experience that if I deny him, he’ll dig it right out of my arm.

Regular readers of my blog probably don’t picture this chaos as I write, but it’s an everyday thing. I flatter myself to think that anyone pictures me at all, but if you have ever done so, you probably envisioned me at a bare desk, my computer open in front of me, maybe some notes at my side.

I’m using a laptop—that part is correct. But it’s on my lap, and I’m sitting on the carpeted landing of my staircase, sleeping cat beside me, fortress of Legos trapping him in, helpfully, because my son heard me say, “Stop biting me, cat!” one too many times. Oh, and I have thirteen tabs open, and I monitor them—e-mails, social media, news of the newly terrifying world.

But I’m done, mostly—I just need to write a conclusion, and then I can devote my full attention to my son. And who knows? Maybe, if I’m very efficient, I’ll get some writing in, or some thinking about writing. 

And maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up earlier and do what artists should do, at least sometimes—put creativity first.