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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Badger yourself to better writing habits

A friend of mine has gone a long time without writing poetry.

It bothers her. She defines herself as a poet, and because she is well published, poetry feels to her like it is the key to a better future. But nevertheless, she says that she seldom finds time to write, and when she does, the words don’t come.

“I need something to change,” she told me. “I need to make something change.”

I know what she means. This is one of my first regular blog posts in quite some time, and that’s only half by design. Life got busy and I had to let something go. To be honest, I had to let several things go. I’m having a dry spell, too, poetically speaking.

And here I am at the end of a semester of teaching with the summer looming before me. It feels good—no one needs anything from me for the first time in a long while. I have no appointments. My things-to-do list is entirely self-determined, and today it has one thing on it: Write this blog post.

Poetry remains conspicuously absent. Do you ever feel like I do—like your creative work is something you need to sneak up on? Sometimes my orange tabby cat gets out of the house. Escape is always on his mind, but he’s terrible at it. He’ll dash to the neighbor’s bush and stand under it. From that point I just reach in and grab him by the scruff of the neck—something I would never do under ordinary circumstances—and I put him back in his safe, non-bird-killing, unsquashable-by-car space.

The writing is like this, for me, anyway. It seems very elusive, but when I sit down, I can coax it out of the bushes. The comparison falls apart a bit here, because it’s not my desire to put it in a safe space, but rather to play in the traffic of the psyche. I think writing can be a little dangerous when you do it right. Poetry, in particular, is uncomfortable. There are a lot of ways to write a poem, but for me, it’s very much a process of taking my actual pain and making art out of it. Other poets may work differently, but I don’t find the practice the least bit fun.

Is it any wonder we let it slip? If our art form were something like tickle-fighting or sundae-eating, we’d never miss a day.

Maybe there was a time when writers had plenty of minutes to think and to play with words; I’m no historian, but it seems like the Transcendentalists and the Romantics spent their days walking and writing and bullshitting. Having money helped then, just like it does now, and so did having friends with money to mooch off of. But for the average Joe, or more specifically, the average Jane, I do know this: There was a time when doing laundry started with manufacturing soap out of ashes and beef tallow, and it ended with washboard-scrubbing and wringing. When could Jane write, much less ramble and get high on laudanum and swim in the Gulf of Spezia?

And I guess my friend and I are modern-day versions of Jane. While the laudanum and the Tyrrhenian Sea weren’t strictly necessary for writing, no one really wants to read poems about laundry, and no one wants to read about grading college students’ essays, either. Work gets in the way of writing time, and it also gets in the way of having experiences that lend themselves to writing—even the experience of wool-gathering while spotting animal shapes in the clouds.

I know this about writing: It has always taken me back. Like my friend, I’ve had dry days that have turned into dry weeks and months and even, I regret to say it, years. But when I’ve felt ready to go back in to those bushes, they were there—and there was nothing that said I needed to wait calmly to be lugged back to safety.

My cat is very gentle and would never bite or scratch. Maybe he should. Maybe that goldfinch is as delicious as she seems, and maybe he ought to try harder to consume her and her song.

Again, it’s a faulty metaphor. Unlike the typical house cat, killing up to twenty songbirds each year, my poetry doesn’t hurt anyone. Rather, it makes the world better—a little more gentle and less perplexing, at least for me.

The trick—for me, and for my friend—is to set some goals and to make the time to reach them. I am ready to have a word-rich summer, and so I’m starting out by making a plan.

***

Are you interested in setting some goals for your summer writing projects? I have a new personal training program for writers that I call “The Badger.” For the month of June or July—or for both—you set the goals and I “badger” you every day with prompts, check-ins, light feedback, and whatever other help you need to get where you want to go. Check it out! 

http://www.papercranewritingservices.com/the-badger-personal-trainer-for-your-writing-life.html

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.

Here Be Scorpions

            In the news today, there is a story about a woman being bitten by a scorpion … while on an airplane.

            It strikes me that life is occasionally like that. We’re fully focused on going from Point A to Point B, in the woman’s case from LA to Alaska, when something unexpectedly stops us in our path. Our plane never even gets off the ground; it turns around and takes us back to the gate.

            Once, on my way to being a lifelong journalist, I was thrown off course by a creative writing degree, which rerouted me from a decade-long job in a newsroom to a career in higher education. It’s been a life of constant adjustment, because despite the attitudes that journalists and professors should share, a dedication to truth-seeking, the pressures inherent in today’s higher education can defeat professors in their efforts.

            Journalists and professors are both on a quest for truth. For journalists, the focus is daily truths. As a small-town reporter, I brought my readers the truth about accidents and county government and school boards and people with problems or with amazing stories to tell. As a faculty member, truth has been shakier, but my students and I have searched for it together, in poems and essays and stories—their consumption and their creation.

            Where journalism is concerned, we come to expect special interests to try to interfere with the news. I remember many times at the newspaper office when a politician or a business owner or a prominent citizen would storm in and insist that we not publish something. I was proud of the fact that their arguments never made a difference. We let the news lead the way, and we didn’t omit any familiar name from the police blotter, the court reports, the breaking news, or the other stories we tracked down.

Our commitment to fairness even nailed me once when I was caught speeding in a corrupt little town in my coverage area. It was a notorious speed trap, one of those places where the speed limit drops a little prematurely and the police chief hides in an alley to catch drivers unaware. I gritted my teeth as I typed my own name into the traffic court reports, but I included it, and I cursed that officer as I did so. In other words, I stayed the journalist’s course.

A strange thing happens when you enter academia, though. When we are students, universities seem like places to challenge our preconceived notions and dig out essential truths. We study philosophy and literature to learn what we can about humanity; we study political science to understand what drives governments; we study languages to learn new ways of conceiving ideas. Science encourages us to posit ideas and test them. Art tells us that we can, and must, continue to try to express ourselves in new and challenging ways.

But when we join the professoriate, what we get is not that dynamic student experience, writ even larger. Instead, administrators minimize faculty contributions and marginalize our voices, and they try to convince us that faculty are a problem of the university. We cost a lot. We make life difficult for our students. We don’t work hard enough. Our best course of action is to keep our heads down and not step out of line.

The effort that goes into keeping faculty mum is pretty substantial. At my old institution, non-tenure track faculty (the instructors and lecturers without the rank of professor) made up a large portion of faculty ranks, but it wasn’t until the end of my time there, almost a hundred years into the life of the institution, that these faculty members were granted a seat on the faculty senate. (I was privileged to represent my colleagues in one of the first NTTF faculty senate seats, and I made the most of the opportunity, speaking up for our rights and lending our voice at every opportunity.)

At my current institution, we don’t even have a faculty senate. We have full faculty meetings, where we get together and listen to lengthy reports by administrators before voting on agenda items that are presented to us by the administration. No one is elected; no one feels special responsibility for one’s position or vote. We do the basic work of reading support materials and voting our conscience, but there is always a sense that someone else is in charge.

But faculty should be in charge of the curricular life of institutions. They are the proper people to set the academic course for a university, and they are a pivot point between the students—the lifeblood of any institution—and the administrators, whose proper job is to buy chalk and make sure the floors get swept. Faculty should have a key role in choosing administrators, in administering a budget, in salary decisions, and in determination of educational policies.

These days, the academic freedom of faculty is threatened by job insecurity and the erosion of tenure. It is threatened by a constant sense that the fiscal sky is falling. It is threatened by an overreliance on ill-conceived evaluation instruments and administrative dictates about classroom policy.

A faculty member tends to feel that she would be safer to pipe down and toe the line than to do what academics have done since Socrates and before: speak out, challenge authority, question received knowledge, and create, whether in the laboratory or the studio.

These days I’m feeling a lot like that woman on the plane. Something poisonous was hiding in a place where she had every reason not to expect it. Who knows how the scorpion got on the plane? Maybe it traveled in on someone’s suitcase. Maybe some malicious person planted it there. But it ended up biting someone, forcing her to alter her course.

The good news about the woman on the plane is that she was fine. After being checked out quickly by medical personnel, she was back in flight, headed to her destination. The scorpion—arguably also an innocent victim of this turn of events—was squashed by flight attendants. The threat was eliminated—that threat, anyway. There is always the potential for another.

Sometimes I think it’s a good idea, when delayed and rerouted, to think about one’s destination, and to embrace a temporary holdup as a chance to change our course. It shouldn’t be necessary for something to bite us in the ass to remind us of where we need to be.

The Job of Faculty: Teaching, Service, Research, and ... Vacuuming?

            There seems to be a movement afoot to put uppity university faculty in their place.

            This happens in ways both large and small. In Wisconsin, for instance, Governor Scott Walker, a college dropout himself, is actively trying to dismantle the state’s university system. He has gutted funding and attempted to skewer the system’s mission statement so that it no longer includes “the search for truth” as one of its core values.

            In my own workplace, a small liberal arts college, I have to empty my own trash. Let’s admit at the outset that this is far less nefarious than what’s happening in Wisconsin. It’s sort of a silly thing—I noticed that my lunch wrappings were amassing aver a number of weeks, and upon inquiring, I found that I was supposed to take care of the office trash myself.

            So do we have university faculty empty their own trash to save time for the important work of the custodial staff? I’m not so sure about this (although, to be sure, the custodial staff is stretched quite thinly). There is currently an all-hands-on-deck mindset at my institution, with faculty, administration, and staff alike aligning to stretch resources, and truly working together on many important aspects of university life. Taking care of our own waste is an egalitarian notion, and I can appreciate that (provided the administrators are all emptying their own trash, too—I haven’t asked if this is the case). Mine is, for the most part, an egalitarian institution, and I love it for that.

            But I have some suspicions about the motives for turning faculty into their own custodians, especially when there is a national drive to depict faculty as layabouts who teach their three or four sections and then put their feet up and pluck at their elbow patches.

            Faculty don’t just teach in the classroom, obviously. They work one-on-one with students and mentor them beyond the end of the semester; they prepare for classes and grade papers and projects; they perform the research that they later “profess” to their students; they write and try to publish, and they stay current on the research of their peers. And they also participate in the life of the institution, which includes committee work, governance, recruiting, and much more.

            These days they also empty their trash, because who do they think they are, expecting someone else to do it.

            As it happens, it is also our responsibility to vacuum our office carpets. This dictate came several months back, and it may well be that everyone has forgotten this odd moment in the life of the institution. Maybe we all expected normal operations to resume at some future point, but no one ever got around to restoring custodial functions to those people who take pride in maintaining our classroom and common areas so beautifully, despite limited personnel.

            But there has been a national drive to force faculty to be held accountable for their time. Governors and legislators are pushing for increased workload. The effort to paint the professoriate as laggards looks from the outside like a coordinated Republican rallying cry, with one GOP governor after another pointing to faculty as a problem that hurts state finances. And this viewpoint even extends to private institutions like my own, where courseload increases are being contemplated.

            Depicting faculty as bums puts them on the defensive. So does depicting higher education as a realm of constant crisis. Well-meaning professionals try to do more for the good of the order, and they start to believe that their jobs are in constant jeopardy. (Remember, the American Association of University Professors maintains that tenure is not a reward for super-special people; rather, job security is a necessary condition of academic freedom, and therefore tenure should happen as a natural course of action after a successful probationary period.) The crisis model, and the constant invocation of the all-hands-on-deck mindset, seems designed to make faculty feel unsafe in their jobs.

            I even had a brief qualm about writing this blogpost. Will I be reprimanded—will I lose my job? I was careful not to name my institution; I’d hate for a prospective student to do a web search on, oh, let’s call it Zoory University, and find a rant about emptying trash instead of a glowing report about how life at ZU is all cupcakes and butterflies. (Remember—all hands on deck.)

            But this is not a rant about trash. It’s a very reasonable speculation that the nationally orchestrated higher education crisis mode could be behind some of the small, daily decisions that impact the quality of faculty worklife.

            And come to think of it, I already know that my three-year contract is not being renewed. (The increasing use of non-tenure track faculty provides flexibility to an institution, while also keeping faculty on their best behavior.) Nothing expressed here is so problematic that administrators are going to pound on my door and smack my cheek with a leather glove. Those folks aren’t going to read Better View of the Moon anyhow.

            But I have a feeling that it may be important for faculty to embrace at least a little bit of uppitiness. Administrators should put us in our place—which is in the classroom, and the lab, and the research library, and the studio—and leave us there to do what we do best: search for truth, inspire students, and breathe life into our unvacuumed institutions.

Standing at the Intersection of Art and Grace

            Someone was mean to me once, and it threw me ten years off course.

            It is sobering to look around in my mid-forties and realize that I’ve squandered some important creative years, all because I took to heart some freakishly harsh criticism from a person I loved, a person who should have done better by me.

            The “who” doesn’t matter. What happened is this: I was in the middle of a creative project that thrilled me, and I talked about it to one of the people I cared most about. This person sat me down and told me all of the things that were wrong with me. I felt I was better than everybody else. I lorded my accomplishments over others. I flaunted my education. I refused to speak normally, and instead used big words and complicated constructions to say basic things.

            This were personal criticisms, not poetic ones, but they rose from my attempt to express that moment of artistic glee—I had a project that was changing my creative life and making me feel like I had real potential as a poet.

            By the end of that conversation, I had put my pen in a drawer, figuratively speaking, and it stayed there for a decade.

            The other day, a friend mentioned that she was worried about sharing her work with her loved ones. Other friends piped in with advice. The work is important, they said; the loved ones need to hear it and support it, or they are not worth loving at all.

            Sharing work with special people is tricky. I’m always hearing artists talk about the fear that accompanies a family member reading their poetry or seeing their visual art in a gallery. And it may not be worth the trouble. When loved ones are also artists, it’s easier; they know how to honor the humanity within the work yet separate the product from the creator. Loved ones who aren’t artists may look for themselves in work; they may psychoanalyze the creator or see something unhealthy about the way we work through things on page or canvas.

            It seems like the best move may be to go ahead and keep work and loved ones separate, unless family, friends, or lovers seek it out on their own, or otherwise show readiness for confronting the artist through the work. I certainly experienced no profit from excitedly talking about my life-changing project with someone who didn’t know or care what it meant to me.

Art, including literary art, can be regarded sort of like, say, gardening is. It’s lovely to hear that someone has planted dahlias in the side yard; we can hear about the bold blossoms, maybe glance at them and appreciate their beauty and the fact that someone has cultivated it. We don’t need to investigate the roots and stalk. We don’t need to count the petals. Seeing the happiness of the gardener is sufficient. That person—and maybe any person who increases, rather than decreases, the beauty in the world—should be congratulated, cheered on.

            It is tempting to be angry with the person behind this moment that never stops being horrible. (I go back to the conversation from time to time, and it hurts just as much after all this time as it did at the moment it was happening.) The fact that this person made the wrong call doesn’t even factor in. An MFA in creative writing is not the kind of education one flaunts. A non-tenure-track job, lowest rank in the institution, is not an accomplishment to be lorded. Being awkward and stilted in conversation is not a source of pride. The poetry, though? That’s a very reasonable source of delight. A professor I had once told me that there are two kinds of poetry: good poetry and great poetry. The act of making art is, in itself, ennobling, whatever the product.

            I think the rightful focus of anger is obvious. It’s me. Most people are nice and supportive—even strangers hold doors and spare a smile. We run into stinkers from time to time, though, and from time to time, we are the stinkers. The only unforgivable act in this scenario is not reporting for duty—not answering the call of those poems that tried to find their way into being during that empty decade. Who knows what words might have visited me, had I been in position and ready to accept them?

            The unkindness of others shouldn’t change me, and I won’t let it change me again. Whatever the actions of people around me, I choose, forever after, to be a loving person and a gracious host.