Our nation's literature, brought to you by the labor movement

Sewing shirts at the H.D. Bob Company, New York City, 1928

Over coffee this morning, I’ve spent some time reflecting about Labor Day, and how it’s a holiday that writers have reason to be especially grateful for.

Without the labor movement, I’m not so sure that writing would happen today the way that it typically does. I know a lot of writers, but I don’t know anyone who gets by solely on writing.

Oh, certainly, I have a lot of writer friends who don’t work. They are not their family’s breadwinners, though, through their writing. If they are privileged enough not to work, it is because someone has provided for them (or they have provided for themselves) through some other enterprise, and through this tremendous boon, they get to spend their days pursuing their passion.

Although I don’t personally know people who support themselves and their families with their writing, I know of many who fit the bill—bestsellers, usually of genre fiction. Other financially successful writers I can think of supplement their publishing revenue with activities like motivational speaking or being the President of the United States, and they could arguably get by on just the writing, were they to choose to live simply.

But most of us write AND. We write and wait tables; we’re barista-writers. Many of us write and teach or write and edit or write and work in bookstores. The writers in my life do their writing on the side, officially—although their writing may come first in their hearts, and writing and its associated activities, like submitting, may actually take up more time than their regular work.

And we couldn’t do this without the labor movement.

The labor movement gave us eight-hour workdays and forty-hour workweeks. Before that, it gave us childhood and the right to an education within it. It gave us minimum wage so that we could (in theory) work our one job and then come home to our regular lives. It gave us safe working conditions, which helps to ensure that when we do come home, our digits are intact and our health is not impaired.

It’s certainly popular to denigrate the labor movement these days—to think of union members as lazy, unproductive shovel-leaners. But behind the idea of unionization is the idea that we have individual worth, and that we can join forces collectively for our common good.

In recent years, businesses have consolidated a lot of power, and we’ve seen our jobs reduced through automation or shipped off to places where people work for pennies on the dollar. We’ve been pressured to work longer hours, to show ourselves to be committed team players, to take on more hours or students or responsibilities. We’ve lost some of our personal time by being forced to remain connected to our worklife when we’re home with our families or even when we’re on vacation.

Writers continue to suffer for their art—to fit it in alongside and often after other parts of their lives. But try to imagine unlimited workdays and unbroken workweeks—imagine what America’s literature would look like without the sacrifices, and sometimes the ultimate sacrifices, of those who stood up to say that our private lives matter, and that they deserve time and space and health for us to pursue wholeness and happiness and, yes, expression.

Happy Labor Day, friends.

A time to dance

Yesterday was magical—one of those perfect late-summer days in the Ozarks, the sun not too hot, a bit of a breeze to boot. My family went apple picking; we had fun at the playground and on walking trails. And at the end of the day, I went to a class at the local holistic life center.

The class was described as a chakra dance class—in fact, it was “Chakradance,” a trademarked name for a holistic practice—but I have to admit, I thought the dance part was a metaphor. I guess it was the poet in me, but I pictured myself meditating, focusing on my chakras, thinking about dancing in a very figurative way.

The way the class works, though, or at least this installment of it, is that participants spread out in a dark room and they close their eyes. In just that way—all attention directed inward, no sense of what others are doing—we moved our bodies while focusing on each chakra in turn, root to crown.

I’m not disciplined enough to follow the rules precisely. I had to peek out between my lashes a few times, just to make sure the others were still there, that they were moving in similar ways, that they weren’t just lined up against a wall and silently laughing at my gyrations. You can’t be too careful, right?

But they weren’t. My lashy perspective revealed that they, too, were swinging their arms and swiveling their hips and moving their shoulders from side to side. And their eyes were shut, so they had me beat in that regard—not that it’s a competition.

I’ve been engaging with my spiritual self in a more focused way recently. I see it as a writerly practice—going inward to find both my inspiration and my discipline. Both are necessary to be a serious writer. Inspiration is no good if it never sits down; discipline does little without an occasional shove from the spirit.

Today I’ll go to church, and it will provide another chance for me to drill down into my core. No matter what my minister says—and she always says valuable things—the point is my taking the time to sit still and think about my spirit. Often I adopt an affirmation for the week—words that will take me instantly inward without a lot of preamble.

I don’t think it’s necessary to be religious to be a good writer. No one I know really thinks of me as religious, and my church—a Christian denomination, but one that encourages a personal approach and has no central shared theology—is looked at askance by many in my Bible belt city. Instead of church, I’m advocating a habit of mind—of deep exploration that doesn’t ignore the spirit, and that consults the center.

Writing is partly about good habits, i.e., going to the writing place (desk, chair, bed, floor) and, you know, writing—setting down some words. It is partly about the intellect, too—about thinking things up (and through) and being clever. I think the best writing transports the reader, though; a reader can feel connection sometimes not because the writer is a genius, but because you’re both tapping into something universal—the collective unconscious, the monomyth, the Godmind, or what have you. You don’t get to that place accidentally; you have to cultivate an awareness somehow. You can probably get there by reading Walt Whitman or by listening to jazz flute. Whatever works, right?

And that’s why I tried the chakra class, and it’s what had me spinning and waving my hula arms and doing a few seconds of the Twist—in the blissful and experiment-friendly dark, glimpsed, if glimpsed at all, through a forgiving veil of lashes.

Try new things in life and maybe you’ll try new things on the page. It’s not a bad plan—not a bad way to move through the world.

Blocked? Sort out your files. Buy some pens.

If you’re not a writer, why do you have so many pens?

Writers I know often talk about experiencing block—a concept I’m not sure I fully endorse. But when I worked in hospice, the governing philosophy was that the patient was the expert on pain, and reports of pain were never to be questioned. Likewise, the writer is the expert on this very particular type of pain—the anguish of not being able to produce. It would be insensitive and maybe even ableist, in some cases, to suggest it’s not happening.

Still, I go through dry spells, some of them long ones, so even if I’m not using the same nomenclature, I’m facing the same issue. And it feels awful—whether a busy worklife is keeping me from the page, or whether I’m in front of the screen and can’t think of a thing to put on it.

I tend to think that if I sit down long enough and manipulate the tools—the pen or the keyboard—the writing will come. This philosophy has never failed me. Sometimes the stupidest things scritch out of my pencil—embarrassing things, things I can’t obliterate quickly enough—but if I keep at it, there will be the glint of something: a nugget, a gem. And that something can become the basis of something bigger, or it can be its own thing.

If a million monkeys on keyboards for an infinite amount of time can produce King Lear, this simian surely has a couplet in her. And a couplet is half a quatrain, and one-seventh of a sonnet. Just sitting and working will yield something every time, and even if it’s awful, it’s not … nothing. That’s a start.

Sometimes I tease myself back toward creativity by doing the butt-tinglingly dull administrative work that accompanies the creative life. Just having my hands on my poetry or fiction or nonfiction sort of gives me the itch to do something new.

If you can’t write, you might try this trick. Here are some of the administrative things you can turn your attention to while you wait for ideas:

·      Clean up your files. My laptop files are a mess. Naming is inconsistent; all genres are jumbled together; published stuff looks the same as unpublished. Imposing order on electronic files sometimes has the effect of clearing mental clutter (while reminding us of what we’re capable of).

·      Do select revision work. I know I’m bad at titles, and sometimes I slap a label-type title on top of a poem, with the idea that I’ll return later and make it something brilliant. That poem you labeled “Water” may have a new life as, say, “What Wetness the Stream Can Offer” or some such thing. It may even be more publishable. In lieu of titles, you might comb through your linebreaks or your starts and stops, just to see what kind of improvements you can make.

·      Research markets. There are a lot of good markets out there; see where your favorite writers are publishing, and check out those journals that are new to you. Make notes about submission windows, policies, fees, and the like.

·      Prepare submission packets. Determine what poems or flashes work well together and group them accordingly. Combine them into one file for submission. Do this as you research new markets—or after.

·      Go back-to-school shopping. Hit the office supply store and buy some notebooks, pens, printer paper, tape, toner—anything you need to make the magic happen. This is psychologically reassuring. If you’re not a writer, why do you have all of those pens?

·      Look into grants and residencies. Creative visualization is powerful, no matter one’s field. You can picture yourself at work on your writing in a residency environment, or you can imagine what you would do with the benison of some extra cash. Spend some time looking up these sorts of opportunities, and let your imagination fly.

·      Work on tracking old submissions. Maybe you never heard back from a specific journal, or maybe your records are a bit of a mess. Follow up; organize. Make sure you’re ready if you need to make an acknowledgements page in the future.

·      Put a new manuscript together. You might be far from having a manuscript that’s ready to send out, but if you read your unattached work, or print it out and move it around, you can start to see patterns and themes; what’s more, you can start to see gaps—places where some new creative effort could do some good.

When I tackle the mindless paper-shuffling tasks, what inevitably happens is that I get very sick of them—and I can’t wait to get back to the pure act of writing. Sometimes I use my energy on a different genre to help ease myself back into the flow, and sometimes I assign myself a project or a specific challenge, so that the intellectual aspects of writing temporarily take precedence over what for me is a spiritual practice.

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a daily contemplative project that contains a writing component—daily haiku-length poems on gun deaths. Some days I don’t write anything else, but this project is roughly equivalent to turning over the engine on that sports car under a tarp in the garage. You have to move the oil from the pan; you have to crank up the battery. Otherwise, it may not be drivable in the future without serious work.

As a bonus, I never have to say I have writer’s block. I write every day, even when it’s vexing and feels more like math. A journal, as discussed yesterday, can serve the same purpose.

If something has taken you away from writing, I hope you find your way back, and I hope you find your break restorative. Sometimes we quit writing temporarily because we’re gathering instead of producing. Thinking is part of the writing process, even when we’re not spitting out words.

Being about what we're about

Yesterday I wrote about my new journaling habit—just a few days old, but fruitful. My post ended with an elliptical fragment: “Now to see how long I can keep the momentum going ….”

Not long, apparently, as I forgot all about it yesterday.

I’m a fickle journal-keeper. I am not, however, a fickle writer. That’s still an everyday thing—something I don’t neglect, ever; although my output varies, I always do the work.

And that brings me to today’s topic: being about what we say we’re about. If I claim that I keep a journal, don’t I need to keep a journal—a jour-nal, a daily record? If I don’t, I’m full of hot air.

But I can top that. For several years, I continued to call myself a poet, even though I was not writing poems. I know lots of people who do the same. Even in grad school, I remember plucking poems from my 30-page application for workshop—thirty pages being sufficient to get me through roughly three of my four semesters of workshops.

I didn’t go quite that far. But when I used old work in a workshop, I was not being a poet. I wasn’t even being much of a poetry student. I’ve since turned it around, but I remain implicated as someone who felt ashamed to say she wasn’t writing, and so clung to the poet title, even though it was unearned.

Several years back, I read poetry with someone, and I was so impressed by her work. But then we had an occasion to read together again four years later, and shockingly, she read the very same poems, and she subtly conveyed the impression that the poems were new.

Look—writers write. Poets make poetry. It’s not a label that doesn’t expire; if you last wrote a poem ten years ago, you’re a former poet.

Some people make the mistake of thinking that quality determines whether we deserve the title of poet. I know people who don’t think they deserve to be called a poet because they don’t think they’re at the point where they’ve earned the name.

My bullshit meter beeps when I hear a statement like that, but in the unlikely event that such a statement is sincere, I have good news: If you regularly write poems, or try to, you’re a poet—just as people who run every day with terrible form are still runners, and people who hang-glide into a mountain are still (bad) hang-gliders, and the guy who punches you in the nose, even weakly and ineffectually, is still a fighter.

I would add that a small dry spell doesn’t mean we’re no longer poets. Sometimes writing is about writing, and sometimes it’s about gathering and listening and thinking.

But if you haven’t written and you don’t see yourself doing so any time soon, you’re probably a lot of beautiful things—but you’re not a poet.

When a writer tries journaling

I’ve felt troubled in recent months. I’ve been busy and unable to catch up; I’ve worked hard, and in my working, I’ve shorted myself time to collect my thoughts and to just relax and fool around. I haven’t been a fun mom or partner or friend. And I’ve had some crushing disappointments—things that have gone wrong that I haven’t managed to bounce back from.

The other day, I bought a journal. I did it on a whim, really—I was at the drugstore, and I spotted a notebook with a pretty pattern on the cover. It was on sale. I grabbed it. I liked the look and feel of it so much that I needed to write in it.

And so I started journaling. It’s a no-brainer for a committed writer to turn to words to make sense of things. Many times in my life I’ve made lists of pros and cons—for moves, for job changes, for breakups. I’ve listed baby names. I’ve listed things to do. I’ve dieted and listed each day’s meals and calories. Seeing my ideas written down has helped me to flesh them out—to turn a notion into a scheme. I’ve always had a gift for untangling words, and when the words are attached to difficulties or desires, my writer-editor brain works for my own larger good.

For my journal, I’ve made a few rules. First, regardless of what’s going on, I’m just going to use a page—the front and back of a single piece of bound paper. This rule requires me to be direct and honest, and to maintain focus as I work.

I end my entries with three specific observations: beauty, loss, and progress. Each day I write down something beautiful I noted since the last time I wrote, and then I write down something that’s causing me grief. I finish on a positive note with progress—what did I do today to allow myself to express more fully as the person I’d like to be?

I leave a bit of a margin, and in it I write down random things—funny quips from my son, a thing the cat did, a phrase I humorously mis-heard. These can be anything, but the common denominator is that they are things that make me laugh or smile. Thus my little journal becomes a tool for optimism, and I certainly needed something like that in my life.

Anyone who is reading this blogpost, in a space dedicated to writing and creativity, is probably wired somewhat like I am. We figure things out on the page. When we hear an introduction, we need to know how the name is spelled, because words are how we process the world.

Although I’ve taken some time off here, I do consider myself a daily blogger—that is my aspiration. And I also have a daily poetry project that I publish on Twitter—small, haiku-like poems that memorialize a person lost to gun violence the previous day. In a way, I’ve been journaling all along; until very recently, though, my writing hasn’t been the same as personal journaling, undertaken to sort out my problems and to work on becoming more fully me.

When a writer journals, the matter of style is front and center, in a way that it likely isn’t for the average diarist. What is the role of style in a journal? Is the journal a blank slate for honesty and candor, or is it a medium for literary artmaking?

I wouldn’t bother writing if I didn’t plan to embrace the potential for the clearest, most expressive, most artful statement possible. Real writers don’t fart around when dealing with words; they make art because they must. Even freewriting is about pushing ideas further and being on the lookout for intriguing chance connections.

In my journal, I try to be very honest as I write about what is, frankly, a monotonous and ordinary life. I have no hang-gliding to report. I don’t invent things. I don’t hobnob with celebrities. Mostly, I watch a lot of TV.

But my life is my topic, and I’m working on making it better. I’d like a full-time job; even more, I’d like a place where I fit in, enjoy friendships, contribute to something larger than myself. I’d like a desk, a set of keys, a job description.

And I’d also like the rest of it all to fall into place. I want the kind of regularity that can allow me to live and work in a clean house, and to exercise love for family, and to engage in rest and relaxation for myself. It’s not happening on its own, so I’m working through it—through getting what I want and need, or through changing what I want and need (I’m not sure which just yet).

I am artful while I do it, though, and I’m always on the lookout for important insights, or for poetic images, or for prose prompts and starts.

It’s going well so far, just a few days in. Now to see how long I can keep the momentum going ….