I started writing posts for this blog over 13 years ago. My interest has ebbed and waned – as have my readers – as have blogs in general. Yet I still like this little corner of the internet. It’s a public map of where I’ve been and where I’m going. It’s the ways in which the world has gotten bigger and smaller. A camera zooming in and out, determining which details were worth noting. Not all of it was (and I still wrote about it) and some truly devastating/wonderful things barely got a mention.
I want to believe this time has been about growth and it was, but the big things, the costly things, were about losses. Perhaps the growth was in understanding those losses and learning to contextualize them. Perhaps it was simply surviving them.
As a writer, I’ve both grown and become diminished. The problem with getting a writer’s education is that you suddenly have a whole new set of internalized rules in addition to whatever fucked-up ideas you had before you knew the rules. I went back to grad school and earned my MFA in Creative Writing. Have I been published? Have I developed a better writing practice? No, emphatically, no. There is no magic elixir that will transform me from unknown to slightly known, no tricks to pull a written work out of the hat. Still, I write.
Sometimes I scavenge the notebooks I’ve filled over the years for ideas. Mostly they are notes from books or webinars or poems that tried to pass by, but hooked me instead. My writing has come to include more poetry than I ever imagined. Somehow, through Adrienne Rich and Ada Limón and Richard Wilbur, I’ve fallen in love with poetry. The affair may be a brief one, but I’ve taken to copying down poems that I like and savoring the words, a distillation of chaos into singular ideas. Last night, I accidentally listened to opera. There will be no love affair there, but it struck me how desperate we humans are for stories. We’ve written them since the beginning of our time on earth in as many ways as there are variations of human beings.
This idea should be a freeing one – that however we tell our stories, it will be in the manner of some long- established tradition of the writers who came before. If only we can shed how things should be due to those traditions. I’ve been trying to shake off some of the “rules” with a spate of free range reading.
Recently, I’ve been pondering size. Cue whatever sophomoric phallic jokes you would like, I’ve been thinking about attention spans and complexity and what gets identified as a “work”. I was delighted to read a novella, for instance, if only to feel like I’d gotten the experience of a giant tome with minimal commitment. Diane Wald’s The Bayrose Files fit that need perfectly. Written with a poet’s eye, The Bayrose Files was a relaxing, funny read that can mildly relieve one of the imposter syndrome that plagues many writers. When an actual imposter resides among the artists at a residency program, goofiness and tension work in tandem to tell a compelling story and is a lovely afternoon read.
While I felt some mild relief from my own outsized imposter syndrome, I facilitated a workshop yesterday that brought it back in full force. The workshop was hosted by two nonprofits and I had no idea of who would attend. I think I lost the full force of my faculties when discovering that I was in the room with established poets, sculptors, English teachers, and college professors. How I find myself in these situations – astounded and impressed by people I’m ostensibly facilitating, baffles me. It strikes me that the things I mock myself for have brought me to this point – organizational skills, reliability, willingness to wade well out of my depth. It is a kind of sweaty courage, I guess. Something that has gotten worse with age. I take my amateur ass into a lot of spaces these days.
A decade ago, I set myself on a path to becoming what I thought a writer was. I surrounded myself with all the accoutrements – workshops, conferences, a degree, and now, a fellowship. I tried to establish a platform, worked to learn social media, went places and did things that I thought would make me more writerly. There’s an entire industry built around that. At the end of the day, it’s still just me and words. I’ve completed the cycle from the idea of a writer to becoming a writer. I wanted to be a lot of other things in my life, and made tepid attempts at them all. I was taken aback when my mother said to me not long ago, we all knew you were going to be a writer. If only I’d experienced that level of certainty. Ever.
I have an embarrassing level of skepticism. If someone tells me something, I tuck it away in my research later file while remaining utterly still, lest an expression give my disbelief away – like a rabbit in the presense of a potential predator right before I dart away to make notes. *scrawls: notetaking rabbit?*
So 13 years later, I keep writing posts here, in this weird little navel-gazing, hopeful place. I continue to fill notebooks with other people’s ideas and my own inane thoughts. I show up in spaces where it seems a little ballsy to call myself a writer. I still don’t know what I’m doing, just plodding along doing it. It turns out, this is what writers do. The only degree of certainty is this moment. And in this moment, I’m writing.
Leave a Reply