Learning to Work

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This is the first blogpost of some ramblings about where my thoughts are lately. Read at your peril.

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great pic from the Bookshelf Porn blog (click on the link to visit)

Some years ago I bumped into a former colleague from Everett Community College, and asked her how early retirement was going. It had been two years since she left, and she admitted, smiling, that it had taken her two years just to figure out “how” to be retired.

Her smile baffled me. Wry? Chagrined? Embarrassed? No, it seemed genuine. But I can still remember thinking to myself, That won’t be me. If I get to retire from teaching–ever–I will make hay while the sun shines! I will write, and I’ll never look back.

But here I am, a little more than two years into this thing, and still learning how to be the writer I have dreamed all my life of being.

I tried to explain this yesterday to my poetry-group friends. I am aware that from the outside it looks as if I’m a successful writer. I have books! I blog! I send out poems and they are published! I finished a novel rewrite last year, and I’m so pleased to discover that I’m more than 100 pages into my new novel manuscript (abandoned in spring of 2014).

Putting it that way makes it sound so great.

Even so, I don’t feel as though I’ve learned how to really work as a writer. I scribble in my journal. I write down my goals and I think about them. I read inspirational books. Eventually I actually read a few pages of poetry or of a chapter.

mom 2015And everything calls me away. I have lunch with an old friend. I go to the gym. I visit my mom. I read a novel. I clean my house (!). I sort through boxes and throw papers away. I take my 16 year old to Barnes & Noble for a study date. I join a church committee. I register for a conference. I read several blogs about setting goals. I read another novel. I watch 3 episodes of Dr. Who (only in the evening, mind you). I decide to find a new blog theme!

None of this is bad, of course, and some of it is utterly necessary. But, getting back to my former colleague, what do I want to be doing with my time? What was it I meant to be doing with my time? Now that I’ve spent those two years floundering around and finding myself, what am I going to do with myself? 

Your Inner Anthropologist

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Imagine that an anthropologist is studying your life.

Based on the evidence, what will he or she infer is most important to you?

1. Subject is devoted to Spider Solitaire. (That would be me.)

2. Whenever the cellphone beeps or pings or kaboodles, subject picks it up as if it were  a fussy baby and soothes it.

3. Subject watches television for several hours every evening.

4. Subject devotes substantial amount of income to espresso drinks.

And so on.

Not that any of this is necessarily bad (and maybe “creates beautiful family dinners,” or “knits sweaters” is what your anthropologist discovers), if these activities are what you wish to spend your life on. As Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

But here’s the real question for anyone reading this blogpost: Would your anthropologist infer that you are a writer, based on the evidence?

This idea doesn’t apply only to writing. A few years ago when I read Jeff Olson’s The Slight Edge, I realized that despite my flaky youngest daughter’s difficult behavior, if she was actually a priority for me (and she is), then I needed to find a way to have at least one positive interaction with her every day. Once I made that a priority, we began to make a little progress.

I asked a boyfriend of one of my older daughters what was most important to him. He got all glowy (it was kind of inspiring!) and went riffing off.

Anything outdoors!

Snowboarding!

Hiking!

He made his ideal life sound like it could be profiled in Outdoor magazine.

However, anytime I see this young man, he’s staring at his cellphone (one arm wrapped around my daughter) while watching television. Or (no arm around my daughter) he’s playing a video game. As far as I can tell, he spends most of his income on games and tee-shirts.

Bless him for highlighting a lesson for me. And of course it isn’t just him — we all spend inordinate amounts of our time doing what is not important to us.

If writing is important to you, you should write.

 

 

 

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

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fall winter 2012 013

I was awake at 5:30 this morning, eager to crack open my notebook and begin writing. But it’s 30 degrees here, and I am not good at being cold. I turned on the heater in my cabin, and then I carried my journal and my favorite pen inside. I turned on a lamp and I sat down in my comfy green chair.

Then, I stalled. Every word I wrote felt like an ice cube stuck with all the other ice cubes. I had to chisel each one free and it wasn’t rewarding. My fingers were blunt and stiff. Surfaces. Temperature. What I ate yesterday. What I might do later today, if I ever get out of this chair. I grabbed some poetry off the bookshelf next to my green chair and I read. Nothing grabbed me, but I copied out a short poem, and then I tried to write a poem using the same sort of gestures.

cabin2But what was the point?

Why write?

And then, I remembered to ask, What is this? What exactly is it that I’m feeling? Can I name it? Where did it come from? What is it trying to tell me? 

I remembered something I read yesterday in Tracey Cleantis’s book, The Next Happy. Fear can masquerade as lethargy. I wrote down that question, too: What am I afraid of? 

The pages began to warm up, and the words weren’t solid little cubes of ice anymore. They began to flow.

The Acrobat’s Success List

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borrowed from https://www.flickr.com/photos/cereal-killer72/2603616192

I had an upsetting experience yesterday. I went to a financial planner with my dear husband, and, as we sat down, he began explaining how precarious our existence is since I have quit my job to be “a writer.” I don’t think he actually put “air quotes” around the words a writer, but he pronounced them as though he might be saying, to join the circus. Over and over he emphasized that I was bringing in “zero income.”

This is, in fact, completely true.

And it does freak me out, too, on occasion. But this morning, remembering how the financial planner began making helpful suggestions (perhaps I could work as a substitute teacher–they make good money!), I am feeling very, very freaked out.

What if my retirement account totals continue plummeting because of current global financial status?

What if, like my mother, I end up needing long-term care? What if my husband needs long-term care?

What if I never sell a novel…no awards…no best-sellers…no movie deals? What if there is never another poetry book? What if I never publish another word?

Somewhere in the midst of all this angst, however, I touched bottom. And I wasn’t on a trapeze, after all. I was more like a swimmer finding the bottom of the pool. I planted my feet, bent my knees, and pushed up, back into oxygen. I gulped in a big, fresh breath. I realized that what I was really doing was procrastinating–not working–and a sure way to never again do any work or experience any success.

As I breathed, I began to remember my strategies for getting work done. One of the strategies is to work for 15 minutes. This, in my opinion, is a little like thinking you are out over your head, then putting your feet down in an unfamiliar pool, only to realize that it’s not that deep. You can stand up! No problem! So I started on my 15 minutes, which turned into 45 minutes before I went into the house to fix myself some breakfast.

Another strategy I remembered, while eating breakfast, comes from a get-organized book I once read: notice the places where what you do is already organized. I am something of a slob and I let clutter accumulate. But where my make-up and hair stuff go in the bathroom? Totally organized. So it is possible for me to be organized. It is not a genetic flaw, pre-determined and impossible to surmount.

So, yes, it is precarious, but here’s my success list (you do not have to read this) around my work, just to remind myself:

  • I have two published books of poems, The Coyotes and My Mom and Sparrow. Three if you count my Carla-published chapbook, Be Careful. 
  • For five years I wrote one-bad-poem a day (you can see my essay about the experience here). And got many of them published, btw. (Some even made money!)
  • From July 27 to August 30 this year I wrote 31 new poems and sent them out as postcards.
  • I facillitate a Writing Lab now going on its sixth year of existence.
  • I have a BA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in American Literature. I taught American Literature, composition, and creative writing for 25 years!
  • Last week I submitted a short story to Glimmer Train, breaking a long send-out dry spell.
  • I have won three poetry awards (or four?), and I have had five poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
  • I have had about 100 poems published in journals, including Blackbird and Calyx and Floating Bridge (Pontoon) and The Sun and Escape into Life.
  • I came in second in both the mainstream-novel and short-story categories in the 2014 PNWA Literary Contest.
  • I have drafted four novels and one is more-or-less finished–I’ve submitted it to two places and will submit it to as many as need be. I will finish the other novels, too.
  • Yesterday morning I took out my poetry submission notebook (for the first time in several years) and began getting ready to do a September send-out (the intention is to submit four or five poems each day of the month to a different journal).

In her book, Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, Carolyn See has this to say:

“Protect yourself. Be careful whom you tell. Because the last thing on earth people living an ordinary life want to hear about is how you want to be a writer.”

When my dear husband outed me as a writer, I felt something like shame, and something like heartache. It was as if I didn’t want this woman in her office that was all about money to know my secret, my dirty little secret. But it isn’t dirty and it isn’t little and it isn’t a secret.

  • Oh, yeah. And I’ve been blogging since 2009 about my writing life! See? Not a secret! (http://awritersalchemy.blogspot.com/2009/08/summit-creek.html)

It’s going to be okay, Bethany. You can breathe now.