Category: writing

In The Planning Stage (Apparently)

It’s a reflection. Get it?

I haven’t posted here since the beginning of the summer, and if you haven’t read that post you need to go there because it’s the most delicious salad that translates into fall with maybe just sturdier greens and some quinoa.

I’ll wait.

But now, this post, which doesn’t have anything to do with food, really, except that I have made white bean and kale soup, gluten-free bagels, and GF and vegan doughnut holes from Minimalist Baker (among other delights), and am working on a ruby chocolate truffle that may make it onto the blog (along with Ruby Chocolate World Peace Cookies, in progress). But this post is not about that.

This post is about this quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish
someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we
get into it because we have good taste. But there is this
gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not
that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s
not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game,
is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints
you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Most people I know who do interesting, creative work
went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t
have this special thing that we want it to have. We all
go through this. And if you are just starting out or you
are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the
most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put
yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish
one story. It is only by going through a volume of work
that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good
as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to
do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while.
It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your
way through.” – Ira Glass

My creative work has gone through some changes with the publication of my book Healing Where You Are: An Introduction to Urban Foraging; the shitty voice in my head has been back for awhile now, and my creative practice in the past eight months or so has simply been to get it to STFU.

I do that by pressing on. By walking. By jotting things down and editing when I get the urge. By saying no to mercenary writing that sucks the life out of me and yes to putting paint on canvas. By starting big projects that might lead to bigger projects (spoiler alert: #tinycabinbiglife).

Have I done as much as I should? Could?

Not likely.

But winter is coming, and for me that just more opportunity to dig deeper. To fight my way through.

To let go, even.

Also to start baking again. So there’s that.

What’s unfolding for you? Curious to know how people are moving forward after the first pandemic years.

How To Be A Poet, by Wendell Berry

Walking helps. Nature is a balm.

I seem to have temporarily lost my voice.

Not my actual one – the one that I use in my work.

A combination of fear, doubt, grief, the weight of the world. I feel silenced and flummoxed and am trying to just listen, learn, and act. No one needs to hear what I have to say right now, but I can still spread the word of others.

Today, though, here’s a white man. Wendell Berry, a Kentuckian, even. This poem is for me, and, when he wrote it, also for himself, as a reminder of how to do this thing that, for me, in many ways, is as reflexive as breath.

We will someday come out of these things – pandemics, the clutch of systemic racism – and be, hopefully, better on the other side.

For now, here is a note to self for when I have more to say.

How to Be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

 

Stay well. Be kind. Black Lives Matter.

Thursday Links To Love

From yesterday’s chilly walk along Stony Run. Hope in the weeds and the art of graffiti.

Dispatch: still not quite certain what day it is. Each seems to flow like water into the next. Here are some links to keep you afloat.

First, something to watch that is not the human depravity that is Tiger King (AVOID). The Barkley Marathons is available through Amazon Prime and is an example of the kind of value you can get for $1.60 in Tennessee. Essentially, a race with fewer than a dozen winners in its 25-year history. 11/10 would recommend.

Back-up viewing if you don’t have Amazon Prime but have someone’s Hulu password: the documentary on Margaret Atwood. She is a badass from way back. Turns out, a word after a word after a word is power.

Next, something that is incredible to look at, and even better to participate in: the Getty Museum’s call for people to recreate famous artworks from things readily available at home. Locally, the American Visionary Art Museum is leading the charge.

For those “working” at home and looking to bone up on some skillz that are business-related, Moz wants to give you some free classes for SEO, backlinks, and other interwebs-optimizing topics.

It’s challenging to find links these days, it seems, that aren’t filthy with news of COVID-19, and we don’t need more of that, but here’s one for my freelance/self-employed/contractor friends anyway: yes, you are now eligible for unemployment. Here’s a direct link to Maryland’s online unemployment form, and another link to find instructions for your state.

In books, KWeeks and I are nearly done reading Michael Pollan’s book A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. One of the things that struck us both today was the following quote from JD Steddings:

“There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.”

Pollan adds, “Small mistakes in the finished product revealed the hand of the worker; perfection was opaque.”

Also, from Ruskin: “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”

May your work, whatever it is, be scarred with the beauty of imperfection, and may all of your errors be honest.

Sunday Poetry

Photo credit: me, of one of the iterations of The Quiet Show, by KWeeks, who is also featured below.

So I put a lovely poem up here last Sunday, and I thought I would continue, only this time with one of my own.

This was published in February in Put Into Words, My Love: Poetry & Prose: A Petite Pomme. This little journal (available on Amazon) is the second publication from Pomme Journal, and it is a pocket-sized compendium of poems about love. Each poem is accompanied by a simple line drawing, and the book is beautiful.

Here is my contribution.

Tracts of longing

And I am loving you in this morning’s rainy strangeness,
Filled as it is with dark clouds and sunshine,
Both.

Birdsongs at 5 a.m.
And the dawn chorus of your upstairs neighbor’s footsteps,
Too early.

Your skin cool above the covers and warm below,
Fuzzy blanket and flannel sheets
Tangled around our legs
Tangled around each other.

Soon you will rise and make
Coffee sounds.
Leaving sounds.

And this lovingness of ours will linger,
In the sweetness of our scents,
Mingled in the bed,
And the way my heart’s longing reaches yours,
Even as we part.

And Still Life Goes On

Lovemaking, circa Pandemic 2020.

It’s Monday, and I am taking a breaking between laundry detergent delivery and a FaceTime conversation that was a little fraught.

My day job is a freelance writer, and this morning I got back to what I refer to as my mercenary writing (the stuff I actually get paid for). It’s time; a few deadlines for April are approaching, and I like to get my stuff in a couple of weeks (at least) ahead of time.

Today’s first topic was 2,000 words on testicular pain, and this afternoon’s topic is breast pain.

I could not figure out a way to work this in to the actual article, but I have decided to open a new sports bar after Pandemic 2020 and call it The Twisted Testicle (TM). Then I will coin phrases like, “Don’t get your testicles in a twist,” which is quite a bit more serious than panties in a wad and so forth.

And then I submitted the first article to my editor and realized how strange it is to be writing anything about anything except COVID.

And then I realized that what we might need now more than ever is anything about anything EXCEPT for COVID.

Or not. I guess we all deal with things differently.

When I log on to the Netflix or the Hulu or the Amazon at night, I am looking for frothy, stupid comedy or cooking shows that stop just short of making me feel like a total moron, but the movie Outbreak was #9 across the country when Khristian Weeks and I watched it last Thursday, so it seems I might be one of the few who functions that way.

I haven’t checked lately, but I would be willing to bet that apocalypse programming is doing pretty well, even this week as Baltimore stops justshort of a shelter-in-place order to help save idiots (and their families) from themselves.

So what to do, how to think, how to feel, what to watch? How strange is it write about breast and testicular pain, except that there are still people with painful boobs and balls, and they need information, too, right?

This blog is the mental ramble that rainy cold weather prevented me from physically taking today.

So let’s make a list: what are you watching/reading/listening to as we continue with our social distancing?