Writing Life
She sheds herself
one rough skin at a time,
drops them dripping into the hamper,
and, naked innards walking,
drags the dripping hamper
to a sly-smiled laundress
who has her discount ticket pre-filled.
Heavy duty cycle, she says,
and remember,
hang is the only way to dry.
-M.
Mortal soul in
mortal vessel broken
spilled out on earth
Thick water on wanting
ground
too dry to drink
God puts his
lips to the dusty
puddle and is slaked
-M.
The blogs that are the best blogs are personal, not academic. Those are the blogs that are fun to read, or at least fun to read for me. The reason they are fun to read is because the author is writing for the joy of it. If you can’t write for the joy of it on your own blog, then where else? Blogs are possibly the most low-pressure forum anywhere.
My focus on my own blogs has been twisted. Right now, I need to focus on making myself a writer rather than making myself a viral success. I need to be an artist first. Always first. And I need to begin at the beginning. I need to humble myself.
I know a lot of craft shit. A lot. I have a style. I have a voice. I know oodles of words. I know how to type. I know how to get myself so balled up about a project that laying down the first word gives me a panic attack—literally.
If I’m writing for the audience first, I get stage fright.
I used to perform often. I was very involved in drama and choir in school. I had two stunningly awesome speech classes. I was a singer. I was and am a performer. Also, every time I am about to perform, I feel like I’m going to die. My anxiety gets full and physical. I have to take long, deep breaths to hopefully slow down my heart enough so my chest doesn’t explode. I have to close my eyes because everything all of a sudden gets bright. My hands shake, hard. I get a little twitch at the corner of my mouth. My knees shake too.
But here’s the great and weird thing:
When I perform, I am amazing. I don’t want to sound conceited there, but performing and public speaking are things at which I know I am excellent.
During the speech class, I stood up there delivering the speech with my hands shaking, suppressing my tick, making sure to slow my words, and even though I am going through all that, the performance comes out shiningly.
After, I sit down and let my hands shake their last shakes, and when they’re done, I feel a euphoria that is so all-encompassing it is impossible to describe. Better than crack, we’ll say. Better than crack.
The difference between performance anxiety before an actual performance and performance anxiety before beginning a writing project is that when you’re set to perform, you must perform. Your cast members, partner, grades depend on it. There is a lot at stake should you fail to act. With writing, it’s different. You can convince yourself all day long that your anxiety is bigger and more important than your need to write. The whole big show won’t be ruined if you take a nap instead. Nobody will fail and be held back if you’d rather play on Facebook. Performance anxiety gets the best of you and stops you in your tracks.
The question becomes, how do you overcome performance anxiety as a writer? I don’t have a clear answer. I remember all the things we’d say to each other before shows: “Don’t be nervous. The audience wants you to succeed,” “Plant your feet and own the stage,” or, my personal favorite, “Anxiety and excitement have the same physical symptoms, so just tell yourself you’re excited.” I like that one because it sounds super wise, but is near impossible to do.
Perhaps the key is not considering your audience at all in the beginning. There is no stage when you sit down to write. No one is watching you or judging you. If you hate what you write, it need not ever see the light of day. You are totally in control. You are totally free.
Dance like no one is watching, blah blah blah and so on, big saccharine barf.
Conquering writers’ stage fright is easier said than done, but better done than undone.
For now, that’s the best I can do.
-M.
I am not a long-write poet and suspect, by nature, I never will be. Most of the time, I see much more value in longer works than in what I produce, (read as: “most of the time I see more value in what everyone else in the world is doing except me”). In this insecurity, I am like a child who stubbornly believes ten one dollar bills will always be worth more than one twenty dollar bill.
A friend of mine once told me he doubts I have the attention span for long-write. Possibly. More likely though, I’ve got an addict’s taste for hit-and-run.
-M.
It’s crazy how these old worries keep coming back. In my mind I’m in a poorly lit room. I look down at my own work and think, pouting, “But my work doesn’t sound like other people’s work. My work doesn’t sound like what’s in the literary journals and magazines.” It’s true, but why I automatically jump to the conclusion that this is a bad thing is beyond me. I may have trouble finding a home, but when I do, it will be the right home, the Goldilocks home. Maybe I’ll find several.
The only thing I must absolutely not do is write what I think I should sound like rather than writing what I actually sound like. My poetry and essays look and sound how it looks and sounds in my mind. That’s a good thing because I’m the only one who has my mind. For the world’s sake, that’s an excellent thing.
-M.
Serrano, Latino
Sunburned dark
Jeans
baggy T-shirt
train soot gray
Trenchcoat
patched leather
slain ranchers’ tack
115 degree morning
blacktop risen
shining
son of god
Round shoulders
Clinging glass
windshield clear
beer bottle green.
-M.
Young Son Virile Boy
Humps his way through the underbrush
Eats out every night
Comes home for dinner
Head grows into the crown
Granddad Limp Limb
Back in the cave
Waits for ointment and
His good bitch to come back
Dad gone
to town for pussy and heartburn
Where’d all the good ones get to?
Loin cloth at the dry cleaner’s
Drags dick and briefcase along the jagged path home
-M.
I just saw a post that my Vanderbilt U. cancelled classes because of the snow. Bunch of pansies. When I went there they ne-e-ver closed for snow. Never. They didn’t even close when, in my freshman year, everything was covered in so much ice, we could have ice skated to class. We never got any Mondays off for anything either. Ne-e-ver. I remember the rumor was that the only time Vandy had ever cancelled class was in the 1870’s when a bull broke through a fence and was chasing students around campus, (which I’m sure was awful, but sounds hilarious, especially because I’m imagining really old-timey students wearing black robes, running around like headless chickens, going “Eek! Eek! as their robes flap in the wind).
They didn’t even cancel class when a tornado hit downtown Nashville and ricocheted off the corner of campus. I remember I was in “Great Works of the Wester Tradition” at the time, in which we had been reading some very atheism-heavy books. A girl was giving her presentation on Thus Spoke Zarathustra while outside it went black, then green. “Man is Superman,” she said.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” from outside.
“Man is the measure,” she said.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” the tornado said.
The lights flickered and went out. My professor raised his hands to the heavens and exclaimed, “God forgive me for making them read these heathen novels!”
State of emergency nothin’. Go to class!
-M.
(That tornado story is one of my all-time favorites to tell—and every word of it true. No joke, yo.)
My world is so incredibly computerized. It seems I spend the entire 2/3rds of my life that I’m not sleeping sitting chained to this screen. To combat this, I’ve started doing my morning writing by hand, which feels wonderful and has improved my previously disused handwriting tremendously. Last night I received a box of stationary supplies from Evil Supply Co. and, among those supplies, was a planner. I can’t even begin to tell you how amazing it felt to do all my deep, creative planning for the next three months by hand. There is something about the connection between brain, hand, ink, and paper that simply cannot be duplicated by typing. (I think there are even studies that confirm this.)
Obviously, as a writer, I will still spend the majority of my workday in front of the screen, but it is wonderful to have an outlet now for real communion with my creativity.
-M.
To the god who loves to roll and nuzzle
into mortal filth the way a dog does
warm grass in a shit-strewn dog park
I offer my sea-less Empire.
The zit-faced babies in their wife-beaters who hang
at the shop across the street
from the central high
who jump the ostensibly smart kids
for quarters to buy snacks
meet in secret over their five finger discounted
bongs and pay homage to you
unknowingly.
You’re in the joke that isn’t funny
sober.
Beloved,
Empirian Theos—
the grasping palms of the Northside
panhandlers with hole-y stories
who live in apartments more lush
than mine—these belong to you also.
Preside over the dying orange groves.
“Infected mosquitos here. Hydrocephalus risk,”
your inviolate scripture between the scruffy rows.
Haunt
our landmark abandoned mall—
commerce’s inbred cousin.
Spin the carousel’s lame horses
that rock drunkenly on their tarnished poles
and whinny in the night for a bullet
between the painted eyes.
I offer our fame to you also—
Sammy Davis Jr. lost his eye here
in the dirt of a precarious fork
in the road out. It has rotted away
now, no doubt, brain food
for gila monsters, but the animus
would make a fine moist orb atop your scepter
with no eyelid to blind it to our resigned demise.
Watch over us, oh God of the Dark
and Disparaged,
I pray.
-M.
M. N. Ashley 