Writing Life
My ancient fiction professor at Vanderbilt once told us about a man he knew who drank Dr. Pepper hot. When work was over, this man would get into his after-fives and stir it in a saucepan over low heat, delicately, like he was handling milk. “Sometimes,” Professor Sullivan said, “it’s all right to let your characters take life a little too far.”
-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.
Watering the plants yesterday, I learned a lesson about patience—a lesson my plants have been desperately trying to teach me for some time. They must be as frustrated with me by now as I have been with them.
When I started taking care of them, they were all nearly dying of heat and drought prostration. I started watering them and feeding them and, at first, they got a bit worse. It showed especially in the hibiscus. The blooms they had all dropped off. I was extremely disturbed and couldn’t understand why the attention I was giving them wasn’t immediately paying off. I kept taking care of them though, because it did me good to get a little sun and a little peace outside and not lock myself in, being righteously productive with writing projects, (read: dinking around on the Internet and taking naps).
It has been about six weeks or so since I started taking care of them. I went out yesterday to water and feed and noticed all the hibiscus that had initially dropped their blossoms were now thick with leaves and blooming like gangbangers with huge, bright flowers, more luscious than the previous ones had ever been. The top branches of the plants, once charred by the sun, had greened up and proudly reached for the sky.
I smiled at myself and shook my head. Oh, yes… patience. Delayed gratification. Hard work paying off, surely, but SLOWLY. All those things we learn but discard in the now, now, now.
I used to consider myself a black thumb when it came to plants, and now I realize maybe I just never hung around long enough to see the results of what I put into them.
I used to consider myself a black thumb with some of my seedling writing projects. Maybe I just never hung around long enough to see the luscious blossoms come in.
-M.
Last night I had an intense dream about meeting a man who wrote for Conde Nast Traveler—a job I covet… deeply. I made a connection there and he was working to get me hired. He threw me with his crew into a rickety van to travel mountainous roads to his next snowy-exotic location. It was a stressful but excellent dream.
Today I ordered a subscription to Traveler. I felt compelled to do it. In all honesty, I have been thinking about ordering a subscription for a long time. I used to have one and I SO looked forward to my copy every month. I remember reading a feature about Patagonia and how I would have never thought of going there pre-article, but post-article it sounded like the most fabulous adventure.
Now, I find myself longing for travel. I find myself longing for adventure. I need the magazine to have something more to dream on—both the travel and the writing.
I feel there are miracles afoot. We’ll see what comes.
-M.
I had a revelation once at writing summer camp for adults at the University of Iowa writers’ conference. I noticed when everybody read their short prose pieces that mine sounded nothing like theirs. But then I read mine and people were delightfully receptive. I wrote about my dad botching sun tea. “I’ll remember that melted orange plastic pitcher for a long, long time,” one of them said and the other two laughed and nodded while we walked away from class, across the stinking river, backs turned to the university art gallery that was featuring second-string Picassos and African furniture.
I realized in that moment and for the first time that maybe not sounding like everybody else is a good thing.
But that was all about prose. It was the opposite reaction in my advanced poetry class. I read the poem that won me the big hoop-dee-doo writing award only a few months earlier and the bald-asshole workshop leader who worked mostly in prisons and wrote about breast milk eroticism told me my poem had “a lot of work to do.”
He was mad at me anyway because when our class went out together at lunchtime and climbed up the interminable campus steps to forage for chi chi sandwiches, my retelling of going to a computer generated atonal concert that was held in the dark by a composer whose silver jacket buttons I was madly in love with got more laughs than his pretentious snarking about “language poets”.
My revelation stands.
-M.
You can’t force yourself to love something even if it is philosophically correct. Likewise, you can’t force yourself to not love something that is philosophically incorrect.
I am speaking here not only of foolish wanting when it comes to romantic love, but also of the writing process. If a writer were to be philosophically correct, she would love the “writing” part of writing as much as the “having written” part—the production as much as the product. But we’re all grownups and we know better. Creative inertia is a bitch. The physical act of writing is an unwieldy drudge. We know such an upright love affair was never carried on in the heart of any writer who has earnestly walked this earth.
-M.
You’ll roll from aisle to aisle
aimless and slow
eyeballing the shiniest packages first
overhead and at foot
at your groin and at your twitching nose.
You’ll make better bad choices
(still bad choices)
fill your cart with loud
brightly powdered crunchies
that exercise your jaw
but stain your hands
without so much as a goodnight kiss
or any nutritional value at all.
-M.
My ancient fiction professor at Vanderbilt creaked in his departmental chair and told us about a man he knew who drank Dr. Pepper hot. When work was over, this man would get into his after-fives and stir it in a saucepan over low heat, delicately, like he was handling milk. “Sometimes,” Professor Sullivan said, “it’s all right to let your characters take life a little too far.”
-M.
M. N. Ashley 