Creating and the Creation

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author, book, fiction, freelance, language, literary theory, literature, non fiction, novel, poetry, poetry theory, writer, Writing

As wordsmiths it is easy to become obsessed with definitions, with steps and cues, with lines, and the manipulation of those lines. Art can resemble a science; the creative process becomes just that – a process, a string of impossible questions and frantic answers, systematic and unwavering. There are theories and rules, guidelines to control the streaming, each wave building further uncertainty and expanding definitions. Layer upon layer. The movement compels further movement, always forward, sustained by its own momentum and governed by the thin lines and strings of our own devising.

The creative process is just that – a process. And it is a consuming one. The act of creation propels itself, inspires itself, as it narrates its own creation. It’s easy to be consumed the process, with the external narrative of creating. We forget then, that our work isn’t about definitions and it isn’t measured by its process. We cannot simply be creative; we cannot simply be writers. We must create something; we must WRITE something. And that which we write, that something, cannot be a mere abstraction. It must extend beyond its narrative, beyond its own eternal possibility, and assume a physical presence in the world.

While it is nice to be a writer and to be in the process, always, of creating, it is far better to have created. Definitions of self, of identity, of who we are are meaningless when it comes to our art. Our art is not an extension of who we are becoming. Rather, it must be something, its own presence, a word, an object, a book, a sound – something to inspire movement, to assume and build upon the stories of others. It is in this exchange that meaning is created and that we (and our words) become something more than our individual symbols and definitions. We are not defined by a process, but by a product and by the way in which this product lives and expands beyond us and our vision – by what it becomes as opposed to who we are becoming. By all the ways that it becomes unrecognizable to us.

It’s hard to remember this. As a writer, so much of my work is wrapped up in abstractions, in ideas. The “something” that they create can easily be confused the process of their creation. And it is easy to settle. Whereas a sculptor can see the difference between each, for a writer, it’s more difficult to recognize the presence created by language; it’s easier to define ourselves in our own terms, our own language, as opposed to accepting and opening ourselves to the definitions of others, our readers.

But we must. I read once that words are just words – they are. But in the hands of a reader, words become something more. The trick? They must be read first.

And so, I retreat back into my maze of half finished projects, of hopeless dreams, and rambling notes to create something, to publish something, to become something. We cannot live our lives as partial verbs and phrases. Eventually, we all become nouns, the objects of our own wandering.

 

Olive Oil, Single Track, and Sand

Tags

Camping, Colorado, Crested Butte, Fruita, literature, Mountain Biking, poetry, Writing

I should have been writing – fulfilling promises to virtual friends and imagined readers. Instead, I was camping.

 

In the Colorado desert, the sky was dust and gold, especially at dawn and dusk when the light caught and the air tumbled. 

The dust was everywhere and in everything; it crept and crept, being places it shouldn’t, defining shapes, building landscapes and skylines. We camped in the dust, setting up our tent along side countless others. A caravan. At least 30 individuals from Crested Butte had wandered along with us into the desert that weekend. It began with a facebook post, somewhat random acts of fate and minds aligned, calling everyone and bringing them to a small, dirty space. 

Dogs raced about the campsite, makeshift and scattered. The neon shades of tents clashed with the gold of the dust and the sharp yellow of the sun burning against the trees and rocks and sand. Trails were carved throughout, bending and arching up makeshift mountains and tracing narrow ridge lines. There were bikes and fires and beer and cheap whiskey. 

The mornings were early and slow. A steep hill stood between us and the only restroom for miles. Many attempts were made in bare feet, still half drunk, and hungry at dawn – few were successful. Most fell and pushed their bikes up the steep incline.

The first night, a dog named Olive Oil dug a hole in our tent. 

She ran free and returned often, exploring the damage. The owner of Olive Oil was far too relaxed about the hole. He offered us whiskey. 

The dust crept in throughout the day and night, staining us and everything with us a slight shimmering. 

At dawn, we biked. Up Prime Cut, over to Joe’s Ridge, along Zippidy Do Da, and down countless other erratic holes in the land. Like water, filling ruts and tracing corners deeper up and then down until the mountains and ridges were a maze of bodies and sweat. Like sugar, taking pictures in the dark, tracing words in flashlights and then dissolving.

Exposure. 

I should have been writing. 

In my youth, I stole the words of others and hid them in books and on napkins. I crept, like the dust, inserting myself between window panes and imagined conversations. I extended the lives of momentary characters, imagining their realities into fiction and then, bringing chaos and sound to create poetry. 

There is no need to write them, these neon strangers passing the whiskey from one mouth to the next. Around the fire, full of dust, the red veins in our makeshift mountains caught in the black, there were stories that I didn’t write or steal, words that I let sit in the sand until they were buried in more words and more sand.

Because we write with more than words.

Colors or sounds, forgotten moments and fires, the taste of someone else’s sweat, sugar, and dust. 

We are always listening and misremembering histories, slipping into the present. Scattered words and pieces of stories, lost and gathered, stitched into a mismatched tapestry of ski bums and rejects, wandering the desert, looking for nothing, running from nothing, simply bathed in dust. 

They are no mine, but they are me.

 

I’ve Fallen Off the Wagon…

Tags

Arizona, Camping, Crested Butte, Escape, fiction, literature, moab, Wilderness, Writing

Meaning…it was winter, then spring, and then summer and I hadn’t written a thing in 6 months.

With summer came sharp realizations, about landscapes and possibilities and adventure.

With spring came road trips and camping tents, and red dust painting every inch of my body. There were sharp sunsets in Arizona, the heat of the sun magnified by the earth – also red and sharp, cut into mesas and stacked mountains built in rock sheets and flat pebbles. 

There were long roads in Utah. Mesas where sand dunes calcified into stone, creating bowls and ledges.There were cults and strange gas stations to the south, towns with stone walls and fortresses, side roads that lead to nothing, where I hunted for beer on a Sunday with little hope besides desperation.

There was the inevitable waiting for letters, for opportunities. But then there were camp fires, sweat, and whisky that tasted better for being hot and full of sand. Nights without dinner, just half melted chocolate and store brand oreo cookies. 

The dogs escaped not once, but twice, chewing through their leashes in the Utah desert. We chased them on bikes through the sand dunes.

We drank coffee from a french press and savored the inability to sleep past 6 when the sun hit the earth and everything was wind and fire and red..

And we stayed there and biked there for weeks. And I worked from coffee houses and truck stops and stole wifi from unsuspecting cell phones and hotels. And we slipped in an out of states and wilderness areas. And we slept and woke and moved and built a home every day again and again until home was a verb we kept finding and imagining one night to the next. 

Moab was hot  and full of stone, polished until it was sticky. And we road our bikes and sat, dirty and red, in coffee houses, drinking coffee and eating ice cream. 

And I forgot about everything but writing. I forgot about PhD programs and marketing and media. I forgot about applications, taxes, start ups, editors, deadlines. I forgot about everything beyond the story we were living and the words to describe it, later, when we threatened to forget it.

And then we came back to Crested Butte, and the words were there and it was summer. The rejection letters were there, and we smiled and were happy to have another chance to get it right, that is, to write and live the story without the need for outside validation. 

It’s summer in Crested Butte, and it’s time to write again.

Review: This is How You Lose Her

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Amazon, Book Review, Character, Dominican Republic, fiction, Junot Diaz, literature, Memory, Narrative, New York Times, novel, Presence, Review, Storytelling, The, This is How You Lose Her, Writing, Yunior

“It’s just so raw,” my grandmother said as she glanced back through the pages. “I only got to page 20. Just page 20, but I was happy to be there.” 

While studying the art of writing, I paid very little attention to the art of reading. I focused on the craft of it, the process of it, as opposed to the purpose of it – to connect, to reveal and to inspire. I define good writing by my grandmother. She has little time for games or conventions. She couldn’t give a damn about the latest trends in narrative fiction, or the musings of distant theorists and philosophers. She has lived her life, a hard life, and now as it draws nearer to its final climax, all she wants is a good story.

Isn’t that what we all want? A good story, the opportunity to dissolve our present within another’s? To experience a world beyond our own if only to illuminate the shadows and corners our imaginations left unseen, unheard? Very few books have that I have read have demanded this level of active commitment. Many books have entertained me, brought me to tears, enraged me, moved me, inspired me, etc. But none have illuminated me. None have left me thrilled by the power of language, none have left me burning with the weight of stories yet to be told. Until now.

The books that I read pass through my grandmother’s hands first. If she approves, they come into mine. And that is how I came into Junot Diaz’s latest book, This is How You Lose Her.

Diaz is a brilliant storyteller. From the first sentence, I was captivated, not only by the quality and power of his story, but by its artistry. Wrapped within his prose, sentences ceased to be sentences, paragraphs were no longer paragraphs. I no longer conceived of the words, but was encompassed by the moments, faces and memories described by his language. The page disentigrated and I was transported. 

I tell my students that the purpose of writing, the art of narrative, depends upon connections. A story isn’t read; it is experienced.

Diaz skill lies in his ability to transcend language – to use language to get beyond language. One of the greatest challenges that I have encountered as a writer: my words tend to get in the way of the story I’m trying to tell. Diaz, damn him, has found a way.

The strength of a story lies in its characters, their ability to create windows as well as mirrors that instantly transport their readers while reflecting them, all of them. When faced with our own reflections, both as individuals and as a culture, we often turn away. It’s far easier to see and digest our own humanity through a veil, a mask of words and metaphors that turn the experience of it all into a distant memory. Diaz’s prose, as my grandmother notes, is raw. There is no veil, no mask or metaphor. There is simply the reflection, a living reflection that shifts, moves and bends the way that light can when faced with the pressures of time, doubt and our own uncertainty.

This eye turns towards the impossible depths of love – its obsessions, insecurities and triumphs. Centered on the trials of Yunior, whose passion is matched only by his recklessness. This is How You Lose Her is study of the connections that define us, the moments that become us, and the relationships that enable us to exist and persist within our own lawless chaos. 

I was captivated by its clarity and its expansiveness, the means by which time slips and spirals in and then, back out pressing its edges out against memory, against presence.

This is How You Lose Her is a powerful exercise in language and memory. It’s characters live within our imaginations, painting a vivid history too often lost, abandoned or ignored. The critical eye of a historian and the tongue of a poet, Diaz further establishes himself as a master of the story.

To those who adore, appreciate or aspire to find the story within our words – read this book.

This is How You Lose Her is available for purchase at amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/This-How-You-Lose-Her/dp/1594487367

 

 

 

 

I Am Writing a Novel – Selections from Agnosia, a Novel in Progress

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Art, creative, editing, editor, feminism, fiction, insomnia, literary theory, literature, nonfiction, novel, poetry, possibility, science, women, writer, Writing

A Novel

I am writing a novel. The words create their own space. They pour from me, pour and scatter. Overflow.

“I can lose myself without anxiety because you keep me. This book is not narrative. It is not a discourse. It is a poetic animal machine…” Helene Cixous, Stigmata

I write this in my journal. I read it out loud, like a mantra.

My mind is numb and frantic similtaneously. There are questions of space and presence. Questions concerning space, location and language. Because where I am matters to the question of why, what, and how I am. My words are.

Trespass and linger, seeping, creeping. My words are scattered across my body, being places that they shouldn’t. I turn my tongues within and search between my shoulder blades for the adjectives I’ve lost.

They fill and overflow pouring over from every angle. It’s an alien substance. But it is me. It is mine. I claim it, driving my hands down my throat to feel the pulsing heart of it in my lungs.

There is flesh in my language. There is dirt in my words. My wandering vocabulary scatters and multiplies. It shifts in the air and returns to me, changed, moved. I cannot control it. I cannot recognize it.

I write and cannot write. The walls expand and contract. Fluctuating presence.

I am writing a novel. There are notes and tones, fractured verses. I dance between them, twitching unexpectedly between keys and tabs.

I write. Inside, the words echo. I must:

Get published

Get published

Get published

or it means nothing. Doesn’t it?

Ceaseless refrains. Every night.

I scribble on napkins and scraps of paper between tables and appetizers. It pulses. Demands.

I ride my bike home at midnight. The pavement is damp. There are no cars, only lights, growing and fading into the dust and dirt edges of the road.

One of my students asked how I could possibly be a qualified teacher without substantial publications.

Scribble. Submit. Wait.

Blue orchids and green foliage are set in wooden vases and left to whither under the reddened light.

Scribble.

Empty wine bottles frame the window sill and the coffee table behind me. A single peacock feather in a delicate glass vase. Papers scattered, printed, repeated, and torn. The blinds are slit. Coffee cups exhaust their water. Tiny drops seep and stain the window behind.

The television is on. I crave noise. I can’t write alone. Blue tipped light flickers, revealing flaws in the glass – tightening circles that intersect and expand.

Keys and ticks. In the loft, a soft, constant drumming.

I do not write novels. I write poems. I convince myself of this.

My writing instructor told me this. That I was a poet and not a writer.

I cannot tell a story. I can, however, trace myself in circles around it.

I do not understand plot, setting, characters. I understand narrative, but these are not the same.

Bobbie Hawkins, my writing instructor, told me I was a poet.

Before I could thank her she told me that she wrote poetry only once – after a man had hit her with his car while she was crossing the street in front of our school. She was in a coma for 3 days, and, as she couldn’t hold a complete thought long enough to remember and write stories, she wrote poems instead.

I understand.

I am walking somewhere in between. I cannot write sober. There is wine and insomnia to inspire the words that pour out of me.

I cannot remember them.

I fall asleep, curled in front of my computer, wrapped in sheets. I leave impressions on the couch. The mornings are damp and cold.

I do not know how to write a story. My husband also tells me this. He does not read my words, but he hears them, ticking away the hours he spends, waiting for me to slip into bed.

In bed, he tosses, driving his nails into the sheets. He dreams about screens. He dreams in black and white. He slips through the pages, constructing databases and worksheets, diagrams and charts. Trading numbers, like words.

Suffocate. I can only do this well – streaming. I focus on the empty nalgene bottle, the dust cleaner, and a bottle of gold calligraphy ink tipped onto its side and dripping onto the printer.

There are boxes and empty cans to house the wine bottles and wine glasses extended towards the end table.

Beneath the table are boxes and boxes of papers I’d left and forgotten. A peacock feather juts out of the holes in the sides. There are pictures of us everywhere. A vase on the mantel. Peacock feathers, dried roses, the remains of my wedding bouquet. The menu from our wedding day. A wooden guest book with our initials carved. Red bull cans and half empty tea cups.

I write myself as I imagined myself. There were stories there – they are not important, but they are me and they must be mine.

The mind slips into the process. Experience becomes language becomes knowledge, a way of seeing. I settle within it, aimlessly drifting in the spaces between.

How do I write what I barely remember?

There were conversations before with friends and roommates before. Whiskey Wednesdays. We stayed up in the whispers, talking or singing or watching one another.

There are no more conversations. I am writing a novel. The rest lapses into memories I will steal for material and manipulate into metaphors. Nothing is sacred. I will write them all, write every moment, every word.

I try to understand time and presence. I try to hold it in my hands.  I wrap myself in blankets and sit against the night, diving deeper and deeper into the screen, the cursor that blinks and demands ink. In the haze, the words cluster and divide, a maze of black lines stitched into the glare.

The sound of feet outside remind me that we live in a townhome. Our neighbors keep their lights on all night. I watch them through the blinds. Their shadows cross and dip beneath the banister. The window catches their reflections.

I write and am never satisfied.

Because I am a poet and not a writer. There is no order to it. I cannot claim it. I cannot hold it. It will not print. It will not manifest.

No one will publish me.

I imagine my reader, then, who is distracted, crowded between shelves in small bookstores buried in dust,  aging hipsters who lurk in late night coffee houses, shifting their eyes between baristas and the patched leather couches framing abstract paintings and dramatic black and white prints of coffee mugs, collapsed vases, and vague doorways, the kind of reader who sinks and finally, blurs before settling into memory, appearing in random list poems and haikus years after she was first noticed and committed to a memory.

She is not in real book stores, but in virtual ones, with virtual feeds and carts and screens. She browses, composing new verbs and adjectives to highlight. This is Tuesday rising and fading into Wednesday. The bar and the dimmed lights and the shades, blackened and stained red, too heavy to capture movement.  I imagine her in pixels. I imagine her barefoot and wandering, curled between piles of books and paper, books that creep, being places that they shouldn’t.

I creep and creep, dreaming of sleep knowing that I cannot sleep. I am writing a novel.

There is no reader beyond the woman I imagined in the corners, between the walls. She whispers to me, at times, telling me through the drywall, to curb my sentences this way or that. She directs me. I name her and she is happy.

In the end, there are only the words, this frantic pulsing that assumes the language I speak. In the night, I hear her laughing between the keys.

Love and Loss: Agnosia Selections

Tags

agnosia, Art, fiction, literature, monkeypuzzlepress.com, nonfiction, novel, publication, publishing, reading, writer, Writing

Hi.  I say

Hi.  He says

At dusk in the shallows, the red shadow of the ferry rises up through the tides.

How are you?  I say

How are you?  He says

Silence.

The book.  He says

The book.  I say and hope that he understands

The rise and fall of the tides coincides with the coming of the mayflies. Small, black boat-shaped dots and oil slicks – beautiful iridescent hues. The lake fills the gutted bellies of its shop with sand, shells, scales and anything else offered, dropped in, lost. Everything outside becomes buried things.

Keep them in. Keep them in.

What?  He says

Nothing. I say Nothing

There are no clouds on an island – just the mist off of the water – thickened. The edges are sharp, fine. It cuts itself into layers, rests and then pushes the air out. There are little deaths every night and every morning. Condensed water and oil – the smell of her, masked by the lights of the city. Its edges pulse in dark rings, a cloud of ash, pools of hot steel.

Tomorrow? He says

Tomorrow. I say and leave him on the docks.

…

Perhaps this needs context.

This is a section taken from a current project, Agnosia. The main character is engaging in a phone conversation with her husband, a man whom she has left though she hasn’t quite realized it yet. Leaving happens first in the heart before it reaches the mind. As she speaks these words, she is sitting in her grandfather’s living room, listening to his death-bed ramblings and chocked memories of lives he has and hasn’t lead. She is 2000 miles away, pretending to write a novel, and at once lost and hopelessly found, drowning in a sea of questions and uncertainty. Unable to know or see what she wants or even, who she is, she succumbs to a kind of numbness that consumes the novel. Her present slips into her grandfather’s past, evoking his memories of the lake, the small town on an island, the fishing, and the cabin in the woods, to describe the storm that she finds herself lost within.  

There will be more! Thank you for reading.

I Quit the Restaurant: Ending the Cycle

Tags

Art, books, chapbooks, editing, editor, education, fiction, Higher Education, literature, masters, non fiction, non profit, novels, poetry, school, server, teacher, teaching, waiting tables, Waitress, writer, Writing

Your waiter is probably smarter than you. It’s true.

A waiter that I trained at my last restaurant job was saving to open a non-profit that would provide guidance, mentoring, and art education to children currently within the foster care system.

He had a Masters in Education and a Masters in Non-Profit Management. Beyond the degrees, which mean little to nothing in today’s world, he was brilliant, poised, eloquent – one of those rare breeds of human that possesses both vision and the ability to realize that vision.

What was he doing waiting tables you may ask?

He was making off like a bandit. Not only was he making $$ working less than 25 hours a week (leaving plenty of time for thinking, writing, and plotting); he was also meeting key members of the community in their element. Wining and dining potential benefactors and members of the town council without actually needing to spend his own $ to do so. It was, in a way, brilliant.

He also enjoyed it. It’s difficult to explain. But waiting tables has a charm to it, a controlled chaos that is both energizing and intoxicating. It’s hard work, but it’s good work. I loved the movement of it, the dance of it. I loved, more than much else, the opportunity to meet individuals, to talk and share stories, to take part, in some way, of their evening. I loved the customers. I loved good food and good wine. I loved the freedom. I loved the $.

Perhaps I should clarify. It wasn’t or isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. But waiting tables did put me through graduate school. It has supported each endeavor and has done so while providing me with something invaluable: time. As a waitress, I decided my hours, worked shifts as I needed to and was able to take time for my passions as I desired. It’s hard work and it is thankless work, but it is perfect work for an starving artist. It puts food on the table while ensuring enough time and even an audience to the pursuit of your own artistic work.

How else could I have lived off of an adjunct’s salary while devoting countless hours to the frivolous and selfish pursuit of reading, writing, and aimless thinking about thinking? Where else would I have met so many inspiring individuals of like minds?

There is, of course, the dark side. And that is, as a waitress I have never had to take a chance on supporting myself with my art, the opportunity to face defeat, despair, doubt and ultimately to experience triumph and elation of making your passion, your career. It has been a safety net, a job that has enabled me to avoid the inevitable: taking a chance on me, believing in me and in what I do. It has allowed me to ignore my calling, deny my potential, and avoid any conversation about the world beyond wine, food, and midnight whiskey runs. I have never had to grow up, to admit that perhaps I was meant to do more, be more, live more. I have remain strangled and tempted, sacrificing what is invaluable for what is fleeting. I have given my time and my youth to the pursuit of financial security as opposed to devoting my time and life to that which is immortal – the pursuit of passion, to be poor and desperate, and of course, desperately happy and satisfied.

Today, I quit the restaurant job that has sustained me for the past year and vowed to not take another. This is it, the real deal, the moment that it shifts, that it turns. Writing is no longer a hobby. It is, in short, a matter of survival. Write or starve. Write or face eviction. Write or lose the car. Write or…well, there is nothing else. I must write and write well and forge ahead without any doubts or second guesses. I will do this. I must do this. I can do this.

I can be a teacher, a writer, and an editor. I can write a novel. I can market a novel. I can sustain myself by the bootstraps of my dreams.

I can do this. I quit the restaurant. And it feels good.

Now what?

 

A Prologue

Tags

ancestry, anthology, family, fiction, grandfather, history, island, Lake, literature, mother, novel, Ohio, poetry

The working prologue of Agnosia, a novel in the works.

A prologue

 

This is the beginning. I never intended it to be.

The beginning of this, at least.

 

Beginnings are strange things. They only exist in the looking back, after the ending. Only when those threads ravel back does their unraveling fixate to a single point. Like any story, the point begins somewhere in the center, expands, spirals out, filling the spaces between until everything blurs into one black dot. Impossible to escape, avoid. Everything falls in. Everything.

 

It works its way backwards – the beginning.

 

On the ferry, cutting through the shallow waves of Lake Erie, the last whispers of spring cling to the horizon. I smell ash, something thick and stale mascarading as air.

 

The rectangular mass that is Cleveland. The steel mill has shut down. Cold. So has the Ford plant where my uncles screwed rivets into the passenger side doors of minivans. Vacant neighborhoods, inescapable shadows that slip and steal in the night, brick by brick, the sidewalks and concrete facades I filled with faces – the otherwise empty corners and yards. Crumbled.

 

I left because of this. The emptiness that I had tried and failed to fill with the memories of my mother and grandfather. A dying city, strung up on rum and whiskey, the grills and the gatherings they invited. This void of never enough. Never enough and then, just enough. Always just and barely enough.

 

I left and there were mountains the ridges of Colorado, of Denver, California. And I thought the beginning was there, somewhere in the fictions I crafted alongside Kerouac and other would-be writers and love drunk poets. Or maybe, it was with him, with the strange acts of marriage and marrying, of courting – or maybe it was in the settling, the house buying, or the standard commuting, the 401K, the stock trading, the 8-5-ing, the teaching, always, the teaching, the grading, the countless nights of questioning, the birthing or lack there of, the could-have-been children I dreamed and imagined into a separate, private reality I fought for and defended against everyone.

 

I thought that the beginning lies in the leaving, always in the leaving, those long roads of indecision and sudden realization. Fearless and open.

 

But those are only spirals, bleeding blotches where the ink ran and poured over.

 

The beginning is always in the going home, the going back, someone else’s history, someone else’s fiction. Something stolen or assumed. Something borrowed.

 

Everything else is a scene, a moment leading back to the beginning already in the process of ending.

 

On a ferry, on an island in Lake Erie. Dark and dirty waters, shallow waters and separate pools.

 

There are shadows in the water, ropes, and cracked steel.

There is whiskey and bad cocaine. And the women. The women, my grandfather says.

The work and the work and beaches covered in glass.

What my mother loved.

The lights on the water.

 

 

 

It’s Been a Week

Tags

Art, books, critical theory, Helene Cixous, literary studies, literature, poetry, post modernism, reader, reading, Writing

or two, or three…

I love my job.

Can I say that?

I love two of my jobs. That’s more accurate.

The intoxication of writing, of creating, possibility.

Reading t he “ten thousand pages of every page,” recognizing this breathless struggle against death with every key stroke. Because that’s what writers do, of course, we battle, strike viciously into the heart of our mortality with our language, as though language, the process of it, the mystery of it, can defy the shadow in the corner and trace us against the sky.

That is what I want to do. I want to write as I live and live as I write. I want to paint the sky in language, in sound, color, in light. I want to fill the pages of my memory, transcribe my flesh in ink. I want to write, yes, but what’s more, I want to be remembered.

That is the art of writing, the meaning of it, its strange gift and intoxicating promise. A kind of transformational immortality. I may not always be, but the words, my words, will.

It’s selfish, yes, but a dream that I succumb to again and again and again. Not to be read, not to be known, but to be remembered.

And to be remembered in a frantic, breathless way. To have my words be read, be imagined and re-imagined again and again, each time with new emphasis, with new meaning.

That is living, my own re-memory, re-imagined presence. Every reading brings new possibilities, the opportunity to touch and to be touched through language.

Because that is what we do, we write in defiance of death and time. Towards connections, building bridges through vowels and consonants, challenging the distance between us. We touch, across decades and endless landscapes in a timeless place of endless possibility – we imagine one another, remember one another, crafting the present as we design the future almost simeltaneously.

That is why am I a writer. Why I spend weeks dreaming about writing, writing about writing, caught up in the near frantic chaos of it. Intoxicated, powerless to deny it. I do not have something to say or to compose. I do not possess a story worthy of my reader.  I am merely trying to reach, to connect, to possess, to touch my reader. Language is the only tool that I have and I wield it foolishly, tirelessly, in the small hopes of finding and being inspired by you.

I love my job.

Balancing the Art and Work of Writing

Tags

Art, books, chapbooks, editing, editor, fiction, Jack Kerouac, K12, language, literature, Naropa University, poetry, reader, reading, work, writer, Writing

I had a moment this morning.

After sending off the final draft of a lesson plan for K12 and settling back into editing, revising, and re-writing the latest chapter of Agnosia, I came to a stunning realization:

I’m a writer.

I have always been a writer. Writing has always been an art to me, an act that is self-satisfying, that is fulfilling in a way that other actions have never been. The reward, the incentive lies in the act itself, in the process by which it is created. There was nothing beyond the act, art of creating through language to inspire it.

But now, I a writer in that my art has become my work – the means by which I financially support myself (sort of).

Yes, there are still the random acts of money-making, waiting tables, bartending, etc. But my primary job title is now: writer and editor.

With this understanding, this recognition of the path that I have created for myself, comes a new act, a new responsibility: learning how to balance the art of writing with the work of it.

Writing as a Reader

In graduate school myself and my small class of Kerouac-soldiers were encouraged to focus solely on the craft of making language, on pressing against the perceived boundaries of fiction and poetry, on breaking the line and exploring new ways to compose and align a sentence. There was little to contemplate beyond the line, charting new territory in vocabulary. Every night resonated, slipped into morning frantically, on the whispers and scattered vowels of a dozen punch drunk poets pretending to write fiction. We dreamed of coffee and whiskey as we carved ourselves into sheets of printer paper.

To make money was to sell out – I remember those days of uninhibited artistic perfection! (sarcasm is obvious)

Reader? What reader? What critic? We were writing experience, living the dream as only a dream can be lived – desperately, at the very edge of what would seem to be possible, to be livable.

What I discovered, however, as I grew into my art, was that my art didn’t exist without a reader. To write, and to live as a writer, I needed to respond to, accept, and rejoice within my reader. Without a reader, I and my art didn’t exist.

My work, though still dependent slightly on finances, became a desperate mission to craft and compose my art in such a way that it was read. This meant marketing it, selling it, contemplating not only what I wanted to say or reveal, but contemplating how to say it. Who was my reader and what did he or she need from me?

My art grew and in the process of growing it became a part of something greater that itself. Art, I believe, is inherently selfish. There is something that I have experienced, an idea that I hold, that I must communicate at all costs.

This is selfish – that I feel that my thoughts, ideas and questions are ones that you NEED to experience.

But art as work, art with its eye fixated on the bigger picture, art that realizes the power and importance of its audience – art does not exist without one – this kind of art is work. It takes effort to explore those pre-work musings and craft them into a language and structure that will reach its audience. It’s difficult to bring so many voices into the conversation. Its traumatic to watch them change, alter, and transform what I had thought to be so perfect.

But art as work is more meaningful, more fulfilling than art alone. In this expanding community, my art works to connect with an audience, it grows and expands, becomes something beyond itself, lives beyond me, and works endlessly to narrate, to transform, to imagine itself over and over again.

My art is now my work. It’s a beautiful thing.