On the Writing Life and Seedlings (Re)Born

So I've posted about it briefly on Facebook, but I truly haven't mentioned here why I've restarted this blog. Here it is: I've finally entered a season of my academic life, for the next few months at least, when it will be possible to actually balance my writing life, both of the academic and the creative varieties, with my teaching life.

It could have been possible over the summer, but I had to move and was pretty burnt out (still recovering from a very full load of teaching so soon after finishing the diss, so regeneration was needed before this semester, which involved a new school and new classes and all the adjustments that come with that.

Despite all that, though, over this summer and into this past semester I was able to crack slowly back into my writing side, like one of those seeds from childhood school projects beginning to germinate and push back up through the dirt surrounded by the inevitable styrofoam cup.

It started small, as it should: a couple of more articles written for the ever-delightful catapult magazine; finally cleaning up a chunk out of my MA thesis from years ago and sharing it at a conference this fall for some great feedback; and then finally revising a couple of chunks of my dissertation intro and extending out the ideas in semi-new directions. I'm grateful to note that both conference papers have been accepted for spring academic conferences. And in the midst of the semester I jotted down some ideas for a diss-related journal article and for turning my diss theory into a book down the road.

Without even talking about my projects for this break, next semester, and the spring (I'll save those for later posts), now that I look at the list of "small" starts, that it's pretty miraculous that I think of this list as small, because my pre-PhD self would have thought of it as a huge list. I won't lie--the PhD process and the dissertation were painful, and I protested much in the midst of them and afterwards. But as I've mentioned here before, my writing muscles have become strong, and my writing stamina grew tremendously from those challenges. I'm delighted by this, and am delighted to be back, firmly planted and with my writing life's metaphorical seedling head again above the soil to the point where it seemed obvious that I would restart this blog.

Sometimes that whole instant gratification thing is overrated, and as my students and I discussed the other way, the work itself--regardless of what happens with it--is valuable. I'm so thankful I was given the strength to stick it out, or I wouldn't be ready for new challenges!

The Next Step on the Journey

It's official: I'm an author!

That's right--my name now appears on Amazon with that little all-important underline. Previously, sure, I had things that appeared in books, but never before have I enjoyed Amazon-underline-authordom.

But seriously, I loved working on this project writing the script for an iPhone tour for Purdue's Discovery Park. It allowed me to apply my academic dissertation-related knowledge to a creative project, and to use my creative writing skills in an academic project. Can't get much better than that.

Plus, it was great working with Sorin Matei, Robert Yale, and the rest of the team on the project.

Okay, I've enjoyed my moment of joy. Now back to my dissertation-writing.

On Knocking Down Them There Walls

I'm pleased that the mojo came back (i.e., that I was able to pull through my spring break and balance the academic tasks I needed to get done with having time also to spend adequate time with people, get a bit caught up on my sleep, and get caught up on some of that impinging life stuff).

As to why it feels like the mojo's back to stay for awhile, I think part of that has to do with some success in the purpose of this blog--being able to knock down the walls in my mind between academic writing and creative writing in my head and heart. This blog has helped me not to privilege one over the other (as I had been doing) and to interrogate the reasons I might be doing so.

By knocking down that wall, I'm looking forward to clearing head space for both of these facets of my writerly self to continue to develop, as well as leaving room for more life events to take place around them. As a result, I'm ready to plunge back into the last six weeks of the semester, viewing them and their likely-accompanying tsunami wave-ishness as a necessary part of the writing life right now.

Not necessarily that they are the writing-life-as-usual, or that the craziness is the way life ought to be all the time, but it feels like if I can surf this wave, I'll be delivered safely to the next stage of my writing life, which will start in the summer with balancing my preparation for the Big Nasty Exams I hope to take in the fall with other writing tasks, and is likely to be a bit more like paddling in a canoe than riding a tsunami.

Since tsunami waves can come when you think it's just a puddle, though, it feels good to know how to do both phases of the writing life when the situation arises.

Ora et Labora: Lessons from the Benedictines (part 1)

Benedictine monks have as their motto three simple words, "Ora et Labora," (Work and Pray). What I love about this motto is in part that it's so balanced--that the monks feel they are equally called to something so practical as work and something that seems so useless in the eyes of the world as prayer.

But I also love this motto because it joins these two seemingly opposed concepts together. When the monks undertake these tasks as part of their day, prayer becomes a kind of regular discipline that brings it closer to work. And as Kathleen Norris pointed out in her talk on acedia at this spring's Festival of Faith and Writing, a monk is able to combat encroaching unbelief by seeing every act of work--whether big or small--as a form of prayer.

I mention this not only because I seek this kind of balance in my own life between work and prayer (though I do), but also because I see a need for similar kinds of focused balance in my writing life--for one, a balance between having time to work on the projects I already have going and the need to keep the channels to new writings open.

I'll take a cue from the Benedictines by making time for both things: scheduling some times specifically meant to generate new ideas that feed my writing life and other times, even if they're limited at times, specifically meant to work out ideas into final forms. When I'm healthy and stick to this, I'll hopefully be able to see pretty much everything in my life as potentially useful for my writing--i.e., as work--but that pretty much everything can also contribute to the creation of new ideas as well.

There may be seasons when I focus more on one of these tasks than the other, but seeing them as connected and overlapping processes will hopefully help me to be able to sprinkle a bit of both throughout, no matter what the season may be.

Inauguration

I've been realizing this summer, once again, how difficult it is to keep the hedges and fences and weeds from popping up in the subdivisioned area that my writing life has become.

I like being a writer who finds the creative process worms its way into my academic essay writing modes and the things I study academically worm their way into my fiction and creative non-fiction. And so I'm creating this blog in an effort to declare that Robert Frost was being ironic when he said "good fences make good neighbors." I think this even applies to different roles in my own life.

I'm a graduate student who writes a lot of papers. I'm a fiction writer who tends to think in novels--I have several in various stages of completion. And I tend to work on other short things from time to time: creative non-fiction essays, poems, and such. And then there are the journals. I think it's important to let these things bleed into one another and inform each other, while reflecting on the differences.

This virtual space, then, will be a place where I talk about my experiences of and reflections on the writing life, in all its incarnations--to knock down the walls between the various parts of my writerly self. And I want to keep joining the conversation going on among writers and readers--I'm hoping this blog will be another way I can do that.

So why the title? I love T. S. Eliot's poem Four Quartets from which the phrase comes, and it was Eliot, after all, who said "immature poets imitate; great poets steal." So it's an homage as well as a writerly theft. But beyond that, it expresses for me one of the primary tensions of the writing life as well as of life in general.

As a writer, I know it's important for me to do two things: (1) remain still enough to notice, to think, to express, and to be patient to wait once my writings have been sent out in the world to seek their fortune; and (2) keep actively moving in the writing life--to keep my projects moving through the creative process and out into the world.

So here it is...now appearing in a feed reader near you: Still and Still Moving: A New Blog on the Writing Life by Deborah Leiter (Hm, think I've watched too many movie trailers over the years?)