Off on Retreat

I'm off for a monastic weekend. And boy do I need it. It's been much too long since I last went. My creative and spiritual lives both need a bit of deep cleaning maintenance work to get them back to tip-top shape after a super-long school year with many challenges.

Time to be still for awhile, so I can keep moving forward.

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.

Dormant with the Bears...

So in case you were wondering, these past few weeks weren't only time off for me from school and from blogging, but they were also time off from creative writing as well. Actually, they were pretty much time off from all types of writing.

And most of the time, I wasn't even in that mode where I felt like I was collecting writing material. When I did think about my creative writing projects, I felt rather "eh" about them, like all my creative energy and confidence had leaked out my little toe or something, and I wasn't even sure where it had leaked to. I mean, you'd 'a thought there'd have been a puddle of creativity somewhere on the floor, but not so much.

It wasn't pretty. But I think it was necessary. I've been dealing with a lot of stresses of various kinds lately, and I think I needed time off, even from creativity. I'm pretty sure what I was going through was what Virginia Hampton Wright calls a "period of dormancy":

In just about every cycle there's a period of dormancy, when it seems that nothing much is happening. Sometimes this is when you think your well has dried up. You can't imagine ever having another good idea ever again. You're not interested in your work. Creativity doesn't mean as much, or if it means anything, you can't really connect with it. (The Soul Tells a Story p. 206)

Ironically, during my time of dormancy I was in a warm place, and now that I'm back in the cold, I'm feeling energized again. Naturally, now that I'm feeling better, it's back into the swing of a busy semester, which means less time to spend on the creative writing parts. But c'est la vie, eh?

Anyone want to swap dormancy stories?

We Interrupt This NaWriMo to Give Thanks

Okay, so I'll get back to NaWriMo reflections soon, but for now I wanted to recognize the fact that here in the Eastern time zone on US soil it just became (American) Thanksgiving day a few minutes ago, and in recognition of that fact, share a short list of writing-life-related things I'm thankful for. So here goes:

• I'm thankful for these bizarre languages we have on this earth, with all their twists and turns, and for opportunities almost everyone on this earth has to learn new ways to articulate using them--and to play with them--every day.
• However much I love words, I'm thankful that not everything can or should be said using them. In a related thought, I'm thankful words like paradox, ambiguity, and mystery exist, because they help to get at why that can be a good thing.
  
• I'm thankful for all the different genres of writing, and the opportunities so many of us have to play with them at various times.
• I'm thankful for stories, and the complex things they do for us.
• I'm thankful for creativity, in all its varied forms, even (or perhaps especially) with all its bizarre processes and side effects.
  

I'm thankful for so much more, of course, seeing as how there's so much more to be thankful for, but that's a start. Right now I'm also thankful that I get to sleep now, so I'll go do that.

Zen and the Art of (Public) Transportation

Okay, so I don't believe in the whole Zen thing, but the title still gets at what I'd like to talk about, and a good part of I like to travel so much.

And I do like it. Despite the feeling that your skin is layered in some sort of film by the end of the day, despite unidentified foot-long smudges your jeans pick up somehow, somewhere, along the the way, despite the delays and the frustrations and the missteps, and the tired back and feet and the required watchfulness over one's ambulatory possessions, I appreciate travel, particularly that by public transportation (though as my friends know, I also wouldn't slam the door in the face of a good road trip that came calling--Alaska, anyone?).

Of course, public transportation is time-consuming and I'd be annoyed with it if I had to do it everyday (witness my driving to school), but on vacation, my writerly self quite enjoys it for three reasons:

1. Serendipity. Although I've been traveling "alone" this weekend, I've never lacked for companionship. Airports, airplanes, and trains are fabulous breeding grounds (liminal spaces, some academics would say) for fabulous conversations. I've certainly experienced that this weekend. Beyond giving me good material, this stretches me and reminds a girl who spends a ton of time beyond a computer screen that there are other people out there. Sure, there was one ride where the person was a bit too much of a chatterbox, but forbearing is part of being part of community, and I like that public spaces are spaces where I get to exercise my community muscles.
   
   
2. Eavesdropping. This wouldn't work for academic research, but for my creative writing self, public transportation is a great place to overhear conversations of people, keeping my ear open for interesting types of dialects and bits of characterization through dialogue. Besides, sometimes overhearing on public transport is inescapable, so one might as well keep its useful purposes in mind. :)
   
   
3. A Step toward Peace. Sure, if I did this on a regular basis, I would feel the need to be fully productive during my public transport time, but this same liminality, disjointedness from what's come before and the place you're going to, is a great space to relax and allow one's brain to calm down, to either give oneself space to dig into a book deeply without so many distractions or just to be still, to stare. As Eliot put it so well, that point when "an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations / And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence" (Four Quartets, "East Coker") can be a jumping-off point into that stillness, that listening mode, that in my everyday life I can be so bad at. That point from which both prayer and writing can grow so well.
   

And that, I think, is at the heart of why, despite the hours and hours spent moving around this weekend, I can go home retaining a level of stillness and a measure of refreshment, ready to plunge back into the page and the screen. (Of course, remind my jetlagged self of that Wednesday morning when I have to get up early and go to school after a final day of buses and airports and airplanes tomorrow.)

Reporting Not-so-live on Something Not-so-new

One thing I both love and hate about today's media ecology is its willingness to reward quickness. Google, for instance, that powerful source, rewards sites that have been updated the most often. It can be fun and helpful to pour out words frequently--and I do think we underestimate the importance of the writing and reading going on in today's culture. But we as content producers in this environment can feel this huge pressure to produce all the time, and to always have our content be new! and exciting!

We as readers become reliant on this news and faux-news, to the point that news outlets, I've noticed lately, have begun sending me "breaking news" stories letting people know that there is no change. I seem to have deleted the links because I thought they were stupid when I read them, but these things have begun coming from reputable news sources.

This development shows that our thirst for news has grown to the point where it's nearly insatiable. Has our desire for MORE! has cycled around to the point where we're actually willing to wait if someone keeps us updated on the waiting?

That wouldn't be such a bad thing, actually, if that were the case. Maybe we writers who try to balance our writing lives between making new content but also work on polishing other projects can use these banal news pauses to divert people to our more substantive pieces about the things that matter most. Things that touch on the human condition, for instance. And we as readers and take advantage of the pauses to think about these things once again.

The current post, written ahead of time and with several revisions to make sure the writing was clear and relatively concise, is an attempt to find a middle ground between relevant, timely, and frequent posts and the benefits of taking time for reflection. It's also my own little writerly rebellion against the tyranny of now.

Hopefully I'm using my enforced break from news to pay attention to the things that matter most. Perhaps I'm sitting in the sun reflecting on a single good sentence or line of poetry, such as Eliot's line in Four Quartets about our "fear/Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God," and working to counteract that fear. Or perhaps I'm staring up at constantly-shifting clouds and reflecting on how long it's been that things have been constantly changing.

Off to a Still Point of the Turning World

Considering the ups and downs of this week, boy am I glad I thought ahead enough to schedule some space at the monastery for this coming weekend.

I believe, with Virginia Hampton Wright, that spirituality and creativity are incredibly closely linked, and so I look forward to some spiritual and creative retreat at the Episcopalian Benedictine abbey I've been visiting for the last ten years, some time to "kneel where prayer has been valid" and soak in the stillness and maybe write a bit, but mostly stare a lot before coming back to the "still moving" part again.

If you're curious about my habit of visiting monasteries and would like to read more, you can check out what I wrote about it this spring at catapult magazine.

I'll be away from the Internet from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, so any comments you post over the weekend will be moderated when I get back, but I look forward to hearing more about where you'd love to go to retreat, if you had your choice.

While I'm gone, The blog will still have daily content: I've scheduled some quotations and comments from The Soul Tells a Story and some other writing-related books (ah, the beauty of the ability to schedule posts)...

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?)