Tag Archives: writing

Saturday night poem.

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This is a night I wish to write poetry — loud, brash, unrhyming poems that stick sideways inside your head and make you walk around shaking like a dog, trying to jar loose that cockeyed idea that did not start with you but lodged in and got dressed up in your own life, became your own words.

A poem like home invasion — sudden, brutal, unflinching — arriving like a stranger in the dark unlocked hallway of your home. Unsmiling. Dishonest. Up to no good.

A poem could be that one saving shove back away from the subway tracks where you had stood contemplating. Your reverie interrupted by the rude press of unseen hands and then gone, leaving you there to wonder how close you might actually have come to stepping down while the night’s last train goes barreling by.

Poems like coffee taken black too late at night, a sinister brew of dreams which you will imbibe and quickly forget, except for one phrase that reaches out and scalds your gullet, scorching as you swallow, all the way down.

Poems dumped like a box of cockroaches, scurry and scatter everywhere, finding the cracks, the crannies, all the tiny, secret places of your life you pretend are not there. Places even the finest brushes cannot reach. Places inside yourself which you can never get clean.

Ah. Here comes a poem, approaching like the evening’s last shopper casually strolling the aisles in a grocery store about to close. The cashier has made her last announcement. The lights are half off. The grocers have other places to be, but the poem makes its way, perusing the shelves, making its maddening slow inventory, a list of things it does not need and will not buy. They cannot lock the doors until it pushes its empty cart through the checkout line.

Here it is. At last. A poem about poetry, which is the writer’s main retreat. When you do not know what to write, you write about writing. You post it for others, inject it into their Saturday night. They read it with a shrug, except for that one other writer who feels the same inexorable urge and pours herself another heavy draught.

Kinship with Losers

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I love the Olympics, even if they are an economic, social and political nightmare.

When I was younger, I used to marvel at the sheer and shining brilliance of the three athletes on the medal stand. Whichever three athletes; whichever three medals. The sport didn’t matter. Mastery mattered. Those three athletes who triumphed above all others through preposterous trials of competence to be crowned the best. All hail the winners. Cue anthem.

Only now, I begin the recognize the actual beauty on display. The opening Olympic ceremony is a parade of people who have dedicated themselves to improbable, ridiculous dreams. Most of these people will not be winners. Most won’t get medals. Most won’t be interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel or Katie Couric. Most won’t appear anywhere in the four hours of nightly prime time coverage. They will go home battered and bruised, some of them broken. Some will get a hero’s welcome but then are quickly forgotten. They’ll take jobs they may or may not enjoy. They’ll have kids and grandkids. Maybe their kids and grandkids will care. Maybe they won’t.

It doesn’t matter. These people burn with weird, impossible, potentially useless urges. They want to push a stone across the ice, 126 feet from hack to tee. Or they want to hurl themselves together in crowded circles at breakneck speeds on millimeter thin blades in races where victories and defeats are defined in hundredths of a second. Or they need to send themselves head first down perilous tubes at interstate traffic speeds with only a helmet and a St. Christopher’s medal. Who sells these kinds of people life insurance?

And then there’s me – this 44 year old person who has spent the last 34 years trying to write a beautiful sentence in hopes that a beautiful sentence might somehow lead to a beautiful paragraph and then a beautiful page and, perhaps, most ridiculous of all, a beautiful story.

There’s no parade for this weird desire. No procession to show the world. No anthem. No medal. No primetime coverage.

I feel tremendous kinship with these Olympic losers, these ridiculous dreamers. We are always working, seldom winning, dreaming our ridiculous, improbable, wonderful dreams.

This Tree. Specific.

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I became friends with a tree this weekend.

Campbell Folk School is a very community-centered place, so I arrived fully expecting to make new friends. I met many fine people from all walks of life and from all over the country. I did not expect the closest of those friends to be the tree outside our Orchard House writing room. I spent a fair amount of my weekend admiring that tree and writing underneath its branches.

Throughout the three day workshop, our instructor admonished us to be specific. Don’t say tree. Say white pine or birch or cedar. The work of revision is always moving toward greater specificity. Not just any tree. This tree. Specific.

The problem was we had no idea what kind of tree my friend was. We didn’t know how to name it. One of the workshop participants teaches biology. She used a tree taxonomy guide to move through the criteria toward a name. Deciduous. Broad. Flat. Asymmetrical. Ragged edges. My biology teacher friend suggested our new friend might be an elm. This made sense. My tree friend was both incredibly familiar (an exemplar of treeness) and otherwordly. It is possible that I had never before seen a fully grown elm. Most elms in my part of the country were killed off by Dutch Elm disease before I was born.

“This Tree. Specific.” is the poem I wrote about my new friend. I was able to read this piece at Sunday Morning Song. Reading this poem on that last morning felt like an appropriate offering to show gratitude to my classmates, to our instructor, to the Folk School and, most of all, to my friend the tree.

“This Tree. Specific.”

We are friends now, you and I. I sit

beneath your branches, waiting to know your name.

Don’t bother me with binomial nomenclature. It is your stature I most admire,

and the welcoming way you spread your branches to embrace new friends.

And your tremendous, unwavering patience as you press careful roots into dirt.

Ever mindful of the bustling, burrowing communities teeming below.

So many questions you might answer.

Did you know John Campbell? Did he sit here where I do listening for your secrets?

Can you teach me to make a meal of sunlight and rain?

Never mind. I’m pestering you now. I do that to my friends.

It is enough for now to sit beneath your branches, to appreciate the way you exert yourself in the world. Patient. Dignified.

I do not need to know your name. You are this tree. Specific. Friendly. My friend.

 

Note to Self: Keep Writing

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Once you step off the path, it is difficult to step back on. There are ten thousand satisfyingly specific reasons not to write. You are tired. You are busy. You are distracted by the events of the earlier day. Or maybe you are worried. Or you don’t have the right ideas. Or you are confused a little bit and waiting to figure things out.

This is what I have come to know about writing. Don’t stop. Not for earthquakes. Not for hurricanes. Not for the fiery wrath of God. Your life will always be busy. You are always going to be tired. People are going to continue disappointing you. Keep writing.

You are going to have to let yourself become weird. It cannot be helped. You are already weird. This urge you have to write things is not a normal condition. You are going to have to let yourself get even weirder. You are going to have to allow yourself to believe in things you know are not true. You will need to converse with people who are not there. You are going to cry about things that did not happen and fall out of touch with the things that are happening all around.

One day soon, you will listen to the news or read it or watch it on TV and you will wonder what strange creatures inhabit this planet. And then you will realize it is no real matter to you because you have work to do. Your home is not your home. You are unfit for the life people think you lead. You have made yourself strange and you are swallowed up entirely by the beauty and the wonder and the sheer, brilliant futility of it all.

You are meant to keep yourself writing. Do not step off the path. Don’t waste this delicious weirdness, these delightful quirks which have accumulated over some many minutes, hours and days.

Go down deeper. Get weirder. Stranger. More ferocious. More fierce.

And then, one day, look up and show the world this thing you have made. And give it to them and let them do with it whatever they will. And get back to work. Do it all again.

The True Work of Writing

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Only now, I am beginning to recognize the true work of writing. It isn’t only the words. The words are the craft. The words are the practice. The words are the instrument.

The true work of writing is learning how to dream on command. It is finding that dark, vast ocean inside of you and tapping in so you can drink or drown at a moment’s notice.

The work of writing is meeting people who do not exist and learning to listen to their stories. You will know you are hearing them when you begin to fall in love. And they will follow you into your waking life, the non-dreaming part and they will begin to whisper at the most inconvenient times. And you will have a thousand other things you are meant to be doing. Things that are more important. Things that are more practical. But these people that you now love are speaking with such urgency. Their whispers so lovely, so personal.

And you will live a kind of divided life. A waking life of here and now; a writing life of lovely whispers. And you will carry forward in both worlds, often simultaneous. But your attention is not divided. You are not living two halves of two lives. Your whole life gets richer. You are living a two-fold life. You have made yourself bigger. The characters live in you and you live in them.

A Writerly Person

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My daughter is a writerly person. Which is to say, she has a facility with words. She can take several completely unrelated ideas and smash them together. She can take one really big idea and bust it up into tiny little pieces.

I love to see her at work. Sometimes organizing a movie script. Sometimes drawing out a comic book. Sometimes just sitting on the floor with her whiteboard and writing until she runs out of room. Then, erase and continue.

Tonight she was drafting her letter to the 4th grade teachers, explaining why, as a rising 4th grader, she would make a kick-ass safety patrol officer. Those are my words. Not hers.

Raising a writerly person is great fun. I get to see her worry over the proper word choice and puzzle over the clarity of this idea or that. She’s on a good track. I expect she will write her books before I do.

I am being careful not to praise her ability too greatly. People often make too much of talent. Fun to see her sit down and write a well-made paragraph easily and with joy. Better to see her save that draft, set it aside until tomorrow, reread, then change a few words. Kill a sentence or three. I encourage the writing but praise the rewriting. Better that she know now what it is taking me a lifetime to figure out. A thing isn’t written until it is completed, and a thing isn’t completed until it is rewritten.

The Reason I’m Not Writing

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It isn’t laziness. It isn’t procrastination or a lack of clear ideas. It is fear.

Best face it direct. Best call it by name.

Fear steals days, then months, then years.

Fear keeps me sitting in the place where I do not belong.

Fear keeps me small, uncomfortable, frustrated.

And there is only one way out of this. The only way out is through.

There is mercy for when you are brave. There is reward for when you persist.

First the words. Then the sentence. Until a paragraph. Then another. And another.

My handwriting is terrible. I’m okay with that.

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I have terrible handwriting. My penmanship has never been great, though I made good marks in that column on my grammar school report card. I abandoned cursive in high school for everything but my signature, which, let’s face it, has become a few letters with long trailing lines spilling out from them.

example of my handwritten note

This is a handwritten note. Can you read it? I can’t.

My wife and coworkers cannot keep themselves from pointing out how astonishingly, eye-achingly cramped, stunted and crippled my handwriting has become. For my coworkers there is a kind of mirthless joy in the show of trying to decipher my hieroglyphs. For my wife, there is the stone cold embarrassment of my abortive signature on documents and the inscrutable mystery that is my handwritten grocery list.

People generally assume that my handicap is a symptom of my strong digital bias. I don’t like making or receiving notes on paper. Other than printed books, which remain a precious joy, words on paper are generally a tedious obligation. I write something down and then I am obligated to figure out what to do with it. Worse, someone else writes something down and I am obligated to figure out how to do something with that. It frustrates me and makes me sad.

So I opt out. I generally don’t do paper. I take notes in several cloud-based apps or in the notepad on my phone. These notes file easily, are indexed automatically and can be searched on demand.

Still, it saddens me a little to realize that my poor handwriting isn’t simply a matter of inattention or disregard. It isn’t just personal preference. I can’t write as well as I used to. Writing by hand takes more effort than it should. I have to really pay attention and think about what I am doing. Contrary to what the research shows about effective information transfer, for me, writing by hand is generally more distracting and frustrating than useful.

As I said, people who know me are likely to assume my handwriting has suffered from disuse and inattention. The truth is very different. I ruined my handwriting through overuse. About 15 years ago, I wrote the better part of a novel in longhand on the back of scrap computer paper. I wrote so much so fast that my fingers learned unfortunate short cuts they now refuse to forget. During that time, I would write my pages and then share what I wrote with my wife. Increasingly, I realized that I couldn’t easily read or puzzle out entire sections of words I had written just minutes before. I stopped writing that way. Keyboard for me, please.

Now, when I try to jot out a simple to do list or make a note, my hand feels stupid. There is anxiety there that does not when my fingers are on the keyboard. I’m not particularly proud of my poor penmanship. I worry about the effect of the coming digital dark age when a mass black out or electromagnetic pulse renders my devices useless and I find myself reduced to remedial communication, like a chimp learning sign language. Still, it is useful, I suppose, to acknowledge one’s shortcomings, even if there is no active plan to make them better.

So, I am wondering, how is your handwriting these days? Do you still write things out by hand the way you used to do? Can people read your handwriting? Can you? I can’t be the only one. Can I?

To Bring You My Love (Final Section)

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The last section of this experiment in blogging my first draft. I understand why a first draft should be kept secret. It is messy and there are lots of weird turns and gaps. There have to be. It is a new thing with edges that don’t connect and spaces that require leaps. Still, I feel like there is a lot to work with here. I will post the revision whenever that is finished. For now, just thanks for reading whatever parts you have read and for being gentle.

***

Lana came out wearing lounge pants and an oversized tee-shirt. She was dressed for comfort. She sat down on an empty space on the couch. Gestured for Sebastian to come sit beside her. They sat in silence for a few minutes, just looking at the room.

“Do you want to stay in and talk? Or do you want to go out?”

Sebastian took her hand, which seemed so impossibly small and fragile in his. He had never before thought of Lana as something delicate that could be so easily crushed.

“It doesn’t matter at all to me. I just want to be beside you.”

She kissed his cheek. “That’s so sweet.” Patting his hand. Then, “Where have you been? I mean, you’ve been gone a long time.”

“Not so long in the scheme of things, but it felt like a very long time to me as well. I had some things I had to take care of. Housekeeping. I’ve got it all sorted out now,” he told her.

“Housekeeping?”

He nodded. “Some decisions. Some loose ends to tie up.”

“Oh. Like a girlfriend or something?”

“No. Nothing like that. Just had to put things in order. It doesn’t matter now. I’m here. I can stay as long as you like. I can stay forever.”

Lana shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Forever,” she said. ““That’s quite a long time. That’s a pretty big mouthful.”

“I don’t mean to scare you,” he told her.

“You don’t,” she said, then kissed him. It was the warm, soft welcome invitation kiss he remembered from so long ago. He gave it right back to her. And soon they were fumbling and rubbing and smoothing and stumbling from the couch to the hallway past the bathroom door to the bedroom where there was no time or need for long conversations. Their hands, bodies and mouths remembered exactly what to say.

**

It was over quickly and then they lay in bed, neither of them knowing what to say.

“That was different,” Lana said at last.

“Yes.”

“I mean, you were different. What’s different about you? What changed?”

“That is what I have been wanting to tell you. I have forsworn by accursed heritage. I have severed my wings and turned my back on my family. I am no longer an Inbetweener. I am finally free and we can be together. Really together.”

Sebastian watched Lana take this information in. The expression on her face like she had a mouthful of curdled milk. It was not the expression Sebastian had hoped for. It had something in it other than the look of amazed surprise.

“You did what?” she said at last.

“I surrendered my wings. I am mortal. I can live with you now. I am free.”

“Free?” she shouted. “How could you? Oh, God!” Lana buried her face in her hands.

Sebastian reached out, pulled her hands from her face as gently as he could. “Don’t worry. Everything is okay now. I can be with you forever. Everything is okay.”

“How could you? I can’t believe you did this.”

“To be with you,” he said.

“To be with me?”

Sebastian nodded.

“You shouldn’t have done this.”

“It is okay. It was an easy choice. Now we can be together.”

“I can’t believe you did this. You should have warned me. You should have told me before doing. This.”

And Sebastian slowly realized the expression in her voice was not amazement or wonder. It was anger. Pure, vile, bitter anger.  And for the first time, his fully mortal heart knew the icy ache of savage fear.

**

Sebastian reached out to touch Lana. She turned from his touch as if the feel of his hand was unpleasant, repulsive.

“I did this for you.”

Lana screamed, pushed him out of the bed. Sebastian reeled backward, once again feeling himself expulsed from the place where he belonged. Felt his father’s hands and the hands of the thousand Host. He felt himself being pushed out of heaven.

Sebastian fell to the floor, the short, brutal work of gravity always dragging bodies down. The oppressive weight of the world and his place in it. For the first time, Sebastian considered that he might have made a mistake, an impetuous, adolescent mistake. He was only 600 years old. Perhaps he had been rash. He shook the thoughts from his head. Those thoughts could not serve him now. He had made his choice. He had made his bed, and even though he had been pushed out of it, he must now try to lie in it.

Lana was crying. Sebastian sat up, peering at Lana from the edge of the mattress. Lana was crying. She had her back turned toward him so he could not see her face but he had studied humankind for centuries. Had studied Lana for such a long time. He recognized the inward slump, the hunched shoulders. Lana was crippled by something he had done. Sebastian felt an insatiable need to fix it, to make things better somehow.

“I did this thing for us,” he said. “So we can be together. That is all I ever wanted. And now it is possible.”

Lana turned to face him. Her eyes large and bright with emotion. This was a thing Sebastian had not expected. He knew it happened but he had never been in the presence of Lana while she cried. Her face was red and swollen. Mucus dripping from her nose. Her lips trembling involuntarily, like some quivering mollusk.

Sebastian was back in bed, stroking Lana’s hair, hoping to smooth the rough edges of her distress using only his hands.

“I did this for us,” he said again.

Lana said nothing. Sebastian gazing into her face, trying to catch her eyes. Lana looking at a spot just over his shoulder at the far-side of the room. She was there, but she was not.

“I couldn’t stay the way I was. I had to change things. Now we are the same. Now we can be together.”

Silence. Lana stopped crying, focused her attention on just breathing. Sebastian watched the careful way she brought her breath in and back out again. Like it was a thing that required much concentration.

And then, in the smallest possible voice, like a whisper in the folds of his brain, she said, “I don’t want this.”

And for the second time, Sebastian felt himself falling, though the plunge was entirely inside himself. The velocity with which he plummeted. The wind howling around his ears as he fell uncontrolled through the brutal, empty expanse. And this time there was no ground to catch him. There was no floor. He fell and fell and fell. Darkness and confusion swallowed him.

Sebastian had no memory of leaving Lana’s bed or apartment, though he now wandered the dark, empty streets of the city. He felt numb and bruised deep inside. This feeling was entirely new. He was acquainted with the urgent piquancy of desire and curiosity but this swallowing sadness was a new thing. It carried him in its stomach as he moved through the world, noticing for the time not the miracle of the light but the miracle of the darknesses that sat between the lights. And the people who moved in this night-time city with him. The lovers walking home from a date. The drunk staggering along the sidewalk. Even the mice and rats and other skulking, shadowy things driven by hunger and need. How these things moved like him, a body in darkness moving from light to light and the miracle of the space between lights where mystery lay.

Sebastian came to a public square, where the buildings made way for grass and trees and an open patch of sky. Sebastian looked up. So many of the stars and planets he knew were obscured by the light. But he was familiar with the darkness. The darkness was his home.

Sebastian looked up and tried to imagine his mother and father and grandparents looking down at him. Would they have it in them to feel proud of him? He had solved the elusive equation. He finally knew what it meant to be human. It was not love or sex or any one of a million mere ambitions.

It was loss. The constant possibility of loss and the uncertainty that came with it. Already, he felt Lana was a million miles away from him. There was a vast, impossible separation between them that could not be breached. And the loneliness that seemed ready to crush him, closed in around him like a capsule and he felt a wild, perverse exhilaration.

Far stronger than gravity, this was the ineffable force that pressed them to the earth. The yearning for things that cannot be kept and the certainty of pain that came from it. Sebastian had made a careful study of human kind and had made his greatest discovery. He had solved the puzzle of human love. It was not only the fierce need and desire that came with the initial attraction. It was the mournful breaking of the heart in solitude. Inevitable but satisfying.

He had given everything he had and found it had not been enough. He had been wrong, perhaps, to give so much.

Sebastian thought of Frieda. She was now his only friend. His first friend. He would find her and thank her for her kindnesses. He would cry on her couch and laugh at her jokes.

A weight shifted inside of him. The pain and bewilderment did not disappear but it moved aside.

Sebastian smiled to his family. It did not matter if they could see him or if they would pay attention. It was enough to know that he was smiling. That he could smile. That he could bear the price he had paid and carry it with him.

Sebastian left the park and began walking again. He would walk as far as his feet would carry him, and, when they would no longer carry him, he would rest and see how that felt. It was a new thing he had found. There was fear and dread and disappointment but he found there was bravery there as well. He had given his wings so he could no longer fly but he could walk anywhere his feet would carry him.

And so he began, understanding.

Earth is the right place for love.

First Draft

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Writer sits down to write the first draft. Leans in too close to the computer screen. Removes glasses to be sure everything remains blurry, always just a little bit out of focus.

It is time to escape the tyranny of ten thousand great novels with their confident, purposeful prose. Strong, clear narrative from the architecture of so many perfectly-placed words. And the characters who always seem to know what they are doing and say exactly the right thing for the maximum emotional effect. And they are beautiful, well-formed people with carefully considered flaws. And even their conflicts are beautiful. And though they seem to struggle mightily as they rise through the miserable complication, they always manage to smile and wave to you as they crest the crisis point and descend joyously down through the denouement.

But this is not yet that kind of story. This is the first draft. The people are hideous and half-made. They amble about in a state of constant delirium, saying useless, thoughtless things. They are not entirely purposeful nor intent on any specific course of action. At times, these poor unmade creatures seem drunk, slightly deranged. At other times, they appear and disappear with supernatural ease, constantly teleporting themselves without reason or explanation across space and time.

“Wasn’t she recently standing over there?” the writer asks himself. “Didn’t she tell him this thing three times already? Why are they eating breakfast when only a paragraph ago they were enjoying lunch?”

None of this matters. This is the first draft. Let the people go where they will go, say what they will say, kiss whomever they please. Let them revel in the joyous anarchy of life without set narrative. Celebrate with them the chaos and incoherence while you can. But keep them moving. Always moving, talking and doing. There will be a point to all of it. There will be sense to be made. A story to be told. It won’t be the story you thought you were writing. It will be something better, if you allow it to find you. If you let the first draft be what it is, a swirling universe, rippling with potential.

Don’t just write. Unleash the first draft, and it will show you the way. And then, piece by piece, begin the other drafts. Build that stately house, that well-tended lawn, that exquisite garden. Give your characters the story they deserve, where no action is wasted, every word has consequence and everyone and everything belongs.