The Part That Doesn't Look Like Writing
Writing so often feels like not writing to me. I don’t know if this will make sense to everyone, but perhaps some of you will know what I mean.
Every morning I wake and make coffee and almost every morning I take that coffee into my office and open my journal to a blank page. I circle the date at the top of the page and do my best to put something down on paper. Usually it is how I feel about my upcoming day or the day before, or some event that’s looming on the horizon of my mind. Sometimes I interrogate myself as if I am two or more people conversing.
How are you, love?
I’m tired, my back hurts, I’m scared about the rising temperatures and the decline of social engagement. I’m exhausted by Ai and I feel thirsty when I think of the land being sucked dry by our greed and folly.
Hmm, yes. You’ve been trying hard to hold that anxiety without letting it take over.
I have, and I am worn out with worry and with trying to distract myself from it.
So let’s just be with the fear and grief for a moment.
(I well up and sit motionless for many minutes, until the feeling moves through me)
If I’m lucky, I will get 10-15 minutes of rambling down on paper and usually, that’s it. I go downstairs and get my son ready for school or camp and go for a morning walk, and begin my work day.
The Fast Current
The truth is, I don’t usually do my best writing on my own. While I can sometimes feel like this is some kind of character flaw as a poet, I write most of my poetry during my own writing sessions or during other people’s classes and workshops. I need the timer, the accountability, the community to feel that elusive pull of interesting language. I need to hear other poets read out loud, I need to be intellectually stimulated!
If you enjoy writing alongside other people, this is exactly what we do together each month inside Earth & Verse’s Writers Circle. I’d love to have you join us.
When I first began writing poetry as an adult, I found a writing circle and the words rushed out of me in great floods of emotion and images. It was glorious and overwhelming and new. I didn’t censor myself, I didn’t edit or curate, I just wrote and posted to Instagram and wrote some more. And, I took so. many. classes and workshops!
There is nothing like that rush of skill acquisition; the challenge, the growth, the connection with a new community.
It was so fun and addictive, really. I do miss that sense of freedom and abandon that only exists for me in the early thralls of a new passion. I wrote through early sobriety, through early parenthood, through a tough year of ministry, through several moves, through the death of my in-laws, and then my own father, through the pandemic (of course). And out of that time, I wrote four books in five years. It was a time of incredible creative abundance.
The Tin Cup
Now it’s been a few years and things are moving more slowly than they were. Any improvements in my craft or poetic skills are subtle and unpredictable. The deeper work of honing my poems, researching new ideas, branching into work that isn’t about my own life is harder than that initial rush, and the feedback cycle is more subdued. The writing feels less like riding a fast current and more like gathering rain in a tin cup.
I know that this is simply another season of being a writer. The poems are asking something different of me now, and I'm trying to lean into the unknown.
While I do miss the velocity of those early years, writing three poems before lunch and feeling like every week brought some obvious improvement, speed was never the goal. The goal is to write poems that surprise even me, the goal is to simply keep writing.
I’ve realized that this season of writing asks for enormous stretches of unscheduled time. Time without administrative tasks or phone calls or interruptions. Time to wander, read, think, walk, stare out the window, follow strange threads of thought into the woods, and trust that all of it belongs to the work.
That spaciousness isn’t separate from writing, it is an integral part of it.
And 10-15 minutes a day adds up, friends. It adds up so much faster than waiting for the right timing or mood. When I go back into my journals after a few months, I find so much more to work with than I’m ever expecting! The morning rambles, the monthly writing sessions, they make up the bulk of the work I eventually publish.
And if there’s one thing I want to keep from those early days of writing, its the sense of joy and play that comes from simply reaching inside myself and listening for what arrives.
Some creative prompts for the week
Journal
What parts of your creative life look unproductive from the outside but feel deeply necessary?
What have you been gathering quietly over the past year?
What is something you’d like to research for your next creative project? (I’d love to hear about these in the comments!)
Poetry
Begin with: “It took a long time…”
Go back to an unfinished poem and re-write it from a different narrator
Read over your writing from the past few months and find 2-3 lines that really intrigue you. See if you can combine them into something new.
If you know another writer who has been feeling like they’re not writing enough, I’d love it if you shared this letter with them.
If you’d like to receive these essays, poems, and creative prompts each week, along with an invitation to our monthly Writers Circle, you can subscribe below. I’d be delighted to have you join us. This fall I am writing and planning a series of new workshops and resources for paid members, so stay tuned for that!
With joy,
Alix
PS: Our next writing circle will be on July 25th at 11am Eastern Time. If you’ve been curious about the workshops, save this date as it will be open and free to all subscribers! (if you’re just following me, you might want to subscribe so you don’t miss it)
PPS: I am taking the summer more slowly to allow myself time to finish a new chapbook! And so I’ve decided to postpone the fall retreat, Stone and Sky, to allow me time and space to focus on that.
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