girls that never diary: week 74

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIARY is a (temporary) series where I try, once again, to create a daily writing practice. This time I’m also trying to reset some of my associations around writing, because my brain is tired of only wrestling with things that hurt me whenever I sit down to write. I’ve started writing these little diaries in my notes app, and they have mostly been helpful in that they get me to write something, and also in that they help me, when I reread them, answer the question for myself about what it is that I actually do all day, as a freelancer with barely any relationship to routine, as a writer who isn’t writing very much these days. I’ll send these out once a week until my brain is fixed.

FRIDAY

I sleep in a bit then get up around 9 to get dressed, make my set list, make a cup of coffee, and close up my bags. Hala and I meet Mustafa in the lobby and do a leisurely walk to the festival grounds. I eat a chocolate chip Clif Bar for “breakfast” on the walk. We check in then find someone with a golf cart to take us to the area where the literary programming will be, arriving exactly at the start time for our event. I do a reading with Mustafa, Hala Alyan, and Patrycja Humienik. We go for food from one of the stalls after (I get chicken tenders with ranch) then sit at a picnic table playing a game that involves trying to guess a number based on an internal ranking system. My next event is an intimate reading where people come into a room two at a time and I choose a poem of mine to read to them based on something that’s been on their mind or something they want to hear about (e.g. someone said “animals” so I read them my poem The Animal, someone said “babies” and I read them Final Weeks 1990, etc). Back to the picnic tables after until it’s time for Hala’s next reading. After her set we say goodbye to everyone and walk back to the hotel, get our things and check out, then Mustafa calls a car that drops him off at the airport and drops Hala and I at the airport hotel we’re staying at tonight. We check in, order delivery sushi for dinner (I get an assortment of nigiri and a lychee beverage), then I take a shower before the order arrives. I watch Diners, Drive Ins, & Dives for a bit then go to bed a little after 11.