hello!

Hello friends!

Sorry I’ve been MIA this month. Life threw me a couple of curve balls, but all is well and I’m back to work this week. I am working on the newsletter and will get that out in the next few days! There is a book giveaway too, but it will have to be a quick one to get it in before March, so watch for that. :)

Thanks for your kind thoughts and checking in. I hope February has been kind to you all. I look forward to catching up with everyone.

much love.

tonia

tether

Last year I decided to try keeping a log of my days.  Most nights, before I go to sleep, I pull a notebook out of my nightstand and make a list of bullet points about what I did:  Gym.  Ideas for short story.  Novel brainstorming.  Draft for newsletter.  Drove to Portland to pick up xyz.  Backgammon with Mark.  Read.  Etc.  It’s boring reading, but it’s an attempt to unlock what’s hidden in my mind.  Often, I find that writing down went for a walk, reminds me that while I was walking I was thinking about one of my kids, or listening to an important podcast, or contemplating the best use of our property in a climate-altered future.   So the bullet points sometimes take on a life of their own and morph into little essays or lines of poetry or plot ideas for stories. 

This is actually the hardest part of writing for me, I think, continually mining my own life, not letting thoughts sink to the warm dark compost of the subconscious, but pulling them out into the light and pinning them to a page like tiny black beetles, or powder-dusted moths.  (Of course, even these skewered specimens are part of the continual composting in the mind.) The writer’s job is to be attentive to what we would normally ignore, to give shape and form to the humus of ideas lying quiet and fertile within us.  

Not everything that gets pinned to the page is worth bringing to life though.  Journaling (even in the form of logging) helps uncover my worn-out themes and tired tropes.  I can see on my pages the fixation on some experiences and the underemphasis of others equally, if not more, important.  I can see the pattern of biases, the pockets of anger that indicate I’m not in a state of forgiveness yet.  I can see the doubts that rise and fall with my hormones, and the need to build more mental stamina. I can see my fears pounding for attention.

I think often about the subjectiveness of our lives.  Unless we are in the regular presence of small children or the sick or very elderly, much of contemporary life is a helium balloon, untethered from the tangible and the earthy.  Food arrives on shelves in packages, money exists in pixelated bank statements, trash gets toted off in trucks to unseen locations, beauty is nothing more than photogenics.  Anchoring, like decluttering, is a survival skill for the modern age.  I’m a word person, so journaling is one of my tethers.  My husband is not; I don’t imagine he would find a daily bullet list enlightening at all.  He’s more likely to discover his thoughts on a run or mowing the lawn, which he does.  The point is, we need to tie the balloon to something or it’s lost. 

But more than that is the need to know we exist in this world for a purpose.  “That we are here is a huge affirmation,” John O’Donohue says.  “Somehow life needed us and wanted us.”  Being attentive to the whispered messages of common life may be the writer’s job, but attentiveness to the messages of our individual lives is everyone’s job.  The disconnectedness that pervades our age leads to anger, fear, anxiety, and a sense of un-reality.  If we are here, it is not to be plagued by the spirit of the age, but because we have something to offer, something to combat it, to bring us together, connect us and nurture life. 

So, consider this post, rambling and mundane as it is, a whisper in the dark, an encouragement to dig and discover, a wave to bring you into harbor and an anchor to help you stay.  Find your way, then find your way.  We need you here.

If you want to share, tell me about your journaling habits, or the other ways you tether and discover yourself in the comments!

a helpful exercise

Even though I set myself a deadline, I find myself taking frequent breaks to watch the hearings on a live stream on my phone. There are so many of these hearings I’ve quit keeping track of what they are. At any rate, they all contain the same cast of characters leaning forward into mics, foreheads furrowed, cloak of righteousness and/or indignation. When they break for lunch or duties or press conferences, I write furiously, try to keep my characters from suddenly becoming indignant and/or righteous and/or spiraling into hopelessness at the demise of everythingtheyeverbelievedaboutdemocracy.

At regular intervals I have to stop and wrestle with the idea that two people, equally desirous of justice, can watch the same never-ending hearings and draw different conclusions. My brain does not want to accept this. Even now I do not want to write this down. I want both people to see the truth. Which is the way I see it. Which is the way all reasonable and justice-loving people see it. On my phone screen is a montage of interviews which defy my desire. A teenage girl in a Woodstock t-shirt flips off an alt-right reporter, a woman with hair the color of old foam scowls to a news network, it’s all a pack of lies and machinations. I make a mental note to use “machinations” in a sentence sometime soon.

I think about what I’ve learned from the Benedictines and the Buddhists and Mr. Rogers and the Pacifists, how everyone has goodness in them and it is our work to find and welcome it. I think about how peacemaking is listening and understanding the other side and I think how I’m tired of hearing the other side and I just want them to quit being wrong but I know that somewhere out there someone is thinking the same about me, and I stop for just a minute and sigh.

I take a break for lunch. The geese have been sleeping on the porch and I shoo them away. It is almost about to rain but I put on my boots and get the old broom and sweep away the mess they’ve made before a delivery driver or a neighbor decides to drop by unexpectedly as they did last week and had to tiptoe around piles of goose shit to reach the front door because I was down in my office writing my novel and didn’t know there was shit happening on the porch. I feel like this is a metaphor for my whole life but I don’t know exactly what it means. Also, I think, while I’m sweeping, that DISTRUST is the common denominator. None of us believes anyone anymore, so we go with the narrative we’ve already been constructing for a long time. This makes sense to me. My whole novel is about the fallout of broken fidelities. I decide that lunch is a bowl of peanut butter and chocolate chips and get back to work writing with renewed purpose.

On the checklist for “How to Be a Writer,” is point number 3: “Know who you are writing for.” There is a helpful exercise accompanying it: “Write a paragraph that states clearly who you are writing for.” This reminds me of the old Slylock Fox comics in the Sunday paper. “How to draw a Fox: Draw a circle. Now draw a square. Now draw a Fox.” At first I was discouraged, because how can I be a writer if I cannot even complete point number 3 on the checklist? Over time, I have realized that the exercise, like Slylock Fox’s drawing instructions, is pointless. You do not discover your readers by paragraphical declaration. You discover them by process of elimination. Is anyone still around after you have written your truth? That’s who you are writing for.

The hearings are done for the day and so now all there is left to do is reconstruct a future for myself which does not include despair. I write some more and I think about the readers who will read this novel and understand what I am saying about shit and cloaks of indignation and disbelief and truth and that little thread of hope that keeps us moving forward and I don’t feel quite so bad. Maybe I even feel like these are the machinations of hope: to be as real as we can be, to keep ourselves from easy categorizations, to make art, and conversation, and mistakes, and stands, and contradictions (I am large, I contain multitudes), and sense, and love, and dinner. I think about how much I want something to trust in again, and I look outside and see the geese are sitting on the porch and so I shoo them away and find the broom and I think, well, there’s that.

what's working

In some ways, shifting my focus is like starting a brand new job but going to the same old office. It’s hard to make new routines in a familiar place. For two decades I trained myself to accomplish certain tasks on certain days in a certain order. (Old habits and old dogs come to mind.)

My family and I talked it out.

“I need specifics,” I said. “What do you need me to be doing?”

“Handle the food,” they said. “The rest we will split up.“

OK. Just food and words. Food and words. I can do that. I can do that. During the day, when I start to get distracted by other jobs, I stop and ask myself if what I am doing is related to feeding my family or to my writing career and if the answer is no, I have to stop doing that thing and get back to work. I’m like a graying kindergartner. ;)

But, some things that are helping me focus on the real job:

1. Listening to and reading about writers and their work. Melissa turned me onto the Commonplace podcasts, which are long, lush conversations between poets and artists about how their lives and work entwine. Every time I come across someone whose work interests me at all, I chase them around the internet for awhile and read whatever I can. (Then I tell myself, we are doing the same work, these people and me. They have bodies and families and houses and demands and they get the work done. You can too.)

2. Starting the day with a little ritual: journaling, exercise, then reading poetry out loud to myself. (Currently working through the latest Poetry Mag, as well as Kyce Bello’s gorgeous new book, Refugia.)

3. I just added another practice to that last week, inspired by Kortney’s Ursula project. Copying one poem a day into a copywork book. Something about reading the work aloud then writing it out by hand fires up the creativity in my brain. I’m ready to get to work!

(On the food front, today I’m making this lasagna for dinner. It’s the kind of thing I can make in stages throughout the day and will provide lunches for tomorrow! Win.)

tonia

P.S. working on the newsletter this week! But it might come out a few days later than usual. I’m sooo close to meeting my goal of finishing the draft of the novel this month! Wish me luck!

small shifts

So often in my life, the biggest changes hinge on the smallest shifts. Just recently, in fact, I was with a friend and happened to see her daily planner. She was showing me some odd bit of something she’d collected and scribbled down for later. Her book, I noted, looked nothing like mine. I stared at her pages. They were perfectly ordinary, no elaborate decorations or cute drawings. No washi tape or fancy clips. But at that moment, a door in my mind swung wide open.

I’m a quasi-bullet journaler. By this I mean, I absorbed the idea of a planning notebook and I write down all my tasks in a neat row and check them off when they are done. At the beginning of the year I make an index in the front and never write anything in it except: “January, p 1.” Sometimes I keep one of those vertical calendars and then get confused by it. Occasionally I use a symbol to mark a task, then forget what the symbol means; later when I notice that task still hasn’t been done, I write it again in a daily task list. My task list includes everything I need to get done in a day: yoga, walk, clean bathrooms, water plants, call X, etc. It works for me.

My friend, as far as I could tell, used a similar method for keeping track of her to-do list: a list, some checkmarks. What caught my attention wasn’t her method, it was her content. She’s a busy woman with multiple jobs and a family. Her day probably has a hundred tasks she could put down and mark off. But her task list didn’t have any of the mundane suspects my own does. She didn’t write down, “feed animals,” like I do - as if I don’t feed the animals every single day of my life, as if somehow, if it doesn’t appear on a list I will just look blankly at the meowing cats and shrug, clueless as to why they keep bothering me. Instead, my friend’s book was a collection of her notes, inspirations, ideas, and specific tasks related to her art.

When I got home, I looked in my notebook and found endless lists of household chores. The same things every day on a rotating carousel. Monday always has “clean kitchen.” Thursday always has “meal plan.” If an archeologist digs up this book someday they will not know I am a writer. They will believe I spent every full day of my life cleaning and cleaning and cleaning some more. (Occasionally, you will find in a task list the all-purpose word “write.” That’s it.)

I’ve thought about this a great deal in the time since I saw my friend’s book, the reasons why such a complex and demanding part of my life rarely shows up in my own notebook. Part of it has to do with fear and claiming ownership of myself. It’s hard to fail at a task like “scrub toilets,” after all. Part of it has to do with a natural period of transition from one career to another, and this, I am still trying to work out.

But I do know this: the next day I didn’t write down anything I usually would. I didn’t note down that it was the day for cleaning bedrooms and doing laundry. I didn’t remind myself to exercise and give basic care to the animals. I wrote a detailed list of what needed to happen next in my novel. And when I came across things I needed to remember for writing articles or ideas for future posts, or notes for my newsletter, I wrote those down there too. Suddenly, my whole approach shifted. In the past, I have struggled to take the time for my writing work the way I should. I would sit down, write frantically for a couple hours, then look at my task list and see a whole list of chores still hanging over me. Now when I look at the page, there is nothing but the vital work calling to me and I am free to attend to it. Amazingly, so far, even without my lists, the house is still standing, the animals are alive and I am still clean and healthy.

Such a small, yet transformative shift.

I’d love to hear about the ways you nurture your own vocations.

peace keep you.

tonia