blogging

color photo of a white woman face up, just under the surface of the water. She appears to be struggling to breathe. This quote from Adrienne Rich's poem Diving Into The Wreck is in the bottom right corner: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

I love blogging because it allows me to share my ideas with my writing community in quick, readable chunks and get immediate feedback. Blogging should be low-stakes public writing, and maybe it was 20 years ago when it was mostly teenagers sharing their angst on Live Journal. But today there are professional bloggers with fancy websites and a team of graphic designers making them look good. Writers who regularly appear in the New Yorker are publishing on Medium. It feels like the bar for self-published online writing has been raised higher than I can ever hope to jump.

I put so much pressure on myself to make every blog post witty and smart and beautifully designed that I always fall short of my expectations and ultimately can’t sustain the effort for more than a few weeks. Then I pile on some more guilt making it harder to get back to writing. When I’m away from my blog for any length of time I feel the need to explain why, to have a good excuse as if I were late to work and about to be fired. I feel this pressure to resurface with something that’s the blog equivalent of the great American novel. And so I stay hidden longer because the pressure is too much.

Why can’t I just say “I’ve been away because life, because reasons, because shit happens. Why can’t I just say “I’ve been away and now I’m back.” Why put so much pressure on posting to my blog when I have no publisher, no deadlines, no money on the line? Where are these expectations coming from? Who’s setting them?

Part of this is my OCD, which makes me feel an intense sense of obligation to everyone including imagined blog readers. But it’s also about the way our culture defines what it means to be a writer. I’ve lost count of how many author profiles I’ve read that begin with some version of this idealized writing process: the writer gets up at 6, walks the dog, reads while drinking their coffee, and then heads out to their writing studio at 8 for four hours of writing. Then lunch, four more hours of writing, dinner, then more reading before bed. It’s always some version of this. I’m not sure when these idealized writers do laundry, buy groceries, pay bills, or even shower, but I’ll save that rant for a future post.

My point is, we think (even though we know better) that all successful writers have perfect, uninterrupted days of writing. We imagine them crafting sublime sentence after sentence for hours at a time. But how many times do they check Twitter? How much time is spent staring at the cracks on the ceiling or making another cup of tea? How many days are spent producing little to no writing no matter how much time they spend at their desk? The writing community touts the value of doing the work, but we don’t talk much about the fact that doing the work, more often than not, doesn’t result in publishable writing.

I have dozens of half finished blog posts. A whole folder of notes for my memoir. A third of that work will make it to readers if I’m lucky. And that’s OK because it’s part of the process. Being silent publicly while writing privately (or even not writing at all for a time) can be the process. We have to take time to dive into the wreck, to use words for ourselves, as tools to discover and shape our realities, to find out what’s broken and how it got that way. And sometimes we have to stay underwater for a long time before we resurface.

The technical ease of online self-publishing has sped up distribution but it hasn’t sped up the act of writing. I have been trying to make my writing process match the speed of the internet, and that is setting myself up for failure. In fact, for those of us without a team of people, blogging has placed extra burdens on us. We are our own web designers, photographers, editors, typesetters, and marketing teams. It’s easy to get caught up in concerns about creating a brand, SEO, and social media marketing. Did you know all your Instagram posts should use a consistent color palette and filter? Well, they should. And mine don’t. And they never will.

So, this post isn’t perfect. It might not even be mildly interesting, but it’s published. I have successfully resurfaced. My goal is to publish a post every week, but the bigger goal is stop grasping at perfection, to stop feeling guilty if I skip a week. To rediscover the joy of writing, the pleasure that blogging should be.

I’m back. Did you miss me?

It’s been almost a year and a half since I began my obsession with Marie Howe‘s poetry. She has a way of revealing the emotional meaning of everyday moments and objects by focusing on their materiality. She doesn’t turn away from the ordinary in favor of the philosophical because the meaning is in the thing itself. The description on the back cover of her book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time sums up this idea:

Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her child down the playground slide, the speaker in in these poems wonders: What is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy.

In the Catholic Church, Ordinary Time is the part of the liturgical calendar not part of the Christmas or Easter season. In other words, Ordinary Time is most of the time. And it is not a time of insignificance where our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual life stops or slows down. Nor is it simply a time of preparation for the holidays, the special times. It is where we live and love and die through the folding of laundry and cleaning of sinks. It is where we come to know God and ourselves. Whenever I need reminding of this, I listen to Howe read her poem, “The Gate.”

I am participating in Andrea Scher’s Brave Blogging course, and one of the lessons included an interview with poet Maya Stein, whose 10-Line Tuesday poems reminded me of a writing practice Howe assigns to her students. Both require the poet to place a singular focus on an object or moment without turning away. Stein uses the limits of only ten lines to maintain her focus. Howe requires her students to come to each class with one sentence describing something they saw or otherwise experienced through the senses, and they must write that sentence without the use of metaphor—they must focus on the thing itself, they cannot turn away, they cannot intellectualize or explain. Only after they master this practice of describing things can they use these things as metaphors for something else.

This writing practice of staying with the thing itself is much like meditation. Meditation asks the practitioner to stay with whatever feelings arise without trying to explain them because the act of explaining is a form of distancing, of easing the the intensity of both pain and joy.

On May 16, the Church will enter its long stretch of Ordinary Time that lasts until the Christmas season begins in November. While I love Easter and the rebirth of earth and spirit that happens in Spring, it is all for naught if we can’t figure out how to live in the ordinary time of Summer and Fall, of growth and harvest, because if we can’t we starve. So I am preparing for ordinary time by following Howe’s assignment to write one sentence each day describing something from my ordinary life. My goal is to work up to a point where I can reflect on the materiality of my life half as beautifully as Stein does in an inch of vinegar:

You’re saving it, apparently, for a salad you keep forgetting to make.
In the bathroom’s mirrored cabinet, a flick of nail polish left at the bottom
of a small glass jar. There’s a rumpled bag in the garage holding a clutch of dirt
that will likely not root the plant you’ve yet to purchase from the garden store.
These leavings, these leftovers, this clinging to the maybe useful – the house
is full of both optimism and neglect, a store of Lilliputian portions
incapable of meeting your large and shifting demands. The coupons
you are so scrupulously stockpiling. The last dregs of living room paint.
A spool of thread down to its final three loops. A candle with less than an hour left
you hold onto, nevertheless, certain you will need that light somewhere.

In the meantime, I’ll continue training myself to be fully present with the ordinary.

Resurfacing: What’s Happening When the Writer Isn’t Writing

The poetry of an ordinary life