The Writer’s Life
Eva’s final paragraph invokes the same takeaway I’d discovered:
“One of the most important takeaway for me was the realization that all writers, (regardless of fame or fortune) share this: we all must face the blank page, we sit alone with our thoughts, we wrestle with insecurity, we know nothing will emerge from the page unless we do the work, we pray that it will be good, we hope others will like it. Welcome to the writer’s life.”
This is where the discipline, desire, and drive enter, and you tell yourself, “Just keep writing,” and try to write the best that you can.
And then you edit.
photo by Karl Fernandes
“You do not need to leave your room, remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” Franz Kafka
And so the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing summer conference began with the reading of this Kafka quote. Throughout the weeklong conference, an overarching theme of trust—whether it’s trusting your individual style, voice and process, or allowing yourself to write freely, “clean out the pipes” even if it’s bad writing, or that ideas can come from the subconscious when you least expect it, so be ready and listen for it—revealed itself over and over again.
The MVICW, founded by Alexander Weinstein and in its eighth year, provided poetry and fiction workshops that…
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Midnight Cha-Cha-Cha and Tabasco
A friend’s picturesque and intimate memory of herself and her mother, and the life they lived.
I am about sixteen. I wake up in the middle of night. The sound of distant crunching, faint music and the light spilling into the corridor lure me like the tune of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I get out of bed. Naz, the canine of miscellaneous origin curled up at the bottom of my bed, opens his sleep-glazed eyes briefly, then closes them again. No cause for alarm. He’s seen this happen before over the years. Many, many times.
At the small kitchen table, my mother is leafing through an out-of-date Il Corriere della Sera or Le Monde which she hasn’t had time to look at sooner. She’s at the office all day and sometimes doesn’t come home until late. She is buttering a row of three of four grissini, trying not to break them, balances a small piece of parmigiano on the pan flute-like construction, then shakes…
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Cosmopolitan Dress
We stopped in mid-morning during the round of errands to drop a book off with a friend. She was embarking on travel. It started with several lengthy flights, and she lacked anything to read. Could anyone suggest anything?
What did she seek? She’s well-read, but for this, she thought she’d like a mystery. How ’bout “Dissolution,” by C.J. Sansom? After a brief description, she was enticed into accepting our offering.
Opening her door, we were impressed with how she was dressed. Usually, she looks like most folks in southern Oregon, ready to hike or pick fruit. Today, she was dressed in svelte black clothes. We gushed with admiration.
She blushed with confession. “These are my p.j. bottoms. I haven’t dressed yet.”
Ah. Well, she still looked quite cosmopolitan.
Today’s Theme Music
Ah, love songs. I love them, especially when one side is singing to the other, attempting to sway them to stay together.
Such is what I take from this song, “Buddy Holly,” by Weezer. It came out in during my second or third spring, in nineteen ninety-four. I always understood a few refrains:
Oo-ee-oo I look just like Buddy Holly
Oh-oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore
I don’t care what they say about us anyway
I don’t care bout that
~ h/t AZLyrics.com
It’s the rest of the song that always mystified me. Fortunately, we moved into the Internet age, where Google searches and various websites, like AZLyrics, are able to clarify the words.
Sing along if you know them. As a bonus, Spike Lee directed the video. Fun stuff.
Singufloofity
Singufloofity (Catfinition): A cat with one color of fur.
In Use: “A black singufloofity, Crystal’s shade was so deep, it often cast a sheen like black oil.”
Tighten Up
He knows he needs to tighten up, but the threads are stripped, and the nut just spins, and spins, without getting anywhere.
Beginning Again
Cut those strings, he told himself. Release the ballast. Unfurl your sails. Anchors aweigh.
He wasn’t certain about that last expression. “Anchors aweigh.” Sounded like he should be readying a scale. He was pretty sure that’s how the song went, “Anchors aweigh, my boys, anchors aweigh.” He owned a computer, and could easily look it all up, but he thought it a dated reference, anyhow.
Searching for something more appropriate for the digital age, he came up with “Just Do It.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t use that; the slash folks have trademarked it, and zealously guard their carefully cultivated expression.
Sliding back into the rocket age, he counted down, “Three, two, one…we have liftoff.” But those words failed to lift him, and he became a little depressed, because Major Tom entered his head. The Air Force song came up, “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,” but yonder construed a vague distance and direction.
“Where are we going?”
“Over yonder.”
“There?”
“Yes, yonder. There.”
Umm.
“Once more into the breach, lads,” he thought, but it would not do. Various people and rock performers sang about being back in the saddle again. Where was his creativity today?
What the hell. He needed an ending so he could start. “Lit ’em up,” he said, wincing. Time to reboot, he decided, pressing start, but it was such a dejecting way to begin. “On the road again,” he hummed.
Curse Willy Nelson.
Today’s Theme Music
I awoke with Tom Jones singing “What’s New Pussycat?” in my head.
I don’t know how Tom got in there; I thought he was a bigger person that that. There are multiple unguarded entries into my head, of course. He may have slipped in through an ear opening, my nostrils, or my mouth. My mouth tasted like Tom Jones might have walked through there during the night, when I awoke.
Shrugging off the song, I instead began streaming the Foo Fighters’ “Best of You” from sometime in the first decade of this bold, new century. According to what my memory tells me about an interview I read with Dave Grohl back sometime in the shadow of the song’s release, it was written about breaking away from things that confine you, or something like that. I might be thinking of another song, or making this up completely.
Several lines in the song attract me. Like, “Were you born to resist, or be abused?” I’ve pondered the ways in which our systems abuse us, and how we take it with a tautological shrug, because that’s the way things are.
Later, he sings in a calmer moment, “I’ve got another confession my friend, I’m no fool.
I’m getting tired of starting again, somewhere new.”
That’s really I feel this lethargic summer Friday. I’m getting tired of starting again.
Michael Seidel, writer 