On Stuckness
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Last week I was stuck. I was working on a piece of flash nonfiction that is definitely about Zumba and somewhere along the way started also to be about racism and violence. When I discovered that it was about something much more than just dancing for exercise, I got excited and also scared. The stakes had just risen immeasurably. There was a lot of room to misstep. Rather than sit with the fear, rather than be patient with the work, I did something I’m good at: I muscled. I bashed my head against it. I decided that if I just kept looking at it, I would figure it out. I sat down every day for a week and spent nearly an hour rearranging paragraphs, sentences, and phrases, only to revert all of them to where they were when I’d begun—the writing version of walking or driving in circles.
Unfortunately, it’s tough to know when I’m muscling, because revision requires moving things around—this is how I see new connections, decide what can be cut, and spot gaps where connective tissue need to be added. It takes at least a few days to realize and accept that I’m treading water. At that point, I can put it down.
But I hate doing that. We’ve been force-fed the myth of productivity (thanks manifest destiny, capitalism), that if we work hard enough, we’ll be worthy and we’ll succeed. What we often sidestep is the reality that sometimes working on a thing means leaving it alone. Means forgetting to clean out your petri dishes, going on vacation, and coming back to discover you’ve invented penicillin.
The shitty thing about stuckness is you never know how long it’s gonna last (Covid, anyone?). I let a few days go by before I opened the piece again, unsure when I sat down if anything would be any clearer. Writing is an odd practice, one in which you always need to be prepared to wait a little bit longer. In the case of the Zumba piece, I got lucky. After a few days off, I came back with rested eyes and discovered the connections that were missing, enabling me to bring the piece to a point of doneness, at least for now.
If you think I’m making this sound easy, I want to clarify that the Zumba piece is 1,000 words, whereas the novel I’m working on is currently 50,000 words. I don’t know yet how that book comes together. I won’t know for at least a year, likely longer. But I’m OK with that. I’m not old, but writing for so many years has forced me to learn to be patient, has made it easier to live in the stuckness and believe it will pass. For better or worse, nothing lasts forever. That’s a thing I tell myself a lot these days.
J.
Reading and Writing Memoir starts February 16th! I’m pulling together materials now and excited to explore some stellar writing and dive into the craft of writing about our lives. Memoir is all about accessing the emotion of events and recreating lived experiences in detail. This class is for anybody who wants to start writing about their experiences or those who want to deepen the writing they’ve already begun. Financial aid is available. Full details and registration are here.
I’m currently reading two excellent books on teaching creative writing: Craft in the Real World, by Matthew Salesses, and A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing by David Mura. Both center questions of race and identity, examining how traditional workshop forms and ideas of craft silence voices of people of color as well as anybody else who has some sort of otherness in their identity. Both books emphasize that craft is a function of culture, experience, and language—the water we are swimming in without even noticing it—and that we must acknowledge the wide range of culture and experience if we are going to effectively and inclusively write as well as teach the craft of writing.
Both books are deeply wise and have offered me concrete tools to continue to notice, question, and improve my teaching practices. I aspire to create a learning environment that promotes inclusion and creates space for all voices to be heard and represented; these texts are helping me in that quest. If you want a sample of Salesses’ work, one section of his book, 25 Essential Notes on Craft, is up at LitHub.
I am also planning to dig into George Saunders’ new book on short story craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which includes seven Russian short stories he’s been teaching to MFA students for decades. I admit that I am very under-read in the Russian department, so this is another good opportunity to learn. For a hint of what this book contains as well as a wonderful dose of Saunders’ compassion and wisdom, I recommend this recent interview with Maris Kreizman.
Hopefully by now you’ve watched Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem at least a few times. Gorman’s vibrant voicing of the duality of this moment, this pandemic, this country, and its citizens was very much what we needed, as demonstrated by how widely this poem and her work spread after her performance. I enjoyed this piece in the Washington Post, which breaks down some of what was so masterful about her performance, as well as the challenges and tropes of the Inaugural Poem in general. Gorman will be performing another original work at the Superbowl, a sentence that blows my mind. My heart expands thinking that this could be a moment that gets more Americans to read and love poetry.
To Go Poems
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Kim Addonizio, who spoke a few years ago at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ conference. I hadn’t really registered her before, but when she started reading her incisive, transgressive poems, I lit up. Here are a few, including one she published last November about these times we are living in. The photo on her website also speaks volumes.
Grace, To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall, and Winter Solstice
The First Line is the Deepest
Ways of Being Lonely
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