Writing week 10

I'll sort all that out later.

Monday

Last night I was babysitting while my brother and his partner went to see The Odyssey, so I stayed up late writing and eagerly anticipating their return so that we could discuss the pig scene. (I have tired of all other discourse about The Odyssey but find I’m always ready to discuss the pig scene.) I was writing by hand, covered in blankets, drinking cups of tea and eating biscuits, like I’d just returned from sea myself, and this set-up was incredibly peaceful and absorbing. I was able to keep writing for a couple of hours, not flagging but gathering speed. When writing by hand, the very things that distract me when writing on a laptop – whether a sentence is precise enough, whether and how it connects to all the other stuff, and above all whether I’m being boring or sounding tortured – are not a problem. Instead I just think, ‘I’ll sort all that out later.’ There seems to be the space for that in a handwritten text. It feels like being a hen, sort of roaming around pecking at things out of curiosity. Whereas typing on a laptop feels like . . . I guess also being a hen. But a hungrier, more worried one. She must find the worms now. Not later.

Today I worked away at some of the raw material on a screen, and found I could carry some of the handwriting feeling into it.

I also went to a Writers on Mondays session, which featured Tusiata Avia. Tusiata was smart, hilarious, totally frank, and cool as hell. And unafraid of the terrible question ‘What is poetry for?’, before which I have seen other poets quiver and disintegrate, myself included. It’s a question that is disproportionately levelled at poets. You always have to armour up before you speak about poetry in public.

Tuesday

Went for a feeble lurching kind of jog and then sat down to grapple with an essay about driving (one of several). The essay kept slipping out of view, and the thing happened again where I didn’t like the voice of some previous work I’d done on it, and I let my worry about this scupper my progress.

What I badly need to do is come up with a timetable – a list of things to have accomplished by certain dates. I need this so I can understand what time is doing. Time is a big worry and source of confusion to me. It always has been. I don’t understand a year. This has only grown worse as more years have passed. How can so much time pass, big globs of it, and you still come up empty-handed and older than you have ever been? Every so often on social media, this quote by Annie Dillard goes around: ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ And every time, I find that line totally paralysing, sort of enraging, as I empty the dishwasher again and make my hundred thousandth piece of toast. But! Then I remember the rest of the paragraph, which isn’t as often quoted, where Dillard talks about the usefulness of keeping a schedule to defend against that very paralysis: ‘It is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time.’ The wreck of time! I’m embarrassed to have abandoned myself to it without a proper schedule for so long.

In the afternoon it snowed in a big whirling bluster for the first time in 15 years. This wasn’t the kind of snow that piles up in heaps on the ground to be marvelled at but the kind of snow you have to look at exactly as it is falling, and marvel at it then, otherwise you miss it altogether. Painful metaphor in here somewhere.

Spent some hours reading in the late afternoon. And then gave in to the urge to work on a couple of prose experiments (once again I don’t know whether to call these prose poems or noncommittal ‘fragments’. I always liked Catherine Vidler’s term for anything she wrote: ‘blurts’). I also liked this interview with Joe Dunthorne, who notes that writing a poem is a kind of biological urge for him, ‘like burping’. The piece also quotes Train Ride by Ted Berrigan. I went and read the whole thing and had a great time.

from Train Ride by Ted Berrigan (in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, University of California Press, 2007)

Wednesday

I had meetings all morning to discuss my imminent return to work (around six weeks away, now) and then in the afternoon I settled into an essay that is about halfway there, maybe, with the rest of it in chaos. In the essay I’ve realised I need to write a bit about mental illness. I find this harder than it used to be; there was a period of time when I seemed to think that my difficulties must be automatically interesting, but now I see that there is nothing unique about them at all. And also what a relief that is. I ended up enjoying this bit of writing though – the challenge of describing certain states, of trying to keep some compassion for that person, of resisting the urge to swoop in world-wearily and say something like, ‘As you can see, she had lost her mind.’

Thursday

Once again I have a cold. I always feel like I am playing a miserable dirge when I say ‘Once again I have a cold.’ I miss being completely well. After whining my way through some morning pages I went out for a short walk without headphones. The quietness helped me think about what I am writing and calm the routine surges of panic I have about it. I often rely on music to help me access certain feelings more easily – joy and optimism mainly – and these feelings are so helpful in keeping the work percolating. But a non-headphoned walk, summoning the less flashy feelings, has a lot to offer in this realm too. I am sure that if you are a writer you will have heard all about this.

Still haven’t come up with that schedule.

Too much caffeine, and too many Lemsip Maxes, the most foul-tasting drink on earth.

In the afternoon I worked on the essay from yesterday and felt like I could see the shape becoming clearer. There is still a bunch of building to do.

Friday

Spent a lot of the morning reading about ‘the startling intelligence’ of chickens. I can’t explain how I ended up here, but this was so, so far away from anything that I should’ve been doing that I felt terribly guilty about it and tried to justify this time by writing something about the startling intelligence. Just now, I’ve looked back at what I wrote. It is OK, that’s all I’ll say.

Sent a couple of emails asking for interviews with people I’d like to speak to for one essay in particular. It took me a long time to write these emails – trying to get the temperature right, to sound somewhat legitimate, and hardest of all, to not waffle – but I am keeping my expectations low.

In the evening I worked on a small group of interconnected prose pieces. I imagine these not sitting together but apart, as locations or problems to return to. It’s fun to decide not to be finished with a subject – to write one thing, then decide you’re going to have another go, from another angle. You could keep going forever. You will never need another subject! But I made myself stop at five goes.

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