Three weeks later the clutter is back, as I now work to meet the deadlines for several guest blog spots, a newspaper column, and my MFA thesis. I’m familiar with the muddle of my surroundings and in my mind and am oddly calmed by it. Scribbles on scraps of paper, napkins, envelopes, receipts, sticky notes, and index cards are once again ubiquitous, tacked to my bulletin board and adhered to my computer monitors, reminding me to add a transition, description, or a bit of dialogue to some work-in-progress. Books, writing magazines, and drafts of my columns, stories, essays, and novel chapters, defaced with nearly illegible edits and suggestions (mine and others’), litter the floor in shambolic piles that seem incongruous with my reputed compulsion toward extreme tidiness. It appears this is how I create. Even without the looming deadlines, disorder is part of my process.

While writing my Bakhtinian analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray a few years ago, I learned that the crude journals in which Mikhail Bakhtin had written one of his most influential manuscripts were lost for nearly seventy years, buried in a lumber room where rats and seeping water had severely damaged much of them. About what could be discerned, Michael Holquist says this: “In the faded scrawl we can see the race between the occurrence of ideas and their feverish transcription. This volume provides a chance to see Bakhtin in all the heat and urgency of thought as it wrestles with itself. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act we catch Bakhtin in the act – the act of creation” (ix).

An 1890 typescript of Dorian Gray with Wilde’s corrections and emendations reflects a similar, seemingly haphazard approach to the process. Words and even entire sections are crossed out or rewritten, and handwritten insertions run between the typed lines and up the margins. Nearly indecipherable notes and corrections to himself and to his typist fill the white space of each page of what we know is not even an early draft of the narrative.

A characteristically organized person, the chaos of my own comparatively tiny writing life vexes me. Over the years, I’ve created paper and computer files and designated bins to contain my various projects, but, once immersed in the work, the system seems to fall apart. And no matter how many journals I purchase, the ideas and insights continue to be recorded on the nearest scrap.

The act of creation, it would seem, is simply messy.

Published on TreeHouse: An Exhibition of the Arts on June 12, 2013.

First galley proof of Marcel Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

                                        ~ Li-Young Lee

Lyman Orchards in Middlefield, Connecticut by Sage Ross

The first place winner will receive $2,500, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and twenty copies of that issue.  The second and third place winners will receive $1,000 and $600, respectively.  Results will be posted on September 1.  For more information or to submit your work, visit the website at
http://www.glimmertrain.com/fictionopen.html
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with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then

we lose it in the pond grass, lashed

among the bottom-feeders.  Pocketing goggles,

my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky

in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted),

a month of sun days.  In Fairbanks, all-night baseball

and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style.  Someone’s

driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift

that here will linger long enough for us

to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung,

to get the hang of happiness and get going.

Get the picture?  I do, but just for the moment,

which is why I want it monumental, equestrian,

astride, however I can get it.  What’s

passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards

from the lower forty-eight.  The frog I trod sprang back

intact, all its receptors set on July.

                                                    ~ Robin Becker

“Evening in June” by Anders Zorn, 1886

Finding stretches of uninterrupted time to write fiction was a recurring topic in my four years of workshops and technique classes in Chapman University’s MFA program.  While full-time professional writers can hole up for days and weeks or even months to attend to their craft, the novice or aspiring professional writer has a “real” job and other demands that take precedence – or at least appear to in the moment.

In my defense, I’ve had a busy academic and professional year so far.  But I have to confess there’s more than busyness going on here.  The truth is…I’m terrified.  There.  I’ve said it.  Despite the encouragement and favorable criticism I’ve received from respected instructors, authors, and editors regarding my work, the inadequacy Demon taunts me relentlessly (and a little too gleefully, I might add) and, at the moment, has me whimpering in a corner with my pile of draft chapters.

With graduation scheduled for early next year, the thesis portion of my novel is due in about nine months.  There’s simply no time for the Demon or for whimpering.  There is, however, time for the wisdom and irreverent humor of Anne Lamott:

“How?” [her] students ask.  “How do you actually do it?”  Write, that is. 

You sit down. […] You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day.  This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. […] You turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. [...] You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again.  Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind – a scene, a locale, a character, whatever – and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.  The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys.  They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt.  Also, severe hypochondria.  There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed.  But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.  There is a vague pain at the base of your neck.  It crosses your mind that you have meningitis […]. 

Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences.  You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story.  You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive.  But you cannot will this to happen.  It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work.  So you might as well just go ahead and get started (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 6-7).

Forty-five pages by August 26 – I can do that.  I must do that.  It’s time to slay the Demon and get started…again.

All over the sand road where we walk

multiflora rose climbs trees cascading

white or pink blossoms, simple, intense

the scene drifting like colored mist.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy

clumps of flower and the blackberries

are blooming in the thickets.  Season of

joy for the bee.  The green will never

again be so green, so purely and lushly

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads

into the wind.  Rich fresh wine

of June, we stagger into you smeared

with pollen, overcome as the turtle

laying her eggs in roadside sand.

                      ~ Marge Piercy

“Girl with Lilies” by John White Alexander, 1889

the thirtieth of November,

a beginning or an end,

we are moving into the solstice

and there is so much here

I still do not understand.

If I could make sense of how

my life is still tangled

with dead weeds, thistles,

enormous burdocks, burdens

slowly shifting under

this first fall of snow,

beaten by this early, racking rain

calling all new life to declare itself strong

or die

if I could know

in what language to address

the spirits that claim a place

beneath these low and simple ceilings,

tenants that neither speak nor stir

yet dwell in mute insistence

till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.

~ from “Toward the Solstice” by Adrienne Rich

“A Woman in Bed” by Rembrandt, 1645

authority is magic.

When you think you’ve got it straight

wax wane declination

feel the movement under your hand

one summer morning

as you observe it set

then rise that night.

Always use a well-sharpened pencil

followed by a good eraser.

Watch the white emerge.

~ Caroline Caddy

“Die Sentimentale” by Johann Peter Hasenclever, circa 1846

                                                                                                                            ~ from “reading” by Joanne Burns

Vincent van Gogh, 1887

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