What does it mean to be a creative soul in a challenging and often uncreative universe?
How can we tackle those challenges to embrace our inner creativity in whatever form it takes?
To inspire you on your journey, here are some hopefully helpful snippets and contemplations from my life as a writer, activist, and wannabee musician–the good, the bad, and the ugly, but mostly stuff I’m grateful for!
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True confessions: I subscribe to far more Substacks, blogs, writing sites, daily poems, daily prompts, magazines, news reports, activist mailing lists, and social media groups, than I can possibly keep up with.
So my day begins with a delicate dance of choosing what to read and what to ignore. Actually, I’ve revised my habits so my day begins with a brief meditation followed by 30 minutes of exercise before I even look at the onslaught of text in my email box, but once I’ve opened the lid on my laptop, the rush is on. So many little tentacles of info competing for my attention, and all of them are just a small slice of the wider pie of projects and activities I’ve committed to, not to mention the obligations of maintaining my home, nurturing my family, and being a good friend to the many people who matter to me.
Somehow, I don’t think this issue is uniquely my problem. Likely, many of us are swamped by the competition between our life’s obligations and our desires for how we might want to spend our time. Being rained on by torrents of electronic words only adds to the flood.
So, I get it when I write a blog post and there are absolutely no reactions. But it’s still an eerie feeling–like shouting into the void.
Artist: Sam White; retrieved from newgrounds.com
Does *anybody* hear me? Does *anyone* think what I’m writing is worth listening to?
Absolutely not, says my inner critic, whom I’ve decided to name Eloise. No one cares about your stupid weekly dribbles.
Should I stop blogging? It could be a relief to take one more thing off my to-do list!
My initial reason for starting a blog was to do what all authors are told they need to do. The goal–stated by every marketing workshop I attended and every resource I read was to build a platform by acquiring a large degree of subscribers. That never happened, and as I’m not generally someone who plays the long-term patience game, I could have quit after the first year, when my most recent books were considered old news anyway. But the surprising thing was that I found I really liked blogging. Taking the time to think about some tidbit from my life or the wider world and its relationship to the themes I’m passionate about–creative expression and social change–has been invigorating. And trying to encapsulate that thought into a short 500-800 word post has been a formidable and stimulating writing challenge.
Besides, Substack continues to seduce me with a challenge of how many weeks in a row I can post a blog. And this is something I can control, even if I can’t control the number of people in my subscriber base.
What’s also satisfying is the feeling that I’m not just spouting words on paper to an amorphous audience. I’m writing to a bunch of friends, as most of my subscribers are people I know. (And I’d love to meet the rest of you!) Because of that, I’m determined to stay authentically myself and not hide behind some ostensibly wiser but more distant “author mask.” And it tickles me thinking that if you’re able to take some of your very precious time to read some of these musings, it might lead to more connection between us. If you react, or comment, or let me know in some way, then I can feel more connected, too.
Which is why the posts with no reactions at all leave me a bit lonely and off-kilter. But seriously, no shade! I wish I could read every Substack post from every single friend I subscribe to, and I can’t. Though I do try to prioritize reading posts written by friends so that I can get to at least some of them some of the time. And I’m going to make it a point to react more, because I often read and don’t react–out of busyness, or laziness, and now I’m realizing how great it would be if if the void I’m shouting into could echo back. Yes! I hear you!
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Mercury is not currently in retrograde, but earlier this week, there was a 24-hour time period when I was convinced that supernatural forces were taunting me with one of my biggest pet peeves: wasted time.
It all started with the kale, which I’d been eyeing in the garden as it grew bigger and shaggier every day. I knew I should harvest it, but there were so many more perishable things to attend to: cherry tomatoes to pick, cucumbers and zucchini that were still holding on, larger heirloom tomatoes finally ripening, peppers, eggplant, the first blush of fall raspberries, grapes. The kale can wait, I kept telling myself. It’s hearty, and there are so many other things I need to cook and eat.
But last Monday, despite two time-consuming Zoom meetings and a bunch of activism homework, I looked at the yellowing lower leaves and decided the kale really shouldn’t wait any longer. I gave all six plants a severe haircut, gathering the leaves in a large plastic bag. Way too much to eat before it went bad, the only option was to freeze it for soup and smoothies. So I set about the process, which involved washing, chopping, and rewashing two colanders full, plunging them first into boiling water, and then into a large pot of ice water–a chore in itself to make room for in the fridge. Afterwards I gave my hands a workout squeezing the chopped kale into little balls, which I prepared to freeze on a cookie sheet before transferring them into freezer bags.
It took me an hour to wash and chop the first batch, which I did sometime midday, and then it took until mid-evening before I got back to the project–the boiling, cooling, ball formation, and then a repeat for the second batch. It was about 10:30 pm, and I was almost done when I saw it in my hands among the kale shards.
A little worm.
I’ve been gardening long enough that one worm to remove is not going to bother me. But I also know that more often than not, worms travel in packs. So I checked the kale balls on the cookie sheet that I’d spent the last two hours putting together.
Sure enough…a tiny little worm or two hiding in every single ball.
What got to me most was not the ruined kale (it’s pretty easy to get good kale in the fall in New England) but the lost hours, time when I could have been working on writing or activism projects, or shortening the list of household and administrative chores I’d put aside, or finishing my PT exercises, which I was now going to have to stay up late to do.
But in my quest toward mindfulness I didn’t let myself get as upset as I might have been. The moments spent on the activity were not unpleasant. I was kind of enjoying the quietness of the kitchen, the meditative quality of chopping and washing, getting some time for my brain to roam where ever it wanted as I went about the rote aspects of the task. And the shimmering bright green color the kale turned in the boiling water remains a pleasant memory, even days later.
I had a harder time staying mindful the next day when I left my car headlights on and was delayed an hour and a half getting home because my battery had died. It’s hard not to scold myself for my lack of mindfulness that led me to leave them on in the first place, but I’m over it now. And I just looked up what to do about worms in kale. They’re likely cabbage worms, based on the holes in the leaves–which I did notice as I was chopping and washing, but attributed to old age or a few bites from hungry beetles, rather than a major infestation. Apparently, planting marigolds or applying plant extracts can help. I’ll think about that for next year.
In the meantime, I have one previous batch of frozen kale I already put away for smoothies. And in the summer, I’m substituting cucumbers instead. And I am very mindful when I drink my morning smoothie, because in addition to being filled with protein and calcium, it is always utterly delicious! Here’s my recipe:
–2 scoops of whey protein powder (I use Terra’s Organic vanilla–which does not taste grainy. There are also vegan options, but I haven’t tried them.)
–1/2 cup of plain kefir or Greek yogurt
–Splash of beet juice
–Splash of unsweetened cranberry juice
–1 mini cucumber, or 1/3 of a big cucumber (or a small ball of frozen kale if you have some that isn’t worm-infested)
–1 tablespoon of hemp seeds
–3 frozen strawberries (can substitute raspberries or blueberries)
–2 slices of ginger
Blend and enjoy!
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Tomorrow is my father’s birthday. Had he not died a year and a half ago, he would have been 95 years old.
Last month, during a weekend visit to my childhood home in Queens, I read through a chunk my father’s files. My brother had already started this process and created a spreadsheet with name of each folder, a brief description of the contents, and suggestions on what to do after I reviewed it. A few folders were labeled, “keep.” Most said “read and discard.”
And even though I’m the one often chiding my partner about his insistence on holding onto things he doesn’t need, I found it really hard to throw most of these files away. Not because there was anything extraordinary. Mostly I read through correspondence related to his job: thank you letters from people who appeared on the public affairs talk show, Straight Talk, which he produced for WWOR-TV (way before it was owned by Fox) as well as several letters of appreciation and a smattering of complaints. Not surprising, since he didn’t shy away from controversial issues in the talk show, nor in the documentaries he wrote and produced for the station, though he was meticulously ethical about the obligation to present different points of view, back in the days when the FCC’s fairness doctrine demanded balanced media.
There was another file folder where he kept his attempts to market his outside writing: TV scripts and plays in his early years, before he settled into his professional life, and a memoir he attempted after he retired. That file was filled with rejection letters from agents back in the days when agents actually wrote letters and didn’t simply ghost you. I threw away all the ones that said, blah, blah–doesn’t meet our needs, but I kept the ones that were specific, like this one from May 1, 1952:
I even kept this nastier one, because, hey, chances are we’ve all gotten letters like this once in a while. (I have, at least. I hope those of you who are also writers haven’t.)
Even though he never sold any scripts, he persisted. Because writing for the sake of writing, whether or not it got published, meant something to him. In fact, falling asleep every night to the clack of his manual typewriter was one of the first inspirations that led me to becoming a writer.
I’m hoping I’ll find just the right moment to shred all my embarrassing teenage diaries, love letters from old boyfriends, angsty journal entries, and more angsty journal entries disguised as faltering poems and thinly disguised failed fiction, because, yes, I also hold onto things I really don’t need, and because–God forbid–I don’t want my children or grandchildren, or any other relatives stumbling upon them after I die. But at the same time, I’m thankful to my father that he kept so much of his life intact in those folders, and that I can choose some of them to hold onto, even if he’s no longer there.
Happy birthday, Dad!
Stanley Friedman, age 91. Photo by Shel Horowitz
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Can art change our lives? Why does creative expression matter so much?
And to whom does it matter? Should “great art” be confined to those who’ve achieved some recognized level of skill/talent/recognition in a world where we don’t define value as the impact it makes on others, but on its ability to be commoditized. Or should we equally appreciate all attempts of creative expression (even if some may touch us more than others) as an offering from one soul to another, and perhaps a mutual healing?
These are questions I’ve been thinking about ever since I returned to piano and stuffed all the baggage about my musical family, creativity, and judgment (by both self and others) into Imperfect Pitch, a memoir, I’ve yet to publish. But recently, my good friend, Lanette Sweeney, (whose blog, Paying Attention: A New Mindfulness Method, I highly recommend) told me about Vijay Gupta’s Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation.
Like me, Gupta had perfect pitch. And like my younger child, he started Suzuki violin lessons at four years old and figured out in a couple of weeks how to play all of Book 1 when he was supposed to be standing on a pizza box and learning how to bow. But unlike either of us, Gupta was, perhaps, a child prodigy, or perhaps pushed into that box. His very scary, overachieving parents, who hit him when he wasn’t practicing enough or to their liking, and several years later shamed him for only coming in second in a prestigious concerto competition, brought him 90 miles into New York City several times a week, so he could train with highly ranked teachers. By the time he was nine, he was touring as a soloist. At the age of 19 he became the youngest player to ever gain an orchestra position with the LA Philharmonic–the dream dangled before many conservatory students who labor and train for years to try to “win” a job with a reputed orchestra.
But for Gupta, this was not the dream. As passionate as he was about the music he played (which is obvious in the memoir from his descriptions of pieces he performed) he felt empty. Still reeling from his parents’ abuse and subsequent estrangement, he turned to overeating and alcohol to numb his pain. Until he found himself with a small group of players giving a “charity performance” on Skid Row in LA, where the audience, not adhering to the classical concert etiquette of deathly quiet listening to the point of doing everything you can to suppress a cough, freely emoted whatever they were feeling as the musicians played.
As Gupta listened to the stories of the audience members sharing their lives and their pain, he began to see the reactions of people in Skid Row as a sort of reciprocal music, a mutual gift. He realized that the musicians weren’t there in the role of experts or to change or heal people. In fact, through the experience, they were the ones being healed. Without knowing it, Gupta says, every time I walked into a shelter or clinic with my violin, I was loosening the grip of my own story, rewriting my relationship to my instrument, to my music, and to myself.
Gupta founded Street Symphony, an organization where professional musicians and community members engage in musical collaborations and perform in homeless shelters, prisons, transitional housing and other spaces that are often deprived of the ability to create and engage in artistic collaboration. Its core programs include a songwriting and mentorship series led by survivors of homelessness and trauma and a project inside the Los Angeles County jails that brings together professional musicians and incarcerated artists for shared rehearsals and performances.” Gupta explains in this three-minute video why these kind of collaborations matter so much (and also gives us a taste of his juicy playing).
What I loved most about this book was Gupta’s humility and honesty. So many “music memoirs” I’ve read sound snotty, making me feel (as much as I might want to be) like I’m not really “a member of the club,” but this book focuses on the flaws of being human–Gupta’s, his parents, (whom he describes with admirable understanding, despite the way they treated him) and the many people the Skid Row community he encounters in his work with Street Symphony. Highly recommended as a story of #artforchange and why music–or any creative pursuit–absolutely matters.
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Tonight is the first night of Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), a time when it’s customary to engage in heshbon hanefesh, searching of the soul. The goal is to attempt to “wipe the slate clean” by engaging in an intense process of forgiving others for past wrongs, forgiving yourself for “missing the mark” and setting aspirations for personal growth during the new year.
Even though I’m a non-observant Jew who’s been leaning further and further toward atheism, I’ve found this process extremely useful over the past five years–ever since a friend and I started engaging in it deliberately and mindfully, sharing things we read or did that inspired us, and checking in frequently over the month to discuss our insights and support each other in our goals for personal growth.
Yesterday, as I went outside to meditate, the sun was just beginning to creep over the mountain, and I thought about the direction I wanted to set for this year: Open without Overwhelm.
I have a pull toward taking on new projects and activities because I enjoy the freshness that they bring to my brain–and to my heart. Yet, I’ve gotten my life to a place where I don’t want to give up any of the things that nurture me, so it’s easy to fall into an anxious frenzy of having too much on my plate.
How can I do both–be open, without overwhelm? Or overload?
The night before, despite some niggling anxiety around confronting new social situations (which I’d never had until years of pandemic isolation left me out of practice) I went by myself to an improvisational singing group of complete strangers. This was one of the few group singing activities I’ve tried since I got my voice back. I keep telling myself I want to join a chorus again, but truth be told, I’m really not sure I’d be able to handle it, yet. What I liked about this group was that it was low-stress. I could drop out whenever I wanted to and there would be plenty of other voices to carry on. Since we were mostly improvising whatever we wanted (occasionally someone in the group would act as a conductor and give us a part), I could sing in a range that was entirely comfortable. What surprised me was that it wasn’t musically boring, or weird, or like some big cluttered mess–as I feared it might be. Instead, my musical brain felt happily stimulated in figuring out what I could add to fit in to the pieces we were creating.
Yay! But, oh no! Another thing to add to the calendar. Thankfully, it’s only once a month.
I’m still thinking the key to all this is to be fully present and grounded in the joy of the moment–even if at times that’s easier said than done.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling the need to recommit to the soul-nurturing activities I’ve already taken on, because it’s so easy for them to become pro-forma–another thing I check off the to-do list without always being really present when I do it. And if I can’t do something with full presence, attention, and joy, maybe it is time to take it off the list for a while so that when I come back to that activity, it feels new and fresh. This has kind of happened unintentionally, as I’ve had little time for piano because of all the PT I’m needing to do. So the few times I have made time for piano, it’s become especially enjoyable.
And more good news: the PT is paying off! I’m seeing clear improvements in my posture and mobility, especially in my thoracic spine. When the spine is open, the heart is open. And that is the ultimate aspiration.
Writing is another thing I’ll never give up, though I’ve done significantly less of it over the past few months. But yesterday, I decided to start my morning with a prompt from the amazing Seema Reza of A Little Less Lonely. Seema put out a group of thirty prompts (one/day) in April for National Poetry Month. Here it is, August, and I’m still wading my way through. Her prompt for Day 22: What do you remember about the earth?
My answer:
So, every day the sun comes up, and today there’s a solar eclipse. But the view where I am will be minimal–only 16% at the peak. And it’s at the same time I have an appointment with the eye doctor because my new far-sighted glasses are blurry. What a metaphor! But seriously, they only function at a pinpoint distance. Not any closer or farther. And I’m not willing to accept that, because my goal is to be expansive in my sight, not more constrained. So I’ll miss the partial covering of the sun by the moon. Maybe afterwards I’ll spend some time pulling weeds and opening pathways in the garden, where I do know the earth, and where the feel of the earth on my hands will be one of the best gifts of the day. But I must be mindful. The ubiquitous onion grass I spend all year trying to yank is flowering, and the best thing, for now, might be to leave it and enjoy the blossoms.
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At my Wednesday morning writing group check-in today, nearly everyone talked about being pulled by other obligations, from packing up the literal rubble in their house in preparation for a move, to the growing piles of put-off chores and administrivia. Yet here we all were, attempting to navigate that obstacle for a couple of hours of time to nurture and spark the vibrant and needy creative child inside us that chatters non-stop and keeps tugging at our arm.
I was no exception to the prevailing mood. In fact, I can’t ever remember a time where 100% of my body and mind were full speed ahead focused on writing. There’s always something else that some small (or large) part of my brain fixates on, and tells me I should be doing instead. The trick to my writing success lies with how much I can tune out that nagging voice–which, of course, varies tremendously.
There’s a funny cartoon by Asher Perlman where someone with a truck labeled “Writers Cleaning Service” comes to someone’s door. The caption reads: The process is simple: you tell me to get some writing done and then to avoid getting started I clean your whole house. But chores and administrivia are only a couple of the many obstacles writers can use to distract ourselves. Job responsibilities, young children, vulnerable family members, or personal health issues can legitimately take up a whole lot of our time. And many of us already have other compelling and competing interests that keep us away from our creativity. If I weren’t an activist, I’d have more time to write, but sorry, working to make the world a better place is not a vocation I want to give up on.
Even if we don’t have too many these issues already built into our lives, any project we take on from learning to knit to painting the garage can help us circumvent the feelings of fear and doubt that often arise during the creative process, giving us more reason to avoid it. My writer friend and colleague Linda Castronovo writes about this beautifully in her (highly recommended) blog Starry, Starry Kite, Projects became my Prozac, she says, a coat of armor I constantly reshaped for myself.
Linda, how did you capture the story of my life in just a handful of words? Friends have challenged me many times on my tendency to load myself up with tasks and projects to the point of overwhelm so that I perceive myself as too busy to attend to the things that really matter–relationships and creativity. I wish I were as clear as Linda is on the reasons why I’m always overloading myself, but knowledge of this obstacle and the desire to clear its hurdle is, at least, an important first step.
Last night another friend, a visual artist, called me to briefly touch on the malaise of being in between projects–that What should I do now feeling when you’ve managed to corral the adrenaline and engage in a creative spree that enables you to tune out the competing shoulds of daily life, but alas, the project is now done. And whether the end result is flawed or perfect, you’re suddenly adrift. I can relate to that obstacle, too. It’s one of the reasons I’ve started to shy away from longer work. It’s way easier to begin another poem or short prose piece than to figure out what to do next after you’ve dedicated years of your life to a novel or memoir. As someone with eleven full length novels and one memoir to my name, (two published, the rest, not yet) I know how painful that what next moment can be. But I guess I can give myself credit for not quitting after the first longer work and eventually pushing on. And I know that my friend, who has already completed a large number of paintings, will go on the next leg of his creative journey, even if he first needs to take a breather.
I am so glad I went to the check-in at writing group this morning, instead of following the part of me that wanted to lean right away into the administrative tasks toppling over on my plate. And I’m grateful to my fellow writers for inspiring me by example with their determination to push forward in their writing, regardless of obstacles and obligations. And, hey, I got a blog post done, which is kind of in between creative work and other chores, as it is another thing on I can check off the weekly to-do list. But it’s also a place where I can set aside some time to take creativity seriously and practice being mindful with my words and thoughts.
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Photo by D. Dina Friedman
Back in the 1980s when I was working as a VISTA volunteer in Brooklyn and had very little money for entertainment, the Staten Island Ferry was one of the best bargains and a most pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon. You could ride back and forth as much as you wanted back then. Now, you have to get off the boat and get back on, but the ride is free (in the 1980s it was a quarter.) If you don’t want to pay a lot of money or deal with the crowds at Liberty Island, the ferry can give you a pretty darn good view of the Statue of Liberty, which still stirs something in me–maybe even more so in these turbulent times. So, I was excited to ride the ferry again on my way to visit friends in Staten Island when I was in NYC last weekend.
Once again, as we passed through the harbor, I thought about my own history with the Statue of Liberty, which I wrote about shortly after going to the refugee camp on the Mexican border in 2020. Here’s the piece. It was originally published in Prose Online in 2023 (You can hear me reading it, here) and then republished in my chapbook, Here in Sanctuary Whirling.
STATUE OF LIBERTY
I.
You can’t really forget a green statue, because when you’re a kid you know that statues are not supposed to be Comet-vomit-green. We took a boat. I was little, maybe four or five, and I couldn’t see over other people’s heads. We might have gone into the statue, but maybe we didn’t because the line was too long and my mother hates waiting in lines. My mother told me you used to be able to go all the way to the torch, but they closed that part off because someone fell, or maybe they jumped. I looked up at the torch and felt cheated. That’s the only part I remember.
II.
I took my boyfriend here when I was in college. He was from suburban Illinois, a land of tall, white, blond people. It was a windy day in January, so there was hardly anyone on the boat. We couldn’t go into the statue because it was closed for renovations. Or maybe we went in and walked up all those stairs to look out the crown’s windows to the harbor, and beyond it, to the open sea. To tell the truth, I don’t remember. To tell the truth, I couldn’t see over his head.
III.
I broke up with my boyfriend because he was blond. That’s the simplified version, though perhaps I broke up with him because he was from not-New York, or because the Statue of Liberty was closed the day we made the trip, or because the statue was open. I broke up with my best friend several years earlier when I was still in high school. She was the Chinese daughter of immigrants. We were on the subway. She was reading Ayn Rand. I told her I was a socialist and she stopped talking to me. Her stop came first. She got off the train and I watched the closing doors.
IV.
I never thought I could leave New York, but I did. That break-up was harder than leaving my blond boyfriend and harder than the day my best friend stopped talking to me. Now I’m living on a farm with tall, blond people and a lot of cows. The cows have the illusion of freedom in the pasture until they graze by the electric fence.
V.
There have been many cartoons of the Statue of Liberty being compromised. There was one where she had a For Sale sign hung around her neck. There was another with the former president, the one who hated immigrants, ripping off her head and holding it as a trophy. Before he was elected, they put a statue of this president in Union Square. He was naked with diaper rash and a sagging pot belly. The statue wasn’t green, but maybe it should have been.
VI.
I think I went once with my kids to the Statue of Liberty, but they were bored and we didn’t go inside. Or maybe we did go inside and they were bored. Or maybe we just went to Ellis Island, where I remember with certainty that they were bored, even when we found the plaques my parents paid for, which had the names of my great-great-grandparents, who came to the Statue of Liberty on crowded boats where they couldn’t see over people’s heads. It’s hard, sometimes, to raise kids in a land of blond people with too many cows.
VII.
My great-great grandmother came here to escape the pogroms. My great grandmother told me her mother said that whenever the Cossacks came to the door, she would make the sign of the cross and say “Christians Live Here,” or maybe my grandmother told me that story about her grandmother. I don’t remember. What I do remember is they both said the Old Country was very bad. Other people I went to school with were children of Holocaust survivors. We played a game in the schoolyard called Concentration Camp. It was kind of like tag, except the “it” person was the Nazi, and if they caught you, they made you do unspeakable second-grade things. In school we sang, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and “God Bless America.” One year we did an assembly program called “Sing, America, Sing.” I wrote a satire called, “Cry, America, Cry.” Even then I had the leanings of a socialist.
IX.
I have recently returned from the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, where there is no Statue of Liberty. Instead, there’s a tall guard at the bridge who won’t let anyone put a foot in the country to claim asylum, or see over his head. A man in the camp tells me of intruders coming to his house with guns. He tells me about being shoved into a car with his eight-year-old daughter by kidnappers demanding ransom. He tells me about being taken by immigration authorities and locked in a cold, windowless room. At least, the statue still has windows. I did climb it at least once. I remember clearly, the day I looked out through the dirty glass.
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Last Tuesday, as we were walking in the woods, my partner said to me. How come you don’t show me so many of your poems any more? There are some I don’t even know until I see them published.
He was referring to a poem I’d published the day before in Second Coming, a poem-a-day protest against the current administration’s fascist regime, which we both subscribe to on Substack. I’d mentioned how surprised I was that the poem got so many likes. I’ve published there before and usually only received only one or two reactions. This poem had already gotten 13! And they were mostly from people I didn’t even know.
I was touched that he wanted to see more of my poems. Not that I thought he wouldn’t want to–after all, we met at an open poetry reading in Greenwich Village, and love of poetry has always been a connector for us. But he doesn’t write many poems any more and I have strong connections with other writers, so I don’t generally make him the first stop for feedback. Also, these days, I’m more centered in my writing process and don’t usually share my work with people until I’ve given it a chance to simmer and revised it myself. I also have less of a need for validation for the many things I might jot down in a fit of emotional angst, some of which might end up being publishable poems, but many of which will not.
So, I explained that all to him, gaining my own clarity as we talked about it. And then he told me he had made peace with the idea that he’d likely never be more than a mediocre poet. You’re more of a journalist who occasionally writes in poetic form. You have some great images, but I think what’s often missing is that oomph, I told him.
Our conversation morphed into an exploration of the crevices of mediocrity, and how I also had finally made peace with accepting that I would never be more than a mediocre pianist, though I still feel that as a writer, I can rise above mediocrity by touching people, even if I likely will never make it to the “big leagues.” Then we happily reminisced about our days involved in that Village reading, and the poets we knew there, one of whom had made the jump into national recognition.
It was only after we got home and were in the kitchen trying to declutter the abundance of cucumbers and zucchini, that I asked, So, did you like the poem?
He hesitated. Well… I don’t think it was one of your strongest.
Really? What didn’t you like?
He hesitated again. Actually, I don’t really remember it. Let me read it again.
He disappeared and returned a few minutes later. It’s kind of like journalism. I mean I already know about the MAGA fortress on our corner.
It is true that a lot of the images in this particular poem come from our shared experience. But that didn’t seem like a helpful comment. Maybe he was getting back at me for my comments about his journalistic poetry, but he’d agreed with my assessment. And it’s not his style to be passive-aggressive.
I just don’t think it’s your strongest poem, he repeated, cramming his foot farther into his mouth. I did like the image of the girl in the pink dress dancing.
I write this not to garner sympathy. Truth be told, I was more inclined to laugh at my partner’s floundering than cry about his lack of support, because I knew he was genuinely trying to be supportive, even though this poem clearly didn’t grab him. He even deliberately went to back to Substack to give the poem a like and make a comment, as he makes a point of doing on many of my posts. However, it is a cautionary tale. Be careful about what you ask for from those you love and whose opinions have extra weight. In other words–beware of your darlings. (This is different from the phrase, kill your darlings, a standard trope of writer advice that warns you not to let something something stay if it doesn’t belong in a particular piece, no matter how precious you might find your crafting of a particular phrase.)
This is why I don’t often share my writing–especially writing that is more raw and still-in-progress–with close friends and family. Instead, I depend on my writing communities, where feedback structures have been specifically designed to provide support and all members share mutual goals and a common understanding, coated in respect without other interfering baggage.
But once something is published, it belongs to everyone. That’s what publishing means–making public. All cards on the table. All comments allowed. From anyone who happens to see it. I’m just happy I haven’t gotten very much hate mail.
So have at it. Would love to hear your stories–the good, the bad, and the ugly–about sharing work with those you love. Or if you want to read the poem in question, it’s here. And BTW, I did share this with my partner before posting to get his okay, out of respect and the deep love we have for each other.
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