Category Archives: blog

Babies, Blessings, and the Bird’s Eye View

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For the past five days I’ve been living with my daughter, helping to take care of seven-month-old Baby Manu while her husband is away. Like most of life, there have been moments of  joy, moments of challenge, moments of laughter, drudgery, frustration, profound peacefulness, you-name-it. The only thing certain about life with a baby is that there’s rarely a dull moment.

As a grandparent I feel blessed by having a lot more perspective than I had when my own children were young. In my years of early motherhood, whenever my kids screamed, I worried that not addressing on some immediate need they were expressing would scar them for life, the fog of sleep-deprivation only adding to my anxiety. Now, as I carry Baby Manu around the house and try with my old arms to satisfy his need for incessant “jumping” (i.e. lifting him up and down as he flexes his leg muscles as a launching point on my lap) I feel wiser and calmer–even when he’s screaming. And I’ve thought about how like writing, taking care of a baby is really just an exercise in plunging in and dealing with a lot of trial and error as I try to find that “true north” point of connection.

With Manu this might mean reading a book and taking stops between each page for jumping breaks, or tango dancing around the house while humming riffs from Raffi’s greatest hits or rap songs I’m making up on the spot–all on the theme of Manu: The Life. It might mean playing hand games, or making funny noises, or going through an entire array of animal sounds. Or taking a moment to put him down to play by himself, recognizing in my new found older-age wisdom that both of us could use a little time to chill.  “Little” is the defining word here. All of these activities have proven successful–but generally none of them work for more than 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

The writing process can sometimes feel similar. While I welcome the blessings of the time I feel “in the groove,” other times my words–and my brain–can feel jumpy and fragmented. These are the days I go into the garden to chill, just as I put Manu under his playstation, so he can shake his rattles and babble to himself without Grandma’s interference. And other times, when I’m struggling with trying to write that “one true sentence,” I realize I need to switch up the activity, which for me usually means putting a story aside to revise a poem, or putting the poem aside to work on another poem, or another story or essay until I find something I’m connected to enough in that moment to “re-see.”

But I’m counting my blessings and taking the “birds-eye view” as both a grandparent and a writer. Eventually Manu will grow old enough to tell me what he wants–and so, I hope, will my baby poems and prose in progress.

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Gardening: An Antidote for Perfectionism

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It’s May, which means it’s time to get real about the garden!

April has always been a hard month for me emotionally. (I resonate with T.S. Elliot.) I generally feel as unsettled as the weather. The minute we get a warm day, I’m warring with my impatience, chomping at the bit to start planting, while at the same time feeling anxious about how I’m going to incorporate daily gardening time into what seems like my already too busy life. And when the days turn back to being cold and rainy, there’s actually a part of me that feels relieved that I can stay burrowed into my winter self for a while, though I wonder what masochistic inner voice is making such a silly choice. Meanwhile the crocuses, the daffodils, the rhododendrons, the pink and white flowering trees are lighting the world with promise but fading so quickly, I worry I’m not paying enough to attention to enjoy them before they’re gone.

But now it’s May. The peas, onions, cilantro, and tat-soi are all planted, and half of my garden bed has been prepared as I wait for some reliably warmer weather to plant the more vulnerable vegetables. A few of the daffodils are still hanging on, while the tulips I planted last year are springing out among the wild violets and dandelions. We’re still getting cold, rainy, weather, but this didn’t stop me from seeking the garden yesterday the minute I felt stuck with a writing project. There is something about feeling the dirt sifting through my fingers that consistently gives me my best writing ideas. My writing/gardening motto: When in doubt, go out!

I didn’t grow up loving gardening. As a NYC girl, I think I was a teenager before I realized that vegetables didn’t come from the supermarket. When I first moved to western Mass. I didn’t really get what the fuss was about when people made a point of proudly showing me their tomatoes.  Yet, gardening is a thing here, so when my downstairs neighbor at the first house we rented long-term said she’d teach me how to garden and we could make one together, I agreed. And fell in love.

Some people find the endless cycle of weeding and digging and mulching and watering a kind of drudgery, but I make sure to stop the minute I get tired of a task–which makes the 30-60 minutes I try to spend each day a joy rather than a chore.

What I love most about gardening is that I have no desire to do it perfectly. Each thing I manage to grow and harvest feels like nothing short of a miracle, even after more than thirty years of experience. If the peas don’t come up, I shrug and re-plant them if it’s not too late in the season, or figure I’ll buy some from a local farmer. Some seasons I’ve replanted cucumbers and zucchini four times before they didn’t wilt or get eaten by animals. While I like to exchange tips with other gardening enthusiasts, I don’t spend any time comparing my gardens to theirs. Really, all I want is to get my hands back into the dirt and dig up some writing revelations as I pull out the stubborn blades of grass. And to jump for joy as I see the asparagus spears poking their heads out of my little plot. And celebrate the delicious mint from last year that’s survived the winter and come again all by itself. Time to make a mojito!

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Vulnerability, Writer’s Block, and Performance Anxiety

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I’ve fallen in love with a new Chopin Nocturne I’m learning, Op. 9, No. 2. There are a few different versions of this on youtube, but my favorite is this one by Tiffany Poon. Sometimes it’s hard to listen to professional pianists play the pieces I’m learning, as they remind me, even after I get the basics down, how far away I am from ever playing with such fluidity and ease.

A friend of mine who is co-authoring a book I’m editing writes about his past experience with writers block: I labored under the mistaken notion that writing was a gift from the muse, he says. You either had that gift or you didn’t–and obviously and sadly, I wasn’t one of the chosen few. This is how I feel about piano, except that when I was a child my parents and extended family led me to believe that because I had perfect pitch, I was one of the chosen few. But I couldn’t actualize “that gift” because my fingers were never as good as my ear, especially in a performance setting. I played exactly one piano recital when I was nine–a special concert for “teachers’ best pupils” in a fancy hall in New York City–and it was an unqualified disaster, as I wrote about in detail in an earlier post: Reframing a Past Mess-Up.

I want to feel that spending the last three years returning to piano, a process that has required not only frequent practicing but also a deep dive into my family history in order to decode and defuse a long line of harmful generational messages, would put me past some of my performance anxiety. However, I don’t play the piano if anyone other than my husband, Shel, is in the house. (And if he went out more, I’d probably wait until he was gone, as well.) Even as I’ve managed to turn the screech of my inner music critic down to a low murmur and generate enjoyment from my own flawed renditions, I’m terrified of anyone else’s judgment. So, it was an odd leap of faith to impulsively ask my visiting younger child, Raf–who is a professional musician, nonetheless–if they wanted to hear this new piece I loved and was in the middle of learning. I could do this–even if it made me more vulnerable, I told myself.

How wrong I was.

Man sitting on a chair covering his ears. Earworm concept, also know as brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome. <a href=”https://depositphotos.com/vector-images/places.html”>Earworm Concept. Man Sitting on a Chair Covering His Ears. – depositphotos.com</a>

Even though I could already play the piece decently with just a few rough spots, knowing Raf was listening made me miss the easy notes as well as the hard ones. My baseline totally fell apart and it seemed to be a matter of chance as to whether I was going to hit the right chords or the wrong ones. Keep playing! I told myself, even as I could barely breathe. Focus on the expression–why you love this piece. Somehow, I managed to finesse the melody, finally landing pianissimo on the last few chords, their soft reverberations calming my shaky insides.

It will be a long time before I do that again, I said to myself. But something had shifted. Unlike the time I was nine, the minute I stood up and walked away from the piano bench, I left the incident behind me. My inner critic didn’t take this little blip as a chance to screech with delight. It stayed at its current murmuring level, which I could easily drown out the next time I tackled the Chopin.

My friend writes about writers’ block, Now I accept without pain that I am a reasonably competent writer. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy the writing I produce. While I prefer to use “aspiring,” rather than “reasonably competent” to describe my musicianship, the last sentence rings true. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy my piano playing. Even if I may not be ready to play for others very often–or at all; for myself, I can play well enough to express what’s in my heart. And in any art we might pursue at whatever level we might be at, that’s what should matter–whether or not we choose to make ourselves vulnerable by sharing.

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Dayeinu

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some of the exercises from Julia Cameron’s classic book, The Artists’ Way. As my children are grown and I’ve been blessed with the luxury of retirement and the ability to structure my “Act III” life to center around creativity, the book doesn’t speak to me as much as it would to those who trying to pull off whatever tiny pieces of life they can from the morass of work and family demands to nurture their creative selves. Yet, I’ve found the process of “morning pages,” (brain-dumping three pages of long-hand uncensored meanderings before I get out of bed in the morning) useful. And I’ve been glad to discover that unloading my mind’s detritus in purposefully pedantic prose hasn’t seemed to affect my ability to write more creatively in other contexts, as I first feared it would. It actually can be liberating to write without worrying about creating flow or metaphor, a clear difference from other stream-of-consciousness prompt writing that I try to load up with gems I can later grow into poems.

I usually end my morning pages with an intention for the day. And while I know that an intention is simply a way of focusing on the day’s array of opportunities, rather than some set of goals I must meet or feel bad about myself for not meeting, the tightrope between goal and intention is a fine line to balance on. In the last few weeks, prepping for Passover (extensive cooking and curating a new Haggadah) along with trying to meet my self-imposed deadline of revising an old novel and submitting it to my publisher have made it difficult to get through my general daily list of writing/revising/submitting poetry or short fiction, playing the piano, taking a walk in the woods, doing a cardio or yoga tape, and meditating–creative and self-care activities that have become essential markers of my day.

Then there are all the other weekly to-dos to fit in: writing political calls-to-action and doing immigration justice work, editing/giving feedback on writing to others, spending time (in person or virtually) with friends I care about, cooking dinner, making sure the house doesn’t fall into utter chaos–and what I call admin: emails to answer, calls and texts to return, bills to pay. The list can be endless.

And, in the last six months, I’ve spent several afternoons each week putting all of this aside to babysit for my grandchild, Manu, which is the best thing of all. In fact, for this moment with Manu, I say what we say every year on Passover, Dayeinu: It would have been enough for us.

Julia Cameron talks about the importance of making dates with your inner artist that are geared solely for playing rather than to get projects done. And in my experience, there is nothing more purely playful as putting your whole self–heart and soul–into the space of a baby newly exploring the world.

So, today, even as I will still stress about being behind on deadlines, intentions, goals, whatever, I will try to remind myself–Dayeinu. Gratitude. It’s all good.

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Who is Your Audience?

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Back when I started teaching business communication and my children were still young, my daughter drew a cartoon picture of me: a frizzy-haired cartoon stick figure with my signature hippie flowered pants and a huge dialogue bubble coming out of my mouth that said, “Who is your audience?”

The picture, a light-hearted attempt at making fun of the teaching adventures and insights I talked about incessantly at the dinner table, lived on the refrigerator for a long time. I wish I still had it, but somewhere along the way, it joined the big compost pile in the sky.

More recently than that, I finally stopped teaching business communication, but the message lives on in my creative life. Every time I write something, I need to think, who is going to read this? Whom do I want to read this? My parents? My children? Other writers in my various circles of creative community? The general public? The literary public? The snotty branch of the literary public? My intimate friends who know and love me, but don’t really know me as a writer? Or is this something I’m writing only for myself that doesn’t really need a home in the wider universe?

Like many, I often feel driven to share my work because I want the affirmation–not so much to be told I’m a good writer, but to know that the reader got whatever important thing I was trying to express. That it mattered. That something I said moved them.

So it can be devastating when that doesn’t happen. Especially when a piece is brand new and I’m high from the excitement of having just birthed it. Later, as I gain perspective and see the piece as a work-in-progress that will likely continue to evolve, I feel more ready to hear whatever comments people might have, even if they didn’t get what I was trying to do (perhaps because I hadn’t really done it yet).

So, I tend to think about levels of audience when deciding to share a piece. The safest places–and pretty much the only places where I share raw work–are my various writing communities, because there’s a sense of all of us being in it together, and often the type of “allowable” comments are set in advance by the norms of the group. Therefore, I know I’m not going to get deluged with negative comments, irrelevant asides about how my experience is like theirs, or grammar corrections,

The least safe places, somewhat surprisingly, are in my close circle of family and friends– partly because their opinion matters too much, and I so desperately want them to grok what I’m saying. When they don’t, I feel crushed. It’s so hard to let go of the time my mother said, Can’t you write about anything other than death? Or when my husband, who usually gets it, reacted to a brand new, raw heavy heartfelt dump by telling me there was a comma missing in the second sentence.

And then there’s the bigger question of when to offer your work to an outside audience, which can set you up for tons of rejection, putting you at risk at denting the foundation of your inner confidence. And even if you’re lucky enough to get something accepted and published, you can end up as fodder for trolls on social media sites or critics who might give your work bad reviews.

If you take this scary plunge into the depths of different on audiences, on whatever level, affirm yourself for being brave. Here’s my brave attempt at recreating that picture from the refrigerator. It’s a good reminder to think about our goals for writing and our reasons for sharing with others.

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Into the Vortex

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I changed some of the paintings in my bedroom a few weeks ago. Now, every morning when I open my eyes, this painting, by my late father-in-law Michihiro Yoshida, is the first thing to greet me.

I love the comfort of the deep blue, as well as the complementary blue/green, the side of the color palette that has always felt most soothing.  And while I’ve had this painting in the house for years, I’ve never looked at it so closely and consistently until I moved it into the bedroom. In addition to taking it in on first waking, I gaze across at it when I’m meditating, and sometimes, when I feel like I’m foaming at the mouth in frustration because whatever I’m trying to write feels like a stuck and hopeless endeavor.

I just gaze into that blue vortex and breathe. The writing may or may not come, but at least I start feeling a little bit calmer. And eventually, as if I’m standing with my toes curled on the cold mossy edge of a pond surrounded by deep green trees, I’m ready to dive in.

The act of writing, especially when we give ourselves permission to speak our truths–whether real or fictionally dressed– is like entering a vortex, a place where we might lose control of the carefully constructed selves we’ve fabricated to present to the unsafe world. Writing is like the cave journey I took a couple of summers ago in Oregon–how we walked down, down, down, the light evaporating into nothing until we were in a place that was so dark, all we could do was hold on to the rope and trust as we continued to take careful steps on the wet stones. And even when we flicked on the flashlight to get our bearings, all we could see were the dimmest of boundaries.

That’s what writing is about: dimming the boundaries; entering the vortex.

And when/if we can do this, or even take a few small steps closer to this state, we can be rewarded, as this painting reminds us, with the whoosh of our words rising out of us like the funnel cloud of eggs bursting forth from the center.

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Writing Retreats: Enforced or Otherwise

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Last Sunday, I had a stuffy nose, and since an out-of-town friend was coming to stay with me, I decided to test for COVID, even though I’d had it a month ago. And WTF, my test was positive! I couldn’t believe it, so I took a second test. Positive again!

So for the past few days (taking isolation seriously in order to try not to give it to my husband) I’ve had an adventure in my room–my own personalized writing retreat.

I love my room, which is where I both sleep and write, and has its own attached bathroom. I usually spend a lot of time here, but somehow it’s different when I know I have to be here, when the rest of the house is off limits except for a few brief masked forays into the kitchen, accompanied by hand-wipes to sanitize everything I might touch.

It’s kind of like facing the terror of the blank page.

After all, there’s nothing here but me, my books, and my computer. And I can only distract myself for so long with email, social media, and Wordle before the real work calls: poems to revise, poems to submit, a knotty novel that needs to be smoothed out, the last round of edits on my short-story collection, this blogging project, posts for Rogan’s list–the Call to Action site I write for (check it out on substack), articles and mailings related to my immigration justice work. In terms of COVID, I feel absolutely fine–healthy enough to write all day.

If only I could.

I’ve generally gotten a good jump start in the morning after a yoga or exercise tape and been able to write until my husband, the saint, brings lunch to the door. Then, a refreshing walk outside, a ritual I’m religious about that’s easy to do in a COVID compliant way in my unpopulated neighborhood. Hell, I even walked in yesterday’s Noreaster! It was, admittedly, unpleasant to forge through the wind with the soggy slush pouring down, but not as unpleasant as it would have been to stay inside all day. And I’m very much looking forward to going outside today when the sun is shining on the snow. The view from the window is already beckoning.

But after my walk, 9 times out of 10, the afternoon doldrums hit, and I don’t want to write a word.

Many people love writing retreats. They feel they get their best work with the quiet and peace of a new environment and uninterrupted time. But I’ve avoided them because to me a retreat means extra pressure on myself to produce. And when I’m in a new environment, I’m drawn to exploring it, rather than sitting somewhere and writing all day. If I’m going to go to Guatemala, I want to spend all my time seeing Guatemala, not a lined page in a notebook or a computer screen.

 

And, as I’m learning, I can’t even write all day in my very familiar bedroom.

But that’s just how I’m wired. If you’re one of those people who thrives from being creative in a place that’s free of daily household stress and chores, go for the retreat. I’d just advise being gentle with yourself on how much you get done.

And if you’re like me, or you can’t afford the luxury of a retreat right now, trust that there are other ways to get into your groove. We can delude ourselves by saying things like “I can’t write unless I have …. things you might not ever have like a cottage by the sea, a week in the woods with a bottle of whiskey, four straight hours of uninterrupted time, etc.

And then you might never write.

It might take a while to figure out how to create optimal writing space with what you do have. And this is going to be different for everyone. I’m looking forward to exploring some ideas in another post, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your comments on what writing conditions work for you.

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A Writer is Someone Who Writes

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One of the most annoying questions people ask me when I say that I’m a writer is, What have you published? While I can counter that parry because I’ve published a lot (two novels from major houses, upcoming short story collection from a smaller press, poetry chapbook, and numerous poems, stories, articles and essays in newspapers and literary journals) I don’t consider myself any more or less of a writer than someone who hasn’t published.

As my writing mentor, the late Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists put it: A writer is someone who writes. Period.

If you are driven to put words on paper to try to make sense of your inner and/or outer worlds, or because there’s something inside you that you are driving to express, you are a writer. And what you have to say matters.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to make the pieces you write more vivid compelling, clear, unique, original, and powerful. When I play the piano, I have no need to be in a musical spotlight, I just want an outlet to express the deep feelings the music holds within. But it’s still important for me to drill and practice so I can do this more effectively. There are many craft elements from conceptualizing a book-length project to writing a perfect sentence that are absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if they take a lifetime to master, or even if we can never fully master them. This likely means that, like me, you may have days or weeks or months of metaphorically banging your head against the wall trying to wrestle your incoherent thoughts into a pattern of words that flows smoothly on the page. That’s what makes you a writer–not whether some public entity casts a yay or nay on whatever you ultimately offer them.

Being published is a choice. (At least, it’s a choice of whether or not you want to try to get your work published.) Some writers might prefer to write only for themselves, or to share with friends and loved ones. And some writers choose to publish themselves–which opens up a whole other set of issues I’ll write about in a future post.  But in the meantime, don’t downgrade yourself if your publishing credentials aren’t as good as you might want them to be. Keep going for that authentic nugget of your own truth and making it sing.

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