Since my father died in early March, my writing has gone from a fairly steady stream to mostly drought with an an occasional faucet drip. I’ve told myself this is okay. It’s hard to write when your mind is fogged in by grief–hard to focus on anything. And when my attention wasn’t focused on my own personal loss, the onslaught of news–particularly the kidnapping and forced disappearance of people off our city streets and reports of humanitarian aid being blocked for the sick and starving in Gaza–has generated a lot of tears, but not too many new words.

Still, like the trouper I am, I’ve kept at it, sitting down at the prescribed moments in my schedule to write, but mostly using the time to send things to journals, which did involve some occasional tweaking, but mostly felt like dropping in on my work for a brief visit, rather than living with it.

However, yesterday I received a gift that might have shifted things.

If you subscribe to Lori Snyder’s Substack, Splendid Mola, you, too, can receive a 5-minute Writers Happiness Exercise delivered to your inbox every Tuesday. This one invited people to “Set the Thermostat for your Heart” by reframing negative stories into positive ones. We were asked to take 30 seconds to focus on one thing that was important in our lives–which could be writing, or could be something else, whatever resonated most at the moment. The next step was to take 3 minutes to brainstorm success stories about what was working well, or–in my case, and perhaps many other people’s cases–what had worked well in the past, even if it wasn’t working well now.

So I chose writing, and this is what I wrote for my brainstorm:

• Regular times with my words
• Lots of publications
• Having the drive to finish and keep going
• Belief that it mattered
• Spiritual uplift and “oomph”
• Wow moments

The final step in the process (1.5 minutes) was to whittle these moments into a one-sentence success story that you can keep telling yourself. Mine was: People care about my message. Lori suggested setting reminders to tell yourself this success story at least once a day, if not more.

But before I even needed to do that, I immediately got the inspiration to pick up with a YA manuscript I’d abandoned after 10,000 words about a neurodiverse middle school girl whose only friend, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, suddenly disappears. Interestingly enough, about an hour after the euphoric high of squeezing out two more pages and the thrill of congratulating myself for inserting new life into what I felt had been a dead project, I started to feel like crap–teary, angry, unfocused. I knew that part of the reason I hadn’t gone back to the book was that I hadn’t yet formulated exactly what had happened to the disappeared girl and her family, and consistently reading real accounts on what happened to similar people for research had become too paralyzing to dive into. But even though I wasn’t writing that part of the book in the smidgeon I drafted yesterday, I realized that being that deep into my words again had brought me to the spiky edge of feelings I might prefer to sidestep. No wonder I’d been playing the avoidance game.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

What I hope will keep me going this time is that little success story sentence–People care about my message–instead of the story I’ve told myself for the last three months, which is, I’m not writing because I’m grieving. Of course I’m still grieving, but the major fog has cleared. And while I still want to honor the truth of the “not writing/grieving story,” it can’t be the final chapter in the book of my life. There’s never been a more important time to believe in happy endings.

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I generally reserve Wednesdays for blogging, because the end of the week is busier, but today, I find myself wondering what to write about. 

It’s likely a spread of the “writer’s block” that has permeated most of the rest of my writing life. It’s more like a silty fog than a blockade on the road. I can still delve into old poems/stories and revise them; I just haven’t been able to generate anything new that feels worth keeping.  

So instead of writing, I’ve been using the time to pour through my lists of submission opportunities, dragging out poems and stories, reading them through, working on a few and then putting things together in batches to send on Submittable. This is not terrible. I’m still spending time with my words; I’m just not birthing new ones.  But I’m missing the thrill of the generative process, saying something that feels important and urgent in the moment–something that matters.

I’m pretty sure the reason I’m feeling blocked is that I just don’t want to access the deep feelings lurking below the surface–my anger, fear and despair at all that’s happening in the world, tinted with the residue of grief from my father’s recent death. It’s not even that I’m feeling a need to write directly about these things, but to write anything of substance still requires a journey outside the carefully constructed contours of my world that I’ve struggled to hold front and center–even as I feel gratitude for having the reassurance of that world: the smiling greenery, the flowering trees, my friends and family, financial and food security.

Today, in writing group, a quote from Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel James, a brilliant and poignant retelling of Huck Finn from the enslaved character Jim’s point of view:

I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it. 

And I realized that somehow I need to befriend my anger, my sadness, rather than keep it as a barely visible apparition on the other side of the fog. And then, simply brace myself, as the dam erupts, letting the rush of water and words spew forward.

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Seven summers ago I took a canoe trip in the boundary waters in northern Minnesota, a state that seems to have found its way into the spotlight with the selection of its Governor Tim Walz for Vice President on the Democratic ticket.

For days we paddled in a quiet dreamscape, rarely seeing another canoe. No Google Maps here. To get from lake to lake, you needed to consult a large laminated map, where the portage spots were little dots that you needed to approximate by looking at the shape of the lake, the shape of the map, the shape of the lake, back and forth until you spotted it…a small break in the tree-line that just possibly could be a path to the next lake.

We discovered the hard way that once we docked the boat, it was a  good idea to take a few steps down the path to make sure it really was a path before carrying the canoe and all our heavy gear. We had a few false starts and a few longer-than-expected portages where I began to wonder if I was on a canoeing trip or a hiking trip that involved carrying canoes.

But, on the whole, things went smoothly–until the last night, where all the campsites on the lake we planned to stop at were full. So even though it was late and we were tired, we portaged to the next lake–where there were still no empty campsites.

“Why don’t we ask someone if they’re willing to share,” I suggested. The areas marked for camping were huge… big enough for many tents. As a New Yorker used to crowds and small spaces, that seemed like the obvious solution. But my companions–all Minnesota born and bred–were not as wild about the idea of intruding on other people.

So we went on to the next lake. The campsites were still full. And it was getting dark.

Finally, we asked a nice family if we could share, and chatted with them a bit before braving the swarms of dusk-ruling mosquitoes as we quickly put up our tents and cached our food.

The mosquitoes were so bad that my sister-in-law hung a mosquito net over the “outhouse” (i.e. stand-alone toilet). It felt like a little boudoir. Still the goal was no liquids after sundown–get into your tent, and try not to have to come out and pee until morning.

I started thinking about this trip again several days ago–before all the Tim Walz hoopla, especially the challenge of finding those hidden portage paths. Because lately a lot of my writing life feels like I’m circling around the lake, unsure of where the exits are that will take me to the next step on my journey.

Each day I consider three projects that all will require some heavy-lifting: a revision of my piano memoir to potentially make it more “prescriptive,” a YA novel that I seemed to have sputtered to a halt on, and a new collection of poems that needs polishing and shaping, as well as some more overall conceptualization. Instead of diving into any of them, I’ve done some minor picking away, and then mostly pivoted to revising individual poems (not necessarily in the collection), sending out submissions, engaging in small social media marketing, and writing blog posts–haha! Then I’ve spent the rest of the day in the garden picking string beans and cherry tomatoes, pulling weeds, and trying to make space among the overgrown beds of irises and lambs ears. My shoulders are aching!

But my mind’s eye is on the memory of those small breaks in the bushes of the boundary waters, because I know that eventually I WILL find the right path to the next lake with all of these projects.

In the meantime, LFG Walz & Harris!

***

For anyone interested, I had a poem about this trip, Lessons in Portaging, published in What Rough Beast, which was a daily on-line publication of resistance-oriented poems from the years of He-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named. We’re NOT going back! (Another writers block activity I’ve been doing is writing letters and postcards.)

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