Generation

On producing work and seasons of writing

Photo by Demian Tejeda-Benitez on Unsplash

My parents visited Bowling Green last weekend, and, walking along Slippery Elm trail, we saw fields of corn that were either planted for this year’s crop or lying fallow. I realized how little of agriculture I actually know, when my father commented upon the dead stalks in one field, and wondered whether the ground needed to be plowed or have another crop planted over it, if the farmers were resting the soil.

My googling afterwards was not especially conclusive, just a few pages suggesting that the stalks prevent erosion. But in any case, these are the images in my mind as I think about seasons of writing: fields of withered husks and fields with turned over soil and fields with hidden seeds. The flush green stalks that will emerge in July. The way they’ll all look harvested in the fall and buried in snow by winter.

I’d like to think that there is a set rhythm to writing that mirrors the changing seasons and planned rotation of crops, that it follows a predictable pattern of generating and workshopping, resting and editing. But I know better by now.

For me, writing does have seasons, but they come as they will, for unpredictable lengths of time, and you have to take them as you get them—which isn’t to say writing puts you in a passive state, waiting on its whims, but rather that what works for one chapter of life won’t for another, that the space or practices conducive for one project need tweaking for the next, and that many (or most) things are good precisely because they are limited and unsustainable, dependent upon the circumstances of the moment.

Maybe not unlike agriculture then, which follows the predictable rhythm of seasons but is unpredictable in so many other ways.

The conditions are rarely expected, ideal.

Dormant writing

There’s an essay I’ve been trying to write for a couple of years now, on narratives of pain, that I’ve never managed to get right. I was working on it last spring, the notes written on the window of my office, when my professor stopped by and read them, then recommended Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain. I had been thinking about my experiences with endometriosis, about questions of narrative perspective and time, about how a Catholic framework of suffering would map onto any of this. The window, though, contained little of my own thoughts, and was mostly a messy web of quotes: I had started trying to write a contained piece on chronic, physical pain, drawing from Meaghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, but I kept picking up pieces that touched on narrative through other types of pain (acute pain, psychological pain), so I wasn’t sure whether any of the pieces really made sense together any more. I can only imagine what it must have looked like to my professor, but the Scarry recommendation was a good one, a book that I started and meant to finish reading last summer, before (irony or ironies) I gave myself a concussion and halted my writing plans, then narrowed them to only the most essential.

I haven’t gotten back to the essay, and I feel, if anything, as though the topic has become more unwieldy and less appealing in the intervening time as I’ve found myself confronted with pain in a new form. I’ve become less and less certain what, exactly, we mean by that word pain, a condition I wouldn’t actually claim to have been in this year, not really, but that I’ve been asked to account for nonethess, numbering my days by it on a calendar where I rank my headaches 1-10, an imperfect system that works only when I don’t think too hard about it or try to reconcile the scale with other, realer types of pain. I’ve decided to think of it as a closed system, meaningful only in relation to itself. A 4 headache on the calendar relates to a 6 headache on the calendar, but those numbers mean nothing in relation to other conditions, not even to the headaches of other people. My own headaches might all be gradations of 2 and I’d never know.

And so the essay remains in a state of limbo, not written because within the experience of (for lack of a better word) pain, narration of that pain is difficult. It’s a truism of any type of memoir, really, that you need the distance of time to make sense of it, but sociologist Arthur Frank makes this point in particular with regards to illness, describing the story-telling from within it as a “chaos narrative.” O’Rourke, in her discussion of Frank, notes that “When you get seriously ill. . . your sense of story is disrupted.”¹ The post-concussion migraines I have are not serious illness, but they are, without a doubt, disruptive, literally and and narratively. And so the essay remains shelved.

I didn’t plan to let the essay rest this long, and I have no idea if or when I’ll come back to it. But I’ve felt, sometimes, this year, perhaps (not to lean on the image too hard), that the essay exists as a field I’ve planted over, as something that maybe doesn’t need to be completed itself but needed to be drafted for other things to come out of it. Perhaps it was just ground for working out thoughts about narrative difficulty; perhaps it was a place to prepare material better suited, in the end, for poems and fiction than an essay—an essay that required a thesis I never could find.

Seeds

There’s another kind of dormancy too, a chosen one—letting projects go and letting them lay to the side for a time.²

I’ve been spending the past two months allowing my thesis to do just that, and in the space it has left, I’ve been writing more new pieces than I have in a long time.

It started with the poets in my MFA program allowing me to insert myself into a month-long challenge they’d set: writing a poem a day for the month of April, national poetry month. The simple practice of this—one poem, each day, posted to a channel on discord—shifted me profoundly out of novel-writing. We read each others’ poems, gave brief, encouraging comments on our favorite lines, and kept writing. The difficulty of writing something new, every day, forced a kind of stretching of the imagination—and also allowed me to let go of an impossible ideal. It forced me to try things that might be silly or bad or rushed.

I found myself reaching for ideas at work, writing about the mop that busted while I was closing one night and asking my coworkers for words that I had to incorporate into the poem that day. Midway through the month, out of ideas, I spent some time writing from the perspective of Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, imagining her in various modern contexts. I went into the corners of memory, wandering back down the Camino de Santiago.

The point was not that everything was good (it wasn’t) or even that most of it was good (it wasn’t) but that the daily practice worked a kind of creative muscle, a kind of attention.

I also found the solitary act of writing moving towards the communal. This happened not just within the discord channel, but outside of it too: between myself and the poets, but also between myself and my coworkers at the brewery, as I spoke to them about the poems that came out of their words, and as a few of them began talking to me about their writing too.

When the month was up, I wanted more, and the fiction writers wanted in, so we decided to try something similar for the month of May, writing a microfiction (fiction under 300 words) or the opening scene of a longer piece. We created a new discord channel, inviting some of the poets to join us.

We’re nearing the end of this challenge now, and I feel, simultaneously, ready to be done and sad to finish. I’m a bit burned out, in need of a rest from this kind of pace. But I’m also already regretting the end of it. I’ve loved regularly reading one another’s work, knowing that each day I’ll write something short that someone else will read and respond to as well.

There’s been something exhilarating about this time, to feel so alive with ideas, to think, some nights, that I have nothing in me, and then to find a story or poem surprisingly there. Sometimes the ones that I think are the worst grow on me over time. Sometimes the ones I think are good diminish after a week or so.

The point of these challenges is not for them to be indefinite. There’s a natural end to this season, just as there was a gratuitous, natural start to it.

And, in its wake, other seasons have presented themselves: An old friend from South Bend called, asking to exchange writing again. There are ongoing workshops in Bowling Green and over Zoom. And, while most of the pieces from May are complete pieces, microfiction or flash that stand alone, a few are the starts of longer stories that I’m eager to sink into and spend some time drafting at length.

One, currently titled “July,” is, bizarrely, stolen from a story I wrote a decade ago, the plot of which I’ve mostly forgotten but that had something to do with cornfields and humid nights and longing. I didn’t look back at it when I wrote this version, but the opening scene and the first sentence, the voice, stayed in my mind all these years. It came floating back to me late one night, several weeks into the microfiction challenge, as I was searching for something, anything to put on the page. And this was what my imagination found: not something new, but something quite old, that felt somehow fresh, something looking for another life.

I had to think about it later, what it had been. I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, that the story was one I included in my first MFA application. A short story I worked over several times, a dramatic, angsty one that was never fully realized.

But now the voice, which had been sitting untouched for so long, is back on the page, still full of drama and angst—but maybe I’ll know better how to wield it this time.

---

The broader point I’d like to make, outside of my own particularities, is about the way in which seasons such as these can present themselves. It’s not a matter (as some of my creative writing students wanted to know, last fall) of “waiting for inspiration to strike” but rather of taking chances as they arise, accepting that sometimes a story will come in a flash and sometimes it will take years and sometimes the thing you think you are going to be working on is not the thing you end up doing at all.

My experiences with recurrent pain and prolonged injury (or whatever these things shoud be called) have, in many ways, conditioned me to this way of thinking. The cyclical nature of endometriosis, and its unpredictability—fine some months and not-so others—means that I loosened my hold on a fixed routine years ago, accepting that it was better to adapt my activity to my body’s capabilities than run against them. The same, I’ve found, has been true of post-concussion syndrome this year, in which my head has become weirdly attuned to the weather. I can wake up clear in the morning, capable, in recent weeks, of a good run and quick thought under blue skies, and, then, as a pressure system moves in, become suddenly muddled and dull, as though the clouds have built themselves inside my brain and eyes.

All of which means: I write when I can, when I’m clearest, because I don’t know if it’ll be the same later that day or that week or that month. I try not to do this with a sense of frenzy or doom, try not to think of it as fleeting, try, insead, to think of it as small offerings of time.

Regardless of health or wellness, I think this is often the case for writers: writing fits between a full work schedule and the day’s minutiae; it intersects with all the other thoughts running through the brain. Writing is the thing those of us who write are always wanting to do and then (often) struggling to do when we can; it is the thing that feels like it won’t possibly come, and then suddenly, strangely (sometimes) it does. What a thorny, odd little gift.

1. O’Rourke, Meaghan. The Invisible Kingdom. Narrated by Meaghan O’Rourke. Penguin Audio, 2022. Audiobook.

2. As I was looking back to link to an earlier post on having a “dormant season” a few years ago, I realized that I started working on the essay about narrative and pain during a similar season to my current one, just after I finished drafting a novel. I didn’t reread the post until I finished this one, but the language is a strikingly similar in parts, though my writing practices were quite different.