Wrestling “time” again this week [1]. I have only myself to blame, climbing into the ring with too many opponents under the guise of some super woman with a cape that’s quickly fraying.
I’ve hit another bad patch of resistance in my writing. These weekly posts are beginning to highlight patterns of behaviour I’m good at ignoring. Example? When creativity becomes difficult, I make myself so busy I can’t face it. Spirals of dark descending and self-loathing [2]. I’m trying to work through it. This is process too.
Deep breath. Look outwards for inspiration and it will find you. Fill you. This week a few superb finds as I let myself fall down the rabbit hole into the warren of the internet:
Brevity’s nonfiction blog [3] featured a most beautiful visual essay created by Nina Gaby. I love how her essay looks on the page with muted pastels and transparent paper bits that make the whole thing feel ephemeral. And I love her sense of humour and play that rolls off the type-written statements like we’re sharing a laugh together. I love that she loves James Brown.
On her own website, a gallery of Nina Gaby’s artwork is well worth the visit: soft folds of porcelain with a variety of media. Inspiring. Gorgeous.
Roving over Nina Gaby’s visual essay, I come across her suggestion #6: Read Brian Doyle’s “Playfullnessless”. So, a few clicks later I’m reading a piece by a writer who always makes me cry and laugh. Brian Doyle passed away (too young!) a few years ago and I discovered it’s possible to mourn the loss of someone you have never met or known in real life. I miss his writings. And here, a piece I hadn’t come across before, fresh and new and fun, published on Welcome Table Press (with several more inspiring works on the essay form).
I start to question why I’m trying (essaying) to write fiction when non-fiction would be so much the better fit for working through my shit. Brian Doyle makes a good case.
And on the Welcome Table Press I follow the link in a red banner on the top of the webpage to (un)common sense, a digital chapbook|for times that try one’s soul. The universe is listening! And I descend into reading…and I’ve moved through an invisible wormhole, from feeling dark to feeling better.
I’m also reading Kyo Maclear’s gorgeous memoir Birds Art Life and it is full of passages I wish I could tear off and eat and embody [4]. Passages like this one:
“I understand. I understand getting stuck. I understand wanting to make a change while circling around the same neural cage. I understand that sometimes, when you are at a stage of life when you have given yourself over to mothering and daughtering and you get to keep very little of yourself, it can be hard to live with open doors. Yet in an effort to hoard solitude and keep people out, there is a risk that all you end up doing is fencing yourself in.”
Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life (page 47)
[1] Can I start a paragraph with a gerund?
[2] annoying analyst notes: don’t worry, not THAT bad. It just feels good to write these lines. A colleague at work suggested it’s the shortening daylight and that I should get a lamp to sit in front of. Good idea…
[3] I regularly read this blog/online lit mag and it’s always fulfilling, inspiring. I suggest subscribing if you don’t already. It’s free!!
[4] inner critic notes: ok, that’s really weird.
Process Peace 