How do I know I am a writer when I haven't been writing much (since the pandemic, since November, since 2012, since...)? First, I'm not going to regret the massive pivot I had to make in order to function in my position for pandemic lockdown--being a higher education professor and administrator required quite a pivot. I had to rethink most aspects of my job (and additional duties) due to going virtual. If I wasn't worried, or outright panicked, I wouldn't have been human. I worried about my students, my friends, my family, the world. I honestly didn't feel like writing much during that time.
But I'm coming out of what I'm going to call a multi-year-global-pandemic-intellectual-haze. I took November of 2022 to go full NaNoWriMo (https://nanowrimo.org/), but I didn't write a novel. Instead a dear friend and I dedicated ourselves to writing again--about art, about life, about whatever we wanted--but not writing about writing, not writing about work, and not writing for work. Our goal was to write 50k words in one month, just like the novelists who use this annual event to crank it out, but our focus would be whatever we wanted.
We started prepping in October to develop a series of topics to guide our work--each with our own agenda--but generally calling the month-long writing endeavor: The Mattering Project, writing about what matters the most to each of us. We had determined through conversation and individual brainstorming how we might proceed. We'd each identified time we could write: mornings, lunchtime, nights, weekends, holidays, vacation days. We each planned out a word count we might reasonably shoot for daily or weekly--hoping that 50k words would be the end result.
We did not care if we had a comprehensible whole text as a result of writing--but rather were focused on small texts which could address various interests and might include, really, any genre we felt like tackling on whatever topic we felt would be right. I ended up with short essays (1500 words), found poetry, haiku, longer poetry, a short story, and long essays (3,000+ words).
I set up a series of folders in Gdocs with tentative titles to help me remember what I wanted to write about, but in the end, the folder titles became a found poem themselves as I rarely looked to that initial thinking for inspiration. Instead, I kept a short list in Notes, or on actual paper, of the things sparking my writerly urges. And I wrote. When I had time to write, I picked something from a list (whichever list was handy), and I wrote for as long as I had time. Sometimes it was a half hour before work. Sometimes it was an hour at lunchtime. Sometimes it was several hours at night. Or on a day off it might have been 7-8 hours of playing with words, talking with my writing partner, haunting the internet for information, details, inspiration.
When I finished with a "text" (whatever it was), I assigned a title of some kind (even if unfinished) and dragged it into a folder on Gdocs. Frequently, the texts I created had nothing to do with the titles of the folders on Gdocs, so I just jammed them into folders that sort of fit or seemed to be aligned. And, this is very important:
I NEVER LOOKED BACK.
I kept writing the next time I had a bit of time. I did not re-read previously written texts, unless I had left myself a breadcrumb trail which would lead me to writing more on purpose. For example, the short story took several writing sessions. I say again: I didn't re-read what I had already written. I did not allow myself to obsess over perfect sentence or paragraph structure, word choice, or punctuation--or even overall structure. Screw any kind of structure, I was playing! Instead, I left myself a note in an unfinished text, highlighted in hot pink, about where I needed to pick up and, next time I sat down to write, I'd go on. I then wrote from that point onward. I did spend time editing the short story and a long poem, but other texts, I wrote them, left them, and carried on. I had to do it that way. Too often writers stop being inventive or true to their muse because they fuss over an opening line or how to end a section, or over one line of a poem. No. That isn't my way. Write. Write. Write. Later, then I'll edit. I knew that was going to happen at some point. Write now; edit later.
I ended up, by 30 November 2022, with 51,032 words. I had some finished texts, some nearly finished pieces, some good starts. I started a mash up of love poetry and Clausewitz's On War that I could not finish. That's okay. I needed to get this particular composition into the rotation of my fore-brain again. I'd first wanted to play with On War in 2014, but it wasn't my priority. Then I was distracted by something else, oh, now I remember: my father's Alzheimer's and his death, changing jobs, then: Pandemic. Fast forward to this week: what do I do with this writing now?
March 2023. I just finished a multi-hour collaboration with my partner-in-writing-crime (we'd first written together in 1996). At the end of November 2022, we had hinted that this spring, we'd circle back and take stock. We have now talked through what we want to do with what we've written and how we might do more writing based on what we started. We treated it like a mini-two-person conference. I ended up accounting for all I'd written by creating a Table of Contents which helped me see where I ended up focusing my time, what I created (genres), and what I actually wrote (finished or otherwise). I spent about an hour cranking out a list of all the titles accompanied by a brief statement of what the "thing" is about (death, high fantasy, education) or what it is (essay, poem), and added in footnotes to indicate if a work was incomplete or unfinished and what my intention HAD been or might still be.
Next steps--we've set up lunch time on Fridays going forward to update each other and account for what we've done as writers. Writing what we want for us--not for work, not for others--for me, for her. My intention with all of this was to let the stories bubble up to the surface and see what happened.
As my friend and I know in our bones, over the last couple of decades (or more), we have served as wildly successful guides for other writers, but spent too little time actually doing own own writing (though honestly, it's probably a ton of writing compared to people who don't define themselves as writing professors). We took 8 days in 2007 for ourselves. And other pockets of time now and again. For many years I used to write nearly every day from 4 am-7 am, before my household got started. Because life happens, I didn't sustain my early writing impulses. And one job gave way to another and another and another and sometimes I taught early or taught late or had to travel or had to create a master's degree. I was urgently and decisively productive. It felt great. Mostly.
Besides a semi-weekly Friday lunch touch-base-thing we are doing, I am committed to read and edit or play with what I created. My goal is to publish everything I wrote from this last November, from the 8 days writing retreat from way back when, from all the stolen moments when I was sneaking around creating art despite my often artless work (there is AN art to administration, but that's not what I mean--I mean the Lost Generation creating ART kind of art--the Late Victorians creating art for art's sake--writing what they felt, thought, experienced, saw, short, sweet, epic, little to no second guessing or looking back, with all the dreaming, imagining, expansive, and small). I intend to publish an opus of a kind--a memoiresque work that includes all the genres, that includes a chronicle of my creative work: fiction, non-fiction, and visual art. It will be whatever it is, a Frankenstein's monster of literature, but one that I will not allow to die from lack of love and attention.
I've told students for decades, "you are writer if you write." I write; therefore, I am a writer. It feels great to have recovered this part of who I am: my writerly self. Not the professor, not the administrator, not the tech writer, not the public relations or outreach writer, not the creative writer, but the internal, historical, mind-shattering, emotionally raw writer who writes what she wants because she can.
I am leading myself to a new intellectual space of my own making, for sure of my own choosing. I am the leader I always needed to make this happen. One thing I've learned about writing from watching leaders up close and personal, for years, from studying leadership, from practicing leadership, is that writers need to write and great leaders help writers find the time to write, and great leaders support that work. I am a leader, too. But I KNEW that when I started this essay because I started this essay, I made a decision, I put in the work. What I needed to remind myself of through this writing: I am a writer.
I'm going back to being inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a writer who was so much more important than most modern readers/thinkers/scholars realize, despite everything--being forgotten, being pushed aside, being silenced by a limited canon. This is a portrait of her from the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University in Waco, Texas. (If I ever win a lottery, I'll move to within walking distance of this library and spend the rest of my life doing research in the scholar's room.) Her poetry, in support of the Italian wars of Independence and the Risorgimento, was the topic of my dissertation (so many years ago now). It inspired me that she inserted her voice in politics and war and social justice through her poetry. She was strong and brutal and aggressive in her condemnation of what she felt was wrong and called out those who needed comeuppance: politicians, diplomats, government leaders, artists, military leaders, crossing all borders. Her poetry was read in the Italian parliament. Her poetry was circulated in broadsheets. People actually read her poetry. And when she died in Florence, shops were closed, the route to her final resting place was crowded with onlookers paying respect. And after her death, she lived on as a Poet of the Risorgimento. Her final volume of poetry (1859) also included a poem about the shame of American slavery. What she had planned for the next edition of that volume of poetry was to contain both poetry in support of abolition of slavery but also unification of the North and South of Italy--a topic she knew was becoming more of an issue in the United States as well--North and South at odds, on the brink of war.
Many remember her as the poet who wrote: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." But she also would not let injustice in the world pass her by without comment. She wrote whatever she wanted. And that's how writers should write.
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