If Ezekiel could see it, why not me

(A Chinese dwarf, courtesy of the Met; my alter ego) As a follow-up to my August 4 posting, I’ve done it, revisited my not-yet-published fiction. Deleted: several paragraphs on what a dumb schmuck I am. Yesterday I submitted one of the revived stories to a contest and charged the fee. Thank you, Chase. On the 21st of I sent off another of these revived stories. Not for a contest but there’s money if they take it. Two stories now out there, waiting. Last month I pulled together a novella I’d started again years ago. Found a reader who has a great eye. So now it’s ready to go asking for what it's worth. It's a delight. Two stories and a novella. Then a novel is collecting dust, all the dust there is in my Cloud. The one solid piece of advice I was given in grad school was: Leave New York. I don't belong here. I never have. I wonder if I'd feel better about my work if I'd moved. I'll be back to this blog in September. Ezekiel? Read the skies. Was he in pain?

Words and their heftier cousins...invited to the writing party

 

You tell me.

Reviving drafts of unfinished short stories which is proving to be enormously rewarding. And by rewarding I mean I'm diggin' the words. The current drafts are just that - fiction that's unfinished or finished but not polished. Stores not new to the party, such as the writing party is. Well, obviously the cellar's been dug and the foundation laid so there's that. Yeah. Stop. Okay.

I haven't sent one of the previously unpublished (and now reworked) stories out yet, mainly because there are few and when the few are gone ... girl, they'll be gone. They'll be gone, girl.

We're talking two or three new stories one of which is novella-like. It's like a novella because it is one.

Some days I am up against depression. It throws me to the ground and holds me down with vicious glee. The counteractive to depression is joy.

Repeat: The counteractive is joy. Words and their heftier cousins, sentences, are joy. New and reworked and working on reworking. Joy. Sarah Sarai 8/4/22

a hefty cousin

Writing in Response to the Times Because the Times Are Demanding

From Askatechteacher.com

It's good that literary outlets are soliciting responses from writers and artists, responses to the strange world we are now in. It is safe to assume that The New Yorker and The Guardian, among others of the more elite venues, are paying their contributors for quickly penning essays and poems about the post-election prospects for a safe world.

Four nonprofit journals have asked for my contribution, and yes, I'm flattered, but also not unaware that my writing will be without financial recompense, I am being asked to add nuance to the nightmare for free.  Of course everything I write I write for free. This model is wrong. But so it a Trump presidency, wrong and a nightmare, Trump in the White House, and even worse, Trump in Trump Tower, making traffic in New York City come to a stop.

Yesterday I wrote my first draft of a prose poem and I will begin work on the other three responses. Partly because being encouraged to think quick and write quick is good practice. Many many artists do so while I mull, believing, me being the believinger, it takes time for the dust to settle and ideas to shape into full-on essays. But it (it?) shouldn't have to and in my case, it won't.

I began writing this blog posting with some resentment, but have written my way out of my resentment, aha!, a model, a lesson, that I can write my way out of resentment and into prose and poetry that will assist myself and others to process what befell and what is to befall us. And not just process, but resist, impact, help rework into policies less ugly than our ugliest nightmares. But if processing the nightmare is all I accomplish, that will be enough. I know I need help making sense of the spectacle of undemocracy.

You Open to the World ("you" vs "I" in a poem)

I'm working on a new poem.  It's a mystery how it came into life although the midwife is enough gifted and magically so, it's a mystery why I say it's a mystery.

Second poem in a row I've opened a collection of Borges' poems and found a word to start me. When you think of Borges, with his bottomless knowledge of myth and bottomless well of mythical creation, it may seem a poor reflection on duncehead simple-minded me that the word was, in fact, "myth."  But there you have it. When a girl is starting a new poem, she ingests the sure witchery without looking back, the sure transformation from emotion to word with gratitude and unquestioning acceptance. 

I began:

Myth is the man with the hook
cramped on the door handle of
my family's red Rambler.  Seems
I'm about to leak the hue's variant,
a worser rose oxidized in
Mulholland's moist night air.

The poem moves on to the hereafter and the here and now.  Writing some days later, some drafts later, I realized that what satisfied me most about the poem--it's obvious hint of self-revelation--worked against the poem opening to the universal and becoming more than confessional. So (with the second stanza added here) I changed pronouns:

Myth is the man with his hook
cramped on the door handle of
your family's red Rambler. 
Seems you're about to leak the hue's
variant, a worser rose oxidized in
Mulholland's moist night air.

Your death will be a mystery because
you don't drive on Mulholland at night.

As a reader I'm now more excited about the poem, where it's heading.  I have a tingling sense of participation.  Granted, I'm easy, a willing participant, happy to be suspended in disbelief, more so after the change because I'm a "you."

This poem, currently "Poem for Mr. Sage," weaves death, the caring and uncaring universe, kindness, callousness, connection, family, a lover.  I think it does, anyway.  I believe the poem stands a better chance of being what I just promised it was, with the pronoun substitution.  YOU, dear reader, are invited in through more stanzas, more transformation.

And for today, I am saved-er; when one job ends another looms; writing

I'm going to start with a post script. Using a Homer Simpson illustration may just undermine any attempt at seriousness here.  Oh well.  Here goes.

There is space in my head today, the kind of space a westerner appreciates, with sweeps of sky thinning into infinite firmament, mountain ranges on the horizon, shrubs, the many passions of dirt..

One job ended. It had been a long spell of databasing and so much information my brain rearranged itself. That's okay. It's malleable, my brain is. Further arrangements can be made and the rearrangement isn't so bad.  I felt its impact a few weeks ago when I wrote a few drafts.  Not so later with a different draft but any influence on a poem is if not good, then at least worth consideration and evaluation. 

Makes me wonder, did driving myself so much for these past few months open a few new passageways, block a door or two, narrow a circuit?  Does the new wallpaper work for me or doesn't it.  Yeah, I'm being abstract but then I'm not saying so much that detail is called for.

Only four hours of work today.  A full half-day vacation--time to detox or adjust as if I just stepped off a cross-country flight and am vibrating in solidarity with the airplane. 

Something new on Monday. And creation this weekend. Energy's being lowered like stars onto a stage. Everything's a prop. Every prop serves.

Where to write? At work, with speed and subterfuge.

**No lambs harmed.

I do the work for which I'm hired. A jacket (or "jacket" since it's rectangular, plastic, flat) is placed in my hands and I study every word and image; I evaluate spacing; content; the overall look of an ad or brochure or whatever.  I am a good copyeditor, editor, proofreader and rewriter.

But there are lulls in the workload, and while I'm not going to flourish a feather pen from my pack, adjust my velvet cap or post "Room of One's Own" on the office door, I can "sneak in" writing time. Legitimately. But always with a bit of guilt.

So what.  Guilt doesn't harm a first draft, which can be massively sloppy and incomplete. The point is to get the blood roaring, wake the dragon, blow on the live spark. Once an idea starts to show itself it wants all of itself to be shown and will summon the artist in more legitimate moments of repose to give it its due, to refine and whittle the first draft over and over and over and over.

Sometimes I'm settled in an individual office rather than a cubicle. Because everyone looks busy at a keyboard I am able to hide writing, though for extra insurance use the acting exercise of memory retrieval. Recently the memory I retrieved was of Googling a recipe. I was specific. Looking in later, one of the kids in Traffic might have asked, How was the rack-of-lamb with a persillade of olive oil, garlic cloves, smoked paprika and whole rye bread crumbs?

I thought parts of the above paragraph were voices crying out in the wilderness of a borrowed office, but I lopped them off the poem, many drafts later (writing at home). I let the poem drift.  

It can be helpful, in fact, to force myself to thunder out a draft while at a keyboard at a job because speed and subterfuge numb my conscious mind and the first draft may be usable (as a first draft). What about you?  Do you write at work?  Where do you write? 

**re: the lamb. I eat very little meat and don't cook it at home. Little Lamb, who made thee?

I'm Writing Faster (Redux): Release perfectionism

Grow a pair [of patron saints or spirit guides or good flesh & blood critics or muses or . . .].

To follow up on my posting of Saturday (I'm Writing Faster: The Force That Won't Take No for an Answer), my epic outburst  --epic for Sarah Sarai-- of fiction began when I let go.

I had decided to add my two novellas to my short story line-up and so hadr to complete the two novellas, both of which had been hanging around for years because I was unconvinced they were ready to go into the world. Thank all creatures of Heaven I didn't have children! They'd be forty years-old and living on cots in my kitchen!

Who ever knows. Maybe the novellas are still unready, or never will be but each made a good case for its adulthood and maturity. I pushed myself to make decisions about characters and situations and folded the novellas into story collections; each  (A Vote for Ross Perot and From the One Side of Heaven) is the finale of its own (titular) story collection (which I submit when there is opportunity).

Please understand. My reason for writing today's posting is to encourage you: Let go of perfectionism. Grow a pair [of patron saints or spirit guides or good flesh & blood critics or muses or . . .]. Yes, I was working on a novel, those novellas and touching up this or that story, but fact is I generated only a few new stories in the past ten or so years. Yes, I wrote poetry, and as some of you will understand, Poetry Saves Lives. The Future Is Happy (see Tab on this blog). Still.

My hope is to step up the encouragement and advice here. To help. To be of service. My list of complaints about the poetry world, the literary world, academia, politics, institutions and Times Square at rush hour defines endless and eternal.  So what.

Please feel free to backchannel or post a question about writing.  I'm not able to fully change my cranky nature; even so I can help you.

Keep writing.

Fiction and Frustration: The writing process, unemployment, e-mails.

Roman Verostko "Genesis"

On the one hand, my friends, I am not getting enough freelance work and am scared about my future plans. Well, there is only one plan right now, to hold onto my rent-stabilized apartment. So I look for work but am seduced--or allow myself, or pretend nothing is going to work out so I might as well. . .--by writing.

Case in point:  Monday I worked in an ad agency from two to ten (afternoon to evening), copyediting and proofreading. The flow was steady. I earned my money and return tomorrow, Friday. In between?

Tuesday morning I did the usual coffee drinking, NPR listening, moments of thoughtfulness, and started to "feel," for me a dangerous activity AT TIMES. This kind of "feeling," depressive, was the enemy for years.  I thought it couldn't be battled.

A friend of mine once  joked with me that we could have written a novel or two (or a year's worth of stand-up routines in her case) in the time we spent having feelings.

Tuesday as feelings descended I thought of a different friend, T. A month ago I realized I'd fallen back on my lazy non-writing ways and asked T. if I could email every day, for a while, to report. Five minutes. Two hours. Edited. Wrote. Like that. T.'s a good, as in goooood, writer, with a day job and a nice flow of output.

Soon after I email T. a responsive note appears with his output for the day. I hadn't planned on that part of the exchange, initially, and was, at first, only begrudgingly willing (or able) to read of T.'s work. I did the emails for a month last year with another writer who merely responded: Great work!

More and more, however, I knew T.'s output to be inspiration. On Tuesday when I was headed for that morass of depressive nihilistic thinking, I remembered T. Did I want to email "no work, I had to flagellate"? 

So I wrote a draft of a new story on Tuesday. I was at it (maniacally so) for five hours. I haven't yet taken a look at what I wrote--the steam of intensity is still too hot to allow approach--but whatever I wrote needed expression if only so it could be cleared and another story written. (Not saying it isn't good--I've written three new short stories this year and I'm happy with all three.) Just saying, well, who knows.

Time off, as in unemployed, makes my writing richer. Not being alone with my writing helps; definitely helps.  (I'm not a workshop person.) The balance between work and writing remains unsteady.

Write it out, girl: just the fax; incest

Mid-1999, I was working for the great Condé Nast empire. At that point I may have still have freelance. My time there was short as it usually is for me. The thing is, that as I stood at the fax machine, punching in numbers to send some document to H.R.--I was not in the great Time Square building where shoulders could brush against Anna Wintour's, but a pale office suite on Madison Avenue--it hit me.

My body registered the strangest and most unexpected muscle memory of incest. Me being as verbal as I am, I received a telegraph from my corpus reading something like: There's a reason you were so remarkably unhappy a teen.

Except it was probably more like the neon extravaganzas up and down Broadway, flashing images. In my case they were not of the latest Hollywood stars.

Taking the long view, which I am able to do spot on (I am supremely logical too often), I wasn't surprised. My weird ups and downs and other various of my emotional states paralleled those I'd read were the case for women who'd been ill-used by family. It made sense--huh, well I saw that coming--and at the same time I was stunned. Flattened.

I decided to trust my body with what it was telling me--and no more. I wasn't going to point a finger or pretend to know specifics. My body hadn't specified, although my memories begged for a rolling list of credits. Equally and more importantly, I wasn't going to let this bit of information fall back into my body for another slug of years. 1999? Jesus, Lord have mercy. I was 50.

I have experience parenting myself and parented this: Best thing it to tell three friends--and soon. I'm still pretty proud I chose to do that. I had--and have--really trustworthy pals who can hear the worst and not faint. I phoned three of them and described exactly what I felt at the fax machine and why I was telling them.

They heard me.

Of course I couldn't resist the fax/facts connection. Even as the first buzz of memory came to me, I thought of Jack Webb, Dragnet, Just the facts, ma'am.

The unpacking of this revelation is the work of a lifetime, conscious or not. In other words, I was unpacking before I could see what was in the suitcase, and once I had access its contents, my unpacking was more useful.

Why tell you this? I am sitting here, reading a novel (Robert Harris' The Ghost, in preparation for the new Polanski movie) (isn't that funny: Polanski, the rascal misuer of young women; sidebar: he should stand trial, though I can never forget what it was like in L.A. during the Sharon Tate murders and trial--Polanski has led a life).

Where was I? Oh, here in this great chair my friend David gave to me (from his living room), with a host of ideas coming to me for possible blog posts, and me pushing them away, preferring not to write. So I have come up with an ultimate tale in the spirit of: Tell it! Say it!

Write, girl. Whether it's about an old difficult memory or a book I'm reading, write, share, there's no reason to keep secrets. Don't wait for some great idea. You already have it. Don't wait.

Note: That's Anna Wintour, up there. I considered using an image of the famous $35 million cafeteria with titanium fixtures, but, hey.