I wake
around 7 am, to my partner reaching over for a kiss before he heads to the winery
he works as a farm manager and beekeeper. I sleep for anywhere from another
hour to another five hours; a hurdle to my writing is my need for seemingly
endless sleep.
On a good
day, an alarm, or the street cleaners propels me out of bed around eight, and I
do my best to resist the urge to check Facebook, Twitter, and email. I am slow
in the mornings. I throw on an old tee shirt and head to our kitschy yellow kitchen
to make some tea, or, if I'm feeling ambitious, brew some coffee. Sometimes I
remember to make breakfast. I stumble into the living room and either sit on
the floor, painting in the sun, or read in my armchair by the window. I usually
do this for an hour or so, or until I remember the coffee or tea growing cold
in the kitchen. If my partner left some jellybeans or chips by the couch I snack
on those and regret it later on. I listen to jazz records or true crime podcasts
in this time, too tired to un-hunch myself from my book or my canvas on the
floor. When I finally have a cup of something warm in my hands (usually
re-heated), I stare out the bay windows at the garden in front of our building,
then at the river across the street, then at the skyscrapers of downtown
Calgary. In the spring, I watch the new blooms and the bees swarming them. I
watch the crows play in the trees. If it is warm, I take an old blanket into
the front garden and lay in the sun. I will half-heartedly read or doodle until
a new flower or an insect piques my interest. I spend a lot of my morning time
chasing slow bees with thimbles of sugar water, trying to revive them. When it
doesn’t work, I collect the dead bodies and put them in a tin. I often scribble
ideas and lines for poems in a notebook or text them to myself while I wait for
the vitamin d to do its trick.
After this
quiet time, I try to get some of the housework out of the way, avoiding folding
the laundry or vacuuming, but always rinsing and drying the recycling and
making sure the wine glasses are clean for dinner. Again, I listen to podcasts
while I tidy the house, sometimes finding myself staring open-mouthed into
space, or rushing to my office to write something down that has struck me as a
detail for a poem. I trim the plants while I listen to gruesome details of
serial killings or the origins of folk tales. When I have opened all of the
windows (not an impressive feat- most of them are so old they don't work) and
watered all the plants, and tidied things enough so that I can focus, I settle
in to work. I will either sprawl out in the living room, covering it with books
and papers, retreat to the bed and type slowly but consistently, or sit in my
office.
I recently
took time off of work to focus on my writing (mainly my MA thesis). For the
last six years, since I began university, I held multiple jobs in addition to
being in school full-time. On top of that, I’ve held committee and volunteer
positions. This break from work and doing a million things at once has been
challenging: on one hand, there are few things better than waking up, making
coffee, and spending an hour either painting or reading before the real work
starts. On the other hand, I am so used to a day where every half hour is
accounted for in my day timer that this change of pace is a shock to the
system. I used to work 6+ days a week, now I work part of three days. Sometimes
the motivation to write is nowhere to be found, and I jump from poetry to
fiction to blogging to editing to ink drawings to mixed media collage to yoga
and back again.
I usually
drift into reading for a bit and then go back to writing, before I go for a
walk or a jog. Our neighbourhood is small, and it reminds me of the small town
I grew up in. To the north are houses and hills, to the south are skyscrapers
and the Bow River. Our neighbour has a fantastic collection of garden gnomes,
and trees are everywhere. There are about four Little Free Libraries that I
frequent on my walks, dropping off and picking up books. I like to wander past
the houses and imagine the lives of people inside. Most of my writing day, in
truth, is spent daydreaming, eavesdropping, and casually spying on the
neighbours.
A
mid-afternoon bath is often when I get the most writing done. I crawl into our
claw foot tub (not as glamorous as you’d think- it is stained in places and the
ceramic is chipped) and place my laptop on the bath shelf my father made for
me. I try to balance all of my “need to” writing with things that want to be
written: for every paragraph of an academic paper I write a few lines of
poetry. For every article or solicited piece I work on a short story. If I’m
stuck I’ll work on Bernstein’s experiments or find something to black out.
Unlike most
writers I know, one of my favourite things to do is edit. I have a massive
document of first drafts of poems on my desktop, and every day I try to fix one
up so that I can add it to the document of poems ready for submission. Perhaps
the only organized part of my life is the way I approach submitting my writing.
I have spreadsheets, folders, lists, and calendars. Submitting and editing feel
like the real work, and after working as an archives assistant this structure
is immensely appealing. My moments of self-doubt are plentiful, but with one
look at my spreadsheet of current submissions know that I am nothing, if not
persistent.
A
writing day doesn’t have to involve sitting in front of the computer for eight
hours. It doesn’t have to be scribbling in a notebook in a busy café. It can be
catching up on sleep when your husband has the kids, so that you have the
energy to spend an hour before bed working on your novel. It can be going for a
run to clear your head so that the endless chatter quiets long enough for your
poetic voice to come through and write a poem. It can be depression chaining
you to your bed and texting yourself an idea for a poem in between naps. It can
be your anxiety forcing you to clean every inch of the house until you are
frantically scribbling down an idea that formed in the dish grease splashed up
your arms.
A
writing day, to me, is any day that I persist and any day that I remain
curious. A writing day is any day that I assert to myself or the world (in
whatever way that may be) that I exist and that my voice matters. A writing day
is any day that I can walk back from the grocery store and stop to admire the
way that tiny white blossoms on ivy look like huge dew drops at 7pm on a dry
day.
Erin
Emily Ann Vance’s work appears in journals such as Contemporary Verse 2 and filling
station. She was a 2017 recipient of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts
Young Artist Prize and a 2018 Finalist for the Alberta Magazine Awards in
Fiction. She has work forthcoming in The
Occulum, Revue Post, and The
Blasted Tree. Find her at www.erinvance.ca and @erinemilyann on instagram and
twitter.
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