The last time I
was introduced to a group of new people, it was by a classmate secure enough in
herself to admit to having a friend closer to her mom’s age than her own. She
went over my bio for the beautiful young people crowded around a table in a
small Korean pub in arty inner Edmonton—three novels, five sons, PhD student,
China, blah, blah—and I made it weirder by shaking my head and saying, “No,
stop. It’s not true, none of it’s true.”
It is my real
bio, one that usually provokes cringe-y but polite and perfectly reasonable
follow up questions about how I can do those things all at the same time. These
questions are seldom meant maliciously. I know that and try not to let them
smack me down, but they often sound to prickly me like a challenge, an audit.
Let’s see your logbook, ya big phony. Look, the fact is, except for where it
mentions a few awards, my bio never claims I’m any good at the things I do.
Living the way I do means being bad at stuff. Achievements and good habits many
people have perfected by the time they’re my age either aren’t on my schedule
or appear there only in half-butt messes. Let’s just say, thank goodness for
pre-fab Pillsbury cookie-dough-in-a-tube and kids who are precocious with
kitchen appliances.
But beyond the
mother-student-artist-daughter-friend guilt issues I drag behind me into small
talk, there is a real, logistical question here, the one people have actually
asked: where does the time for writing come from? What, as rob’s blog series
asks, is my writing day?
All that stuff
about writing as a daily way of life, a regular routine, in the same cozy
place, when the sunlight is coming through the window just so—if that’s not
you, go ahead and scrap all of that. If you’re like me, writing time is a
season, like in that old Byrds song on the cassette tape in my parents’ car,
with the “turn, turn, turn” and the rest of the lyrics lifted from somewhere
deep in the Old Testament.
“A time to
plant, a time to reap…a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones
together.”
When I’m
writing, I’m in a season of casting away stones. What I have seen, felt, heard,
imagined is set loose, tossed into the open, raked out and cobbled into a form,
a path that can be traveled by other people, readers. Writing season is a
frantic time, no moderation, no routine, no discipline. It usually happens in
the summer when my children’s school schedule is not pounding out a rhythm for
me to march against. It’s a season of sleeping 3 ½ to 4 hours a night. I’ll try
to go to bed, just to be sociable, to maintain a marriage, but then I’ll lie in
the dark, knowing the only two choices I really have are to write or to lie
awake thinking about what I wish I was writing.
My husband doesn’t stir when I leave to sit at the desk in my laundry
room. He might notice I’m gone and come find me to make sure I’m not fighting a
burglar or cleaning up someone’s vomit. Otherwise, he leaves me to it. Writing
season doesn’t last long but while it’s on, it’s a mania—productive, tolerable
but still a mania. My nurse sister says I could probably get a prescription to
fix it.
No thanks.
Currently, I am
in a season of gathering stones together. I am in a season of reading. This is
the phase of my doctoral studies where I prepare to write comprehensive exams
to prove myself knowledgeable enough to become the kind of doctor who can
rescue people hemorrhaging comparative literature. It is a cold and quiet
season—a winter. There are no classes, no teaching assignments, just me, some
snacks, and the sixty-one books I will be tested on. This season is not a
mania, but a slog. Two-thirds of the way through my PhD reading list, I
realized something. If I was going to appreciate any more of what I was
reading, if I was going to gather any more stones to grind away in my poor
brain, I needed to cast a few stones away. I needed to take a few minutes now
and then, even in the winter, to write something.
There was no
time for anything in excess of my PhD work so I found ways to write within that
scope. Translation is creative rewriting and the subject of my studies. Of
course, I can’t write about translation theory without translating anything so
I reworked a few excerpts from canonical modern Chinese literature that I’ve
never seen translated into English to my satisfaction.
Even the
creative outlet of translation wasn’t enough. I ducked into my desk drawer and
found the notebook I had been keeping while studying in China last summer.
“Listen to your story” it says in dubious English on the foot of each blank,
lined page. The notebook began as a personal journal, another white-lady travel
memoir, but as I add to it now, my research, my reading list, mobilizes my idle
reflections on that time abroad into something more. The notebook is the same
kind of creative nonfiction I’ve written for years, but it feels different.
I’ve never cast away stones like these before. Maybe the notebook will become
an appendix to my dissertation, read by me and three or four other people
obliged to by their academic duties. Or maybe it will develop into a fully
realized manuscript I don’t yet understand. Perhaps all it will ever do is
sustain me through this dull, difficult winter season. I write on, in fits,
after 2am, by the light of a laundry room lamp, even on school nights, waiting
for summer.
Jennifer Quist
is a writer, critic, student, cry baby, and author of Love Letters of the
Angels of Death (2013), Sistering (2015), and the newly released The Apocalypse
of Morgan Turner (2018). After careers in social research, journalism, and
stay-at-home-mothering, she is now studies as a graduate student in Comparative
Literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
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