This
early morning hour is the poet’s hour.
My house is shrouded in blue black darkness. I note that my house is the only one in the
neighborhood whose lights are illuminated at this hour, in this storm on a
Sunday morning.
The
sudden descent into autumn offers me the false promise that I suddenly have
more time to write. Such fallacy! By trade, I am a 25-year public high school English
teacher. Not too many weeks ago, another
school year commenced. Summer is a
wildly abundant time to write: No
meetings, alarm clocks, schedules to speak of.
But weekends throughout the school year are especially poignant,
focused. The weather, more extreme; their use and planning, more intentional
and paced.
My
writing room is a sacred, functional, creative space. It overlooks the Pacific Ocean. My neighbors are gracious and allowed me to
have the tall Sitka spruce and yellow cedar limbed to open the view. In this
room, my late husband and I put down a blue pine floor together and stained it
with Minwax, Mosaic Blue. Like me, it
has become scuffed, distressed, worn and ragged around the edges. The room houses my art supplies, rubber and
ink, the poetry books consumed during and since my MFA years. It is filled with raven art, family photos of
our three before we became two, 20 years of We’Moon
datebooks. The windows are filled with
hanging crystals, bells, windchimes.
Prisms catch and dance on sunny days and pattern the floor much like the
rain does the windows now. There are
non-twinkling twinkle lights hanging from the edges of shelving adorned with
broken bits of bright and colorful glass, some of the bulbs are
extinguished. The stout oak desk is
covered with ephemera: washi tape,
oracle cards, stones, beaded doodads, a writing muse of part-raven, part-woman
sculpted and fired of clay, correspondence from friends near and far, the $41 summer
Petro fuel bill, my favorite pens. It is
here I wrote my first collection of poetry, Something
Yet to Be Named (Aldrich Press, 2017), followed shortly thereafter by a
chapbook, What Caught Raven’s Eye (Petroglyph
Press, 2018). It is here, second summer
in the making, that a new collection begins to emerge.
This
morning, the offshore gale settles in, rattles the roof, sneaks in through the gaps
around the door. I pussyfoot down the stairs
so as to not wake my sleeping teen daughter, sidestep the dogs and the cats to French
press the coffee. Candles flickering,
National Public Radio chattering softly against the wind, I mentally assess the
writing to-do’s of the day: Daily
writing (a poem, some journaling), a letter or two, a blurb for a long-distance
poet friend on the cusp of publishing two collections whose titles chase the
colors of red and yellow, a flip and read through the latest issue of Orion, of Slipstream, advancement in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the consideration of a blog update, the cover
reveal of the fall issue of Alaska Women
Speak on various social media platforms.
All
I know is that when I write, I can slip away from one moment’s reality into the
reality of another, the writing craft.
My MacBook Pro is my go-to tool of choice, be it at this desk or what I
call the “thinking chair” in the living room.
Next to the Mac, a softcover, paperbound journal, this one sporting a
moon face. It is a makeshift collector
of writing ideas in which are gathered one-liners, interesting words, informal
research, lines overheard, an occasional phone number or message. In weather nicer than this, I’ll write using
the Notes function on my iPhone while on the go. Sometimes, the app Voice Record Pro as I walk
coastline or trails busting out haiku and tanka that I count out on the fingers
of one hand while recording onto the phone held by the other hand. But those walks won’t happen today, not in
this weather. No, this foul-weathered
day will offer breaks of a different sort:
refill the water bottle, warm up a bowl of chili, play Chuck-It down the
driveway with the dogs for a leg-stretcher, take time to view the patterns and
colors of leaves newly dropped from their trees, load the dishwasher, clean the
bathrooms. These are the bursts of busy
that allow for the breathing space and even inspiration to write beyond without
boundary.
Recently,
I reread a chapter from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing
Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer
Within. The chapter, “Writing as a
Practice” offers insight into Goldberg’s own writing habits, including her
personal goal to finish a notebook a month.
She enters this writing space without regard for margins, expectations
or even traditional form. In turn, this practice offers her a “psychological freedom and permission” to
simply write. In an earlier chapter, she
suggests using inexpensive notebooks, which further allow her greater room to
fill the void with written word, ideas and language traveling the spark of mind
to hand to pen to paper. I eyeball the
stack of my own unfilled journals that reside on the shelf, await their day of
scratch and use. Why not now? Why not give them the chance to join those
already filled stashed away in a storage cubby for a longtime-from-now read, or
a someday bonfire?
As
I mentally checkmark each item off my list for the day, I relish again that it
is the weekend; that in autumn the darkness lingers late into the morning, but
returns again in short hours by late afternoon.
I celebrate my writing space that is one-part eclectic, another magic,
and that even I am learning again how to push life back into the leeway.
Kersten Christianson is a raven-watching,
moon-gazing, Alaskan. When not exploring the summer lands and dark winter of
the Yukon, she lives in Sitka, Alaska. Kersten is the author of two books of
poetry: What Caught Raven’s Eye (Petroglyph Press, 2018) and Something Yet to Be Named (Aldrich
Press, 2017). She is the poetry editor
of the quarterly journal, Alaska Women
Speak, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska
Anchorage. www.kerstenchristianson.com
No comments:
Post a Comment