my (small press) writing day : Julie Larick

 

A good poem starts with a walk, while my day starts with burnt espresso. I generally wake up around 8 (sometimes later) thanks to my luxurious stay-at-home college schedule. I finished the first semester of my freshman year at the College of Wooster on December 7. Still, because of my winter restlessness and deep craving to be occupied every day of my life, I have a few workshop deadlines and literary magazine obligations. After a few too many minutes of Twitter-scrolling, I walk downstairs and make some espresso with oat milk (try it if you haven’t; it’s fantastic). I’m trying to go vegan, but I’m learning that junk foods full of chemicals technically fall under the aforementioned vegan umbrella. Reading during breakfast is a necessity for me right now. Even if it’s a teen romance novel that I enjoyed in middle school, anything to get my eyes off a screen is a blessing. Right now, I’m reading the beautiful Little Fires Everywhere (set in my hometown of little Shaker Heights, OH) by Celeste Ng. Sometimes I’ll watch the birds and critters crowd around the backyard bird feeder, footprinting the snow and fighting over seeds, with the occasional bunny tucked away in the bushes.

I used to have early morning English online classes around 9 AM, but since winter break started, I’ve spent that time sifting through the Submittable Discover page and hunting down workshop opportunities. I have an ever-growing list of writing tasks on my computer, meant to bolster my “career.” Whether it’s researching unrealistic competitions, planning the skeleton of a chapbook, or editing a very rustic short story, I try to complete one realistic task per morning. I also edit and manage the Creative Writing Team at The Incandescent Review, so I often review my daily tasks around 10. We are in the process of selecting poems and short stories for Issue 5, so I read and rate my assigned submissions. Sometimes I send reminders to fellow staff members about upcoming meetings or deadlines. I don’t start writing rough drafts until later in the afternoon (if at all), usually after a winding walk around the neighborhood. Most of my poems and stories are ridden with nature-related metaphors and imagery (despite my utter lack of outdoorsmanship), so I often find inspiration on the lonesome dusk walk. Sometimes the soft wind reminds me of a memory, or a swaying wildflower looks lonely, or my mind trails, and I think of a poignant phrase that later ends up in the dark depths of my Notes app. Recently the sidewalks have been layered with a thick layer of gorgeous brown Ohio slush, so I’ve been relegated inside.

I have written a few poems and short stories I’m proud of this year. Lately, I’ve been writing short, free-form poems, which fall out of my brain in a rush. My latest came from misplaced melancholy that remained from finishing a poignant novel (Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng). The poems are sometimes unruly and always childish, but I am just relieved to get words onto a page. I let the poems bake for a few hours and then return for late-night editing (my favorite). My fellow teen writers and I have formed a symbiotic peer-editing community on Twitter, which has been exponentially helpful for my writing quality. Around 10, I either funnel the poem off to Submittable or crack open Netflix.

I’m exhausted mentally after writing a poem or short story, especially if the subject is emotionally-draining. I’m in bed by 11, either binging a murder mystery show or back on Twitter. But by morning, the murmuring generosity of words and poetry keep me coming back for more.

 

 

Julie Larick is a 17-year-old student and writer living in Shaker Heights, OH. She is an English major and Spanish minor at the College of Wooster. Julie is the creative writing manager for the Incandescent Review and has been published in Kalopsia Literary Journal, Incandescent Review, Teen Voices Media, Lake Erie Ink, and others. She loves to sew and watercolor. Her website is https://julielarickwriting.weebly.com and Twitter is https://twitter.com/crookyshanks.

 

Alice Wickenden : My small press writing day

 

I’ve been waiting about a decade to become a morning person. At first I assumed my need for sleep was just because of puberty. Then because I was an undergraduate with too many deadlines and too many wine-fueled night out. Then because I was depressed. Now, teetotal and comprehensively an adult, I guess I’m just one of those people just need a lot of sleep. Fine. I love sleep. People who don’t like sleep confuse me. People who don’t like pillows confuse me. Sleeping is great.

So on a writing day I wake up, eventually, and then I have to take iron pills for anemia. This is a recent development and it’s horrible: the pills are heavy but also if you drink caffeine with them they don’t really absorb. Which means waiting two hours until I can have a cup of tea or coffee. My flatmate might make a pot and ask me if I want some and then I have to scramble to work out when I can drink it: sure, make some now, I can drink it in... 27 minutes. Those two hours seem like dead time: I usually try and answer any outstanding emails and come up with a to-do list for the day. I love lists... breaking tasks down so you can tick more off... what a feeling.

There are two main spaces in my flat to work: my desk, and the kitchen table. When my partner moved countries he left me the spare monitor and it’s been a revelation, especially for PhD work and revisions. (If you haven’t got one I cannot recommend it highly enough.) Unfortunately my room is also noticeably colder than the rest of the flat, especially in winter, so the payoff for having the second screen to work on is being incredibly cold. As I’m writing this, I’ve got a jumper on underneath my dressing gown which in turn is underneath a blanket. There’s a cherry-stone cushion somewhere too. Sometimes my cat throws herself into the mix. She’s usually somewhere in the room as I write, buried under the duvet with her tail sticking out or sleeping on the floor next to me.

When I was a teenager writing angsty poetry for the first time, I wrote most of it in biro on giant pads of paper. I’d type the ones I liked onto the family laptop, print them off and stick them in a ringbinder: odd mix of analogue and digital technologies. I miss writing by hand but I definitely think that the connection between creativity and creation has moved onto the keyboard for me. I need Word to think through.

I’m very bad with keeping to schedules, although I’d love to be one of those people who can keep emails to one section of the day, writing to another, etc. I tend to write in hugely intense bursts when it comes to prose, whether that’s non-fiction or academic. Poetry is different. Sometimes I do sit down ‘to write a poem’ but usually I’m doing something else when an idea, or line, strikes me, so I’ve got a lot of hasty notes on my phone. Usually when an idea comes, rather than rush to write it down straight away, I work it out in my head a bit: key words or phrases, a sense of the tone. I don’t have a visual imagination at all which probably helps, but it means I don’t ‘see’ the poem: I just... think it.

This means that a writing day doesn’t so much involve writing as it does editing. Are they the same thing? I’m trying to become more rigorous with my editing process, to come back to poems more, to read them out loud, to not be happy with them. I attended a helpful editing session with Will Harris at the Poetry Society recently. (Okay, writing this I thought it was ‘recently’ and then realised it was almost a year ago – the bizarreness of pandemic time.) That was important both for me to think more confidently of myself as a writer, but also in giving me practical tools: changing the tense of a poem to see what happens, that sort of thing. I was always afraid to edit too much, but now I’m like, hey, why not try it out? I’m also becoming happier to just stop when a poem isn’t working for me. And again, the computer saves them all. There’s all sorts of stuff in my ‘In Progress’ folder that maybe one day I’ll come back to. Or maybe not!

Once I’ve stopped working I usually cook dinner with my flatmate and then spend the evening watching a film, or reading, or catching up on the volunteering work I do. I try and read every day – sometimes dipping into things throughout but mostly at night. Novels, essays, poems. I’ve been teaching a first year university course on Poetry this year and it’s been a great chance to revisit some poems and even come across a couple of new ones. Showing students how to read and seeing them get it – it’s a great feeling. At the moment I’m about halfway through Bleak House, and I just read Miles Bradley’s chapbook Emotional Dance Music.

 

 

 

Alice Wickenden is finishing her PhD on Renaissance books in London. She has poems in Anthropocene, Cypress and Coffin Bell and a forthcoming chapbook with Variant Literature called To Fall Fable. In her spare time she volunteers for Abortion Support Network, and reads to her cat.

melanie brannagan frederiksen : my (small press) writing day

What you see is a picture of my desk with about half its usual amount of clutter and chaos. I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point after i finished grad school, i became a person who writes in the mornings. No one is more surprised by this development than i am.

If it's sunny, my study is brightly lit, and the cat meows her way in to sleep in my chair.

Since the pandemic forced the university to limit the amount of on-campus work, my husband is working from home, so my days are not only punctuated by the cat's meow, but by the sound of video meetings (You're on mute. No! Unmute yourself.) and snatched moments of guitar practice.

My actual day starts either when i first wake up (today, at 4:03) or when Andrew brings me a cup of green tea, just after 6:30. We let the cat out and let the cat in, read the news, putter around, pet the cat.

My writing day starts, as it usually does, when i sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee at 8:40. Unusually for this year, which has mostly been spent in the weeds of escalating anxiety, it also starts with a sense of focus and purpose.

I'm editing a long poem that i hope to have ready for submission in the next couple of weeks. This morning, editing has looked like shifting the order of various sections around and then returning half of them to their original position, as well as agonizing over the word fear, which is too banal for the just grew an iceberg the size of Antarctica in my stomach/ doom thundering at my temples/ sand in my mouth feeling that floods me within seconds of tuning into our provincial health officer's daily press conference.

At 10:45, the cat interrupts me and leads me to her next chosen napping spot, where she demands that i scratch her in precisely that way. I spend 10 minutes petting her in the living room before i go back to editing.

After a surprising scramble to download and install the latest version of Zoom, i sit with my second cup of coffee to watch Adam Pottle give a short craft talk about writing violence. I still haven't found the words for my question when the talk and discussion is over, which feels like a missed opportunity.

During my walk, i listen to Robot Rights for a long-term academic collaboration. Whenever i listen either to an audio book or an album while i walk, i tell myself that this is not how poets are supposed to do it. We are not supposed to crave distraction, and yet...

After my walk, around 2:30, i answer email and do whatever administrative tasks are on my calendar. Maybe i'll spend some time on Twitter or reading the news before i curl up with a book. Today, i'm re-reading the opening few pages of Sue Goyette's Anthesis for a multi-genre speculative memoir that's in its early stages, even though i've been working on it for years.

My work day ends like this, taking notes in the margins of other people's words for an hour or two before i make dinner.

My evenings are decidedly not writerly, unless i have a deadline. I'm knitting a (long-overdue) baby blanket, so i work on that while we watch a couple of old episodes of The Great British Baking Show.

 

 

 

melanie brannagan frederiksen is a writer, copyeditor, and critic living in Winnipeg. Her writing has appeared in The Waggle, Prairie Fire, The Winnipeg Free Press, Prairie Books Now, CV2, and GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for our Times. She can be found @shereadswinnipeg on Instagram or @shereadswpg on Twitter.

 

Stephanie King : My Interstitial Writing Day

As another November ends in which I have utterly failed at NaNoWriMo, I find myself looking at others’ word counts piling up and can’t help but ask, “Where do they find the time?”

I worked full-time through college, then worked full-time and taught, then worked full-time and taught and had small children, so for me writing has always had to come in the small pockets of time between everything else.

My writer’s day starts with me on the sofa at 6:30 am, sucking down coffee. If nothing’s gone wrong in the ol’ work email, this might be the first pocket where I find some writing time. Sometimes I’ll remember the hazy thoughts that came to me right before falling asleep and capture them. Other times, I’ll pick up somewhere promising from yesterday’s writing session where I’ve been itching to get back.

If none of that works, and I spend the first hour of my day staring into my coffee cup, then soon the kids are up and it’s a mad dash to get them ready for school. A silver lining during the pandemic is that at least we don’t have to get them out the door, only online.

Once school is underway at 8:30, that’s another transition to work that might offer me some dead spots, but more usually, that’s when I start being on and don’t stop until 2:30. I run an adult education program whose hours overlap with my kids’ school hours, so that’s a lot of Zoom during business hours.

But once the school day is over, another pocket of time might open up. The 3-5 pm range tends to be when the house is in a lull between school and dinner, so I can burn through a lot of words during this time. (I’m writing this right now in that pocket.) Even in the Before Times, that mid-afternoon pocket at work was often a quiet time when I could churn out a few words.

Then it’s dinner and family time, which is a big distraction from writing OOPS I mean a delightful time that I cherish. Usually my kids want to watch some kind of dreadful but informative show on PBS kids, so while they’re learning about wildlife from the Wild Kratts or geography from Carmen Sandiego, I might plug in the noise-canceling headphones and squeeze in a few paragraphs.

If not, then it’s bedtime! An hour given over to reading from some of the hottest new releases for kids or listening to one of my son’s endlessly inventive Pokémon stories (getting into fan-fiction young these days).

After the kids are asleep (or at least pretending to be), then there’s another pocket of potential. On the days when I’m not too exhausted and my husband and I are caught up on the couple of shows we watch, then I might write from 9-10 pm.

The afternoon slot and the post-bedtime slot have both proven themselves to be capable of putting down a fully-formed draft of a flash story, article, or op-ed, while the smaller slots might only be a paragraph or two, or notes on something bigger. Oftentimes, I find inspiration by revisiting a news article or science fact that I bookmarked during my morning new reading (or Twitter scrolling).

None of this matters if it’s the weekend! I take the day off for Shabbat, even though I’m not particularly observant, because sometimes a girl just needs a break. I find that a ritualistically designated day, with hard stops around it, means that you’ll actually unwind and get the rest you need without feeling like you’re “procrastinating” or should be doing something else.

Sundays are almost fully writing or writing-related. I might start the day during the coffee hours read the submission queue for Fractured Lit. Like all time spent reading, I love the way that others’ stories always make me a better writer. Thinking about what pushes a story over the threshold from “that was pretty good” to accepted will have you looking at your own writing with new eyes.

Sunday afternoons are usually given over to writing. Sometimes I’ll swing by a writers’ group like the Barrelhouse Write-In, or take an afternoon workshop. Often, I’ve contemplated telling myself that I’ve signed up for an imaginary workshop and spending those 3-5 pm hours pulling prompts out of a hat.

Then it’s onto another week, and doing it all again! Those minutes pulled between meetings when I email myself a couple of lines, or that half-hour watching my kids ride scooters around the courtyard while I dictate some dialogue into my phone, are tiny Lego blocks that build up my stories, brick by brick.

 

 

 

Stephanie King is a past winner of the Quarterly West Novella Prize and the Lilith Short Fiction Prize, with stories also appearing in CutBank, Entropy, and Every Day Fiction. She received her MFA from Bennington and serves on the board of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. You can find her online at stephanieking.net or Twitter @stephstephking.

 

my (small press) writing day – Ren Pike

7:00 Up. Remember who I am. Gradually become human.

7:30 Laptop open. Set a timer. Eat porridge made by my spouse, side by side, each of us in a separate mental universe, two planets revolving around the same sun. Read the news. Watch the magpies magpie-ing, especially Lil Squeaky. Check on my poems—imagine someone my size and shape tut-tutting over an array of plants, except instead of plants there are poems, on screen, each in their own wee box—seeing if they are doing okay after last night's pruning. Plucking a wilting word here, watering a dry patch there. Curses when the timer goes off. Grab coffee. Run to the home office!

8:00-10:30 Working in the data mines.

10:30-10:45 Another pass at the poems—mostly grooming. Browse a few journals on Twitter. Open one and read some poems. Post about any poems that I like. Be sure to link in the poet—let people know they write good shit.

10:45-12:30 The data won't mine itself.

12:30-1:00 Lunch, outside if possible. Think about writing a poem in my head. Make a few notes when I come inside.

1:00-3:00 Even with my headlamp, it's easy to get lost in the data mines.

3:00-3:30 Walk in the neighbourhood. Wave to folks. Try to get out of my own head.

3:30-5:00 Last shift with the data pick and shovel.

5:00-6:00 Prep and eat a supper that is a rotation of the same 7 meals every 7 days. Listen to the escalating Alberta covid case numbers. Bewail the lack of political leadership for the common good.

6:00-7:00 Do something—row the rower while imagining I'm out on Conception Bay, play a video game (wandering the wasteland with a tire iron clears the cobwebs), have an involved discussion with my spouse about things techie, sew a 3 ply face mask made out of old shirts, haul the bins to the curb, read whatever rests at hand.

7:00-7:10 Think about having a beer, dissuade myself, open fridge and stare at beer, think about the way kindness and caring is losing ground to assholery and callousness, close fridge, stand firm.

7:10-9:00 Sit down at the laptop. Open up CherryTree. Maybe pull out my notes and write a new poem. Maybe do a re-write on a few poems. I keep dozens of branching versions of my poems. I like to follow impulses to their end then start over in a different direction, sometimes abandoning a branch after hours of input, sometimes picking up my original version and deciding it really was the best. Maybe checkout the Discover area of Submittable to see which journals are accepting submissions. Maybe check out the Twitterverse and see what the poets and journals I follow are broadcasting. Maybe pick one and curate a submission, and tumble down a rabbit hole remaking a poem I thought was done. Maybe let my mind wander over all the days events. Touching each like a shell found on a beach. Turning it over and over. Till a kernel emerges that I tackle as a new poem.

9:00-10:30 Watch Netflix or CBC Gem. Maybe some Quebecois music video channel. Nothing too serious. Think about calling family, abandon thought as its always too late out east. Crochet or tat a motif.

10:30-11:30 Read something written deliciously. Something where every sentence requires you to roll around in it. After some rolling—fall asleep.

 

Ren Pike grew up in Newfoundland. Through sheer luck, she was born into a family who understood the exceptional value of a library card. Her poetry has appeared in Train, NDQ, IceFloe Press, and Juniper. When she is not writing, she wrangles data for non-profit organizations in Calgary, Canada. http://rpike.mm.st/  | Twitter: @sputta