Ian A. Bain : My Writing Day

 

4:50 am, the alarm chimes. I try to turn it off before it has a chance to fully wake up my wife. As silently as my clumsy body allows, I grab my writing partner: a fifteen-pound Havanese named Luka, and head for the couch. I make my coffee (Chemex; darkest roast in the store) while I get Luka settled on the couch, nestled in the white fur blanket we bought for ourselves, but which Luka has taken as his own. I pour my coffee into my Gremlins mug (the undisputed best Christmas film ever) and begin writing. I have approximately one hour to write (less if Luka needs out).

I write most things long-hand first, especially poetry. It’s probably just in my head, but I feel a more personal connection to the work when writing with a pen. I have my current projects in a OneNote folder, to avoid jumping from project to project and never actually finishing anything. Currently, I’m working on a collection of Canadian Historical Atrocity poetry, so some of my writing hour might be spent researching the event I’m writing about. I find that when I write by hand, I spend less time staring at a blank page, like I do with a blank Microsoft Word page, like I did before writing “4:50 am”. I’ll start working on a new poem, or, if I have a poem I’ve written in my notebook, which has been sitting, gestating, for a few days, I’ll type that up. I’ll also use this window of time for any editing.

Just as I’m getting my stride, 6:00 am rolls around, and it’s time to get ready to mold the minds of the youth (I teach High School English). I have about an hour commute, one way, down winding country roads. This is where I get my best ideas, while half-listening to podcasts. My mind wanders, the trees on either side of the road create a cozy--

DEER!

I snap back and focus my attention on the road. It used to be that I’d pull off the road to write my ideas in my Notes app. Now I’m working under the belief that if an idea is really that good, I’ll remember it. The exception to this rule is: if I think of a killer line, I will pull over to write it down.

Then I teach at a small high school. English, mostly, but in smaller schools you often find yourself teaching whatever needs to be taught. On rare occasions, I’ll have an idea or two while teaching, but mostly, my mental capacity is occupied by students.

I drive the hour home again, if I’ve had an exhausting day, it’s unlikely that I’ll have any great--

MOOSE!

ideas.

Exercise, dinner, quality time with my wife, then bed sometime between 8-9. If inspiration hits, I’ve been known to do a bit of writing in the evening, generally after a drink or two, with headphones on and listening to something dour and melancholic.

I sleep; I repeat.

 

***

 

 

Ian A. Bain (he/him) is a writer of dark fiction and poetry living in Muskoka, Ontario. Ian enjoys Horror, coffee, and long walks through the swamp with his wife and undead dog. Ian's poetry has most recently been featured in Not Deer Magazine, his latest fiction is a short story in Shiver: A Cold-Weather Horror Anthology, and his non-fiction has been published by Rue Morgue. Ian can be stalked online at @bainwrites on Twitter.

Small Press Writing Day : Christopher Schmidt

About a year ago I placed my writing desk in front of a window. Only last week did I finally clear away a monitor to open up the view. I fantasized this would open up new prospects in writing, force a confrontation with the real (whatever that may be).
            Today, square in my vision is a person shoveling snow, digging out a blue Volvo from yesterday’s nor’easter. I fixate on the shovel’s blade and handle. They are school-bus yellow, a cheering color in a field of white and gray. The shoveler is exhausted, wants to give up. Finally he does and scrambles over a snowbank to reach the curb.
            Could this be a parable for today’s writing? No parables, please. No, really.

*
This week I’ve been reworking a set of conversations with the architect Wesley Macedo. I’m folding them into a dossier of site writings about landscape and queer spaces, mostly in Brazil. Today I wrote up notes on our talk about mid-century São Paulo architecture. The passage in the conversation I keep circling isn’t about history, though. It’s just a dollop of language, accidental poetry found in translation. (My halting Portuguese means Wesley and I speak in English—the privilege of ignorance—so the translation is his.) I ask if there’s a chance we might be allowed to visit a famous mural by the designer Roberto Burle Marx, tucked away in a private building.
            “Maybe,” he says. “But really maybe.”
             I like how Wesley almost sings the words in the original recording, which echo in my head as I read. He pulls on the word really like it’s a trombone slide.
             The poetry of the phrasing lies in the errant—queer?—way he bends maybe into a position it doesn’t usually assume. The phrase contains a paradoxical magnetism, cousin words that point in different directions. Really is emphatic. It amplifies. Maybe, two verbs wedded into adverb, keeps possibility open, with more than a pinch of doubt. It apologizes for the bossiness of its partner. Maybe… is a way of suspending decision, the ghost of a possible yes that in retrospect turns no.
            The more I worry the phrase, I wonder if it doesn’t capture a relation to my writing: a will-to-claim followed by equivocation. Really tries to convince, to make you see it my way. Maybe backs down, acknowledges other points of view. Or maybe I’ve just worried the phrase to death, and it’s humoring me with meaning so I’ll leave it alone.

 

*   
Lyn Hejinian traces her origins as a poet to the pleasures found in the materials of writing: the kinetic typewriter, the smudgy letterpress. A few months ago, I broke with the computer and started to write longhand in notebooks. To recapture the thrill of ink, I bought a cheap yellow fountain pen—a happy shade, same as the shovel.
            Because my handwriting is almost illegible, I’m temporarily freed from quality control. I can’t rescan what I’ve written with a cold editor’s eye. I let myself skate. (Full disclosure: this diary I’ve written on a computer, which means I’ve fussed words relentlessly.)
            In my zeal to organize, I’ve invented a system of notebooks. Rather than a diary of my writing day, I give you its spatial coordinates, color-coded:

-          A pewter-gray notebook contains process notes. Meta-reflections kept intruding into the text of whatever I wrote. Very Ashbery, but it was becoming a manner or a bad habit. This notebook is a sandbox where unruly thoughts can play.

-          A mango notebook for the dossier of site writings mentioned above. A full draft of the project lives on my computer—oh so many drafts—but it’s helpful to have a separate place to sketch new excursions.

-          A manila notebook for poetry. It’s a quirky assemblage of different paper types sewn into a monster fascicle: gridded, lined, blank, colored. Lately ignored.

-          A black soft-covered Moleskine diary for daily journaling.

-          A Muji notebook to record novels I’ve read as I study the form. I just finished Gerald Murnane’s The Plains and Christina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome. Yesterday I started Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast, published posthumously by CUNY’s The Feminist Press. (Her collected poems is also nearby.) Next up is Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel. At bedtime, I’ve been slowly working through Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a gift. I read a chapter every night and expect I’ll still be plowing through it in March. Diarmuid Hester’s excellent Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper has inspired me to reread Cooper’s sneaky novel Sluts, which I alternate with Mann for a darker bedtime story.

-          The last notebook features bank-ledger smooth paper, Japanese in origin, that is an almost obscene pleasure to put pen on. It’s for a fiction project I’m developing. I began it in Scrivener, which led to fragmentation. Writing longhand has given me at least the illusion of forward momentum. Now it’s time to review what’s there and see if anything is worth rescuing.

 

 

Christopher Schmidt is a poet, critic, and Professor of English and Liberal Studies at City University of New York, LaGuardia CC and CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of The Next in Line (poems), Thermae (poetry chapbook), and The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (criticism). Recent work has appeared in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and Bookforum. An essay on Brazilian landscape in Elizabeth Bishop and Roberto Burle Marx is forthcoming at Modernism/modernity.  

my (small press) writing day - Aimée Lê

 

Since the onset of Covid-19 I have contributed several urgent essays on labour movement strategy which have had some degree of influence in my union. These were co-written but my willingness to crank out the prose was important and so I take credit for that aspect.

I strongly oppose the idea of the pure literary innovator on the basis that all thoughts arrive in a language that we did not create. In that way all writing is co-production and my role is sometimes just to be the person passively receiving and structuring the articulations of others, like a tape recorder with a brain. However, this idea that no individual is truly innovative suggests that the most banal acts of resignification can be innovative articulations, which is indeed how I experience them.

I have a very hard time articulating myself under my own name. I have never been able to have control over my day. I am not sure if I will eventually develop a routine or if that is anathema to me. I have many habits, but I am trying to suggest something more conscious and self-aware through the word ‘routine’. I do have a number of writing practices however.

My first practice is crying. I often cry when writing, as the writing process can be distressing for me. This can be true of any form of sincere communication. I often use the Notes app on my phone to write, which suggests the genre of ‘influencer publicly apologising to their fans’. Frankly, I don’t think it’s the best way to do things, but this is the reality. I often cry when reading my work out loud to others, but I enjoy that kind of crying.

I often write in bed because I cannot justify sitting in a chair to write on a laptop, a device literally designed to be used anywhere. I used to put my laptop on my chest and write that way, beginning around age 11 with my first ‘laptop’, which ran Windows 95 and had no internet capacity. Unfortunately, as my eyesight has gotten worse over the years, I cannot put a laptop on my chest and take my glasses off in bed anymore unless I enlarge the font to comical sizes. On the other hand, I am capable of writing for a long time while sitting at a desktop. This is because a desktop to me possesses a maternal metaphor: it is plugged into the wall, it has an umbilical cord.

I took my first laptop to the UK but someone from TSA violently pounded on it, cracking the plastic, so I have never brought it outside of its zone of safety again and it still lives in Michigan with my parents where I hope to eventually return to it. My second laptop was a Dell which I purchased from my university in 2008. I eventually gave it to a dyspraxic friend who destroyed it within a month. My third laptop (my ‘current wife’) is a Lenovo from about 2010 or so which I bought secondhand but which still feels alienatingly new and trendy. Those who know me will be aware that I try to replicate the feeling of Windows 95 as closely as possible.

I do also write by hand, although I preferred typing as a child. If I have a draft that is moving I like to cycle it through several iterations of: hand-write, type, print, read aloud, make hand-written edits, type them, etc.. My dream is to reinstate companions willing to listen to me read each new installation of my writing aloud, as this does help me and it is the common thread in all my best writing. You would think I would have selected my partners and closest friends on this basis but unfortunately not, although that is fine and they have other qualities.

Sometimes I walk down the street writing in the Notes app without looking at where I am going which I find very enjoyable especially as it adds dramatic tension to my walk and performatively rejects the world, which could take revenge upon me at any moment by manifesting a solid obstacle. This is the next step up from walking while reading which I also do but which doesn’t give the same high that it used to. Writing on my phone in the bath is also exciting in the same way. The risk is heightened. I dropped my phone in the water recently and it actually slipped completely under the water but I caught it and threw it out of the bathtub and it was fine. I like to think of myself as Leó Szilárd who was notoriously fat, lazy and an absolute genius in the bathtub. You have to hydrate continually if the bathwater starts out really hot, however, and at some point you have to abandon writing and actually e.g. exfoliate.

This was written in the bath on the Notes app.

 

 

Aimée Lê is a Vietnamese American writer. She is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Exeter University and a member of the Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre.