More often than not, my day involves a run: easy, intervals, tempo, or long. Anywhere from 4 km to 32. Before or after that, there’s a good chance I’m waking the boys up for school (or one of them waking up early if it’s the weekend), clock-minding lodged somewhere in my DNA. Being part of a bilingual family, I’ve also grown more attuned to the dance between English and Polish, and the volley has energized my writing as the years have accumulated. The linguistic acrobatics of bilingual kids are a gift, even when it might involve bickering about snacks or toys before school. So many words can become verbs.
Half a lifetime ago, I used to nurse routines to buttress my writing process: tea or coffee at hand, certain cafes and times of day that I favored, a special notebook, and an intuitive and maybe monkish focus on longer projects or serial works. I’m far less precious about such things now. When I became a parent, adaptability became the primary currency. Whiling away hours at a cafe has been replaced with desk space as collage––precariously stacked reading materials in conversation with my oldest son’s most recent Lego build; an anti-chafing stick, a trusty water bottle, and a Matchbox version of the Lotus Cortina triangulating another corner––and not frittering away available time. If I have 5 or 10 minutes to work on something, I’ll use that as a productive constraint.
I still have a specific notebook, which I’ve been toting around for nearly a decade now, but I’m just as likely to squirrel something into my Notes app or scrawl a line in the margins of whatever I’m reading. If an idea or phrase appears, I jot it down wherever is easiest at the time, and make it a point to revisit the scribbles periodically. Writing can start on a walk to the train station, the train ride itself or within a packed tram en route to work; a line might pop up while I’m on a run, and I’ll type it into my phone as soon as I can. Eventually, I’ll get to my desk––maybe very early in the morning or 20 minutes before I collapse into sleep––and that’s where whatever I’m working on will find its final form.
What has been a constant is that I need to “see” a visual shape (or shapes) for a poetic sequence or a book before I can write anything. And if it’s a book-length manuscript, it’s keyed to a color in my mind. For example, my first book, Euclid Shudders, was grey, and Airport music, my second, was blood red. When I’m working on something, the shapes are constantly hovering like creative GPS letting me know I’m on the right track. I make decisions quicker than I used to, and sequences tend to get clustered together with semi-ruthless efficiency. I can ride a creative wave for a few weeks, and then go back to heaps of reading, stretching and strength training, discussing Star Wars with my oldest, doing yard work or laundry, prepping for classes, or translating or proofreading. The liminal spaces don’t bother me. Just like I can’t run all the time, I can’t write all the time either. Rest and recovery are a critical part of the process.
Mark Tardi is a writer, runner, and translator whose awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. His translations include In Bloom by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press, 2026), Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland (Litmus Press, 2024), Unsovereign by Kacper Bartczak (above/ground press, 2024), The Squatters' Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive, 2021), and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press, 2021). Recent writing and translations have appeared in Conjunctions, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, MAYDAY, Ilanot Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Cagibi, Full Stop, and elsewhere. His newest books are The Thought Lawn (above/ground, 2026) and Recapitulation in the Wrong Key (BlazeVOX, 2025). He is on faculty at the University of Lodź.
