Aaron Tucker : My (Not) Writing Day

I spend most of my days not writing, even during the time I dedicate to write. This is the initial tension in my creative practice: there is a need to produce a sort of automatic writing, a psychography, as a means of coordinating my life that is then contrasted to the deliberate and slow choices that go into my creative work. On the one hand, I write constantly: I write emails, write text messages, pepper my social medias, write comments on students’ works, write notes in the margins to what I am reading, write lists to myself about the writing I need to complete. On the other hand, I do very little writing: I read, I revise, I re-read. There is a lot of non-writing that gets done before I can wring out a cautious poem of a page or two of a novel.

Some days I exist between those two poles of writing constantly and not-writing, setting up machines to do my writing for me. A number of my recent poetic projects deliberately involve little to no writing: Jody Miller and I co-created an app that translates chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com/); I published a version of this as a collection of poetry, having not written a single poem within it, titled irresponsible mediums (introduction by Jennifer Shahade; http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/irresponsible-mediums-the-chess-games-of-marcel-duchamp-by-aaron-tucker/). Inspired by a performance between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp which translated one of their games of chess into a musical score in real time (http://www.johncage.org/blog/cross_reunion.pdf), irresponsible mediums translates all the chess games of Marcel Duchamp into poems. Similarly, Loss Sets is a project wherein Jordan Scott and I co-wrote poems, which are then translated, by a python script I wrote, into data points, which are then made into 3D models and then printed using a 3D printer (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/). I’m thinking here of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes and the idea of writing as raw material that is then enacted through a process of bricolage and recombination. My writing day is then built partly around setting up games and conceits and computer programs that will help me eventually produce writing, and I’ve come to think of the two projects as in line with an OULIPO-driven production, writing set around constraint that is in part algorithm and mechanized, with the process of rearrangement of words and phrases outsourced, but with the interpretative and conceptual aspects of my writing day still rooted inside my “human” brain. Yet, again, much of that involves very little writing: it is reading and researching, it is meetings over coffee, it is phone calls, it is fiddling with the 3D printers, it is waiting, it is posting to Instagram while I am waiting, and then it is waiting some more.

Even when I am engaged with a more “traditional” creative writing project, I still spend most of my time collaborating rather than writing. I speak and write with other writers, writing, emailing and talking on the phone, the exchange of our days and thoughts feeding into the work that is done later; there are the events to attend, to hear others read and then to have a beer or two and talk more. There is the collaboration with my machine co-species, the printers, my laptops, the virtual networks that let me see and hear across the globe, to find all the reading and scraps of information I might need. My writing morning, day and evening are therefore very porous, with all the parts of my writing ecosystem circulating through, all interdependent, all compiling into the work I eventually produce and give away. The objects of my work space become collaborators. I’m thinking now of my desk, one of the stereotypical metaphors of a writer’s life. It’s a wonderful tableau that includes a begonia, a green plastic ape printed at the Chicago Zoo, a piece of Trinite, all the talismen and trappings an altar to writing needs. When I begin my glacial movements towards writing, I start by surrounding myself with objects and books that evoke an emotion in me, a time in my life, a person, a concept, a piece (of poetry, of prose, of sculpture, of painting) that resonates. The Trinite, for example, was deeply important to me as I finished my novel Y (Coach House Books, Spring 2018), a retelling of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s problematic leadership of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Trinite is a piece of fused sand, glassed over in parts and molted green, from the original Trinity Test of the first atomic bomb blast. Part of my writing day was hunting online for such an artifact, filling out the order form, waiting for it to arrive in the mail; once it arrived, part of my writing day was picking it up, feeling the grain of it at the tips of my fingers.

When I do enact the small moments of actual writing, I sit, and I look at the things on my desk and then, once all my emails are answered and my intelligent phone is out of my reach, I fall into a routine that requires all these things, a daily movement back and forth from this station, with far more time is spent away from it, than at it. Personally, to write well, or at least something I can begin to work into something I might be eventually satisfied with, I usually read for at least an hour, on my couch, at my deck, over breakfast at a diner, a book of poetry, a novel, maybe a magazine article, I read and fill my head with words and phrases and arguments, and when my brain pauses, I think about what I want to write later that day, in reaction.  When I finally come to sit down, I will read what I wrote the day before, spend at least a half hour editing and re-reading. Then, and only then, do I begin, and I will write until I’ve exhausted myself, will then shift my energies back to the other whirling words and people and objects that make a day begin and end then repeat.  

Aaron Tucker is the author of two books of poetry, irresponsible mediums: the chesspoems of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), as well as the forthcoming novel Y (Coach House Books, Spring 2018). His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com). In addition, he has written two scholarly monographs: Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both with Palgrave Macmillan). Currently, he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University where he is teaching creative writing and academic writing to first year students.

Jennifer Baker : My (Small Press) Writing Day

I don’t want to sound precious when I describe my writing process, but for years there has been a particular horror bubbling up when left to my own thoughts while writing in isolation. I have had to learn to pick my way between two voices. The first: you are not smart enough to earn a doctorate; your writing is shit, and you’re shit; you’ll always be almost smart, but never very impressive; nothing you do will ever matter; you don’t matter. The other: Get up. Go get it. Go back and make them call you Doctor Baker. Make them feel how thoroughly you’ve scrubbed your name from their mouths. The first doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. The other is still so hot with rage it scares me. By now I recognize both voices as responses to trauma, and I’m starting to learn to push them aside while writing and give them room elsewhere, later, where it’s safe. As I write in that room full of colleagues with their own writing struggles, I wonder what we would hear if our inner monologues were amplified.

I think it says a great deal about my writing day that I have rewritten this particular blog post four times.

I try to reserve Thursdays for writing, and this particular Thursday, I stuff my laptop and several books into my bag and walk the 20 minutes to campus. I’ve started working with a writing group that meets Thursday mornings at the university. We begin by setting intentions and then working for two hours of dedicated dissertation time from 10-noon. I’ve worked with many of its members since the first, second, and third years of my doctorate, and the combination of guilt and comfort is the perfect combination for focus.

There is a part of me that knows I began the PhD at a sprint and in rage, running from the chasm that had opened up between myself and home in a catastrophe of grief. I disappeared. For a long time, grad school was a way to make sure I stayed gone. Several years of therapy later, I’m well aware of the machinations of this impulse and have shifted my priorities to discover new reasons for urgency that extend outward as intellectual curiosity, rather than inward as masochism (most of the time). I have bought that shift with time, though, and spending almost a decade writing a dissertation is nothing if not a working through. I wouldn’t trust anyone who would avoid admitting it.

Poetry and scholarship get worked out work in tandem somewhere beneath consciousness, and somehow, they both brush up against my urgent questions about the deep structures of abuse, whether it be interpersonal or systemic or ecological. On the surface, a dissertation about the history of Canadian literature’s fascination with farm work and its implications and poetry about abuse or apology don’t seem intimately connected. And yet I am the conduit between them. This is not something I’d say at my thesis defense.

So today I edit my final chapter—about object-oriented ontology and the Georgics and Canadian poetry—until noon. Then I go for coffee and chat with friends, revel in the little community I can’t stay in forever. I come back to my office on campus and do some editing work for Arc, and begin drafting some queries for a chapbook I’ve already written but have held onto for another six months: it was an ambitious project. I had wanted to print the final version of three poems on seed paper that could be planted, so I made a couple of prototypes myself, on a Thursday night, several months ago. I linocut the words, because the paper was too delicate (heat would destroy the viability of the seeds) and too thick to fit into my printer, and hand-stitched the covers. The prototypes are sitting on my desk, now, because I didn’t like them, after all of that. I enjoyed learning to construct them, but these first constructions are amateurish because I am an amateur. Maybe I’ll try again. Maybe I’ll ask for help. I haven’t decided. My heart is still set on their being plant-able, and there must be a way.

After dinner, I turn to edit a new poem for a new project. No writing this time, because the subject would take too much out of me, and I’m not in the mood to go there. But with the bare materials I can try to stretch my language beyond cicadas.  I turn on my fake fireplace and my cat nestles herself into a bun at the base of my chair. I begin to pick away at the poem, intimate with the knowledge that my sense of comfort and safety is deliberately manufactured. Go get it.

Jennifer Baker is a Part-Time Professor and doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa, and the incoming Reviews Editor for Arc Magazine. Her first chapbook, Abject Lessons, was published in 2014 by above/ground press. Her poetry and reviews have since been published in The Journal of Canadian Poetry, illiterature, Dusie, Ottawater, The Bird, Philomela, and The Bull Calf Review. She also recently performed her poetry in collaboration with Natalie Hanna and Aella, an Ottawa women’s choir headed by Jennifer Berntson, for Her Voice (June 2017), and with Just Food’s Canada 150 Wine and Words tour (August 2017).

Emily Sanford : My Writing Day

I work full time, and have a busy and active family of four, and we live in a tiny Annex apartment. Engineering a place and time that is “mine” for writing has been an absurd late-capitalist exercise of supply and demand.

By 7:30am, I’ll have wrenched myself from bed, roused the children, changed a diaper, stubbed my toe, mumbled some confused apology to my wife, searched for a breakfast I either did or didn’t prepare the night before, packed my bag for work with lunch, laptop, and a book of poetry from my TBR pile. I bike to campus—I’m the Creative Writing Program Administrator at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies—and work till noon. If a notion, word, or image trickles in that I’d like to revisit, I always have a notebook at the ready. The one I’m currently using is from a Quills gift subscription that was given to me by a dear friend.

At 12pm sharp, I stand up from my desk, grab my bag and coat, and dash down to the lunchroom to be the first at the microwaves. With my warmed meal and office-in-a-bag, I trundle to a neighbouring building on campus, find a sunny window, and arrange my workspace, which consists of my laptop, lunch, notebook, set of four felt-tipped drawing pens of varying thicknesses, book of TBR poetry, iPhone, and headphones. It is now 12:07pm. I spend the next 10 minutes eating and listening to a guided meditation, then 5-10 minutes of actual meditation. I’m not sure I’m doing it right, but I try not to think about it too much. I need caesura, not nirvana. I then have thirty solid minutes of writing or editing, which is done while listening to ambient music. My alarm sounds at 12:57, letting me know to pack up and get back to the office, which is really hard to do. Luckily, I love my day job.

I head back home on my bike at 4pm. The next three and a half hours are spent in a familial chase scene that closely resembles a greased pig contest replete with background banjo music. By 8pm, child the younger is in his bed, and child the elder is ensconced on the couch with a device or a book. If my brain is still operational (more likely on a Monday or Tuesday than later in the week) I may get a chance to read, but usually I’m tidying the domestic wreckage and making lists. Occasionally I’ll make it to a poetry reading or event (I also volunteer for the Brockton Writers’ Series). At 10pm, we crawl into bed, more likely than not having forgotten to prepare breakfast, but, as my talented wife does most of the cooking, I’m almost guaranteed a delicious nigh-gourmet lunch of the leftovers.

It’s not much time spent actually writing, but if I’m consistent, it’s time enough, and on the occasional rare perfect weekend morning, I’ll borrow my wife’s art studio space in Kensington Market for a three-hour spurt of writing/editing.

Factors that make lunchtime sprint-writing accessible to me:

-          I’m currently writing poetry and flash fiction, which I’m able to draw out in short spurts.

-          I’m well-nourished. I never have to waste time deciding where/what for lunch.

-          There are several warm public and university spaces available to me close to my workplace.

-          I was recently awarded a TAC grant, affording me a small lightweight laptop.

-          I have no delusions that this will always work for me. I will certainly need larger chunks of time as I get closer to preparing a complete manuscript.

Emily Sanford was born in Nova Scotia and holds an MA in Literature and Performance from the University of Guelph. She is the winner of the 2016 Eden Mills Writers' Festival Literary Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award, and won third place in the 2017 Blodwyn Prize for Fiction. One of her recent poems was listed amongst The 10 Best Poems of 2016, by Vancouver Poetry House. Her work appears in Canthius, Grain Magazine, Minola Review, newpoetry.ca, and Plenitude Magazine. Emily is the Creative Writing Program Administrator at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and volunteers for the Brockton Writers’ Series.

Michael Dennis : My writing day.

Depending on whether my wife needs a drive to work or not my day starts anywhere from 6:30 until 8:30.  When K can ride her bike to work I generally sleep in until she has left the house so she has the place to herself in the morning.  If I am driving K I need to get up earlier and am usually return around 8:30.

My writing day also depends on whether or not I am posting a blog/review on my site "Today's book of poetry".  If it is a blog day then that usually takes me to noon. 

Most days I have dishes to do, at least some light housework.  Laundry days are busier.  The day after laundry day I fold the laundry and put it away.  That usually takes a few hours. 

I usually cook us dinner on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evening.  Wednesday K is at choir and I eat on my own.  Friday is almost always a delivery of pizza or chicken or Chinese food.  Sunday is always dinner with K's mother.  She lives close by so in the summer we often BBQ and take something over.  Normally K cooks here, sometimes she cooks at her mother's residence.  Either way, Sunday is always dinner with Ann.  And Saturday is up for grabs.  The season has a lot to do with where and how I cook.  We BBQ almost every night in the summer.  Winter it's indoors.

Of course I have to shop before I cook.  And there are the various other chores that need doing around the house.  I'm a "house-husband", whatever that it.  K has a real job and pays all the bills.

I try to have the table set and supper ready to go when K gets home.  Dinner is something we both enjoy.  There is usually some wine.  We have a couple of books we read from before dinner most nights.  And if we can, we languish over dinner until bedtime.  Otherwise K looks after her business and I look after mine.

I have a reading schedule dictated by the blog I do and my interest in reading as much poetry as possible.  The night before I have to write a blog I read the book in question for the second time, make my notes, plan the blog and then I read for pleasure.  It could be another book of poetry that has nothing to do with the blog, a novel (I always have two or three on the go), or any other sort of book.  And to clear my palette before sleep I always read an author and a book that I know will give me comfort one way or another.  Right this minute I'm reading Alistair MacLeod's short stories.  I read them for the first time many years ago when they were first published and I've read them all several times since.  MacLeod is one of the best.

On the nights when I don't have to write a blog/review the next morning I always take three or four recent arrivals for the blog and give them a read.  When I'm done those, Alistair.

I write poems any time.  I love writing when we travel, when we are at a cottage.  I write in bed often, almost always at night.  I have a lovely office arranged just so and I write there all the time.  I usually write poems in longhand although I'm a very good typist.  Not a good speller but a good typist.  I have a special notebook that I've used in recent years for poems, but I also always have a regular notebook with me most of the time and write poems in that from time to time.  Usually I write my poems on the backs of scrap paper I've collected.  I keep a big stack of scrap paper in my office.  Some of it is from manuscripts I've been sent over the years, dozens and dozens of those.  I write in the morning at my desk or sometimes the kitchen table and sometimes, if the weather is nice I write outside on our front porch.  I write in the afternoon, usually at my desk.  I write in the evening but only if K is not home or if we aren't doing something together, that's always a priority.  I write when K is busy in the evening with other things. 

I've written poems in the backs of cars, buses, trucks and trains.  I've written poems on airplanes as well, but not many.  I've written poems when no one was watching while at work on other jobs.  I've borrowed paper, borrowed pens and run all the way home to write poems.  The running part was several knee operations ago.  Now running is not in my vocabulary but it is in my memory.

I have no rules about how, when, where or why I write poems.  I never seem to have enough time.  I never seem to write as many poems as I want.  I'm frequently afraid I'm not writing enough.  But whenever I look in my file of new poems it turns out there are plenty there. 



Michael Dennis is a poet from Ottawa, Ontario. He has published seven books of poetry and nearly twenty chapbooks, and has been widely published in Canadian literary magazines and journals. For the last three years Dennis has been the labour behind Today's Book of Poetry, a regular blog where Dennis talks about books of poetry he likes. Dennis has posted over 450 blogs/reviews of Canadian and American small press poetry. These days he can be found in Vanier, keeping his laneway clean.

Jacqueline Valencia : my (small press) writing day

Every day is different and not every day is a writing day. However, on a typical day I’m at 6am to make breakfast, get the kids ready for school, clean up the litter box, and replenish the cat food. Once the kids are often on their buses, I head for a run every other day. Running is a huge percentage of my writing process because it’s where my mind goes blank and I let ideas flow. Groceries, helping my sister with my niece, and laundry aside, I’ll get to writing sometime between lunch, library school homework, and before the kids come home. Generally though, I don’t have the time. It’s after the day is done and if I have the energy that I get down to giving my ideas form. Writing on a page will take a burst inspiration, an upcoming deadline, or a committed love for a project to really motivate me. I also am a literary editor for two publications, and write reviews for film and books for various publications, so that takes a bit of my time as well.

I once heard a woman lecture a single mother who has a day job that every writer is always writing. While this might be true in the sense that our daily thoughts often become part of what we put on the page, it is presumptuous for someone to think we all have the time to dedicate to writing. While writing is a means of living for some, it’s not a complete means. It’s also not a hobby for most. Writing is always a passion, but it can also sometimes be a privilege.

For many years I was a stay at home mother who had time while the kids were in school to write. I’m now juggling single mother duties, while trying to find a part-time job, and going to school so I can get a full-time job, and become independent one day. While I ache to create, it also hurts to give up the time to do it because I’d like to sleep, spend time with my kids, my boyfriend, and my family. I’ve had to cut back on activist/volunteer projects in the literary community because it is free emotional and writing labour I should be dedicating to creating. There’s a mental capacity that people don’t generally talk about as writers and I think we should start there. That not every writer is ready to write and not every one can afford to dedicate their head to it. I’m happiest when I can write and feel the most productive when I’ve done what needs to get to done to progress in both my every day in my writing day. We’re all just trying to create AND get by.

Thus, my writing day depends if my head is on right, if I’m dedicated to the project (whether out of a passion for it, or if it is paid work). Let’s not fail to mention that as a hermit, I spend a lot of time on the internet networking and socializing, a habit which I have had to cut back on due to a love for a life project which happens to actually be my life.

Jacqueline Valencia lives and writes in Toronto. Her latest poetry collection is There Is No Escape Out Of Time (Insomniac Press, 2016). She’s a literary editor for The Rusty Toque and manygenderedmothers, and is a regular contributor to Broken Pencil Magazine, Spiral Nature Magazine, and Next Projection.