Sara Renee Marshall : My Writing Day

For a year and a half, I have been raising a baby. For a year and a half, I have been reading books and crafting long essays for the comprehensive examination requirement in my doctoral program, which occupies the majority of my writing life. The entanglement of these timelines and processes materializes physically in my workspace: home.

While I type entanglement, baby R sleeps in her crib in an adjacent room, which pulses with womb-like noises to obfuscate my work on the other side of her door. While I type in clipped intervals stretched across time and space (at my kitchen table, in my living room, at the desk in our office), a parallel script nags me—what to cook, how to entertain a toddler on these grey and glacial winter days, words like night-weaning, sovereignty, extinction burst. Each day, my mind splits to tend to—first—the physical fact of a child’s life, that child’s urgent body and voice, her needs, her totalizing otherness, which enter whenever and however they please. And work spills into any narrow aperture that otherwise appears—as if it had been hovering politely and yet impatiently overhead.

Today, for instance, I read the portion of Jane Eyre in which she hungrily roams the countryside near Thornfield while I am sitting on the toilet, and hearing the baby repeat “mommy” outside the bathroom door, I abandon its world. Hours pass in which we play “kitchen” (we cut and stir wooden carrots), go out for pancakes at Sweet Melissa’s, and visit Little Shop of Stories. All the while, the protagonists of Charlotte Brontë and Frances Burney bob near me like anxious little spirits. Abridged clips of their dramas play in my mind: silhouettes of women’s bodies that move through others’ homes, attempt to pass thresholds or travel foreign terrain safely, and are everywhere blocked. I wash baby R’s sticky dishes. When I finish, the same images follow me to my desk. My astigmatic eyes glaze. I refocus. I gather an outline: carriages, class, claustrophobia, moral economies of space. Words hang in loose constellations. The filament between each object of thought remains too distant to make out—a pulsing fog. I observe that light and must, for now, let it withhold its puzzle.

Like all of my work, today’s is bookended and paralleled by care for the baby, who, even when not calling, calls.

Sara Renee Marshall’s work can be found in places like Colorado Review, jubilat, OmniVerse, chapbooks, and elsewhere. She’s pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Georgia. Sara lives in Atlanta with Thomas and Rosa Bernadette. She recently had two chapbook manuscripts accepted by above/ground press for 2018 publication.

Dale Smith : New Again: Two Mornings in October

Oct 16, 2017

9:05 Receive email prompt from rob to think about my writing day. I just tried to knock out a weekend’s worth of email. Now looking at the screen. Now coffee. Now time to flip the record (Nina Simone at Newport).

9:08 Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas has got me thinking a lot about writing, about how such thinking inhabits writing. That is, the words of others can often inflect my own sounding within a writing day. Shapes and phrases, sounds and rhythms of urgency move into my thinking, the daily hum and calm of routine. I value these adjacencies. In Long Soldier’s work there is an intimacy with language and an awareness of the social removal of the writer from her language, the train wreck’s white tongue. The flapping of social discourse that inhabits an English that must, at some level, be coeval with a body of feeling. I think about the priority of language next to the sensate images and feelings that coexist with words, that shock or absorb certain words to include new outlooks, an achievement of an attitude. This latter is hard to accomplish. Form is not a stable object. Poetry is a history of adjustments and attunements. Attitudes arrive from the knotty substance of life. One’s position in relation to others is activated, assessed, required. If I can’t form a new outlook, don’t bother. I don’t mean something heavy. There is a softness in Long Soldier’s language that is iron. There are roots. How I feel about a word, a vowel or cluster of consonants. Her attitudes convey a depth of experience. Not always experience, not always knowledge. A speculative tempo outward toward the barely as-yet perceived horizon of where I wander. Reading and writing in adjacencies. The page, the day—they blend. Now, I go wash dishes.

9:34 Long Soldier’s writing disrupts self/world in the gesture of speech. Print. Sound. Blank page spaces. Long Soldier is clear about the dispersed histories and presents and futures words carry. The radical gesture of refusal enlivens an outlook that grates against the reality of a North American past—a violent physical and psychic occupation. Of a present occupation. What Robert Duncan called “the raving mania of the nation.” How refuse the weight of the impositions of conquest, servitude, and conveniently organized liberty?

10:00   Last night, I wrote the following. I wasn’t thinking of Long Soldier’s poems. But her words settled somewhere in me. There’s no direct evidence here. What I’m saying is that communion is my understanding of art. A commons of where we don’t forget but do know the urgencies of our feelings. This is perhaps too much of a build-up for the following little observation, a minor coordination of some impulses working out into a poem at an odd moment in a tavern waiting for pizza:

someone said Canada

was a collection of

atmospheres, old

garden, distant tavern

patterns, sovereign

common, mosaic

mosque prayers

I heard outside

the pizza shop

10:20 My kids are home from school, sick. A storm blew through last night with new cold wind. I putter between projects. Essays. Poems. Reading. I don’t really dedicate time to writing unless there’s a deadline. Poems come whenever. Like last night at the tavern where I began writing about an incoming storm and the maple leaves blowing around and a tree branch that fell on Logan Avenue before I came home with pizza for everyone.

10:28 Hoa reads a poem from her computer by Michael McClure for Joanne Kyger (CA Conrad just e-mailed it from a Richard Brautigan conference where, says Conrad, McClure read “honey voiced”). It is lonely and strange to witness the passing of friends. The time grinder thing our bodies are in.

October 17, 2017

7:02                 Up, coffee. Thick wool sweater.

7:03                 counting seasons

                        from Humber Bay

                        where those manic

                        Europeans La Salle and

                        Brulé portaged

                        neat grids arrive

                        now placed

in sovereign time

7:20 Lester Young, “Almost Like Being in Love.” Hoa says, look out the window. Venus and a fingernail sliver of moon to the east ahead of the sunrise.

7:22 “Now / make room in the mouth / for grassesgrassesgrasses” Long Soldier acknowledges an earth of things and actions. Earth of things and the unsaid’s enactments. Invisible lines, permanent trails to the interior of one’s unraveling in the violent determination of the Republic. I wonder about that word—Republic—and the Canadian more common Commonwealth. Instances of sovereignty. “Soldier” from “soldarius.” From “soldato.” One who receives pay. Solidus, a gold, Roman coin. Stamped by the Emperor’s image. Coined. To be lost in grassesgrassesgrasses.

7:41 “Indiana.” Still Lester Young.

9:00               Notes on Writing my Days for Rob

Every day you

look for surprise

in the ordinary

routine of now.

An awakening

through the noise

shows what’s light

and readied

to be known,

your own ongoing

ground. And on

you return like

a musical pattern.

On to the sound.

On in the round

of days to play

in, as if a child

wilded the lost

and the found,

the weird and the

blatant beat.

To be shown

new again.

Dale Smith is a poet and scholar of poetry and rhetorical theory. A book of poetry, Sons, was published last year by Knife / Fork / Book, and two edited volumes appeared with the University of New Mexico Press's Recencies Series: An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson. Recent reviews, essays, and poems have appeared in Brick, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, and The Walrus. He teaches at Ryerson University, Toronto.

photo credit: Waylon Hart Smith

Manahil Bandukwala : my (small press) writing day

I write in the interim spaces between things: on the bus ride to school/work, during work, between class. Sometimes someone will say something and I’ll pull out my phone and type up a note, only to forget about it for months (some gems from this inventory include “ethical vegan poems” and “rewrite Beowulf where Beowulf is a werewolf.”

Ever since I started working a 9-5 in a cubicle, I’ve found more interim spaces to write during. I’ve filled up three notebooks these past three months, with there being a fair amount of salvageable content in there. Writing in a notebook is much more subtle than typing away, and I’ve rediscovered writing by hand. And then I type up my work, tearing it apart as I do.

Sometimes it’s hard to find inspiration staring at grey walls (even though I’ve covered them with paintings). So I read poetry while I’m in here. I’ve read Ben Ladouceur’s “Otter” and Rob Thomas’s “Brood,” along with countless poems online on ottawater, the Puritan, etc. etc. On a side note, I also revamped the In/Words website sitting in this cubicle.

Also on the topic of In/Words – submission periods are honestly one of my favourite times ever. I love opening the inbox and seeing a new submission in. I’ll read submissions and be pushed to write and I’ll have a poem of my own to submit somewhere. It’s a great cycle.

Occasionally on weekends I’ll pull myself towards Black Squirrel or Starbucks (my roommate works there – I get a discount) and let coffee-shop vibes pull words out. I fill pages with rambling before ripping them apart to make a poem. I take away more words than I add. I take poems to writer’s circles and have people tell me what stands out to them. I submit poems to magazines and continue to rework them.

Oh, and I do always sit cross-legged, or with my legs tucked under my body in some way. I hate sitting upright on chairs, so I don’t. Even in a ‘professional’ office cube.

Even when I have zero inspiration and all that comes out is angsty, cliché-ridden post-teenage thoughts, I write those down. Because beneath the angsty, cliché-ridden post-teenage rambling is something I can use in writing. And sometimes there’s nothing, but writing bad stuff that no one reads is better than not writing anything at all.

When the workday finally ends, I make my cup of tea and sip it as I sift through penned down rambles and shape them into something decent.

And the next day starts and I do it all again.

Manahil Bandukwala lives, thrives, and creates in Ottawa. An undergrad student in Carleton University’s English program, she is an editor of In/Words Magazine & Press, run out of Carleton. Her writing has appeared in Bywords, In/Words, the Ottawa Arts Review, re:asian, ottawater and where is the river, among other places. She has work forthcoming in Room Magazine. You can find her artwork on Instagram @manahil_art, and read her inner thoughts on Twitter @manaaaahil.

Sarah Crookall’s (Small Press) Writing Day

My writing desk is one of the first things I should see in the morning. It sits opposite to the bed, facing the north window of my Vanier bedroom. But I don't notice it. Either because I'm too tired, preoccupied by thinking about what needs to be done, or because the furniture likes to blend with the walls after being in a place for a while.

I make coffee. An embarrassing five to six cups that, each morning, I tell myself I will drink throughout the day. Instead, I usually drink 4.5 cups before I leave for class.  As someone with an anxiety-prone peripheral nervous system, it's probably not the best decision in my morning-non-routine. But the black brew is as comforting as it is nerve-racking.

I hop on board the 12 bus and if it's not packed, as it usually is, I sit and read. Lately, I’ve been reading from a collection of essays. When I'm forced to stand, there's always a lot to look at: the winding Rideau River, addicts on the street, or the folks crowded around me on the bus. Occasionally, I thumb in quirky observations on my outdated iPhone 5s.

Before class I mentally tell myself I'll write a couplet, or something, in my blue 108-paged Hilroy notebook. I don't. The fluorescent buzzing and shuffling bags are too distracting. Throughout the day, I mutter through classes, study, eat, and find excuses for coffee breaks. I write an essay on Rossellini's "Rome Open City" for an Italian cinema class. As I type, my fingers faintly shake from caffeine overload.

It's Friday so it's the day I visit my 95-year-old grandfather at The Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre. It's become my favourite day of the week. I’m able to see my super genuine, navy sailing minister of a papa. But being there is also a wonderful exercise in learning, empathy, and a great source for writing. 

I've been a bit self-conscious about not writing professionally very much in 2017. There’s a gnawing background guilt when I write anything else. But it seems to dissipate when cheesy polka music spills into my papa’s room from the nursing home's hallway. Encounters at The Perley are too interesting for a writer not to be motivated. Today the polka music fuses with The Eagles’ “Take It Easy.”

I thumb in what I don't want to forget into the iPhone 5s with its silly case covered in Eiffel Towers and hearts. I get home. I open the curtains behind my desk hoping to fan away the mental cobwebs I brought back from the long journey home.

With bright snow reflecting a strenuous light on my desk, I scrawl rough notes in the blue 108-paged Hilroy notebook. I translate the image of a lifelike-in-a-dead-way stuffed orange tabby on an elderly lady’s lap into thin lines of paper. In the evening, I add more precise sentences on my outdated MacBook Pro. Eventually, I’ll compile both the rough and precise thoughts on the MacBook.

I close the notebook, Macbook, and curtains. I turn in, thinking in bed. I’m not writing professionally right now, but I’m generally satisfied with being able to get a feeling down. It’s how it all started for me, and it’s how I hope to continue stockpiling ideas.

Sarah Crookall is a writer and poet originally from Toronto. While living there, she was involved with Bänoo Zan’s Shab-e She’r poetry nights and occasionally wrote freelance for minor publications. She is a journalism graduate from Durham College and currently studies psychology at UOttawa while monitoring her radar for writing opportunities.