Colin Mylrea : My Writing Day

Writing days, rather than just writings, are special for me because they are few and far between. As both a university student and someone who works in retail, my schedule is rarely stable enough to allow for a daily routine. In a sense, these days are a vacation away from my usual routine and allow me to take a, in my opinion, well-deserved break.

After breakfast and coffee, I like to meditate for a half hour before looking over notes I have taken in the last few days. Most of my poems start as fragments in my commonplace book so, in a sense, I take this time of day to look for inspiration. Sometimes it's a quote I admire from a novel I'm reading, other times, it's my recording of a newly-recognized detail in a painting at the National Gallery. If I find something I like, I start to play with it, grafting other experiences and images onto it. The purple brocade of a courtesan's dress becomes an amethyst I received as a gift from a friend. The amethyst becomes a summer rainstorm I remember from a visit to Oberammergau as a child. Mornings are for drafting.

To transition to my other work, I like to go for a walk. It's never very far or for very long but it's enough to clear my head. It helps to compartmentalize the poems. While I like to play at a sort of free-association in my work, it's a very rigorously managed free association. Like an overgrown garden surrounded by brick walls. I'll correct spelling, change line endings, and sometimes rewrite entire poems in this time. None of my poems are very long but I like to be as precise and evocative, every word in my poems has to count. If I am a taxidermist in the morning, sewing my chimeras together from disparate bits of memory; I am a lapidary in the afternoon, refining every edge to its sharpest.

I don't write much after having done this work. I'll read a book (at the moment: Sumptuary Laws by Nyla Matuk) and/or visit with my family and friends depending on the day I'm off. After dinner if I still feel a desire to work, I'll keep editing the poems from the afternoon.

In between these days, I keep taking notes.

Colin Mylrea is the author of the chapbook The Rose Bush and the Myrtle (In/Words, 2018). He is also the editor of North, a literary journal published by Carleton University’s College of the Humanities, where he is a student in the Great Books program.

Anne-Marie Kinney : My Writing Day

My writing day is never as long as a day. The last time I tried to take an entire two-day stretch of writing time, I checked myself into the Joshua Tree Inn because I wanted to get haunted by Gram Parsons, and, whether by ghostly interference or by my own overwhelmed and overworked brain, had an all-night panic attack. For whatever reason, I’ve found that I can’t write for longer than four hours without going a little nuts in a way that is…neither productive nor fun.

            I have a full-time copyediting job, so, during the week, it’s a challenge to make progress on my personal writing projects. One indispensible aspect of keeping my writing going is transcendental meditation, which I do first thing every morning. I can’t count how many times I’ve wrestled for weeks with a plot or structure problem, only to have the answer coalesce before my eyes as I’m coming out of a meditation. Then, as I get writing ideas throughout the workday, I send myself texts, an ongoing conversation that would seem demented to any third party, but which helps me work through ideas. When I’m lucky, I’m able to snatch an hour or two after I’ve finished any pressing work tasks. In those cases, I pull up Dropbox and open up whatever I feel like working on (in addition to a novel-in-progress, I usually have a short story going). But because it’s hard to concentrate at the office when I know another “hot” project could come in at any moment, those times are usually spent editing, fiddling and moving things around—no real heavy lifting.

            The real writing happens on the weekend, typically on Saturday mornings. Because my husband is also an artist with a day job, and we have a 4-year-old daughter, we trade off, with me writing for a few hours on Saturday and him painting for a few hours on Sunday, always juggling around birthday parties and family obligations and, and, and. This may well make me sound like a dilettante and dabbler, but as my daughter said recently, when I asked her why she took her shoes and socks off when we were about to get out of the car: “That’s just how it is, it’s my life.”

            I don’t fetishize rituals but I do practice a few. On my writing Saturdays, I like to walk to my favorite coffee shop, Romancing the Bean in Burbank. The walk is important because it promotes a certain kind of thinking. As I walk, I put myself inside the story I plan to work on, inside the body of the character. It’s a kind of self-hypnosis that puts me in the right frame of mind to write, and makes it so, once I have my coffee and my laptop turned on, I’m already in the story’s mood. My other ritual is always facing the window. When I look up after working steadily for a good stretch, a few minutes of looking at people’s outfits and dogs is the perfect break for my brain.

            I’ve never measured progress in terms of word count. I don’t count words at all until I’m looking for the right place to submit something. Instead I measure in beats and scenes, so I’ll go into a writing day with the goal of finishing a certain scene or getting to a particular shift in the story. Reaching a pivotal moment gives me a jumping-off point for my next writing session in a way that an arbitrary number of words doesn’t. Then, on the walk home, I invariably get ideas for how to proceed with the story, leading me to stop frequently to text myself, beginning the demented one-sided conversation anew. The walk home takes a lot longer than the walk there.

Anne-Marie Kinney is the author of two novels, Radio Iris (2012, Two Dollar Radio) and Coldwater Canyon, forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in October, 2018. Her shorter work has appeared in Joyland, The Collagist, Fanzine, Entropy, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rattling Wall, Black Clock and elsewhere. She lives in California.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill : Small Press Writing Day

This is a special edition of my writing day, written in my loft apartment in Mainz-Kastel, which is surprisingly nice and an ideal writing retreat, with high ceilings and bright windows, clean white walls like pages. Drafted in the Rhine air with trains blurring by, with blurry parakeets darting from branch to branch outside my window. This writing day expires this summer, when I will return back to my shared abode in Toronto, where the wail of sirens and the distraction of almost-daily reading events and a constant need for groceries will blend with my clumsy, happenstance poetics.

My writing is vagrant, occupies the spare moments between other deadlines. I’ve put the coffee on because this is the first step in getting to the place. The morning is a blank page, blank time, and sometimes the writing happens here, but often it happens after the other work is done. Writing here blends with research and teaching in ways that feel new and urgent, because I’ve never had a full-time academic job before, and even though I’m busier than I’ve ever been, I still want the writing to happen, and the writing also wants to happen. Writing happens over milky morning coffee, or it happens over tea, later. I’m teaching my grad students how to write and I listen in on my own lectures, taking notes. My students are surprised to learn I write (para-academically, creatively) and a few of them have come to me for writing advice. I’m never sure that I’m as helpful as I’d like to be; I tell them what I know and what I know they can eventually know themselves, I tell them about MFAs (uncommon in Germany) and writing residencies and workshops; I tell them to read and read and take notes; I tell them to attend readings and buy books and talk to the writers, have them sign the books because then the books become fetishes for the altar. These meetings turn my thoughts to my own writing, and often I find myself writing or revising in my apartment those evenings, cheating on my other deadlines because I remember that writing feeds everything else.

My writing happens on a laptop, desktop jammed with powerpoints and open articles, and this is how ideas bleed from document to document, text to text. I love words, but I mostly love ideas, and bringing these together is what I do in almost every writing context. I write for myself unless someone invites me to write for them, and this has led me down a shy path, quiet and gentle. I write to steel myself for the times I will open an email to learn that not everything I write is lucky or destined for celebration, and I also write mostly for myself, which worries me because my thinking often seems, to me, quite eccentric. Teaching students to write well helps, but I still have this alien brain.

I live in (Mainz-) Kastel and I work over the Rhine in Mainz. Kastel, a former part of Mainz,  became a part of Wiesbaden, the capital of the federal state of Hesse, in 1945, after American occupiers ordered the city be melded into the administration of Wiesbaden. Mainz itself is the capital of the federal state of Rhineland Palatinate. I cross state lines daily, visible to me only via the competing addresses on state paycheques and notices from the Landeshauptstadt, on the bus or on foot, often thinking about how I can feel this area’s history in my body, and I’ve found myself processing this in my poetry, though in ways that reflect the emotional weight of war, a certain rawness, and not in misconstrued narratives. Today (I wrote this in the past, on June 12, 2018) is Anne Frank Day in nearby Frankfurt (also in Hesse), for instance, and I remember my English teacher reading us passages from her diary, as we sat in our large featureless classroom in Whitehorse, Yukon, listening without comprehending, beautifully and callously without the possibility of comprehending. I often write to channel the affect of either the mystery of non-comprehension or the horrors of comprehension, and the places in between. I write to deflect or to absorb.

I write with my body, and to do so I have been established a bodily practice. My writing day means I need to stretch, and I have a basic Vinyasa yoga routine that gets me to a place where my sitting or lounging with my laptop is less likely to twist my body into a broken shape. I write to deflect or absorb, but my body mostly absorbs, so I need to wring it out. My window parakeets know this, and when I surface between paragraphs, I often stretch, work on my balance. I woke up one day a few years ago and noticed I had a body, so have been learning to care for it, and not just as an encasement for my preoccupied mind. By this point I’ve opened files and started compiling materials for my lectures, have opened and perhaps responded to emails, have participated in the networks and networked thinking that this life asks of me, so a return to my body is also a way to turn to the private space of poetry. I listen to my own advice and take the time to read; sometimes this means taking account of my emotions and cataloguing the poems (of others, of myself) that help me better know how I feel. This process is intellectual but it is also of and for the body, here in my bright calm apartment. I dabble in yoga and I also run, and this is where the rhythms are worked out in six or ten kilometer increments. Writing is also always not writing, just as reading asks us to breathe between lines or stanzas or as we turn the page.

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is a doctoral candidate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, where she is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative critical study of contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She has taught in art history and contemporary visual culture, and is currently a visiting lecturer and scholar in Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, dusie, Tripwire, Train, Where is the river, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, forthcoming 2018), and is co-editing a special issue of the journal Canadian Literature with Gregory Betts. Her debut chapbook, femme, was published in 2016 by above/ground press; her second, Everything will be taken away, also from above/ground, will be published in August.

Tanis MacDonald : Afternoon Mind, Beginner’s Mind: my (small-press) writing day

Whenever I catch sight of my office off-guard, out of the corner of my eye as I head down the hallway to do something else, I feel lucky.  My office is the room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf talked about, and I make 500 pounds a year (okay, more) by my own wits. It’s a converted bedroom at the back of the house, crowded with books and desk and comfy chair. I don’t sit in the comfy chair; I’ve got a stabilized yoga ball chair where I sit.

On the best days, that room of my own is my hard-won sanctuary. On the worst days, it’s where I sit and wonder how so much time has passed. Chelsea Hodson’s essay “Trying to Write Down Life Before It’s Too Late” on Lit Hub spoke to my anxiety about writing and not writing. My writing day is prosaic but it gives me access to what is glamorous: that is, the inside of my head. Annie Dillard asserted in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that she wrote in a room without a window facing a cinder-block wall so that she could have undistracted access to her imagination. Do you have the right writing space? Maybe. What is the inside of your head like?

The biggest change to my writing day came at the advice of my doctor, who told me that the pain I’d been feeling for five years was not due to poor ergonomics or simple aging, but because I was in the early stages of degenerative disk disease, a condition so alliterative I think it must only affect writers. The cushioning disks between my vertebrae were wearing thin. My doctor gave me glucosamine, the instruction to ingest a lot of calcium and vitamin D, and the irrefutable caveat that I must stand up from the computer screen every twenty minutes. I was aghast: my process! The interruption! But soon, standing up became as necessary as any other part of my process. Standing up did one very necessary thing: it alleviated pain and that was very good for my thoughts. For me, sitting is the new shrieking.

Many descriptions of a writing day favour the morning: you know, a writer gets up in the morning and starts their day off by pounding out 1000 words. There’s not a thing wrong with that: if the circumstances of your life allow it, if you are savvy and lucky enough. But my brain doesn’t work that way. Sure, I’m freshest in the morning, but that’s not when my writer’s mind is sharpest. In the mornings, I have a wide-awake analytical brain, so mornings are for TCOB, every day, every way. Mornings are for arranging, organizing, evaluating, emailing, brainstorming, nailing down details, checking off items on to-do lists with a little social contact, and maybe drinking a hot beverage while staring out the window. For me, the writing does not happen if I am thinking about other things. I’ve got to clear the cache to get to the material.

When asked at a speaking appearance a little while ago, David Sedaris said that his favourite time of day was 8:30 at night, because that was when he had lived a whole day, walked and picked up trash and talked on the phone and cooked and eaten dinner, cleaned the kitchen with his partner and at 8:30 Sedaris could go back into his office and write up the day. Sedaris’s essay “Day In, Day Out” in Let’s Discuss Diabetes with Owls is devoted to discussing the benefits (and pitfalls) of writing up the day. I don’t go as late as Sedaris; my sweet spot is sometime in the afternoon – maybe 2:00 or so, when something stirs in my writer’s brain and strikes a tiny gong. It’s time, it says, time to write. There are days – many of them – when the gong sounds and I can’t answer it. Sometimes I teach at this hour of the day. Sometimes I’m in a meeting and if so, then my meeting notes are crosshatched with writing ideas because it’s the hour of the day when I find nearly everything that comes out of people’s mouths punny or metaphoric or a nudge towards the missing thread of the essay I’ve been writing.  

I know this is unromantic in the extreme. We’ve been psychologically primed to honour the pristine potential of morning, the idea of writing all morning and standing up and stretching at 11:00, checking your word count and thinking, “That’s a good morning’s work.” It does sound great, and it also sounds like a REAL writer’s life. Maybe that’s because every white male novelist in mid-20^th century America claimed to work this way, with a door shut against children and distractions and a wife bringing coffee and cookies for that 11:00 break. (I remember reading that thing about cookies and coffee years ago and I won’t look up the writer who said it because I don’t actually believe it.) I’m not immune to the inherent romanticism of this, and I also know that this is not my life. I am a writer who bursts from her everyday responsibilities like a bell has been rung, the bell that says “that is enough reality that for now.” If there are too many days in a row when I don’t pay attention to the bell, I’ll start to feel it and wonder why I am so grouchy. Just as I have to ask myself when was the last time I ate (hello, low blood sugar) or the last time I was outside (serotonin uptake, check), I have to ask myself when was the last time I wrote. Because if I have to clear the cache of everyday detail, then I also have to clear the imaginative cache: the lyric load, as it were.

I know that writers are interested in how other writers do it. It’s a question that I hear from beginner writers all the time; people crave confirmation that they are already doing it the right way. No one likes the answer that there isn’t a right way to write; if you are writing, that’s the right way. Maybe a more useful question, the one people really mean to ask is about options: is a better method out there that they could/should/might adopt, or at least think about? Because every time I think I’ve discovered the optimal conditions under which I prefer to write, something happens to change my mind.

I love to write with others. I sometimes meet with a group of writers to write for two hours. We meet up, open our notebooks and tablets and write: that’s it. This is known by various names. I attended one called “Shut Up and Write” in Vancouver, invited by writer Jane Eaton Hamilton. You don’t need to know anyone to attend. No one will teach you or mentor you or make you write; you could just sit and stare into space for two hours, but that’s so boring that odds are you’ll write. It’s hard to explain until you do it; why should being in the room with other people writing get you to write? Logically, it shouldn’t. But don’t pay too much attention to logic.   

I love a deadline.  

I love writing projects that demand directed once-a-day writing. A month is usually the longest I can sustain one of those. But I’ve written a poem a day during April as part of NaPoWriMo for the past six years, and more than once have produced book chapters by adhering to a strict 800 words-a-day-or-die rule for three or four weeks.  

I love to revise, and that’s when morning works for me as a writer. Because revision is detailed, painstaking, and distracting with its many needs. And I do sometimes write in the late evening, when I have shut down every other thing. This is a good time to turn to something I’ve struggled with writing, with adapting, with changing and allow my tired brain to call it out: nope, stop pussyfooting, say this and this and this. Enough prevarication.

I love when my writer’s mind won’t stand for any niceties.  

I love when my back lets me write.

I love when my afternoon mind kicks in.

Tanis MacDonald is the author of three books of poetry and one of creative nonfiction, Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City (Wolsak and Wynn 2018). She was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in 2013 for The Daughter’s Way and was the recipient of the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award in 2017, and the Faculty of Arts Teaching Scholar Award at WLU in 2018. She is also a co-editor, with Rosanna Deerchild and Ariel Gordon, of GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times for Frontenac House (2018). Widely known as a scholar and a reviewer, her fourth poetry book, Mobile, is coming out with Book*hug in Fall 2019. You can find her at www.tanismacdonald.com.