Jessica Evans : Act Now!

Sometimes I pretend my writing day is an infomercial.

In my mind, I hear an announcer’s voice, male, boisterous, Southern charm, indeterminate age. He prods, cajoles, demands my attention with grandiose claims about what his product can do for me.

Act now and receive a lifetime supply of words.

Only for a limited time – write one paragraph and get another free.

I see the jarring flash of an in-store special, like K-Mart with those blue lights, only these are clear, the color of everything and nothing, like kaleidoscopes from pressing on my eyeballs too long.

Pervasive, these claims.

All I have to do is start. Begin. Press a button and let my words flow like water from the springs of Tepelena in Albania where entire cafes are built around the rushing constant roar of water coming out of the mountain.

I want to build my day around my words just like that café.

But for as strong as the infomercial announcer is, I still sit motionless.

There are errands to run and laundry to do and meals to prep. A house to care for, a family who needs tending. Herbs which should be watered. Other, better, greater writers whose words should be read. Miles to be run. Cities to explore. Trails to be hiked.

The dark screen reflects my face back. My glasses reflect back the screen and, in this way, I enter a parallel universe where my reflection begets my reflection. Somewhere from the distance I can make out church bells; a quarter of an hour has passed while I’ve danced with this imposter writer woman who doesn’t believe in what she’s doing.

There are plenty of other products on the market, the announcer tells me. But this is going to revolutionize your way of life.

It’s going to make every sentence easier to construct. Your metaphors will shine when you use it. Never again will you have a misplaced conjoiner, or a dangling modifier interrupt your craft.

I’m telling you right here right now, this is the way of the future.

The parallel universe attempts to draw me back in, a charlatan screen which shows me what I want to see. I shake my head.

Listen, he says, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just listen to what other people have to say about this great product.

A word-siren-sister-friend who is inviting, alluring, and who makes me want to want more smiles and nods her head. She radiates positive, sunshine on the first crisp day of spring, the kind of magnetism that only a few ever have. Her bright face makes the corners of my lips rise into the most advanced yoga move I’ve ever learned – a smile.

Seriously, she tells me, there’s no stopping you. Life is abundant and all you have to do is welcome it in. I don’t know how else to say it. The best thing I’ve ever done is get started. I wasn’t sure I could do it but once that momentum gets moving, it’s the best feeling ever.

See? the announcer asks. That’s all it is, friend. One simple step and just like that, magic in your hands.

Jessica Evans is a Cincinnati native currently living in a Bavarian forest. She’s the author of a novel, a collection of poetry, and a number of short stories and flash pieces. A previous Pushcart nominee, Evans spends most of her life in front of a screen. When she’s not creating worlds with her fingers, she is an avid runner, Olympic lifter, yogi, and adventurer.

Kevin Spenst : a slice of my (small press) writing day

       

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
 - Emily Dickinson

if you need us we'll be on the water watching it all go up in smoke
 - Hilary Peach

I hate to admit it, but I’m stunned. I hate to admit that I’m not only reliant on technology to write, edit, email, query, and submit poetry and prose to various places around the globe, but I also need my computer to… well, think. It’s a sort of mental prosthetic and with my old macbook pro flatlining on me this morning, I’m left a little stunned, braindead dazzled. I promised rob to write something for my (small press) writing day and it was on my list of things to do this morning, a list that was on my laptop that is now an empty, flat cranium. Yesterday, I wrote from nine to five. I wrote the rough drafts of two new short stories, which fortunately I had written on google docs. I had set aside today for applying for a writing grant, applying to go back to university and… all the other things that were on the list that was on a word document that no longer exists.

This is not a normal day.

What makes all this particularly irksome is that I’ve taken two months off to be the writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House. I’m now living in the childhood home of Canadian author Joy Kogawa. I see her family’s cherry blossom tree in the backyard. I have a writing room, which is something I haven’t had in over ten years. I have a new neighborhood to explore and a house all to myself. I’d applied for Canada Council funding but I didn’t get anything, so here I am writing and applying again.

The rest of the year I teach ESL at a private school downtown Vancouver. Usually, I wake up early, do a bit of journal writing, and then spend the rest of the morning corresponding to any number of people in regards to reviews that I write for subTerrain magazine, or interviews I co-host at Wax Poetic… etc and so on. After a day of teaching that ends at two-thirty, I try to hunker into a poem or essay for an hour or two. On rare occasions, I write into the evening. This past fall I read a lot about mushrooms and I’ve been putting this mycological matter into a series of new poems that have been absorbing the rain in a number of literary ways.

But this morning, I took my unresponsive laptop to the nearest Apple store in a mall two short bus-rides away. I stepped into the middle class glitz and glamour of Oakridge mall and made a beeline to Apple’s tech support station.  I stood in a lineup of five. Astonishingly, no one was on their phone. Was it that we all sensed we could absorb what we usually needed from our phones and devices by just standing in the midst of so much shimmering technology? Or was it something else? “This is the only lineup where people aren’t on their phones because their devices need fixing and they’ve just lost faith,” I suggested to an older woman standing behind me. “It’s awful isn’t it? Everywhere you go everyone’s on their phone.” “And here they are with broken devices and they need to stand and wait.” I was fishing for some recognition that I had an idea of possible interest. She stared at me. “What do you usually do on your device?” I asked. “I love biographies. I get them from the library and listen to them. They help me sleep. My favourite is the biography on Wallis Simpson. She had an affair with the king, hoping that she would become queen and then he abdicated.” “That sure did backfire.” “I listen to it every night and it puts my mind at ease.”

It was my turn to talk to the man with the all-knowing tablet. He had a slight British accent and I wanted to ask him if he’d heard of the dark British comedy Flowers, but his expert slickness had me scheduled for an appointment before I could squeeze in anything superfluous. “You’ll be texted in about forty minutes or so.”

On my way out, I stopped in front of a MacBook Air. A salesperson approached me, asking if I needed help. “Essentially, I just need something for writing and the occasional bit of netflix.” He took me through the features of the MacBook Air, ending on how the new ones didn’t have USB ports. “No disrespect, but isn’t that kind of douchey of Apple?” He was delighted to hear me diss his employer, so I said even worse things about Apple that made him smile even more. “You know you can just get the Air and return it in two months after you’ve used it,” he said quietly.

I stepped out into the mall and sat down, wondering what I’d say about my writing day as it so rarely fell into any sort of routine. For one thing, distractions. While staring back into the store, I saw an Apple employee who looked like Blaine Thurier, keyboardist of the New Pornographers, Vancouver indie pop darlings. A elderly British couple passed in front of me with their grandson or a boy they’d stolen. Someone took over the mall’s PA and a loud “hello?” boomed out. I soon grew restless and went to the library, which adjoined the mall. Just as I found the poetry section, my phone beeped with a flirtatious text: We’re almost ready for you at the Genius Bar. Please let a specialist know when you’re here.

I returned and sat at a stool and talked with a man named Dan. I explained how my laptop had gone from perpetual beachballs to a flatline. He hooked my computer up to the store’s network. We talked while he did the diagnostics. I asked him what his company Christmas party was like. “We have it in February.” He asked me what I did and I told him I was a writer. “Who’s your publisher?” “Anvil Press. They’re local but they have pretty good distribution across North America. They’re great. I get a lot of support. They’ve helped me with my book tours across the province and country.” “My sister works for a large publisher in London, England. She’s always complaining about not making enough.” “Her salary doesn’t match the prestige of working for a big name publisher?” “Exactly.” We talked about the likelihood of me not being able to retrieve data from my hard drive. “I have a lot of my writing on google docs,” I explained. “Smart. You know if I were a professor, the first thing I’d do is get my students to write on google docs. They’d get one percent of their mark for doing that.” He turned to a coworker and repeated his idea while smiling and bobbing his head with enthusiasm. “Hey, is that Blaine Thurier?” I asked. “Yeah, we trained together. He gets lots of flexibility working here. They’re going on tour in the spring for their next album.”

Leaving the store with a new MacBook Air, I raced back to the Joy Kogawa House to get caught up and collected, to get everything out of my head and onto the page. Below the essay, I wrote down all the to-dos I could remember under categories of “now” “today” “this week” “this month.” When I started writing on a daily basis fifteen or so years ago, it was easy. I woke up early, wrote a flash fiction, and put it on a website. That was my old writing routine. That practice has multiplied into a hundred different writerly activities and I’m lucky to be doing each and every one, connecting with so many brilliant people in Vancouver and across the country. Even on a day of stupifying misadventures, I’m here to learn my way through.




From January to the end of February, Kevin‘s goal at the Joy Kogawa House is to start his first book of short fiction, which will be rooted in the Mennonite refugee experience centred around South Vancouver in the 20s and 30s and branching out to 1495 Southwest Marine Drive, where his mother lived in the late 30s. Furnishing his stories with Vancouver and world history, he also hopes to bring an element of the surreal with an eye to creating a kind of Mennonite magic realism. For upcoming events at the Kogawa House visit: https://www.kogawahouse.com/

Kevin Spenst is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, (both with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press), Ward Notes (the serif of nottingham) and most recently Upend (Frog Hollow Press). His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, BafterC, Lemon Hound, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2014. Kevin Spenst is one of the co-organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series which takes place every other month at the Vancouver Public Library.

Caroline Grand-Clement : My (small press) writing day.

          There! A word, a thought, a whim of something a little too magical to let it go.

          It is barely 7am & I am half-awake, struggling to get out from under the covers. But this idea, I’ve got to write it down! I look around for my phone, jot the words down, & continue on with my morning. Eat breakfast, brush my teeth, leave too early to be sure I won’t be late. Walk out of my building, stuff the keys into my bag, & look up.

         

          & then, there it is. The sky. The endless, ricocheting sky. Some days, a gray backdrop to the gray buildings; others, an ocean of cherry blossoms; others still, whipped cream the color of a smile. Today is going to be a good day, it says. & I can do nothing but trust it.

          I go into the underground metro, watch the tracks ebb away into the darkness. Look, there again! The shadow of a verse. Pause my music, look deeper. Yes, there it is, I’ve got it. Easy as hunting Pokemon. Turn my music back on. Take a breath. Notes: time is silver lining the tracks.

          & then, nothing for hours. I get stuck in a drowsy consciousness, only half-aware of the words spoken to me. I spend the day nodding along to classes, scribbling lyrics known by heart without paying attention to them, transcribing the alphabet into morse code to make sure I haven’t forgotten. Switch pens mechanically; red for the titles, then subtitles in blue, then green. The rest in black. New words in pink & purple, important ones highlighted orange, yellow; sunset seeping through the page. Laugh at jokes I only half-understand, squint to see the board, shake my head & roll my eyes. If only I could find a poem in here. It’s got to be somewhere. Search through all the spare paper, every square a box waiting to be filled.

          Now thank goodness it’s over. I’ve finished early & I go outside; the sky has turned into water. There is the poem I’ve been looking for. I take out my phone, desperately try to type it up but the drops keep hitting the screen & creating nonsense, so I wipe my screen against my scarf (wet), against my jeans (also wet), against my sweater (not too wet... yet). Raise my phone screen down towards the sky, I’m typing up a poem upside down. Ha, that’s a good one. Notes: rain. upside down poem.

          I decide to go to a museum, because it’s a rainy Tuesday afternoon & that there’s a faint air of poetry lingering in the clouds. Walking around empty museums always takes me into a parallel universe, feeling like there is just me & all this art, & nothing else really matters at all. The sound of my own steps gets louder & more present as I wander until I forget about it & it fades away once again. My leg hurts, & I find there is something special about hurting alone in the middle of all these paintings. Notes: walking in an empty museum with pain. I am surrounded by numbers, by colors, by shapes that  make my head spin. There is a room full of black mirrors & I sit for a long time, facing a stranger version of myself. I think we’ve become friends, & I will write a poem for her someday. Notes: write poem about black mirror room.

          Going home on the bus I watch the two girls laughing about a received text, hiding their smiles in their scarfs, their heads pressed together, & I think how beautiful it is to be so in love with the world that everyone around you can feel it. Notes: two girls in love. neither of them is me, for once. The rain has left its fingerprints across the sidewalks & they carry me home, tickling my feet. My heart feels full of poetry today.

          I arrive home, check the mail, unlock the door, peel off the layers of sweaters which have been keeping me warm. Notes: sweaters like your own kind arms. I make myself some hot chocolate, or tea, walk around too many times around the apartment. I’m restless, I want to see more of the world. I sit in front of my window for half an hour. Damn it, I’ve forgotten my tea. Notes: cold tea & warm tongues. Time to write.

I take out my computer. I check my Twitter, read a few new publications, fall in love, follow new lit mags. Open a new document. Open some old documents. Look at my notes. Look around. Stand up, walk around the apartment again, wish I had a dog, or a cat, or both. Even just a plant that doesn’t die under my care. Sit at my computer again. Notes: all my plants die anyways. even the cacti. especially the cacti. White page, staring back. I think about the room with the black mirrors. Maybe there’s a friend here too, staring back.

But it’s the evening already & no friend has reached out from the blank. I eat dinner, watch some series, try to forget about the words that won’t fit together. Notes: distraction as inspiration. I shower, wash my face, wash my teeth, stare into the mirror. I get ready for bed, turn the lights off. I hear words running away behind my eyelids. I have to catch up to them, I have to write them down.

Puzzles. Tents & trees. Pieces of puzzles. Words that don’t fit. Too many puz—

Caroline Grand-Clement is a queer, seventeen years old half-time poet, half-time student at an international school in Lyon, France. She dreams of art in any form, falling stars & late night conversations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in L’Ephémère Review, Rose Quartz Magazine, Homology Lit, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram @octopodeshearts. 

SJ Bradley : My Writing Day

A blurry, disorienting start: a xylophone blurting from my phone, the dark outside. Seven a.m., but it feels like the middle of the night. I'm getting up now because if I want to keep on doing Regular Person things (eating, paying bills, switching on lights) I can't very well not go to my day job. Have you ever tried calling your boss with the excuse: “I'm not coming in today. I'm an artist, and I'm too good for this sort of thing?”

Work is what underwrites my writing. It pays for little treats, like having the heating on during my Writing Days, electricity so I can boil the kettle for hot drinks: on Writing Days, when it's freezing cold in our Victorian millworkers' house, I need something to keep my hands warm. My day job pays for all the books I buy. Do I need more books? Yes, always.

The mortgage, so I've got somewhere to park my writing desk. The tea that I drink in the mornings, when the writing is going poorly, the red wine that I drink when it is going well. My snacking system is multitudinous and complicated. A lot of staring out of the window is involved. I always need supplies. So you see, I can't very well not go. 

A good thing about my day job is that I like it. It gets me out of my head and into the company of real people. Laughter with people who have seen things, my colleagues, my clients, people who have lived. I go into people's homes, I meet their children, their aunties, their extended families, I hear their stories. Often, in the homes I go into, somebody has recently been seriously ill. The relief, the anxiety, of all that fear, it's in their faces, their gestures. Everybody's home is different and I drink that in, along with the tea I've been offered, noticing the feel of their carpets, the smell of food in their homes.

From there I drive to another place. Half hours are spent in my car, driving from one home to another, to the office and back. These moments in the car can be used to solve problems with structure and plot, invent whole new worlds. I can pull up at a zebra crossing, watch a woman with her children waiting to cross the road, and draw a whole new character and story from the way she stands at the kerb, the colour of her clothes, the expression on her face. Is she waiting for somebody? Going to somebody? Maybe she has just left? These moments, these threads and rug-rags, are the pieces that make up the fabric of my work.

Yet when I leave work for the day it's always with a bit of relief. Most work days, I'm glad to have been out of the house. Glad to have spent at least a bit of time with real people, and not just the imaginary people I create in my head. You can, I've discovered, go a little crazy when the only people you socialise with are people who don't really exist.

So leaving is a joy, but the journey home a terror. Hours on the motorway, often sitting there with my handbrake on. Red lights in a fiery fairy string, stretching for miles. Five solid lanes of steel, each with a single driver occupant. We stare straight ahead like dummies in a shop. “I'm an artist,” I tell myself, inching forward. “I'm much too good for this sort of thing.”

SJ Bradley is an award-winning writer and editor from Leeds, UK. Her short fiction has appeared in December and Toasted Cheese magazine, and others, and has been published by Comma Press. She won a Saboteur Award for her work as editor on the Remembering Oluwale Anthology. She is Fiction Editor at Strix Magazine, and director of the Northern Short Story Festival. Two novels (Brick Mother and Guest) are out now, available from Dead Ink Books.

The Writing Adventures (or misadventures) of a High School Teacher by Irene Sanchez

A typical writing day, doesn’t look typical, especially if you’re a teacher, mother, professor struggling to make time to even get a break, but between breakfast, and laundry between lunch, groceries, and grading sometimes things get written and submitted.  

6:00am is what the alarm is set for, but most days I snooze it until 6:25am

6:30am after thinking of what I have to do and getting in a few minutes of thinking about where I need to submit to, or poems I want to write or essays that are halfway finished, I get up finally and rush to get ready and get me and my son out the door.

7:15am without fail, my son needs to handle business before we can really leave.

7:25am finally in the car

7:30am I rush to drop him off before school

7:30-8am I have thirty minutes to think about writing and life as I drive to work. This only works if I’m not thinking about teaching. Some days my son will say something or do something that inspires, sometimes it comes in the drive, sometimes inspiration comes from the weather, whatever it is, I vow not to forget and write it down as soon as I park unless I’m in a rush. Then I’m usually sad I forgot, forget that I’m sad, eventually it comes back. 

8am-12:11pm teach until lunch. I love teaching. I teach Chicano/Latino Studies. Somewhere in there I drove from my 1st school to the 2nd one. Maybe took a restroom break. Maybe. By now I’m annoyed with hearing students say “Miss! I have to go to the restroom” or “Miss! Can you repeat that?”for the 100th time by now, but I have a lot of patience. It’s a gift. I write down a couple notes about the day overall if I can, but rarely does that happen in a moment. Most of the time that doesn’t happen until lunch.

12:11-12:20pm mandatory zone out time after students leave.

12:20-1pm handle teacher stuff prepping, grading etc

1pm-1:30 take time for lunch and getting to my last school (I teach at 3 everyday) Coffee at this point is a necessity. Number 2 cup!

1:45-3pm Last class

3pm-3:30pm wait for traffic to die down and use time to decompress, sometimes write, often more teacher stuff.

3:30-4pm Drive home

4pm-5:30 catch up at home, cook, clean, laundry, rarely is it writing, but sometimes I get that in or at least organize myself

5:30-5:45 pick up my child

6ish-8pm dinner, homework, bath time and bedtime

8pm-9pm convincing my son “no really it is time for bed kid”.

9pm-10pm Lying down in the same room as my son trying not to fall asleep, tired, but finally time to do what has alluded me all day sometimes I draft poems or essays on my phone.

10pm-12am write, submit, research, catch up with friends or post a new blog post on my blog, sometimes a combination of the two, rarely does it involve more than 2 things. Most days lucky if I can do one.

12am-12:30am fall asleep if I haven’t already. Dream of days where I can write more, but know I have to get up to go to work and sleep deprived teaching is never fun.

12:30am-1:00am Panic if I’m behind in something for teaching. Post a new blog piece if I feel the urge, even though it’s not the most optimal viewing time, but for me it’s the only time and I always forget to schedule posts.

1:05-1:15am Realize how late it is. Try to remember things I forgot earlier, there it is!  I think how I should write that down, but always fall asleep before I do. 

Irene Sanchez is an award wining educator, poet, writer, and public scholar. She has spoken/presented/keynoted at over 50 colleges/universities/conferences. 

Her work has been featured by KPFK 90.7 Los Angeles, KPCC-Southern California Public Radio, Latino Rebels, Telesur English, Inside Higher Education, NASPA, The American Federation of Teachers, The Huffington Post, Zocalo Public Square and more. Irene blogs at www.xicanaphd.com and www.thesouthwestpoliticalreport.com

She lives and teaches high school in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County. She is also Humanities/Education Faculty at Bard College-Los Angeles.

For more information see www.irenesanchezphd.com