My
daughters missed the bus this morning. So rather than waving goodbye, walking
home from the bus stop at the top of the street, washing the breakfast dishes,
brushing my teeth, starting the laundry, then sitting down at my desk, I drove
them to school, waited until my younger daughter’s group went inside, and went
for a twenty-five minute walk in the hundred acre wood (also known as Terra
Cotta Park) across the street from the school. Although it delayed even more
the start of my “real” day, this walk was the reward for the disrupted routine,
and as walked I felt grateful for this place, these maples and meadow, although
the trees are already losing their leaves and although my sabbatical is now
over and the first week of classes is now done.
I’m
grateful for my job, too. It brings into my life amazing people, some of whom
have become lasting friends. And their writing: vulnerable, audacious, raw,
polished, hesitant, explosive. In any one class, quality varies, sometimes
significantly, but the range of sensibilities I encounter, the scope of style
and tone, is almost always greater than what I see in most literary journals.
I’m grateful for that. I’m less grateful for the committee meetings and files
to review, for the letters to write and reiterate, for the awards and
fellowships to adjudicate, for the websites to rejuvenate. I’m not grateful for
those things at all. They are as much a part of the job as are the students. I
didn’t recognize this seventeen years ago when I applied for, and accepted,
this job. But I have two children. I’m a poet. I’m grateful for my job.
While
in the woods I saw a woman I recognized. We hello’d as we passed, heading in
opposite directions on the narrow path. I placed her just after: she was once
the receptionist of a doctor whose emergency walk-in clinic my older daughter
used to frequent. I kept walking. I thought about my day, for which I had a
long list of tasks, including (though it was only the first week of term)
submitting my teaching preferences for next year, adding student names to a
course schedule, reviewing next week’s class notes, reading half a book of
poems for discussion as part of an independent study project with a
particularly promising student, transferring funds for my RRSP, picking my
daughters up from the school daycare, taking my older daughter to her ballet
class. Clean-up, bedtime routine, e-mail, more work, then, as an end-of-week
reward, an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale
or Treme. But first dishes and
laundry. And somewhere in there, because I had promised myself during my
sabbatical that I would write for half an hour a day, three to five days a week
(because this should after all be manageable in a job I got because I was a
writer, right?), I would begin this essay.
I
knew, from past experience and conversations with friends who were managing a
daily writing practice in spite of being parents with demanding jobs, that if
this plan was to work, I would need to put writing first. But first after what?
I could not, as the writer Rachel Kushner said in an onstage interview at an
AWP conference several years ago, simply wake up and go to my desk. (When
someone asked about her child, she responded that she had a husband. My
relationship with my husband is not like that.) After the school bus had left,
should I write then, without cleaning up the dishes, starting the laundry,
brushing my teeth? I should, but I couldn’t. But could I write before doing
those nagging work tasks? I longed to clear them away so I could write into an
open space, the ticked-off list tossed into the recycling bin. But I knew the
endlessness of the list. Once I opened Gmail I would find new messages. By the
time I’d responded to the last of them, new ones would have come in. I would
have to supply my availability for the next six months in order to facilitate
the creation of a schedule of meetings for a particularly demanding committee
to which I’d just signed over my life for the next two years. The day would
pass and poetry would not be in it. Not my poetry, anyway. I would resolve to
try again on Monday. And etcetera.
During
my sabbatical I had to relearn a daily writing practice. That I had spent years
coaching my students in the particulars – keep your commitment; put writing
first; stick it out at least half an hour and by then you probably won’t feel
the time pass; reading counts, too – made it, if anything, harder. From
September through April each year I’d felt like an imposter in the classroom,
speaking about writing in the present tense when, with a few exceptions
(invitations or rare flashes of inspiration, the kind I tell students not to
count on), I had become one of those seasonal writers whose schedules used to
baffle me. Now I felt like an imposter in my life.
I
lived it out. I lost, though I know this loss was a gain in another column,
hours of the autumn to cycling to the lake and back in preparationn for a
four-hour bike tour I planned to take on a research trip to New Orleans. (I
hadn’t cycled in over a decade.) I lost, though I doubt this loss was a gain in
another column, hours of the fall to scrolling on Facebook, sickened by Trump’s
rise and the divisions within the Canadian literary community. (Then I stopped
going on Facebook.) I lost moments falling asleep at my screen as I read over
1100 pages of writing I’d produced since just before my younger daughter was
born. Yes I fell asleep. Since my first daughter was born I’ve rarely gotten
more than six hours of sleep a night. I didn’t used to think it possible to
function on so little sleep. I have become one of those people.
What
is a writing day? For the first seven months of my sabbatical, interrupted by a
massive housecleaning and -organizing (with only minimal input from Marie
Kondo), by the girls’ summer break, by a few days of readings at a poetry
festival, by the trip to New Orleans, by the girls’ Christmas break, by
weekends, by spilling a few drops of water on my laptop and losing it for
weeks, by setting up a new laptop, I cut and pasted those parts of my writing
that felt alive, or that felt dead but necessary in their statement of what
needed to be done, into a new file. During those weeks without my computer, I
wrote raw, charged descriptions of photographs from Robert Polidori’s After the Flood. Almost daily, I
researched. Whether this was procrastination or necessity is still unclear. It
wasn’t writing but it was part of writing. How many hours roaming news stories,
watching news footage and documentaries, for the thing that sticks, the woman
who spent eight days after Hurricane Katrina floating on her Sterns and Foster
mattress in a bra planning that, when she was found and renovated her house,
she would choose marble countertops next time.
No
day emerges as typical. Some days what I read as I cut and pasted moved me,
reacquainted me with a self – the parent of a baby, the parent of a toddler – I
barely remembered. Some days I saw a way to improve what I’d written. But mostly
I pasted. Revision would come later.
Into
how much detail can I go before this ceases to interest even me? I’ve often
wished there were an app (there probably is) that could track what I did during
a writing session. How I moved, when I deleted, when I added, what my eyes did,
how often I reached for my mug of water (kept on my window ledge, not the desk,
ever since the spill), how often I got up to transfer the laundry or to pee,
how often I opened the Google tab to check a fact, how often I let myself
scroll on Facebook for a few minutes before I stopped going on Facebook, how
often I checked e-mail.
Because
I had promised myself, I made it through the last fifty or so pages of material
in a rush over a couple of evenings before 31 December 2016. When the girls
returned to school in January – the younger one in tears, the bus missed, me
dropping her off, still teary, then walking, nearly teary myself, in thirty
below through snow and ice in that forest – I began another round of cuts. This
took mere weeks. What had changed? There were still nearly four hundred pages
of material. But less clutter. Less bad writing to drag me down. I had stopped
Facebook. Time was dwindling. If not now, etcetera.
There
were two weeks in Burnaby with my family. These days were not writing days and
because it snowed – it really and truly snowed and kept snowing, and the snow
didn’t melt – I didn’t get to go on the research trip to the site of the Tashme
internment camp as planned. But I walked to the National Nikkei Museum to
research this camp. Were those hours taking notes on and photographs of old
photographs and newspaper clippings, a handmade “souvenir of Tashme”
handkerchief, writing hours? I went through objects in my parents’ home and
stuck strips of post-it notes on those things I would eventually want for my
own. The implications of this were not lost on me. We looked at old family
photograph albums and I wrote down the stories that went with them. I hadn’t
done this before. This was not part of my project but were these writing hours?
Once
home, I organized the culled manuscript material into Word docs by subject. Fukushima
and internment. Chernobyl material. NOLA material. Expo and Vancouver. Other and
imagined disasters. Personal meditations hinges refrains. Some passages didn’t
make it into the new files. What remained was becoming almost holdable in the
brain. We went to Disney World. While there, nothing about my writing life and
my project felt real, even though I had, just days ago, felt it was the universe.
Yes people were still struggling in the Lower Ninth Ward. Yes my manuscript was
worth every hour I had given it. Was it? Would we one day be able to afford a
vacation property in Florida? It was so good to go outside without a coat boots
mitts a toque. To be with my daughters every moment. To be taken on rides. To
be suspended briefly in the air the castle in the distance and beyond it Space
Mountain and below it a nest of thorns, to plummet shrieking into those thorns,
to get wet because we wanted to. If I could do this every day would I do this
every day? I knew I would tire of it but at that moment I didn’t believe I
would tire. I wanted this life. Even though Trump. Even though the wall. Even
though this place used to be a swamp and it was costing us as much to be here
for a week as it would cost to send my older daughter for a year to the private
high school she was considering.
We
came home. The world sprang back into its place, the parade music lingered then
faded. I culled again. I printed the docs. I cut them into strips, each part
(some as brief as a line) its own thing. I sat on the floor of my office and
began to place them into a sequence. After a few hours I could barely pull
myself up off the floor. I switched to a table. I imagined this would take
months. It was now spring, warm enough to open the windows, but sometimes I
didn’t get the paperweight placed in time and some strips fluttered out of
their places. How did I know where their places were? I wanted the subjects,
intertwined before I separated them, back together. But I’d had to separate
them so I knew what I was looking at. Was this writing? I felt which things
pulled toward each other, which pushed away. In fact, it took only a few days
for an order I could work with. Now I had to replicate on the screen what I’d
made on paper. More cut and paste. But I’d had to move to paper so I knew what
I was looking at. Was this?
Once
I had a thing I had a thing to come to each morning. After school bus dishes
laundry teeth it was the first thing. I didn’t fall asleep. I cut and rewrote.
I cut and pasted. I added. I checked facts. These days I was a writer. I had a
project that was real. I gathered, honed, excerpts to send to competitions and
to journals. Was I writing, was I revising, was I researching? These were not
separable. Through these larger clusters of material I began to find a way to
build the thing of other than fragments. Or, a glue. Or, a spine. It teetered
less. My mind could hold even more almost.
The
early writing days of this work were naptimes. A few hours in the afternoon, of
indeterminate duration, the writing, if it was going well, continuing for as
many minutes as I could manage even after my younger daughter woke. I had told
myself to write what came. This meant sometimes Katrina sometimes Chernobyl
sometimes the girls who lived down the street passing by the window, the older
of whom was born premature and had endured several heart surgeries and who
would probably always, according to her parents, live at home; she was now back
in school, a baking program, while the younger ascended to CEGEP, to
university. They still sometimes passed together but mostly alone. Sometimes I
wrote about death.
Any
account leaves out almost everything. The laundry has just beeped. I allotted
myself an hour today because it’s early in the term, the treadmill has not yet
begun to run of its own accord, and I have one minute left. Is this a writing
day? I spend so much of my time talking about writing that writing about
writing seems legitimate, but I can’t help feeling inauthentic. Do I know
anyone who is able to afford, over years and decades, a regular writing
practice? Do I know any poet who is able to? Those I do know can do so thanks
to a partner’s income, or living in a country where their dollars last longer.
If I don’t know what my own writing day looks like, I don’t know what anyone’s
does.
During
sabbatical, I was usually done writing by lunchtime, which was often late. Then
the necessary e-mails, or exercising, a shower, the arrival of the school bus
or the drive to the school. Sometimes in the evenings some more time to write,
but more often e-mail. Reading, sometimes The
New Yorker, sometimes a novel.
This
was the past. Now I am back to the days in a chair critiquing student work, the
days in workshops and office hours, the days in meetings, the days in
coursepacks and anthologies, the evenings of leaving my laptop late and, if
time permits, reading just a few pages of something chosen. Or else more
coursepacks and anthologies.
This
is the first day. I have exceeded my hour. I will not get more than this –
unless I wish to crush the other end of my day and sleep even less – for
months, maybe not until spring. (So it’s fitting that it is now spring as I
reread this and at last send it off into the world. This file called “My
Writing Day 11 September 2017 rev. 10 May 2018.”) (Except I didn’t send it off,
I wasn’t sure if this was right for “My Writing Day” even though it’s more
right there than anywhere else, and now it’s now January 2019. You’re reading
this because rob kindly, gently, asked again if I’d consider writing
something.)
This
is how it goes. I’m in the middle of my life. My children will never be this
young again. When the near-total eclipse happens in Montreal in seven years, I
may be on sabbatical again. When I told my parents, in their late seventies,
this was not that far off really, there was a silence. Will they still be there
then, on the other end of the line?
It
matters not how each day goes but that is all that matters. One day at a time
but through this a life. Next spring (this spring; now) I will get back to work
on my manuscript in a sustained way. I’m starting to think of it as a book.
When it comes out – after more days of work, the nature of which I can’t yet
know – I hope it will bear the traces of time, of struggle. Each fragment “hard
won.” I want someone to understand that. The struggles with which my manuscript’s
concerned are so great that this hour I have taken for this assignment of
describing what it is like to have part of a day to write is a luxury almost
obscene. I am guilty. I am grateful. I am typical in ways I recognize.
This
is not what I intended to write. Had I not seen the former doctor’s former
receptionist again on the way out of the park, in the meadow this time, the
meadow quivering with crickets, goldenrod, chicory, and mist, both of us again
crossing in different directions, and had we not stopped and discussed how we
knew each other, and had we not talked about the park and had I not said I had
enjoyed walking there while on sabbatical and had she not asked what I worked
on during my sabbatical and had I not spoken of the difficulties of finding
both time and mental space for a writing practice while working and parenting
and had she not nodded and smiled kindly as she always did to mothers of sick
children at the clinic and had we not discussed the value of that walk in the
park as mental preparation and had she not said perhaps a routine was necessary
and had I not told her I knew I had to put the writing first or it wouldn’t
happen and had we not wished each other well and had I not decided on the way
out of the park back to the car before dropping off the books at the library
then home that I would not open Gmail that I would not fill out the teaching
preference questionnaire that I would not put the students’ names on the
workshop schedules that I would instead give myself one hour to write first
before anything that I would work on this piece because rob invited me to write
it and it was easier to put writing on the “to do” list when I had been asked
to do it, I would be reading over course outlines right now. This essay would
not exist in this form. The lesson in this is when the little voice says Do it
now, do it now. I cannot do this every day any longer. I cannot do this for
this long (75 minutes now) and I cannot do it most days. But if I’ve done it
once I can do it again. I have this evidence. (Is writing about writing
writing?)
She
told me her name, which I’d forgotten. Thank you, Jane.
11 September 2017, 10
May 2018, 23 January 2019
Stephanie Bolster has published four
books of poetry, the most recent of which, A
Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, was a finalist for the Pat Lowther
Award; an excerpt from her current manuscript, Long Exposure, was a finalist for the 2012 CBC Poetry Prize. White Stone: The Alice Poems, her first
book, won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards in 1998. Her
work has been translated into French (Pierre
Blanche: poèmes d’Alice), Spanish, and German. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems,
she grew up in Burnaby, BC and has taught creative writing at Concordia
University in Montreal since 2000.
