Writing is Like Wednesday : Razielle Aigen

Initially, it’s a matter of the immaterial.

A nameless thing. A mood. A void. Or a maybe
carefully crafted avoidance
of full entry into the stream of life.
You’re on the outside
looking in. Inside, the body
speaks. The body is made of matter.
A few inversions and a twist
will probably be a good thing. Stretching
the limits of confined spaces, you find yourself
moving. Moving bodies of thought.
Movement reshapes matter, giving
space to thinking. You are not moved
necessarily by what is good, but rather
by what is true.

By Wednesday, it always
feels like its been a week of Wednesdays,
an amorphous inside-out time-lapse
continuum of middles, no beginning and no end,
a Mobius strip. Seamless. By Wednesday
it’s about substance. A seamless substance
that mimics biomimicry. Seamless,
like the skin of an amphibian, making
an imperceptible transition from one medium (air)
to another (water). In the background,
it’s “All Tomorrow's Parties” on repeat,
because it elevates you. It’s uplifting. It’s a mood.
And you take in the mountains, they uplift you too.
You take in the tree or skyscraper, or whatever
your view of the outside
happens to be. Wednesday
is just another way of saying
the in-between, the liminal space, the movement
between the one and the other,
the in-between between inside and outside.
You shake and rattle and lift the mood
with a few crystals and a mantra:
“more isn’t better, it’s just more.”

Then, once you get into the parabola of it,
you realize that thoughts are also matter
and that it’s only, but by no means simply,
a matter of being. You begin by being
with time, being with the time it takes to be
with the things that matter. The lavender
clouds at dusk drifting sideways against a peach sky.
This is time moving, and you sense it. Sensing
the way it effects your being by the way
you are moved. This is your perception.
It’s also a matter of taking time
and also a matter of making time.
The taking and the making are separate
but interrelated. For example, knowing
that you are thinking, knowing why you are crying
takes time, this is a kind of taking of time.
The time it takes to realize the parabola of a mood.
Making time always also involves giving
something up, foregoing, sacrifice, a giving up
in order to get, to get at something, and
what you’re getting at is taking shape,
it’s on the move, it’s moving. You go inside.
Giving up time for something that matters
to you, and you alone. It is solitary.
It is a good space for getting into
the singularity of who you are.

How you think about what you’re thinking about
matters. It is an unmediated process of watching
and listening to the unfolding, making what matters
count. Then, shaping it on the outside.
This is the shape of things.
A matter of making/sculpting.
A matter of listening/deleting/bending/remaking/stretching.
Chiseling out meaning from the dream. It’s both
at once, organic and contrived. It’s about getting
in and being able to give meaning, giving
it an unspoken name, then letting it float
downstream. I am not my thoughts,
you keep thinking. This is the way
you go about the making of something
that is, in reality, nothing.
It’s about solutions, problem solving.
How to say the thing you’re thinking
without depleting it’s dream meaning,
without giving it away? It is both
a saying and a not saying, both
a nothing and a something.
It’s a matter of not and a matter of is,
a matter of capturing a vanishing point.
It’s a field and a passing mood. It’s a matter of meta
and micro narratives. It’s a matter of dropping
the story line, getting quiet and waiting,
without projecting avatars of Self.
It’s a matter of making the most of this
“less is more”/soft focus process.
Eventually,
you learn to rattle and shake,
you learn to call it by incantation.
Calling it a calling.

Recalling something, some shape that was
mustard yellow or avocado green recalls
the felt sense of childhood, the feeling of being
in a place of learning, in a library, a place in which
you mattered because you could read,
you knew how, this was your gift!
You are gifted!
This was affirmed by a row of metallic gold stars
next to your name just for being
able to make meaning out of symbols and signs
and this mattered to you very very deeply,
because it let you know that inside you were good.
Believing you were good because you could read.
You’re a star!
Somewhere, deeply inside, you still believe
this to be true, at least the molecular level. After all,
you and the stars are composed
basically of the same matter. More or less.
Reading makes you feel good, and so you go on
reading. And it often begins in the reading,
you are shaped by it, moved beyond words,
by it’s alchemical process, funnelling your thoughts
and moods and feelings. Something takes shape
inside you when you read.

In the end it is a matter of your basic conditioning or,
more accurately, digging yourself out of it, carving,
getting around it, getting quiet enough to hear the wind
brush the forrest and the soft sound of light rain falling
on the leaves, getting quiet enough to encounter
the non-verbal, the timeless, the shadows
and the dead. You become more you
in the process. You’re saying hello
to your incubating visions, you’re moved
by the thought that maybe, in reality,
there really is no outside-
text. You nourish thoughts,
letting the unconscious flourish
and unfold into matter.
You straddle the divide between inside and outside.
You straddle the divide between knowing and not knowing.
But actually, to be perfectly honest,
it’s a bit of an abyss.

Razielle Aigen is a Montreal-born writer and artist with a B.A. in History and Contemporary Studies from Dalhousie/King’s University, and is an alumna of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Sewer Lid (forthcoming), Fresh Voices, Five:2:One, Synapse, écho!, Hinge, California Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Constance Schultz : most days we only run once

my writing day is all about distractions and other types of avoidance...

...begins w/2 cups of coffee from a soup mug drunk slow while checking social websites which immediately suck me in

scroll,scroll

...poetry often created

between

coulee walls & various

points of the day

...words struggle to be heard between

the time I'm awake & my daughter wakes

up between the time we arrive at the park

& she finishes playing

...notebooks stand ready cameras compete w/Annie &

Steamboat Rock//Northrup Canyon//

Crown Pointe Overlook//all the wildlife in Grand Coulee

all the other coulee views are swimming in soft sand in summer in Spring Canyon

& every time I start

to write my mind//is drawn

//away to nature paths

full of badgers & marmots &

mule deer w/twins//coyotes//

the Canadian Lynx we saw recline on

a large boulder last year & powerful

storms full of canyon winds when the sky wears deeper shades

& always rocks

so many distractions

& words come out

when they want &

fight to be heard louder

than all of that

& if, heaven forbid

my inspiration falters then

we run

Constance Schultz lives near Grand Coulee in Washington State, USA. She writes w/her daughter-who-must-be-mentioned, w/ Winston-the-little-dog-who-thinks-he's-big & all the animals seen/unseen wherever they go. 

She has work in literary magazines around the world including Hidden Channel Zine, Train: a Journal of Investigation, Sobotka Literary Magazine and Empty Mirror. 

Holly Pelesky : my writing day

Over the years, my writing day has atrophied and burgeoned and contorted to make way for my life. At one time, a writing day meant taking my children to a babysitter and coming back home to my desk and sitting down without any distractions but the changing song on my Pandora station. I made myself a little ritual with a blended coffee and the quiet of my usually loud place allowed me to write.  That was when I was pursuing my MFA and people saw how seriously I took writing.

There is this perception sometimes that writing isn’t a serious profession and maybe that’s because it’s largely unpaid. But it as serious a profession as one makes it, even without a paycheck. We can throw ourselves into the craft of writing as much as a person throws themselves into staying late at an office, overbooking an Outlook calendar, and catching up on emails. One is not greater than the other because of its fiscal returns. One is more reasonable, maybe, but those of us who are writers are not known for our reason.  

It is hard to describe a typical writing day because many days I don’t write at all. There are days for housework or submitting my existing work or the jobs I toil away at so I can continue to write. There are days when I go for a run and shower and contemplate what I will write next but never open a Word document. I count all that as part of the process, too. By the time I sit down to write, I have spent hours mulling through what I have to say, spinning words in my head, erasing them, writing them again without ever seeing them on a page. 

As much as I admire the people who wake up early or stay up late each day to write on a schedule, I am not one of them. My discipline is not in the time I set aside to write but the regenerating motivation to. The actual time I spend ass-in-chair is parceled out into large or small chunks as life allows.

I have learned now to write amidst distractions—which I never thought I’d be able to do before—out of sheer necessity. I know now it is my necessity to write—it is my brain’s yoga—so if the only way to write is in the chaos of two screaming, wrestling boys, that’s what I’ll do. Right now I am typing on a laptop in the back of a coffee shop. I get my writing time in where I can fit it. I have written a poem on a pumpkin patch field trip, made a story outline in the grocery store aisle, and crafted an essay on the bench next to the inflatables my children were jumping on.

I have a desk, but my writing day could be anywhere. The words get put typed into documents at my desk, largely, but they are put into my head and then notebooks wherever I am. Today I didn’t think I’d finish writing this, but after each iced vanilla latte, I returned to this computer to finish what I started. I think that is my regenerating motivation: to make something whole any way I can.

Holly Pelesky is a lover of spreadsheets, giant sandwiches, and handwritten letters. Her essays have appeared in The Nasiona, Jellyfish Review, and Homology Lit, among other places. Her poems are bound in Quiver: A Sexploration. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. She cobbles together gigs to pay off loans and eke by, refusing to give up this writing life. She lives in Omaha with her two sons.

Sarah Priscus : my writing day

Every day is a writing day for me. Or at least, every day tries to be one.

I write on the bus and frequently -- usually -- spell everything wrong. I’m too stubborn to turn on my phone’s autocorrect (because “I don’t need it!”), but the bus is too bumpy and my fingers are too fumbling for me to form anything resembling coherency.

          It doesn’t really matter. Those small somethings lying behind a crack in my phone’s screen (once again, something I am too stubborn to fix) never see the light of day in their original form. Right now it’s summer, so every idea seems to be about foreign words for milk and pink flowers and baby sheep and the “static channel” on my childhood television and middle-of-the-night nosebleeds and the way water balloons sting when they burst on your bare skin.

          I am fascinated with the mundane and the ugly and the small pieces of shattered glass that still twinkle in the sand at the playground behind my school. Someone once pointed out that half my pieces involve someone vomiting, which is either reflective of my fear of public puking or of my idea that everything feels realer if it’s also a little disgusting.

Once I’m home and wearing my comfy pants, I decipher the notes titled “GOOD IDEA” and “MEH” and edit them as I copy them into my laptop. I edit them more, until they sparkle like they’re supposed to, but there’s something that remains special about those first scrambled-text, jotted-down ideas. I never delete them, but I never look at them again.

          Sometimes the process is different. Don’t tell my professors, but I can spend hours mulling over rhymes and drafting dialogue when I should be taking notes on Oscar Wilde or Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s not a habit I’d recommend, but I urge myself to write down everything that pops into my brain out of fear it’ll disappear forever. I tell myself that if I write it down, it can’t float away. It’ll be permanent, in some semi-tangible way, and won’t slither away from existence like dripping condensation.

          I’m reminded of my obsession with permanence every time (which is often) I make some sort of self-obsessed literary breakthrough in the shower or as I’m halfway asleep. At those times, I jolt and start to scribble onto a scrap of paper. If there’s no paper to devour, and no phone to misspell words on, I repeat ideas to myself until they find familiarity in my mind.

          I hate to forget, and every time I do, I spend about an hour mourning what was certainly The Best Idea of All Time.

          Most of the time, I sit in front of my laptop and alternate between writing metaphors about ghosts and green fields and watching whatever recommended Youtube interests me first. I write about a thousand words a day, and I’m not sure how, because it feels like most of my writing time is spent curating Pinterest boards that evoke the “aesthetic mood” of whatever piece I’m currently swallowed by.

          In eleventh grade, I took a grade twelve Creative Writing course. I devoured down every prompt and produced work that presented itself with such sincerity that I’d laugh at it. I snapped at a boy who called Sylvia Plath “crazy”. I gave a forty-minute presentation on the similarities between Ulysses and Trainspotting. I was oh-so-wise and oh-so-literate and thrilling in the idea that my teacher would read the things I had written.

          I took it too seriously.

I take it all too seriously, and I care about it all too much -- every writing prompt and flickering idea and quiet moment in between conversations -- and that’s fine with me. I like myself this way. I like writing this way.

Sarah Priscus writes in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where she attends the University of Ottawa for English and Theatre. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in a number of journals, most recently Slippage Lit, Scribble Lit, and Barren Magazine. Her hobbies including working on a novel and talking about "working on a novel".