Frances Boyle : My (small press) writing day: the big stall

The day starts with coffee, then a few “quick” emails, scanning social media and reading some articles and poems that come up (LitHub, Poem a Day, Tuesday’s Poem of course). This week a moderate crisis – the cappuccino machine is not functioning, so we do a workaround with stovetop espresso machine and semi-frothed milk. The post-coffee morning components vary – a pilates class or gym visit, writers’ group meetings on Tuesdays, journaling when I can squeeze it in, nearly always an hour or so walk with my standard poodle -- all of which often means its almost lunchtime before I sit down to intentional writing.

Computer work – revisions, some writing, and most emails – takes place at my desk in my office, with chachkas on every surface and books overflowing the shelves. The office is in temporary chaos while some arcane adjustment of the radiators is ongoing, bookcases, file cabinet and desk pulled into the middle of the room. When journaling or otherwise handwriting and reading, I am at my comfy armchair in the living room. My daughter claims that any place where I work, with books piled around it, and pens in jars is also an office, so my photo shows the chair and its surround.

Journalling is a regular component of many days but it often feels anything but creative and is certainly not directed or otherwise intentional. When I’m not mulling in my journal over what I’ve got on my to-do list, or complaining to myself about lack of productivity, I might talk myself through a character’s back story, or freewrite from a prompt or a memory. A recent ramble had me remember curlers – not the bonspiel kind but the ones we used to put in our hair, pink foam or hard plastic cylinders  – and old-school home hair dryers. Will these memories make their way into a story or poem at some point? Maybe yes, likely no, but I hope the process help me tap into some manner of flow, lets me access some trapdoor of my brain. Or maybe it’s just a stall.

Not long ago, I stepped down from a fairly demanding volunteer role (chair of the board of Arc Poetry Magazine) but retain a less-demanding editorial board position, so some time most days is taken up with emails about the magazine and our programming, reading poems on submittable and the occasional meeting. In addition to my regular writing group, I try to arrange occasional visits to keep in touch with other writer friends over coffee/tea/lunch. The business side of the writing life take time too – keeping track of when magazines are open for submissions, choosing work to send, formatting to meet the particular requirements of each magazine (they all differ in small ways – number of poems, cover letter info, even acceptable font). I’ve long extolled the idea of aiming for 100 rejections a year (because of this: [ http://lithub.com/why-you-should-aim-for-100-rejections-a-year/  ]. Yet, lately I’ve been wondering if time taken up by all this submitting is yet another stall (as, likely, is writing this piece and the fidget-revising I know I’ll do).

Stalling. Which brings me to the writing part of my writing day. I’m currently in revision mode on a novella which will be published later this year. I am thrilled to have had it accepted yet I am working ever-so-slowly through the comments from my generous editor/publishers. Their editing suggestions are bang-on, and by and large not terribly daunting. Still, I’ll read over a scene and their comments for the umpteenth time, decide I need to go to YouTube to research some film scene I want a character to think about, scribble a bit, stall a bit more (reaching for the phone to scroll social media for a few minutes is now a stall the way reaching for a cigarette once was), and end up settling for some small progress--a paragraph or two, a few lines of dialogue, maybe a scene revised.

I don’t have a typical writing day. Even though I have the luxury and privilege of no longer having to report to a day job, I’m still shoe-horning my actual writing among all the detritus of my life. It’s a fluid process for me, and I try to acknowledge that I am also working at least on a subconscious level, laying down my mental compost, as I walk the dog or look at movie clips of people crashing through glass (yes, for a legitimate purpose).

Evenings are short. I’m usually at the computer till dinnertime. My partner is the cook in the family and I’m on cleanup. We eat late, so it’s often nine or later by the time I’m finished with dishes (my sister claims I’m the slowest cleaner in the world, which I have little doubt of). After that, I generally read – usually fiction, sometimes poetry – and occasionally watch something on Netflix. All the while percolating, letting things settle. My writing day is my life, I guess.

Frances Boyle writes poetry and fiction when she is not stalling. Her writing appears in literary magazines and anthologies throughout Canada and in the U.S., most recently in The New Quarterly and The Fiddlehead. She is the author of the poetry collection Light-carved Passages (BuschekBooks) and a novella, Tower, (forthcoming, Fish Gotta Swim Editions). She has called the prairies and Vancouver home, but is now firmly rooted in Ottawa.

Steven Ross Smith : My Writing Day

My smart phone alarm calls me into morning between 6:30 and 7 a.m. Currently it’s playing a folkish song from the ‘60s – “Something On Your Mind” by Karen Dalton. I resist, doze, but the song plays on. So I stretch, throw the covers off and get up and head for the bathroom to fetch my housecoat. I’ll need fuel so I descend the carpeted stairs to the kitchen where I assemble multi-grain cereals with fruit in a shiny white bowl, settle at the table and chew while reading a page or two of the latest NewYorker. Then make a latte-to-go and climb back upstairs to the shower.

After the shower, fully awake, freshened, and dressed I ascend the stairs to my attic office where I’m surrounded with several hundred books and twenty or thirty random images stuck or hung on the wall – everything from a picture of my grandfather as a dandy young man in about 1905 to ceramic and stuffed owls and seven or so pieces and photos related to my mentor bpNichol. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas hover atop my window frame, which looks out, when I think to look up from my keyboard, toward Mount Norquay.

I drop into my office chair and flick on my laptop and linked screen. It is about 7:45 a.m. and time to write. I like to get writing before my brain gets cluttered with anything else, notably news or emails.

From that point, things vary from day to day. I might start by reading some poetry; or I might look at a piece I’ve been revising; or I might launch into the void of the new blank page.

I write for art and I write for dollars, so the project might be a new poetic work, or revisions of a story or essay, or an article on literary or visual art topics.

I most often – if there’s no pressing deadline – follow my instincts, i.e., I tune into my mind, the direction of my attention, and move to that project. For instance, I often have two or five or even more things on the go, so I listen to where my attention is aiming, and proceed to begin work on what rises to the surface. Today it is this piece, responding to rob mclennan’s invitation to write about my writing day.

Three times a week I stop at 11:30 to get organized and head for a noon yoga class. Other days I might work a bit longer, before breaking for lunch. In any case, there’ll be a break in the afternoon for the aforementioned, or for errands, a walk, or a trip to the gym to stimulate blood flow to the brain, and to try to counter my body’s - apparently unhealthy – static, seated morning. I like to return to the desk for an hour or two more of work in the late afternoon – more writing, or correspondence, or other administrative tasks. I will descend from the office around 5 or 5:30, angling toward supper. Usually there is no writing energy left in the day. Evening will be for visits or entertainment and (not too late) to bed where I read a bit, then shut the light and hope for a good sleep, before rising next day to start the cycle over again.

Why This Schedule?

I used to write late at night, when I lived alone – say from 10 pm to 1 or 2 a.m. But as I got older I found that my brain grew too sluggish in those hours, and when I became a family guy, there were other nighttime distractions. I don’t recall exactly when, but I began shifting to mornings for writing – I think it must have been on my move to Saskatchewan, where my intent was to focus hard on my poetry and fiction. Often my day commitments nudged me toward early morning. The other aspect of this scheduling was my belief that consistency, the daily application of the posterior to the upholstery – a nice way of saying “bum on chair” – was essential to accomplishment, fighting procrastination and lethargy, and to keeping the part of the brain and unconscious that is attuned to creativity, attentive and on track. It’s that keeping your eye on the ball thing. So getting to work first thing became a habit, and didn’t allow distractions to get in the way. My writing, creative growth, and subsequent publications, were the result of this consistency.

The other principle I believe in is revision. So the application of consistent and ample writing time allows space for musing, writing, refining, revising, setting aside, revising, revising, polishing, and completion. My writing workday will embrace all or some of these processes, depending on where I am in a work’s process. The habit becomes ingrained and enables frustrations to be balanced with reward, a fantastic incentive to get up and do it again.

Okay, my stomach’s telling me its almost time for my lunch break. 



Steven Ross Smith is a poet, perfromance poet, fiction writer and arts journalist. His latest poetry book, his thirteenth, is Emanations: Fluttertongue 6, published by BookThug of Toronto. He has received the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award (2005) and the bpNichol Chapbook Award (2006.) He appears in journals, audio recordings, and videos in Canada, USA, and abroad. Smith served as Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre from 2008 to 2014, and as Director of Sage Hill Writing Expereince from 1990 to 2008. His recent journalism has appeared in GalleriesWest, Poets & Writers, and WestWord. He lives and writes in Banff and Galiano Island, B.C. Find him at: fluttertongue.ca; stevenrosssmith.com; & on Twitter @SonnyBoySmith

Nisa Malli : My (Small Press) Writing Day

As a day-job poet with ill health, I don’t have a writing day. At best I have a writing week, or season, some wider slice of time that allows for flexibility and extenuating circumstances. I often have grand writing plans for vacations, cloistered residencies, and times when my day job is slower and my health is good and I can come home with energy to write. But in my regular life, I write poems like I’m playing the world’s slowest chess game with myself: tweaking a line over breakfast, coming back to it in the evening after work.

My day jobs have usually involved some writing (why fight what you’re good at if it pays the bills). As a day-job poet, I once wrote an ode in rhyming couplets for a dearly departing boss and recited it at her farewell party. I write reports and policy papers, talking points and scenario notes, communication plans and critical paths, and use delicate prose to manifest things into real life through speech acts and declarations.

It has always been like this: cramming the poetry in around other things. During my BFA, I wrote workshop drafts the night before class after a 7am - 4pm shift. I graduated in 2008, the year all the arts funding got cut and even the unpaid internships dried up. I lucked out making $10/hour as the Assistant Editor of a struggling arts magazine, working a 70 hour week during production but getting paid for 37. For a while, I stopped writing poems and wrote only nonfiction because pitching magazines paid at least ten cents a word and had a higher acceptance rate.

I’m a day-job poet because I believe in the work I do, and because pragmatically I need the health insurance and the financial stability and a shot at paying down my student debt in the next decade. If I can’t go to the dentist, pick up a prescription, or rent a mould-free apartment without making stark calculations, I don’t take proper care of myself and my health deteriorates til the pain is more of a distraction than an inspiration. Dig into the finances of most full-time artists and you’ll find family wealth or a partner with a more stable job (or at least two artists praying their fluctuating incomes and grants balance out). But in an economy that assumes two-adult families and doesn’t value poetry, I am my own safety net and my own back-up plan. Many of my fellow full time day-job poets have financial caregiving obligations, or their own chronic health issues or disabilities. Some of us can’t access the editorial and teaching work that often supports writers, whether through geography, discrimination, or lack of higher education. Some came to poetry later in life, after their day job career was already established, and are loathe to leave it.

I’ve learned not to keep a writing routine because I am harder on myself than any teacher or editor and my day job and health refuse to maintain a pre-set schedule. As a poet, word counts are less relevant anyways than making time for poetic intuition and revision. I’ve learned that I am extrinsically motivated and can ride for months on the glory of a single published poem or an invitation to read. I’ve learned to write through the worst of the worst drafts til at least I have something on the board I can move around, though I struggle to balance the illusion of “done-ness” (the lull of rhythm or form that makes poems feel finished before they are ready) with the desire to put work out into the world, and impatience with my own slow process. I’ve learned to write about illness and hunger and financial stress and capitalism and scarcity so that days spent recovering in bed feel fruitful and not wasted. I learned to write down half lines as they find me because they blow away easily in a busy workday if I don’t catch them.

I’ve never had enough space in my apartments for a writing desk so I’ve learned to write with minimal ceremony and accessories: at my kitchen table or someone else’s, on the train to a conference or to visit long distance loves. I’ve learned to treat my writing like a business and keep meticulous records of submission deadlines and expenses. And I’ve learned to squelch the nagging feeling that I am not doing enough in any professional realm.

Poetry slides more neatly than other genres into this diced up approach. It only takes a few minutes to re-read yesterday’s draft and re-orient myself. I can recite a draft under my breath on the 20 minute streetcar ride to work, listening for cracks in the lines, or type quick notes to myself en route. But I wonder sometimes what I would write if I had more time.

For years I kept these two halves of my work separate (if you can call a full work week a half). But maintaining multiple professional brands is its own part time gig, not to mention the extra website hosting fees. And as I write more, it becomes harder to hide what a quick google would show my colleagues anyways.

Being a day-job poet means I am behind my peers in publications, that I can’t afford time off or the tuition for an MFA, and that my chapbook is still a slowly convalescing manuscript. But it also means my head is full of content and ideas, new realms of language and research I would never find if my work didn’t require it. My writing day offers spaciousness and built-in time for poems to breathe between edits.

So this edition of My (Small Press) Writing Day is for all my fellow day-job poets who are writing behind cash registers and in cubicles and on the subway to work, who write slower than they wish but just as brightly, who have chosen, by constraint or by preference, to divide their love and their time. 

Nisa Malli is a writer and researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. Her poems have been published in Grain, Arc, Cart Blanche, Maisonneuve Magazine and elsewhere. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and completed a 2017 Banff Centre Emerging Writers residency. She is working on a manuscript of poems that offers benedictions, incantations, and instruction manuals for sick bodies.

Barbara Tomash : Night and / Day and / Books

Once, over ten years ago, my writing day took place in the dark. Each night, after I pulled down the shade and got into bed, I turned off the light and took out my notebook for a writing session. I wrote with the light off because I didn’t want to wake my husband who is disturbed by even the dimmest reading lamp. I wrote in bed because I wanted, finally, to be horizontal after a long day (we had a small child, busy jobs, etc.). I wrote in the dark in order to better see what it is that light obscures, to not be distracted by color, shape, pattern, noise, and crucially (it seemed to me) to understand what remains of these things within the darkness of a softly breathing body. I wanted darkness so that I could learn a new language, the language of night, my writing hand moving across the page without stopping, my thoughts untraceable as they emerged, barely heard. In the mornings, when I opened my notebook, I’d find strange, undecipherable pages in my own transformed handwriting—a woven net of words sloping down then up in crisscrossing diagonals, letters shifting crazily in scale and size. Later, when I worked to shape this material into the prose poems of my first book, Flying in Water, I often felt as if I were translating myself to myself, moving from one language (night) into another language (day) and so on back and forth.

For my book Arboreal my writing day was held in the frame of a window. I looked out the window over my desk just as day turned into evening and then night. I was arrested in movement—a paradox—the motion of my thinking contained in the view out the window. Light and thought began to feel similar and I was inspired by how small changes appear to us, what a particular instant of transition looks like, feels like. And so, I began to see the page itself as a translucence that shapes and makes possible perception, while above my desk, the actual window, filled with tree branches, became the scrawled-upon page.

The Secret of White came out of writing days in which I was not writing at all, but instead looking closely at works of art. Sometimes, as at a Bonnard exhibition I visited at the Museum of Modern Art, I might take notes, but when I had the good luck to live in Florence for nine months, I walked the streets and entered churches and museums every day without recourse to paper and pen. Was this “imprinting” of images in my imagination and memory a form of daily writing?

My writing days also change dramatically season to season, as they do for so many writers who teach. During the academic semester when I am keeping up with reading student work, offering feedback, and preparing for classes, I work on my own creative projects in fits and starts. My rhythm changes during the winter and summer breaks, periods in which I often work with concentration for long stretches. However, it can be difficult to shift gears suddenly from teaching to writing, and so I have learned that although those fits and starts—perhaps an hour and half on a Monday night, or a quick pass at a revision before bed—may seem hardly worthwhile, they can sustain the work in surprisingly effective ways. Now, when I look back, it seems as if the poems in my latest book PRE- were written and rewritten in a long drawn out series (over years) of short writing sessions—is that possible?

Within these variations in my writing life, there is one wonderful constancy. Every Friday morning, for more than seven years, I have been writing in company with Nona Caspers, Ann Pelletier, and Jesse Nissim. (At this point we live in different cities and so we meet in a video conference call.) We spend three hours writing together. At times we give each other prompts, at other times, when we are immersed in our ongoing projects, we simply keep each other company as we write. Usually, one or two of us will want to read something we have written to the others, so we stop and listen to the raw or revised work and respond, not in critique, but in conversation about what we heard in the writing. These Friday mornings spent with my writing partners are at the heart of my creative life. The inspiration, care, and attention they offer accompany me whenever I write, whether they are present or not.

Barbara Tomash is the author of four books of poetry, PRE- (Black Radish Books 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), Flying in Water, which won the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award, and The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, Witness, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

Richard Harrison : What’s Up, Now?

Now is the winter

And now it sits on a shelf

And now that I am the age of my students’ fathers

What comes to me now is how out of place a man such longings make

Now I have a reason for this knowledge, and a home for it

Not now

Now Jeffers, supervillain of American poetry

It’s not just you, the ones I’m speaking to now, arranged around my writing desk

Now I am not a comic book artist

A big joke now

Or this one, now my favourite

The person I would have apologized to is dead now

Now as I was young and easy

It is here, now, what that hand held when it held itself up

And I have this now, a love I never knew until he was gone

And now, Borges is reading this poem out loud

Now you have more to be happy about

Now it’s the software

Or (until right now) read aloud

But what her body never forgot or forgave, I think now, on my birthday, was men

Her body is much happier now that all of us are in charge at a distance

And now he’s writing

Connecting before and after through now

As if he never wrote what he writes now

I’ve been writing poetry for 40 years, and teaching it in one form or another for twenty. In almost every class or workshop, I start the sentence “Poetry is all about” or “Poetry is” at least once, and every time I finish the sentence differently. The people who’ve worked with me for a while recognize the pattern and smile. I think one of them is making a list: “Poetry is all about images” or “Poetry is how we make up for all the words we don’t have for the feelings we do.” And so on. Poetry has had enough in it for me to fill decades worth of definitions and still have itself left over, in sight but just out of reach.

So I have to settle for the idea that the definition of poetry is dependent on what I am using it for in the moment I reach for the definition. Still, there are a couple of things that poetry is that repeat themselves, and one of those is that an individual’s poetry is the search for a complete understanding of that cluster of words that sit somehow at the centre of their language and so their world, words that return again and again, always revealing something new, and it still seems right to me to say that I have spent my life as a poet trying to understand the full meaning of a dozen words, and maybe fewer than that.

Some of those  have been clear for a long time — father, hero, soldier, hockey, poem — but others have crept up on me —  poetry is investigation — and sometime over the last year of reading from On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood I found the word “now”  over and over no matter how I selected the reading for the night.

Now I am investigating now, my unexpected subject. It appears in the book in 24 lines and phrases; collected, the piece that opens this writing. What is it telling me? What question about it are its own appearances asking me to ask? I’m not sure yet, this is new to me, but here’s what I have now as I think of it: I wrote most of these lines between my father’s death in 2011 and the time I finished the book. I noticed the word, though, after my mother’s death in July last year. I’m finding what everyone finds when they are the oldest generation in their own family, but I hope it’s more than that. Time is precious, of course, and maybe I’m teaching myself to think about time the way someone older than me knows it.

Maybe that’s what poetry is doing because a poem is focus on the moment — all that leads up to that moment the poem plucks from the flow of time, and then all that is attached to it not just linearly or chronologically, but psychologically, spiritually, and more that we can see because the poem is doing its work. Every moment is a possible now, and most of those we let go by, and that’s fair enough, that’s the way the world is too much with us.

But making now out of a moment that would otherwise vanish away into then is art. And in this way, if the poem has done its work well, now is retrieved from the past, from memory, and made present again. And maybe that’s the meaning I never got when I first heard Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “violent emotion recalled in tranquility.” At the time I thought he was talking what was going on at the writing desk. Now I think otherwise (or now I think it’s more than that). Now I think it’s the definition of what poetry is, what it does, how you know it, when you hear it, when you read. I know too, that what I’ve got is only what I’ve got now, and now is not yet done.

Richard Harrison lives in Calgary where he teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in comics and the graphic novel at Mount Royal University. He’s the author of 6 books of poetry, among them Hero of the Play, the first book of poetry launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame. His On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood won the 2017 Governor-General’s Award and Stephan G. Stephansson Prize for Poetry.