Robert Keith : Writing day, shmiting day.

I’ve never had a schedule to follow for my creative endeavours. If it feels like I should punch a time card before I get started then I’m not going to be interested. My writing comes and goes in impulsive spurts. When I have a vague idea of a topic, person, place to write about I’ll scribble down notes over weeks, months, until I have a pile of ideas to piece together.

I think I understand why people try to write every day, or every weekend at least. They want to flex the creative muscles and keep in practice. If I were to try this, I’m scared I’ll end up with a heap of trash writing and filler. And that time could have been used for something else constructive and genuine. I’d rather not pick through garbage to find something salvageable.

My approach is more like the university student that fucks around and slacks off then has a cramming session a few hours before an exam and ends up with a C+. I come in with an idea and sculpt it so I have a basic form, then chisel away until I’m left with the closest thing to what’s in my head.

With fiction I need an ending before I can even think of starting. I need a destination to arrive to before creating the road to get there. At times the road is a Super Highway, other times it’s barely a cow path. Poetry, if I have a concept, I’ll meander around the concept with no end goal in mind and drift along aimlessly until I’m satisfied.

When I’m not working on writing poetry or fiction projects I use my free time creating vispo, asemic work, studying languages, playing and learning musical instruments, reading, watching movies.  All of these activities come in short flashes. I’ll write for a week, then not write for several months. At that time I’ll study a language for a few months to drop it and concentrate on playing and recording music. Then not touch any instruments for four months or so because I’m binge watching movies or a series (which is research for writing sometimes), then return to writing again for a short while.

For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to live alone and stay single. This has given me so much more free time to pursue my interests. I have a tiny abode in a suburb of Victoria, BC to myself that’s quiet most of the day and afternoon, and I work a mundane night job where I can daydream and mentally go somewhere else. Thinking about whatever I’m working on at the time while doing repetitive tasks.

Inspirations, or whatever you want to call them come from things seen, read, heard or overheard, riding the public bus, in the shower, films, other books, other genres. Keeping the senses open is one of the most important parts of the writing itself.

The act of writing, when I’m ready to put it all together, lately happens during layoff periods, statutory holidays, whenever I have a few days to stay indoors and pound away at the keyboard. Mostly this happens at home now, though when I get shack-whacky and need to go outside I’ll head for the library, a café, take my laptop to the laundromat, someplace with caffeine, with my headphones jammed in my ears to drown out the local fauna.

I read somewhere, someone’s writing advice -- that they would stop at a climactic point and pick it back up the next day. I’ve tried to do this and was too committed to make it work. It’s like watching half of an exciting movie and going to bed without watching the rest of it. When I get started on something I plow away at it until either I’m finished or stuck somewhere and I can’t do it anymore. I’ll forget to eat and keep typing until my head aches, I’m all jittery, and I can’t see straight.

Over the past year I’ve had more luck publishing my visual works than poetry and fiction. I’m not sure if I should exploit this or it means I need to focus my energy more on writing.

Robert Keith is a persona that works with visuals, texts, poetics, fiction, and exophonic writing. He is the author of four collections of poetry, and six chapbooks. His collection of Visual poetry Chicken Scratch was published in 2017 (eyeameye books) His visual work have been presented in galleries in Canada, Malta and Russia. Forthcoming is his 1st novella in 2018.

Bola Opaleke : MY WRITING DAY (OR NOT)

It would be hard to say anything worthwhile about 'my writing day' without going a little autobiographical. Born in the early seventies, in Nigeria where almost everyone had forgotten such a thing as Democracy existed, I grew up in the collective regimented life of a people who go to bed and rise at dawn with infused fear of the 'boots and the gun'. The flagrant injustices, the cold helplessness bolting out of every parents' eyes, and the steaming whisper of "when you see the soldiers on the street, run back home as fast as you can" in our ears each morning we set out for the long walk to school, lurks in my dreams even after the Military left the corridors of power in 1979, and again in 1999. The poverty of a people blessed with (plundered) natural resources makes almost everyone here a candidate of Depression. The rape, the murder, the Police and Military brutality, the oppression and suppression of rights and voices, all at a very close range. The extension of that in a different yet acidic version is the racism against people of color in North America and elsewhere in the world. All these combined to craft my words into a peculiar voice. Picking up a bitter pen early in life, writing seems to be the only place where I can both laugh and cry at the same.

Earlier, a typical writing day for me was never in the library or a classroom corner but in the open field closest to nature. Nature, however, was not the reason for my choice. An open field afforded me the opportunity to notice any potential aggressor/assailant from afar and to be able to plan an exit strategy before it's too late. At night, I could stay awake and think about all kind of stuff to write, and pray I remember them in the morning because with about six or more folks in a single room, me clutching to a pen and a paper, staring into the ceilings for tenses that parse is not what anyone in that situation wants to do. I wrote my earliest poems from a place of immense darkness, from bitterness and anger at a society that selfishly makes its own sunshine and outlaw any form of light for us, the underprivileged. In essence, I wasn't a writer at all. I was a lamentor and so had no "writing day" in a real sense.

When I moved to Canada in 2011, everything changed (or at least a lot of things changed). First, I was able to self-publish my first poetry collection 'A Note From Hell' - a collection of poems written in my teenage years (including poems written as early as when I was 11 years old), by a US publisher in 2012. After that, I started musing on the idea of actually becoming a writer. So I would pretend to be a writer by surrounding myself with books, leafing through them slowly and jotting things down. That soon became real after I got a job as a Youth Care Practitioner, working night shifts mostly. As all the kids settle in bed, completing all chores and paperwork, I would, in turn, settle in front of the computer, reading and writing all night. This gift of silence, for me, provided by the enclosing serenity was always immeasurably satisfying. I would speak to the walls and wait for them to speak back to me without any prying eyes calibrating the level of my assumed mental in-balance. Sometimes, I even role play in a bid to conjure up inspiration. The blessings of the night had often found my fingers. Many of the poems I have published, all over the world, in Europe, US, Canada, Africa and elsewhere were crafted on such a night as this. Strangely, I think the god of poetry is nocturnal (no pun intended). She moves around mostly at night.

Finally, for me, a typical writing day/night is not all about writing. It is also about reflecting on things already written or unwritten. It is about tickling all dying dreams or ambitions. Mostly, it is about chewing other people's work, swallowing the part I want to make my own, and spitting out the part that might be indigestible in my system. In this sense, weirdly, at home, my couch (not desk) is my office. And my typical writing day is a potpourri of movie time, soft arguments, board games, and sometimes chasing my four-year-old kid around the house because he would not stop disrespecting my "office", throwing my pens and papers all over the floor (okay, maybe I do that too), and stealthily taking my laptop back to my room even though I have schooled him several times about the kitchen table being its natural habitat.

In Brief:

Hot Chocolate (no coffee): a cup a day

Hours at desk: about 4, if at day (night) job

Twitter: writing partner (laughs), keeps me company while writing

When idle: swim with sharks (in my head).

Bola Opaleke is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in a few Journals like Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, St. Peters College (University of Saskatchewan) Anthology (Society 2013 Vol. 10), Pastiche Magazine, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning, and lives in Winnipeg MB.

David Bradford : Not Knowing

Just watching from bed with my glasses off and the lights out, a couple of things start to look like eyes on a face staring back. The desk chair making sure I stay awake. The elm (elm?) branches over the neighbour’s roof—waggling, prying fingers beyond the curtain.

This poem trying to get on in my head is the closest I’ve come this particular week to writing. I’ve got Sebald’s raccoon working on me, stop, this or that latest knife thru the inner circle, stop, still, stop, people telling me, stop, things I can’t forget. Then more stuff I can’t forget.

Under the covers: the dumbness of it in my note-taking app. I make tiny adjustments. My back hurts, like always, and I try to take the pressure off my L6 and 5. Keep rolling over with the pillow between my thighs. Leg up, leg down. I try to be my own reparative reading before daylight. No tweeting. For a couple of hours I think I sleep.

I wake up to my old B’s gratitude poems over FB—the run-on weave of them, snowshoeing across an old spring this sudden, felling new year—and I’m surprised, pleased. “Coming to understand / some matters are style” and I almost cry, thinking I recognize myself. Eight in the morning, I call him. Happy to hear each other try a laugh.

Before leaving the house R gets me online for a bit of advice. Her old harasser is still making jokes online. For days, weeks, months, it’s been nothing but men and the bad things they’ve done—the sleep lost over those not losing it. I listen, say what I can. We make a date for coffee in a few days. I send work emails.

Noon at the coffee shop, the manuscript doesn’t look like there’s anything else I can do about it before someone reads it. I send it to E. I send it to D. I start to think about the next small thing. I’m re-reading Jericho Brown: “Even asleep, everyone hears everything in prison.” Someone else messages me, needing to process. Maybe there’s no being done yet. Maybe I don’t like conclusions.

Part of me drops in on K at the shop just to see if I can figure it out in the moment. What he’s been skeptical of, and where he’s listened and tuned in. He’s got things on his mind, so I do the listening. I stay an hour, paging through a Sarah Pinder book over tea. He offers me some home-baked BBQ beans. No big answers I didn’t already have.

At N’s, I get that Camilla Grudova he’s been holding for me and we vent a while, talking shop and secrets, bumping shoulders on the front step. Kara texts me kitties licking each other’s heads.

At H and S’s thing, sweet art theory kids read their (actually very good) slow poetry. F brings in his father off the Chinese mainland and introduces him (“On Fiiiiire”) to Springsteen. SS elegizes her sweet dog Auden. A five-year-old thwacks a pink balloon against the VR scupture wall.

Meanwhile, C tries to read: “what stuck to my skin”; wondering out loud. “ZERO,” the little girl hollers, before strolling right up to the Plexiglas lectern in her white Patagonia. She stares him down. “Hey,” he says, kindly, between poems, and she snorts. Her father decides it’s finally time to go. Beer is free all night. I hug more men than I have in a year.

Back in bed, J texts asking if I can bring fun juice to huevos rancheros at hers and A’s in the morning. I answer with a Bitmoji (still): cartoon me in a pitcher of orange juice. I read and reread a message R sent mid-reading about an essay I wrote no one else may ever see. I reread the essay and wonder if anyone else will ever see it.

Downing the last of the sleepy tea, I fail to come up with a single line of poetry before trying, again, to sleep. None of this ever stops being overwhelming, but I get used to it in waves. I decide it’s a good sign. I get better at not knowing all the time.

I hear Inspector Coconut meowing downstairs at T’s and get up to let him in. I pat his butt just how he likes it. Let him roam at will. Find his bedtime in the bathroom sink.

I manage four hours of sleep.

David Bradford is the author of Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and Call Out (knife | fork | book, 2017). His work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Lemon Hound, Vallum, Poetry Is Dead, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate and Ontario Graduate Fellow at the University of Guelph, he splits his time between Toronto and Montreal, and is working on Dream of No One But Myself, a hybrid book of poetry, family photo cut-ups and collages, and soft self-erasures. It's almost almost finished. 

Brenda Brooks : A Day/Night at the Desk

Coffee of course, a mighty brew steamed up in the battered bialetti espresso maker I’ve had for over 20 years.  I pour a jumbo cup then settle in to look over the previous day’s work, whether poetry or fiction.

I find working on fiction to be different psychologically, and even physically, than poetry. The obsessive quality of the latter is equal to fiction, yes, but also limited to smaller, easily broken up increments of time. Even though many drafts of a poem may be required, the whole experience seems calmer somehow, more quickly defined by a sense of completion. And if not, I might either delete what is usually not much more than a page, or drop it into a folder like the parts of an old clock to sort through later. Poetry’s got options, an end in sight. It rolls along like a summertime river with a few rocks thrown in and another view just around the bend.

Fiction isn’t like that. I might show up at 7 a.m  for poetry, and feel pretty pulled-together even in my jammies. Not so for fiction. Up at 4 a.m. Or 5:30. Up at 2 a.m. Or 3:17. Itching to get at it. Pale and wrung. Hair standing on end. No calm in sight. I don’t need a drink. I already feel drunk. The river I mentioned earlier has turned into the one from Deliverance, except there  might not be any. In fiction the ever-present obsessive quality becomes a charge that pulses through the entire first draft. If you’ve done a first draft for a previous book you know it’s going to be shit, just as Hemingway said. But the problem is: you don’t believe it. Not this time. This time’s different. This time you’ve tapped into some stellar vein of brilliant magic and the goddam thing reads like By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept right from the get-go. But low and behold: it’s not true. I mean, the sitting down and weeping part is true, but that’s all.

There’s hardly anything anyone can do to you that will hurt more than what you do to yourself after reading the first draft.

Therefore: I have several inspirational quotes tacked up in my office, a space which doubles as my bedroom, or vice versa. (Since it’s only two small steps to my desk, this makes it easy to find myself staring, terrified, at my first draft before my eyes are even open.) Many of these quotes are by Kurt Vonnegut. A few of my favorites are: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” And: “Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.” Or: “Start as close to the end as possible.” I run my eyes over these daily and never stop getting to the bottom of just how impossible writing fiction really is. But I’m buoyed by Vonnegut’s generosity in sharing them.

My last daily thought is one of my own, a little mantra that I hope will guide the writing journey towards an authentic voice in what is an increasingly noisy, manic world. And so, Note To Self: Writing and publishing are two different things. One is love, the other ambition. Keep all thoughts of them apart while doing the actual writing. Don’t put any conditions on love. 



Brenda Brooks [painting by Tonia Cowan] was a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books In Canada First Novel Award for Gotta Find Me An Angel. She was also shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award. She has written two collections of poetry and is currently at work on a novel about two women who get in trouble. Her hair is standing permanently on end and she is drunk on too many worlds, I mean, words.