Micheline Maylor : My Writing Day: Out of, and into, the Grey

It’s been snowing for a dog’s year. My one open eye sees the fluff and the hunter-green tree silhouettes in the window frame. In the between of sleep and awake I try to record with as much accuracy as possible my dreams, often the seeds of my poems. I like the surreal nature of the night talkings and what appears in the oddest ways. This morning, I recall a dream about Richard Harrison who has called me to a meeting, but he has racoon hands! He me a gift out pulled of a puddle and held in his furry fingers. I think it’s a raspberry, but I’m not sure. I open my other eye. How the hell will I make a poem out of that? Never mind, I rise and head for the coffee machine. I add a shot of espresso for good measure. I can see we are going to be snowed in today, might as well be buzzed and finish the laundry, or unpack a box from two years ago when I moved in. Some tasks are patient. Writing is not a patient task. If I hear the writing call, I go. Everything else is a patient task. Everything. Which explains why my whole life looks like I left something in the middle. I did.

            I left it all to write a few lines of this or that, my computer desk top looks like a rummage sale. Artists know that the best creative ideas come from making odd and unusual connections. I figure a good dose of disorganization is good for new ways of seeing. Sometime the things lying next to one another make the connection, like an unbidden gift in animal hands. A gift from the dark.

            I’m reading five things at once, one about trees and how they communicate with one another, a poetry book about an artist, The Walrus, a book on symbols, and another on the history of ballads. I think I have reading ADD. I can’t shake the dream I had about Richard Harrison’s racoon hands. I wonder if I should tell him. Nah. It couldn’t really happen even if it was a warning or an omen, or a symbol. I’ll keep it to myself.

            The image of the raspberry is fulsome in my mind’s eye. I call to mind these lines of Irving Layton from Berry Picking:

Silently my wife walks on the still wet furze
Now dark green the leaves are full of metaphors
Now lit up is each tiny lamp of blueberry.
The white nails of rain have dropped and the sun is free.

The white nails of rain. There is an image I can appreciate. I turn on some music. Kate Bush, of course, my favourite, and I begin with a line that may or may not pull up a big one, the big fish, the big raspberry, the poem of a lifetime, or a phrase destined to become a long-lost dream, or an untouched file on my desktop:

            If I look back into the very foolishness

of childhood memory, I remember

with impeccable clarity the wonder

of every-day, even the grey sky . . .

This is all an experiment; this is some tepid shit. I need to do better. I’m just trying to stay out of the white nails of precipitation.

Dr. Micheline Maylor is Poet Laureate of Calgary. Maylor attained a Ph.D. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Literature. She teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary where she won the 2015 Teaching Excellence Award, and was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry. She is a University of Calgary Senator, a Tedx talker, a Walrus talker, and she was the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). She serves as poetry editor at Frontenac House Press. She is the co-founder of Freefall Literary Society and remains a consulting editor. Her latest poetry collection is Little Wildheart with U of A Press (2017). 

Charmaine Cadeau : A Typical Writing Day

If writers had spirit animals, mine would be the anemone: grounded and wavering, astringent and delicate. And immeasurably slow.

Some species of anemones reproduce by splitting themselves in half, and I get the appeal. The writing side of my life is time-blind; the other half runs on unforgiving clocks.

When the alarm goes off, I slough off my duvet and shamble to the kitchen, half-asleep, in the midst of the golden hour, the only flattering thing this time of day. I watch the citrus horizon for a minute before I notice the neighbor’s yard is also glowing.

It’s early spring, and the trees that separate our properties are dotted with fine buds. A few weeks from now, their lot will be masked with green leaves, obstructing this view.

My husband looks at me, looks at his coat, and steps outside. When he returns, he tells me in a low voice that overnight, half of their home burned to the ground, leaving firefighters pooled in their yard, stamping out the last of the brush fires licking up leaves.

The air smells acidic.

I finish cooking, dress my kids for school, double-check their bags, and zip up my daughter’s coat because it’s two years old and you have to wiggle it just right. I tell them about the fire because they are about to drive by what remains. I ask them to think about how we can help.

When they leave, I stand at the window with my tea growing lukewarm, watching the forensics truck arrive. Watching as the caution tape is pulled around their property line. This is the time of day I usually write, when the house is empty and quiet, save for the water sluicing off the aquarium filter.

So I write, I do. The part of me that writes is the part that shocks easily. Grieves. Falls into or for uncertainties. There’s nothing I can do to help yet. I set my second alarm, the one that will go off in a little less than five hours when I need to leave the house to pick up my kids. I try not to look at the clock until then.

I try to shut out the world to let it in.

I commit some words to the page, where my level of commitment is the equivalent of going on a first date. I write prolifically, but most of it stays in notebooks or on my hard drive because I see these drafts as a step toward something, not as gestures or conversations yet. I turn off my concerns about how long it takes me to finish something, how much time was lost in something that didn’t work, the fallow periods between publishing.

I’m thinking about my neighbors who I barely know, who I can barely picture. They have two kids, too. I think about what to give them, and how to find where they’re staying. I wonder if my giving will seem like rubbernecking. The ruthlessness of house fires, how callous I feel sitting down to write in the midst of ruins.

In the night, I heard noises I thought were rifle shots. My house is flanked by woods, and all of my neighbors hunt. That it was well after dark and it’s not deer season made it unusual, put me on high alert. I listened harder, and decided I mistook the shots. A garbage truck was making its way to our house, which was also odd, but I remembered my husband’s calls to waste management this week asking for make-up service. It was mundane, all the possibilities. I fell back asleep.

I can dream through tragedy. I can write instead of what?

Part way through my morning, my mind wanders and I look at my son’s books: drawings he has stapled together with a few words here and there. “The Thunderstorm” ends with a man getting struck by lightning. I move to my de facto office: the bathtub. I draw water, grab my notebook and pencil, and start again to write.

My house is the last one on a dead-end street. When we moved in, I pleaded with my husband to have the extra room for my home office. I pointed to my pregnant belly, maybe threw in a little Virginia Woolf, and burnt up the last of the marital capital I will ever have to make my case. When I got what I wanted, I handmade my desk out of Ontario barn boards, set up my printing press, marvelled at the natural light spilling into the room.

What I didn’t account for is that my office is the only room in the house with three points of entry, mostly glass-paned french doors, which means even when they’re closed, I’m working in a fishbowl. My children, hearts of my heart, I can’t escape them.

In time, my office became the place to sort taxes, store patio furniture, and tuck away holiday dishes. My husband moved in his computer. It was lost to me.

I mostly write in my outdated, gloomy bathroom because the door locks. Other times, I work in my bedroom--the only other room with a locking door. Cross-legged on the floor, next to the heat register because I get cold sitting for so long, I write with the window at my back. I’ve become accomplished at writing in my car because so much of my time is spent commuting to work or ferrying my kids.

The pages of my draft for this essay curl in the bathtub’s steam. I towel off, transcribe them, revising as I go. Eat a sandwich. Bring in the UPS package on the porch. Send only necessary emails, and make a mental note of the others for when I’m multitasking later on.

The alarm goes off, and I fall into the lockstep schedule for the rest of the day. Every minute from now until bedtime is measured: school pick-ups, homework, the time it takes the oven to preheat for dinner, cycling the laundry, going for a walk with my kids in this day that turned out to be quite beautiful. I drive to attend a reading and a lecture one city over, then race home in time to plant kisses on my children’s cheeks before they’re asleep.

When I pass by the house, one half is unscathed, the other gutted and unrecognizable. Warped metal is piled in the garden. I’m not yet sure if anyone was hurt.

I dive back into writing, uncuffing the minutes left in the day so as to stretch out time a little bit more. I think about what’s been lost, think about burnt books, of all things. Think about what to make of the ashes.

Sea anemones are thought to resemble flowers of the same name, flowers that are colorful and jostle in the wind. The Greeks believed the four wind gods, the anemoi, were responsible for starting the seasons. Last night, the wind was coming from the southeast. Eurus, known to the Romans as Vulturnus, ushers in bad luck.

More than what’s been made or what’s been lost, the day ends with me thinking about what’s in waiting. “Surely, something comes from a life with savage winds…” (Ovid, Heroides, 11.9 ff). That’s where tomorrow will begin.

(Note: since writing this, I’ve reclaimed my office.)

Charmaine Cadeau is from Toronto, Ontario. Her poetry collections include What You Used to Wear (Goose Lane) and Placeholder (Brick), which won the ReLit Award. She resides in North Carolina, filling her days with teaching, editing, and co-directing The Community Writing Center.

Pauline Holdstock : My Writing Day

I began writing when I was pregnant with my first child. Six years later I had had another three. How to write? When to write? I was too tired at night. I set aside two hours a day at 2 pm precisely, during which the babies would nap or, later, learn to amuse themselves and not disturb my work time – at any cost. Anyone who remembers Jack Nicholson at his typewriter in "The Shining" will get the idea.

I was never more focussed than during those years of two hours a day max. Every minute counted. Here's a piece I wrote at the time —on a typewriter— about that time. It's an extract from a longer piece called Lost and Found and it's from my short story collection Swimming From the Flames.

FINDING TIME

There were so many babies. Finding the time did become a problem. And the room. It did not help at all to know that time and space were curved. She tried not to plot her days like positions on a graph. Nothing was more linear than her own time; it was a track, and the space she wanted to reach was an empty room upon it, a cube that, strangely, diminished at her approach, so that she managed to slip in only briefly before emerging on the other side. Often, just as she was about to step inside, the babies themselves would be there. Ma, ma, ma. Needing. Kneading her heart into pulp until she had to tear it out, scoop it out for them, doling: Here. And here. Take. Take. Scooping and hollowing her self out, eyes on the narrow door. Let me go. Until she would step over the wiggling babies (still needing, wanting more) and close the door. Still they would be there when she came out the other side. Her babies happy now, no longer needing, forcing her with their oblivion to bend to them: I’m here, let me come back. Lacing their lives to hers with their nonchalance.

It was not that she did not enjoy her life on the track, but inside the cube space was cornered, time suspended and everything was possible¾even falling off the track, which could be dreamed here in immunity, no repercussions ever.

But there was another danger. She might emerge incomplete, part of her life still inside the cube. Then her hands would muddle at the soup, the shoelaces, numb, her ears open to receive the plaints and whimpers, the needings when they began again, her eyes fixed and distant while she tried to remember what it was she had lost.

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer and essayist whose work has been shortlisted for the Giller and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her most recent novel, The Hunter and the Wild Girl, winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award and listed by both the CBC and the National Post as one of the Best Books of 2015. She has written book reviews for the Globe and Mail, the National Post and the Vancouver Sun.

www.paulineholdstock.com 

Shannon Quinn : My Writing Day

I’m a poet. I also work five days a week at a psychiatric hospital. I love my day job but it eats up a lot of time. Then there’s my own mental health stuff (that most of us writers deal with) which takes up time…time to meditate, time to work out, time at my therapist’s office. All of this is stuff I can’t skimp on, but I also can’t skimp on my writing time because it is as important as everything else in keeping me well. So, the reality is, I don’t have enough time in general which makes me treasure what I do have.

I write at home, on my couch with a blue notebook and a black inkgel pen and in the company of at least one cat. Dinner time and early evening is my sweet spot because my partner doesn’t get home from work until after 8 pm. My writing practice is dependent on both reading other poets work and being able to spend time in stillness and silence before I put pen to paper. I live in downtown Toronto which offers its own set of challenges (noise, cost) but also gives me access to great cultural events.

My job as a poet is to try to cultivate a feeling of expansiveness and possibility and to let words come to the page however they want to. It’s not my job to judge. That can come later. Weekends can be about revising and ruminating on small details and big picture concepts. Weekdays, I just need to show up at the page. When this happens, I consider it a successful writing day.

I recently came back from a month long writing residency—an experience of pure luxury and privilege that went by in the blink of an eye (lazy example, sorry). Half of the participants were people who had just finished MFA’s and weren’t currently employed or people whose employment was related to their writing versus the other half of us who were still a little stunned we had managed to talk managers into giving us a month off. Those of us with full time jobs seemed to approach the residency in the same way, happy to chat with people at meals and to attend evening readings but otherwise we kept to our studios. The other half who didn’t come from tight schedules were less guarded about their time. They were more social and in the spirit of keeping it real…some of them consumed copious amounts of boxed wine. I say that without judgment. Whatever works, right? But I was thankful as hell when I heard at one breakfast how there had been impromptu musical chairs and pole dancing in the dining hall until 2 am the night before. I watched the stragglers stumble in for breakfast, I could feel their pain.

The weekly karaoke night in town definitely took out a few authors for a day afterwards but to each their own. I don’t doubt that they had a seriously good time and I think bonding while raising a glass is totally cool…unless you’re an alcoholic in recovery like me…which is a whole other story. Let’s just say I felt it was a healthier choice for me to be greedy with my time.

Basically, like the words that come to the page, it’s a successful writing day if I’m not judging myself or anyone else.

Shannon Quinn’s first collection of poetry, Questions for Wolf, was published by Thistledown Press. Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc, subTerrain, Prairie Fire, room and CV2. Her second collection, Nightlight for Children of Insomniacs, will be published this spring by Mansfield Press. Visit her at shannonquinnpoetry.com.

Carl Watts : Poetry and Precarity

Years after reading a book, even if I can’t remember more than a couple of the characters’ names, I can almost always remember the physical space in which I read it and the look and feel of the edition itself. Maybe it’s weird, then, that I’ve never had anything like a specific place, time, or routine for writing. A few years back I had a poem included in the Best Canadian Poetry series. I was surprised that particular poem had resonated with anyone. When I tried to think of what could have made it different from the other poems I’d published, it occurred to me that I had no recollection of when or where I wrote or revised it. So there’s really nothing interesting to report here, except perhaps that Poems.doc (this is the real file name) is now so long that Word bounces me back up to the top a few times as I scroll toward the end.

More consistent is my situation. Playing the academic game (working on my own research and whatever teaching work I have at the time), I do most of my poetry writing and revising in the procrastination spaces between things like grading papers and doing a fifth round of revisions on a would-be scholarly article. One reason for this compulsive turning away from my actual work and toward poems is the doubts I’ve long had about literary criticism—its frequent obscurity, gimmickry, or intellectual dishonesty. Maybe I’m naïve, or just tend to excel at things that don’t make money, but, compared to the “my argument is that x is an exciting new area of study,” sales-pitch approach to literary scholarship, even the most hackneyed lyric poem or redundant found-text exercise seems to me like an idiosyncratic masterstroke. I may not remember when or where I worked on my minor BCP hit, but there’s a good chance it grew up out of the blank lines between a survey of theories of nationalism and a reading of a ‘20s prairie novel. And, whatever my misgivings about academia, it gives you a certain flexibility; the energy required to do its generative (if not really creative) writing tasks can unexpectedly spin off into poetry ideas and edits that can be attended to at pretty much any point of the work day. As a lot of us are aware, there are many, many other ways of struggling to earn a living that don’t permit this kind of behaviour.

Another thing that keeps Poems.doc open is the uncertainty faced by so many people in my situation. Whether you call it precariousness or precarity, there’s a dread in everyone but the most overconfident gimmick artists that each semester could be the last time we’ll work in the field we’ve trained in for years. For me, this financial uncertainty and looming sense of career-level disappointment is compounded by the fact that so much of what you produce in this profession—conference presentations, articles, grant proposals, academic book reviews, lecture notes—will end up having been worth essentially nothing the moment you’ve left the academic ecosystem. At any moment you could become precisely one of those outsiders who is utterly unable (or at least unmotivated) to see any value in the writing that’s long been your primary output.

Poems, despite being famously useless, do have a readership. As with academia, nearly all of that readership consists of insiders—other people who write poems. The difference is that comparatively few of them are doing that reading and writing for the sake of tenure, a promotion, or prestige in the grant hierarchy. I can also say, with certainty, that if tomorrow morning I get fired, or exiled to Siberia, I’ll continue to write and read (and probably write about) poetry. (The odds that I’ll continue reframing my dissertation as a monograph aren’t quite so good.) I’m certain that poetry’s enduring worthlessness will outlive the postwar model of academia that’s currently hobbling towards the post-work era. When this unforgiving profession finally deems me worthless, my worthless poems will still be there. However badly I screw things up, the poems should always be there.

Which is something else I worry about. Isn’t obsessively producing something without value and without much return just neoliberalism—the offloading of economic and systemic failures onto the self-improving, always-producing individual—in its purest form? Isn’t perpetual unwaged labour the sinister obverse of the basic-income coin? Probably. But I can’t think of anything better to do, so I guess I’ll be sitting at my portable procrastination desk for a while, picking at the frivolous, boutique-economy word-packets that would be overpriced if only there were any market for them.

Carl Watts holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University; his dissertation is about whiteness, and his newer research looks at shifting conceptions of experimental and mainstream poetry. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, The Cortland Review, Grain, and The Manchester Review, and in a chapbook, REISSUE, which was published by Frog Hollow Press in 2016. His gauche tweets can be found @carl_a_watts.