Jade Wallace : My Writing Day

The Writing Day

1. The length of the day is indefinite. No two days are of equal length. Some are approximately ten minutes in length, others approximately seven years. Each day lasts as long as it takes to finish the tasks I set for myself that morning.

2. Morning begins at midnight because each day must have its origin in dreams.

3. Dreams are part of the work of writing. So is riding the train and thinking about pedagogy. So is staring grimly at a poem I have been fussing with for weeks. So is memorizing the faces of strangers. So is learning the alchemy of better cake. So is the weather. So are grant applications and journal submissions. So is the day job that lets me buy ink for my refillable pen. So is answering ten thousand emails I never once foresaw when I was a small child dreaming of being a writer.

4.  Most writing actually occurs during sleep.

The Writing Space

1.      Is a one-dollar notebook,

2.      impishly presided over by a cat, who

3.      requires the writer to perform any number of arcane and changeable rituals in order to gain unfettered access to the stash of paper.

Jade Wallace is a writer from the Niagara Fruit Belt whose poetry, short fiction, and essays have been published internationally, including in Studies in Social Justice, The Stockholm Review, and Feathertale. Their most recent solo chapbook is Rituals of Parsing (Anstruther Press 2018) and their most recent collaborative chapbook is Test Centre under the moniker MA|DE (ZED Press 2019). They are an organizing member of the Draft Reading Series collective and one half of The Leafy Greens, a band whose music has been incorrectly described as “psychedelic stoner metal.” Jade Wallace currently resides in Windsor, Ontario, where they are working on an M.A. in Creative Writing. <jadewallace.ca> <ma-de.ca>

Torben Robertson's typical writing day

Dear rob mclennan,

My typical writing day often involves a walk. It is said that Kant’s neighbours set their watches to his daily walk. But the timing of my walk is so capricious that if my neighbours were to set their watches to it, no two clocks would keep the same time, which is the same as saying that time itself would be eliminated, that day would turn to night, and that capitalism would collapse. This cannot be allowed: I admonish my neighbours to continue adhering to Greenwich mean and not to Torben mean time.

Following my walk, whenever that might be, and before I sit at desk, my spiritual weariness is so complete that I must always consume that meth of the masses: coffee. Yes, coffee, that triply foamed and sinful laxative that opens the gates for poetry (and keeps them open long enough for anxiety also to sneak through). Oh how many times I’ve tried to switch to green tea! You might say my typical writing day involves at least a few minutes of deliberation in front of a foil bag of Lavazza and a box of Yama Moto Yama sachets. Inevitably, the latter is relegated to the corridors of the afternoon.

My typical writing day often involves reading, especially if I want a meter in mind. I might, for example, read a canto or two of The Faerie Queene, so the iambs come out more easily. Reading and writing are so nearly one activity that if I go too long without the former—even a day is ‘too long’—the latter becomes an impossibility. To say that one can write without reading is to say that one can piss without drinking!

So where are we, I’ve walked, drunk black angst juice, read a few Spenserian stanzas, and I’m red to go, so I sit at cramped desk (photo enclosed) and quickly dash off as many poems as come to mind, perhaps I’ll get through three or four today. I’ll condense them later, if any are worth editing. But what am I writing about? Well, I’m working on a bit of a book you see… therefore, my subject matter is like the matter of a criminal investigation: I can’t discuss it!

What is coffee but a tunnel from which the muse emerges, and, within that vein, what more is music? Which isn’t to say that music—like Tim Hortons for a dollar.twentyfive—is cheap drugs. Still sometimes when I flag, I let fall the needle into the first groove of a record; no, that’s too poetic—I play my Spotify through a cheap pair of earbuds. These instrumentals keep the rhythm going. I will let you in on one secret: Tim Hecker’s albums lend themselves to some truly 21st century rhythms. And his ilk. It is said that Hart Crane would play jazz in the background. As much didn’t interfere with his pentameter, but enhanced it. Music, like a cup of coffee, is original energy distilled; language is the human superstructure. They do not interfere with one another, but coexist in harmony. Together, they are a two-part harmony. Hauntologically, the music is only a trace in the final product—it leaves a charged silence, which is the same as saying…

…ah! sorry, all that metaphysics must’ve put me to sleep! Which, right, yes, my nap! My daily nap! How could I ever write without that extra thirty minutes of sleep mid-session? Some might call it procrastination. I kiss my teeth at them. For every minute I sleep, I work two extra minutes in the afternoon and evening.

At last, after my resources and recourses are exhausted, my writing day always involves perseverance. Each day of writing is the easiest thing to delay or altogether abandon. Au fond the ideas come neither from coffee nor from music, but from the rote pressing of finger to MacBook Pro key, and again again again, until there is a full poem or a full blog post. My typical writing day is a series of episodes of giving up, and beginning again.

Yours,

Torben

Torben Robertson is a Canadian poet and bookseller living in London, England. 

Mark Russell : my (small press) writing day

My parents bought me a desk for my room when I was quite young. I can remember doing my homework on it, writing ridiculously complex stories for my English teacher that filled whole exercise books instead of a couple of pages. It must have caused her great distress – for both its content and its length.

I can remember cutting out quotations from plays or poems and Sellotaping them around my room; sitting with album covers to examine lyrics while music played in the corner; opening bottles of beer on the handles of its drawers; hiding my stash of marijuana behind pencils and scraps of paper inside its drawers. I still have that desk. It’s in my ‘study’ today, a room I’ve never tidied since we moved in five years ago, and which I’ve therefore never used as a study, and probably won’t until I retire and find the time and energy to clear enough space to sit at it.

This photograph is the desk I share in my school’s Drama Studio. I like desks. For most of the year, it’s where my writing day begins. I get to work as early as possible because I like to avoid heavy traffic, and I like to have plenty of time to prepare for the day ahead. This also allows me to begin what I suppose is my daily writing process. It’s difficult to nail down a precise process because no two days are the same, but during a working day I try to follow a certain pattern. Sometimes I am successful.

Reading is the driver of my writing process. I cannot write unless I read, so the day always begins with reading, either new work or re-reading old work. It’s usually one or two hard collections of poetry – I love the feel of a book in my hand, and I never have just one on the go. Often, I’ll read online journals for poetry, prose, and criticism, and sometimes a novel or some non-fiction. This is like meditation for me. It centres me before the school day, which is a rare old fairground of a time. Imagine the world’s longest rollercoaster: it’s one-and-a-half miles long, can reach 95 miles per hour, and takes four minutes to complete (it’s in Japan). Multiply that by 100. Your ride takes about seven hours. You can’t get off. Nobody can hear you scream because everybody else is screaming, too. That’s what an average day’s education feels like.

So, once the morning bell goes, I have to strap myself in and place all this reading and writing nonsense aside until I get home. Like many writers, especially those with full time jobs, I have to find spaces in a day in order to write. It begins at my school desk. After that, it can be anywhere: on my laptop; in real notebooks; on the back of receipts; on Post-It notes; in my phone’s note app; into an email I mail to myself, or anything else that comes to hand. I have been known to ask my wife to text me a phrase or sentence while I am driving so that I don’t forget it.

A few years ago, I emptied my life of tv and internet. I had neither for three years and it was grand. With just radio or CDs to hand, I kick-started a beneficial routine. I can work with all sorts of music playing. Occasionally, it needs to be instrumental when I am looking for a particular rhythm, or breath pattern. I don’t need silence, though sometimes I think that as my concentration deepens, all extraneous noise becomes silent to me: there is just a beat on which to hang words.

I came back to the tv/internet fold eventually. It’s quite difficult to keep up that level of Ludditism and remain sane. So much of public discourse becomes alien to you, and you then become an alien in public discourse. That’s a little unhealthy. I need to be part of something bigger than myself. That’s what writing is, I think. A communication. We are in conversation with ourselves and each other. It all starts by paying attention to one’s self, and then to others. Even if I record a dream, that dream has come from my conscious interactions. It has been processed in my messy brain and emerged in some form, searching for its audience. Art, I think, is a result of social interaction.

On this perfect exemplar of a successful writing day, I might be able to tinker with a line or stanza during break times. On the drive home, I will think about what I am going to prioritise when I get home. I am privileged to have two marvellous children, but they are adults now and live somewhere else, so my home time is pretty much my own. When I get home, I will put on the radio or my iTunes and I’ll pick up where I was earlier in the day. Later, I may ready some submissions if I have any, or check social media if I can stomach the vitriol that pervades it. And then I’ll hope that nothing wakes me during the night, demanding that I write it down. Though if it does, I’ll do its bidding.

Mark Russell’s publications include Shopping for Punks (Hesterglock), Spearmint & Rescue (Pindrop), ℵ (the book of moose) (Kattywompus), and ا (the book of seals) (Red Ceilings). Other poems have appeared in Stand, Shearsman, The Interpreter’s House, Tears in the Fence, The Lonely Crowd, Blackbox Manifold, Prelude, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Glasgow’s MLitt in Creative Writing, teaches Drama in high school, and lives in Scotland.

My small press writing day – Nancy Campbell

Wherever I wake, whatever words the day demands, it begins early (around 5 a.m.) with strong coffee in bed, reading the London Review of Books or the New Yorker. My brain begins to cast off sleep and make a plan for the hours ahead…

…for no day is the same. Different projects – poems, essays, three thousand words of a book, reading a proof for a review or a blurb – call for different tactics. Prose requires long graft at the desk. Reading requires that I stay in bed in my pyjamas as long as possible. Poetry rejects any routine and will probably burst in upon hours that I have dedicated to other tasks – I try my best to make space for this rare visitor.

Before I begin work, I practise t’ai chi and drink a glass of water. I then unravel some of the benefits of t’ai chi by spending an hour responding to emails and checking social media. How to manage time on Twitter? One writer I know lights a candle and won’t go online until it burns out. I try not to scroll for too long, although it is infinitely fascinating: if I see an article or poem that intrigues me, I’ll save it for lunchtime reading – then stop. I use Twitter to keep up to date with friends and writing community, and make new discoveries. Today I read an article by Mayukh Sen in Hazlitt, tweeted by the writer Nasim Marie Jafry, on queerness in the cookbooks of the late film producer Ismail Merchant. (It described his dazzling dinner parties, and I make a note to organise a more modest dinner party of my own, soon.)

I also check on the news, especially in my own part of the world – wherever that happens to be. As a writer who responds to place, I’m often on the move. My full-time writing life began with a residency at Upernavik Museum (“the most northern museum in the world”) in Greenland during the winter of 2010. And so my first experience of a “writing day” consisted of 24-hour darkness! It was a huge privilege to spend time on the island of Upernavik and the community were generous in sharing their knowledge of the environment with me over equally generous meals. For the last decade I have continued to work on site-specific commissions with museums and environmental organisations. I discovered an additional benefit of the peripatetic lifestyle – not having a home to pay rent on meant for several years I could dedicate more time to writing.

For the last 18 months, as the UK Canal Laureate, I’ve been writing poems in response to a network of waterways, from London’s Regent’s Canal to the ancient Severn River. I need to be able make notes on the move, so I’ve got hold of a kayak and a waterproof notebook. Some days are spent out on the water: meeting boaters and anglers, recording their stories, observing nature. Other days my “desk” may be on a train travelling to the other end of the country for an evening event. This activity balances out the solitude of other days.

If I’m at home I’ll cook supper – or wash up. I discovered today that Ismail Merchant wrote in the introduction for his first cookbook: “A great cook should be able to do something well with the snap of a finger rather to toil over it… he or she should be inventive, be someone who can whip up something from nothing.” My partner can make a meal with a snap of her fingers; but by the close of the day, my invention is exhausted and I like to follow a recipe.

Sometimes I’ll sit with a draft of a poem late in the evening. Ideas can come anytime, anywhere, but I find I can best focus on the poem forwards once night has fallen, and all the day’s tasks are done. Perhaps I was conditioned by that endless darkness in Greenland? A glass of Talisker whisky to hand helps. Then bed around eleven. I try to read but usually I’m asleep within seconds.

Nancy Campbell's books include a memoir, The Library of Ice (2018) and a poetry collection, Disko Bay (2015) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Nancy can often be found on a river in a kayak, or on Twitter @nancycampbelle