On Summer Vacations

I’d like to talk about vacations as this is the time for many of us to plan summer things with family, spouses, et cetera. Here's a question: does one have to leave home for it to be a vacation?

I recall as a freshmen one of my professors talked about all of this stuff he got done during his summer "vacation." I recall challenging his use of the word “vacation” reasoning that the root of vacation is “vacate” and if you haven’t vacated your life of the everyday mundane, you haven’t really taken a vacation, you simply had time off. (Yes, I know I was a bit snotty back then.) And now here I am revisiting this notion.

Last week I took a week off to celebrate my birthday and take a very much needed respite in order to begin a longer writing project and a few other things. There wasn’t any packing or rushed attempt to book a flight or a train. No special shopping or suntan lotion or fancies of getting a tan on my embarrassingly beige legs. I did, however, make a pit stop at my neighborhood library.

Now that I think about it, calling my week off a vacation is a misnomer, right? When I think of a vacation, I think of hopping on a plane, maybe watching the ocean waves from atop a Cruise ship, or changing space of some kind.

The biggest gift anyone can give themselves is time to do the thing they most enjoy. For me that thing was having a quiet conversation with myself and the page (or computer screen.) Don’t get me wrong: I do want to see ocean waves and pack for a voyage. I want to mail postcards to my friends from exotic places with foreign smells and foods I can’t quite pronounce. But for now, I’m content with getting a head start on something I’ve been preparing to do for some time. That is, challenging myself to write in a longer form, that is a book.

Do you have any vacation or time-off stories to share with us on First Person Plural? If so, send them to me with pictures, if you have.

Contact: thecarousel@writer.org

Pensive about New Years

Something happened to me the between Christmas and New Years. I felt a lot like John Coltrane must have felt in the photo above. Like many “good” writers I planned to get some work done making my spiked egg nog all the merrier. The truth is I couldn’t muster one word in my journal. And, I didn’t feel not one iota guilty. I think I may have sighed once at my green notebook staring at me from across the room.

I’ve never been a New Year’s resolutions type. They tend to fade as quick as you make them which begs the question are they really resolutions? Surely, if something is important enough to resolve to do, why wait until New Years? One thing, I’ve decided to do is stop writing so much. Yes, I know this sounds counterintuitive but hear me out. There’s a very seductive lifestyle that writers build around themselves. After a while, all of the readings, book signings, book club meetings, and open mics start to substitute for actual writing and more important reading. There’s about a thousand reading series in the D.C area. With all of the many contests, deadlines and whatnot, after a while you start down this path of writing for the industry of writing and not so much for why you started writing in the first place.

I don’t know about you but writing for me happened first as a reader. I absolutely could not imagine not having something to read on my way to school or between classes or even just a companion to brave the quiet with. Then, one day I realized that I was consumed with the things I read, the ideas, the new ways of viewing the self and the world that this new self inhabited. Writing was about learning about myself and the world. It was about trying to create a beautiful creature that others could play with inside their minds. It was about secret ecstasies that only other readers and writers knew about. Yes, it was about participating into a world that seemed exclusive.

That place seems so far away these days. Writing should happen because it must exist. The novelist Toni Morrison talks about how the story she wanted to read didn’t exist so she wrote it. I like this thinking. In a world of billions, it takes a single person to give validity to a reality that billions know about. Don’t get me wrong. Recognition is really nice. But, I feel like I need to do much more reading. Make sure that my work is growing. Am I taking risks? It’s kind of like the actor who plays himself in every film. I don’t want to be that writer that simply talks about the same subject in every poem, every essay, every story.

Until then, I’m slowing my pen.

Summer Leaves

No matter how much you try to fight it, summer is fleeting. I learned this much as I waltzed out of the house this morning without a jacket. While the temperatures may be slowly dropping, our earnest to writing ought not. There is so much going on around town. September is bursting at the seams with readings, socials, and opportunities to revisit those unfinished poems, manuscripts, family stories, et cetera. Check out the following:

- Open House at the Writer’s Center, this Saturday, September 6, 2008. Meet our instructors; get a $50 discount on a workshop; participate in our raffle where the winner receives a free multi-workshop ticket; special activities for younger writers; and enjoy some lite refreshments sponsored by Trader Joe's.

- Visit the Folger’s Poetry Series as they celebrate their fortieth year. For a full listing of their readers, click here.

-Attend the Nation Book Festival on September 27. Nearly 70 authors will be in attendance.

And yet, I urge you to not forget to attend the most important event: that is your meeting with your desk and chair. There is no substitution for writing. I’m learning this the hard way. I’ve set out to write a poem each day for the month of September. I know it sounds corny but it’s so easy to talk about what you want to write about and how you want it to get done. But, without the doing; it becomes cliché, and we all know that clichés are the enemy. Check out my last blog for a list of telltale signs of being cliche.

Cliche: To Be or Not to Be

Writers love using the word “cliché.” We’re all guilty of it. Even now as I’m writing: I sit in a fancy café with movie set lighting, laptop in arm. Truth be told, I feel ridiculous, a bit pretentious even, like I’m working on the great American story. I even wait for someone to interrupt me so I can give them the medusa stare.

So, I thought I’d share a short list of things that writers do that I find to be cliché. Feel free to disagree with me and drop me a line (aali@writer.org)

Now on with my list, what I hope to revisit in a future post.

It's so cliche for writers to:

-go to coffee shops, meet with other writers and pretend to write.

-cop witty one-liners from family and friends that you plan to use in a story as your own.

-dress in all black.

- bellyache about feeling uninspired.

-write about your family and go on & on as if you were uniquely placed in a dysfunctional family.

-attend a reading simply for the food.

Charlie Jensen: On Hubris and Humility

At lunch this week, one of my colleagues was discussing a friend of his, a poet, whom he said was not much of a "self-promoter" but who was, in fact, a talented writer. He wanted to encourage her to get her work out into the world, to readers, but suspected her quieter demeanor was making her reluctant to make that step forward.

"I think being an artist requires an odd combination of hubris and humility," I told him, and our lunch companion agreed.

It's a philosophy I hold close to my heart as a writer. On the one hand, I have to believe--really believe--that the work I write is worth reading, that people should publish it and, occasionally, purchase it. That's the hubris.

And on the other hand, I always have to remember that there are writers out there who do amazing things, things I admire, things I want to work toward achieving. More than that, no matter how excited I feel about something I've just written or published, I can never "rest" on that excitement. I have to believe I can do better, work harder, accomplish more. That's the source of the humility.

It reminds me of what a teacher once told me about the poet Marianne Moore. Raised Presbyterian, Moore was brought up internalizing the Christian ethos of service toward others and humility toward God, while at the same time having a deep assurrance that Moore was among the "elect," those whose faith guaranteed them a place in Heaven. This tension between entitlement and a kind of poverty are always at work in Moore's poems.

Despite my desire to lean heavily toward humility and go easy on the hubris, I think most artist find themselves migrating between the two poles. When the words are really flowing, we feel empowered, talented, intelligent, unbeatable! And when we go to the well and find it dry, we're reminded of how fleeting the art is and how powerless we are in the face of it.