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June 16, 2004
I'm trying.
It’s the question I dread. Still, I know that if the people who ask it of me stopped asking, that's when I’d feel like I was really lost.
“Are you writing?”
Today, the person asking was Nat, who was my first-year advisor at Swarthmore, my professor for poetry workshop, and an all-around writing mentor throughout college.
I ran into her in front of the Rosenbach at their Bloomsday event. Police barricades cordoned off the block of Delancey between 20th and 21st, and white folding chairs were arranged in the street in a semicircle around the museum’s steps, where every five minutes or so a new reader took his or her place in front of the microphone to read a few pages of Ulysses aloud. I had walked over on my lunch break through the thick humidity. I was sweating and only had 40 minutes and was supposed to meet Patrick, who I couldn’t spot anywhere among the crowd. So I was visibly distracted as we chatted, and felt bad about that.
And then the question.
Am I writing? It’s never simple for me to answer, because I haven’t quite figured out what it would take for me to answer an unqualified yes. So I often say, “I’m trying.” Which is kind of a bullshit answer. How do you "try" to write? What does that mean?
Am I writing? I write three pages in a notebook every morning when I wake up. Sometimes I write about my dreams, or what I need to get done that day, or about memories from my past or questions about my future. It is more journal than art, though art is on my mind constantly, driving me, tormenting me.
Am I writing? I sit down at the computer a few times a week and begin stories that I never seem to complete, though when I begin them I always believe that this time I will. Sometimes I write out conversations, or describe the way the sun looked on the bus ride home. Sometimes I write small poems.
Am I writing? I started this web site explicitly as a way to share my collections of old magazines, my finds and my myriad projects -– but in large part I also started it as a way to begin to be able to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.” Because while I try to tell myself that all that matters is the writing, I am coming to realize that it’s not fully true. Writing alone, no matter how many notebooks and megabytes of hard disk space I fill, is not enough. If I’m to begin saying “yes,” I need to be sharing my writing.
In high school and college there were literary magazines and workshops and readings and open mikes, and since college there has been nothing. A letter to the editor here, an article in the newsletter at work there, a short-lived blog on Typepad that I gave up on because I felt too limited by the service’s constraints. I haven’t completed a story or published a poem since college.
And at first, that was okay. I was so caught up in the newness of living as an adult in new cities -- working at new jobs, meeting new friends, buying furniture and paying bills and just living -- that not writing much was okay. That had been the whole point of telling myself (and Robert Olen Butler, when he called me that day senior year) that I didn’t want to go straight to an MFA program, after all, hadn’t it? I said at the time that I needed to live more before I could really write. And I think that was true. I have grown up and broadened my experiences immensely since college -- I’ve lived in two cities, four apartments, worked at four different jobs. I’ve made new friends and traveled to new countries and volunteered for a presidential campaign and broken bones. Yeah. I’ve been living. And you know what now? I miss writing.
So to Nat, I apologize for being distracted and reticent when we spoke a few hours ago. It was really nice to see you, and thank you for asking the question. Next time we meet, maybe I’ll be able to just say “yes.”
Posted by sarah at June 16, 2004 04:06 PM
