Danse Macabre

Try not to cut yourself on idarem's cheekbones while you watch this.

My Illuminated Agenda

Currently writing 2k a day, five days a week while I wait to see if I've got employment for the summer. If I act like a professional writer, will I be paid like a professional writer? (Hundreds of cents coming my way!)

I've been making art to use as inspiration for the short stories I've been drafting. "Making" is sometimes only a rough approximation of what I've been doing. Sometimes I'm printing out old woodcut images and colouring them by hand (I'm into pencil crayons right now). Today I messed around endlessly in a photoshop knockoff. I ripped the various images of the fish with legs, cavorting fetus skeleton, and woodcut mushrooms from various online sources, and stamped and manipulated the heck out of the resulting collage.

Internet, your images are not safe with me!

Art Under Pressure

Five months ago, I took a vow of going-into-debt, and allowed myself space and time to get back in touch with my inner writer. I highly recommend doing something similar if you're at all able to. This time has been absolutely invaluable to me. I've remembered all the reasons why I wanted to do creative work in the first place. My bank account has a bit of a rash on it, but my shadow is in much better shape than it's been for a long, long time - maybe ever.

Now the six months is almost over, and I've got bills to pay. Although I was willing to play daredevil with my finances, it isn't fair to my partner to continue to draw on our mutual resources as heavily as I've been doing. And yeah, without him, I'd have had to place much stricter limits on the duration of this experiment.

Reality sux, my friends.

The nice thing, though, is that I now have some solid writing time under my belt. I feel much more legitimate in my claim on the name: I'm a writer. I have three short stories out on the market right now, and half a novel draft. And even though I'm looking at taking another teaching contract for the summer, I'm not giving up my dream for anything.

Now that I've fastened on it, I won't let go.

That's what five months of space and time have given me. Was it worth it? Hell yeah. Now I can move forward with some good, solid tools at my disposal. The ability to think more creatively about my life. The idea that there are options. A much better sense of how the craft of writing intersects with who I am right now, and my experience. And a solid plan for building a writing career: build portfolio, complete novel, find agent.

I couldn't have asked for more out of this time.

Art without Pressure

Today I want to speak up as others have done before me and proclaim that the image of the solitary genius in the garret, scribbling away at the Best Novel Ever while simultaneously hairpulling and starving and sacrificing relationships and personal wellbeing is a crock. Art does not equal suffering.

Discipline is necessary, yes. But discipline and punishment are not the same things. I'm not talking about conflict and drama and hard times that you've been through that become your source material for art. (Although hopefully you're also sometimes thinking about the good times too while you write.) I guarantee you that you'll suffer enough just by living to make a million tons of great art. But you don't have to suffer more because you're making art.

I want to share something I've been working on. It's inspired by a book I read while writing my PhD thesis, called Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, by Joan Bolker (highly, highly recommended if you're in grad school and facing the task of writing your diss.).

On days that I've got a story to tell, which isn't every day, even if I don't feel like it, I write for twenty minutes.

Some days, I write for twenty minutes and I'm done for the day.

Other days, those twenty minutes get me into it enough that I want to keep going. So you know what I do?

I still get up from my desk at the end of the twenty minutes. I do something else for a little while. And then I go write for another twenty minutes.

Why?

Because you have to give space for inspiration to come through.
Because there's chili and cornbread to make.
Because the dog needs walking.
Because I still haven't folded my laundry.
Because most people can only concentrate for twenty minutes, max.
Because by giving space, there's room for the story to interpenetrate everything. So it will work through you while you do everything else, and improve itself.


Twenty minutes on, ten minutes off. This is how I do it.

Do you need a cataclysm?

Lately I've been really jamming on Christopher Moors. If you're at all interested in cultivating yourself spiritually, in deepening your creativity, and in finding out what a real teacher sounds like, I think you could do a lot worse than listen to his stuff. (You can find many of his Red Ice interviews and more on his website under the "Radio" tab on the lefthand side.)

I've been going through the back catalogue of his interviews at Red Ice Creations Radio. In one of them, he makes reference to a song that he wrote, and he sings a little bit:

"Do you need a cataclysm to face yourself? Or can you do it now?"

I've definitely gone the cataclysm route in the past. Around the time that I hit twenty, I was really starting to open up in interesting ways. I thought I'd try some yoga. Then I broke both my arms in a cycling accident. Uh...you can't do yoga with two busted arms. So I tried tai chi instead. I'm still on the tai chi path, and it's been deeper and richer and more fascinating than I could have imagined. It's the foundation for all of my spiritual practice. And I have to say that the world is way different - and much better - than it was when I first started tai chi all those years ago.

A few days ago I wrote about an emotional and psychological breakdown I had during grad school. Uh, hello: big indication that there was something not right about what I was doing. (That breakdown came in the wake of a bad breakup - nothing like the end of a crap relationship to make you really ask "why?")

The thing is, I think many of us wait for a big smack to the face before we stop long enough to ask, "Wait - what am I doing? And why am I doing it?" There are few opportunities to look within, especially in this culture, where the key to many people's self-worth seems to lie in their claim to being "really busy". "Oh, I'm so busy," we sigh, and we feel rather proud of ourselves. I recently told some friends that I had made it my goal in life to never be busy again. One of them looked at me like I had two heads. "You can do that?" she said. Sure I can. Watch me stop and smell the roses. Watch me do stuff, but not so much stuff that I run out of time.

Sometimes, if you're lucky (and I consider myself very lucky), life will hand you an opportunity to look within.

If you're smart (and I think I occasionally manage that these days), you'll take the opportunity to look within often, and you'll look thoroughly, and with different sorts of eyes.

So, if you're having a sick day, or something happens to stop you in your tracks (whether it's something beautiful or something terrible), ask what it's trying to show you. What do you need to know? What do you need to face?

For those who want to start without a cataclysm, here are a few clues. If you assemble these into a coherent shape, they might draw a map to your next step:

You totally deserve to be genuinely happy.

Are you living in conflict with something or someone? Why?

Creativity is not just for eccentric artist types. It's for everyone, all the time.

Your body deserves the best care you can give it. If you keep the body happy, you'll be happier, too.

Can you relax? What does relaxation mean to you?

Why did you go where you went? Why did you do what you did? Why do you love who you love? Why do you hate who you hate? How good are your answers to these questions? Do they have deeper, more meaningful answers? Drop down a layer and see.

How do you free yourself?

In many ways, this NaNoWriMo season is a culmination of a long and slow climb toward self-awareness and freedom (in the broadest sense of the term).

Once upon a time, I knew that I wanted to be a writer (since grade three, in fact, thanks very much, Mrs. Cooper, for liking my story about the duck).

And then I decided I had to have some way to make money, some kind of a title, some kind of a place in the world, a job. But the world of literature kept calling out to me, and I decided that a reasonable compromise would be academia. Ten years ago I went back to school for a Master's degree in English literature, and I really loved it. When you're doing degree studies, it's neat because you have more coaching on your writing than you ever will in any other circumstance. It seems like an ideal scenario, really, because you can read all the time and write about what you're reading. And there is an art to the academic essay, whatever people say about how incomprehensible academic writing can be (and oh, it can be ornery stuff).

I finished my PhD three years ago. As I began to go on interviews, though, I began to feel really sick in my heart. I'm sure it showed: the interviews were mostly terrible and even the ones I enjoyed, I ended up with a bad feeling about. I didn't get any job offers. It seemed I had stalled out. I decided not to continue.

That's the superficial level of what went on. But the real story isn't about how I failed at the job market (and oh, I did fail. Sarah Palin's interviews looked pretty good compared to some of the answers I gave). While I was doing all that flunking out career-wise, I was slowly building up my resources elsewhere.

While to the outside world I was working toward my PhD and earning fabulous scholarships and shaping up to be the next bright thing, I was also performing acts of creative espionage. I was having a little bit too much fun. I was spoiling myself for the austere life of a professor:

I read novels that weren't on my reading list. I attended a conference outside of my area of study, but on the topic of one of my favourite horror films, The Wicker Man (the original 1973 film starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee). I wrote a short story and sent it out to a good magazine. It didn't get published, but I got a nice note back from the editor about how it was an "almost". I enjoyed my area of study a little too much. Some of my research sent me into a giddy bouts of raucous creativity, as I imagined ways to spin what I was learning into a fabulous novel about plague and zombies and vampires and Shakespeare. (This is the novel I'm beginning with NaNoWriMo this year.)

Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole I went: I meditated a lot. I chanted. I did tai chi. I opened my mind way, waaay up. I listened to some pretty weird shit. I did Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way course - twice. I still faithfully write morning pages every day.

It wasn't all nice. I suffered through a mid-degree nervous breakdown. I had panic attacks that were pretty scary. I cried a lot of tears. I felt a lot of distress. I did a lot of therapy. I did a lot more tai chi. I meditated. I chanted. I went for long walks in the woods.

Finally, I recognized that the academic world didn't acknowledge or allow for most of the things that rocked my boat. I wished it did. I wished the job market had been better. I wished that being a professor didn't entail sacrificing everything else. And then I decided that the only thing to do was to face the truth. To acknowledge my truth.

So I quit. About a year ago, I had to decide whether to go on the market again or not. I decided not to. I still say the degree was worth it: I have mad research skills now, and I can read just about anything that's written in just about any sort of English. It took me a year to extract myself from the contract work I was doing. Thanks to my ridiculously supportive partner, I'm taking this time to build a fiction portfolio.

At thirty-seven, I decided to begin again. At thirty-eight, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. I'm doing it in relative poverty, mind you, and I'm doing it with a lot of consciousness that I will eventually need to find a way to bring some dollars in. I'm doing it with a healthy heap of guilt, reinforced by our culture at large, that I'm not being "productive". But I'm also doing it with the understanding that doing the PhD was a lot harder than what I'm proposing to do now.

Sell some stories? Way easier than selling out.

This is not to diss the academy altogether. There are a lot of people there, people I consider to be great friends, who are genuinely and deeply invested in expanding knowledge and educating students. But they're working under a sick administration, and the resources they need to do their jobs well are simply not there. The support for a true diversity of opinion is not there. And in English departments everywhere, there are a lot of people who would much rather be writers. Who ache to create, and who are instead looking longingly and lovingly at the work of others, and trying, sometimes even patiently, to explain to undergraduates why creative work is important. But it's a hard place to be. And I don't want to sacrifice myself any more.

My suggestion? If you're reading this, do something creative today. Pick up a paint brush, get your hands on some clay or some plasticene, or write a little poem, play a little music. It might feel silly. Do it anyway.

Chant "om". If that starts to feel good, go for "omanepadmeom". It will open your heart.

Find a good teacher who will show you how to meditate. Stretch a little. Go for a walk. Talk to an animal. Adopt an animal.

Anything to get a wedge into your routine, especially your routine channels of thought.

Open the floodgates, just a crack, so that a trickle of fresh, clear water can run into your life.

And don't forget to ask if you're doing what you really want to do. It's the most important question you can ask yourself. And you might want to ask it over and over again, until the answer is a resounding YES!

Wanna see something really scary?

Joshua Hoffine makes the most amazing photo art. Staged like movie stills, his photos certainly invoke many of my favourite childhood nightmares. Bonus: Mr. Hoffine is really thoughtful and articulate about why he does what he does. Multiple interview excerpts can be found in his blog.

http://www.joshuahoffine.com/