sadness ever

enveloped your heart

though drown it

you verily tried

regardless

you were

good, kind

caring, loving -

an instinct

the latter

for you

experienced it

never

before

giving your

heart

to be

broken

over

and

over

till gaining

the unconditional love

of a daughter;

when you passed

and your wife gave me

the album

of pictures

you'd lovingly saved,

tucked inside -

how i cried -

were

myriad birthday

and

Father's Day cards

I'd sent

that you

kept them

meant,

I hope,

you knew

you were loved

even if

it wasn't

enough

to keep you

from drowning

your sorrows

till neither

love

nor sadness

mattered.

Now 30 years

gone,

I wish

I'd had

more years

to know you

better

to love you

longer.

I

miss

you.

Natural woodgrain, smoothly shaped into

the form of the thing it will be.

“It’s a good line,” he says of the boat,

running his hand along the raw gunwale before

eyeing it once more from the stern.

The sawdusted floor dwarfs his house, and that’s

room one. He’s reorganizing his tools, and we

walk among their groups to the door and gravel path.

He almost died on his fortieth birthday.

He was not, luckily, in this cabin, where pain would have

rendered the phone bric-a-brac among the books.

His mother had said he needed a doctor, and

his father had helped him off the floor.

“Forty-two is time for a partner,” he says, a

second tumbler of fine scotch in his head.

Another friend has another someone

to meet, he says, strumming a few chords.

But what would he do in Wilmington, he laughs.

He has an open-air bath tub, a reloading table,

a coop with three chickens, DVDs from the library,

a whiteboard wall with three dozen recommendations

of books and poets and conversations and films.

Tomorrow someone will pay him a few grand for

new molding, and three more word-of-mouth jobs await.

For now, he sleeps in his loft next to books from seminary,

dreaming perhaps of a boat that will wend toward

in-season geese, maybe soon.

I tried something new this past Friday [in December 2020]. I dedicated a day off work to writing. To my relief, I did so successfully.

Examining my paystub recently, I observed an unintentional accumulation of personal days, as it turns out that I hadn’t taken one in three years. The times being what they are, a day off seemed in order, so when my lessons could aligned so classes could reasonably run without me and my principal indicated the substitute situation was manageable, I put in for my day. I’ve been making an effort to take my writing seriously, and this day constituted something of a test.

Dedicating a calendar block to writing had never worked for me. I’ve often felt at my most creative when there’s some menial task to which I should attend: dishwashing, cleaning, grading papers… My spirit chafes at the work and flies away from it toward creativity. But when I have declared that the writing is the work, my perverse little spirit has flown from it, too.

I think my difficulty has had something to do with the nature of literature. Writing, I think, requires an extraordinary degree of self-presence. Our lyric poems, our vignettes, and our characters all feed on little pieces of us and our impressions; they can feed on nothing else. If I feel divorced from my own being and experience, if I am blocked from feeling wholly present, then I am blocked from writing creatively.

Zanlexus wrote a piece for this challenge suggesting that writer’s block might be the psychic or emotional equivalent of the injury that prevents a construction worker from building, which led me to follow this thread of writing and the self. The comparison of Zanlexus holds true, I think. I do not lose my skills as a writer when experiencing blockage. I can still crank out a sample analysis of a text for my class or edit a letter for a colleague: what I think of as “yeoman writing,” which I’ve trained for extensively and do not need to draw from my own experiences to do. Creative writing, though, is a different animal. It feeds not only on my technical skills or logical analysis, but on my capability to express to someone else how I think and feel, with the center squarely on the “I.”

When I understand writing creativity as an output of the core, internal self, it does make sense for it to come more easily when I should be doing something else. The tension between what I must do and what I want to do fuels my imaginative fancy. Stuck in a cage of sorts, I dream about life beyond the bars. This drifting from task is my self trying to exert its authority. There is, obviously, a limitation to the utility of external demands: if there’s not only a cage but an electrified one, or if the walls are closing in, anxiety can overwhelm any sense of creativity. Awful and draining experiences have inspired many a work of literature, but I think for the most part Wordsworth pegged it in his intro to Lyrical Ballads: “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, recollected in tranquility.” I write not when I feel the powerful emotions, but once they’ve become part of me and my life experiences, when I can recollect them and access them.

That introspection is necessary to writing creatively, if the work is to resonate emotionally, and introspection tends to result from stimuli more than appointment. One does not frequently say, “At 3:00 PM on Wednesday, I will reflect on my life and my psycho-emotional state.” And down-time often passes in a series of actions intended to bring relaxation through distraction; someone exhausted and looking to forget about life for a while will probably not do much soul-searching. Introspection might happen in response to someone’s questions, though, or in response to a place or a song or a poem.

I nearly let my day of writing slip away on Friday. I was tired. I had devoted a lot of energy to teaching and parenting and household chores, and with those demands temporarily at bay, I automatically leaned toward pleasant distractions to “unwind.” I had been awake at 6:30 (though I caught another nap), and by 10:30, I had still written nothing.

So I pulled up recent Prose posts. Reading the writing of others is the surest way for me to feel inspired. Experiencing the creations of others, also striving to self-express, fills me with the desire to offer my own efforts to the world. On this particular morning, I read pieces by deathbyaudio, KMCassidy, and paintingskies, but if you’re reading this post, then chances are at some point I’ve turned to your work, too. I value this community, and I want to remain connected to it. I’ve promised myself to post something at least once per week, even if other projects consume most of my time, and to continue actively reading. Prose can keep me going.

I also found the right music. Music equals mindset, and the right song at the right time can unlock a profusion of feeling. I needed Patty Smith’s Horses on Friday (particularly “Gloria”), and later a Brahms symphony. Other frequent writing music includes Lana del Rey, Beethoven’s symphonies, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, and Wilco’s Being There (playing presently). Nearly everything I write has a soundtrack, and once I find what it is, I get the mood I need for the mode I need.

At some point you’ve felt “on” if you’re a writer; otherwise, you probably wouldn’t want to write. There’s a direct conduit from the mind through the fingers onto the page. There’s a flow. Creativity has many times been likened to a well or a spring, but that seems inaccurate to me because the water, the self, isn’t just sitting there to be drawn up and used. Maple syrup is a more apt metaphor. There’s sap flowing inside the wood. It must be tapped, drawn, and boiled, and if you harvest fifty gallons of rawness, you can finish with one gallon of sweet, finished syrup. You live a lot, and you lock it away, and if you can get at enough of it and distill it enough, you can yield something beautiful.

Whether syrup or water, it’s no accident that our metaphors for literary inspiration are liquid. Solids cause blocks. It’s the flow we seek.

Insisting on the perfection of that flow held me back for a long time. A piece felt so good to write, but the morning light revealed all the flaws and doubts. Without realizing it, I was subscribing to that water model, as though I needed only to pour and realize perfection. But writing needs to be worked at, and I let myself do it, now. I have an outline of my novel: I know where the characters are going and what moments carry them there. A chapter represents my effort to fill in the humanity of it all, making the journey authentic and felt, but on a first try, I will get it wrong. I have learned not to stop when I doubt that it holds together because I know, with certainty, that it doesn’t. It will not read with smoothness, clarity and verisimilitude until I return a day or a week later and fix it. I am following the advice I have given high school students for years: get something down and then revise, because revision is easier and blank pages are terrifying. I am trusting my ability to find the missing pieces. Each chapter and each draft is a problem to be solved.

Having a skilled and trusted editor doesn’t hurt, either.

I should say, clearly, that I’ve never actually finished a novel, and that I abandoned my only prior attempt after thirteen chapters when I concluded it was bad. (Trust me, it was… though I did later post a rejiggered chapter to Prose under the title “Mass.”) EDIT: I finished! I’m proud; it’s not published; I’m at work on the next. But I’m trying, and I’m confident this time. I wrote about 1300 unpolished words that Friday. I was curious, so I looked it up, and Stephen King goes for 2,000 a day, so in that sense I fell short. But Hemingway and Graham Green only tried for 500 words a day. That didn’t seem so bad, and I’ve read more of their stuff than King’s, anyway.

All told, my experiment was a success: I did write. I got 1300 words, and I finished the last 400 of the chapter the next day, and I’m working on the editing. It would have been easier on my day off to lull myself into relaxation with something readily on demand, like John Mulaney on Netflix, or a half hour of beating on cartoon characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. But I passed my test. I applied what I had learned about my process and inspiration and I wrote, and it was better than relaxing. I felt rejuvenated. I was myself, intensely.

I was born; happily, I am here, still alive to write for you, fellow Readers.

I live in Ukraine. We struggle, and I must assure you, this is not going to stop. Fighting for freedom is too much in human nature, it seems, to stop in the middle of fighting.

Now a few more words about me. I write for challenges only, being too idle to challenge myself; that means I must thank fellows who post challeges for introducing my into the world of writing.

Thus, thank you, everybody!

What do I truly know?

That I exist because I think

Everything else must be speculation.

So yes, I write what I wish I knew

I wish that I could be sure that my memories have happened

That I will go to exotic climes and places

That heartbreak can be resolved neatly

All I can be sure of is that I right now am alive

Clutching every second, drowning in time.

So my writing is the result of a human forcing herself to believe in her memories.

All that I write is what I don't know

You can write about anything, with the proper research. Of course writing what you know is easier, but it shouldn't limit you in your writing. Branch out, read, learn. If you don't know something, you should look it up rather than omitting it. If you want to be a better writer, then you should better yourself.

Two

Heartbeats skip as I stare at him for the first time

My eyes have always been attracted to tan skin I will never have

But I am pragmatic and know that I am frightened of rejection

Roads

He comes up to me after breakfast as I walk on the dusty path

Strips me away from the friends I had made already

And strikes up awkward conversation

Diverged

During which his intent becomes clear

He asks me out for that evening

The plan being to go on a walk

In

We are camp counselors together

The children haven't arrived yet

Fewer eyes

A

My dress is stunning

He ignores me all evening

And my heart, not used to rough treatment, resigns itself to its fate

Yellow

But soft! The flickering lights outside the girl's bathhouse reveal a boy standing there

Waiting for someone

We go on the walk tonight

Wood

Stumbling through the bracken

He asks consent and I say yes

The next six weeks will be awkward, but my first kiss is perfect

When my love asks me

To slow down...

It's like a needle or an ice pick...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

It's like a rake across my bicep...

...Oh, no, I can't imagine

I could get

So lost inside my head

That our hearts that are

So locked in motion

Would become unwed...

How did I, under the spell

Of living

Get desensitized,

And not see the words

Written in blood...

This message in the skies?...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

It's like a needle or an ice pick...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

It's like a rake across my bicep...

...She's so right on every count,

She's got me

Blushed down to my shoes...

Like dynamite

Were wired and set

I'm chasing down this fuse...

But I can't deny my destiny,

This head sunk in my lap

Is my life's ambition,

No objections,

Not an inch

Of room for that...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

It's like a needle or an ice pick...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

It's like a rake across my bicep...

When my love...

When my love...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

When my love...

When my love...

When my love asks me

To slow down...

2/27/23

Bunny Villaire

Edit #4

You can write what you do not know or experience. I've never been in love, but I can tell the story of what I imagine falling to feel like. Writing is not always your own trauma and expertise - sometimes a writer's job is to give power to the people who cannot speak. Limiting a person's work to only the known ruining the what if tells and unfortunate desires. I can write for days about the heartbreak i experience when I was 14 and you would never know it was a lie but I bet my words would still water up your eyes. You can write about what you do not know because maybe it'll give you the courage to take the stuff out and learn.