When the levee breaks, I put a spell on you. You, proud Mary, down in it… who’ll stop the rain?

Don’t cry. The end is the beginning is the end, Mary Anne with the shaky hand. God’s gonna cut you down.

“When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin

“I Put a Spell On You,” CCR

“You,” Candlebox

“Proud Mary,” CCR

“Down In It,” Nine Inch Nails

“Who’ll Stop the Rain,” CCR

“Don’t Cry,” Guns n Roses

“The End is the Beginning is the End,” The Smashing Pumpkins

“Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand,” The Who

“God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” Johnny Cash

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.

It is not the rain.

It is not a deep well, or

anything else dark or dank.

It is not ash and flame.

It is green spring with unacknowledged birdsong,

applause for someone staring into space,

flawless sentences misconstrued,

love that doesn’t count.

It is habitual coffee, untasted,

a once-beloved book, unremembered,

a birthday text, unanswered,

perpetually waiting,

untrusted and feared.

“Maybe we need to knock harder.”

I shook my head.

“Come on,” Brayden said. She stood over me where I sat on the floor, slouched against the wall. “You’re the big tough boy, so knock, damnit.”

She was never going to listen. If I had learned anything in the six months my mom had been married to her father, it was that my being 11 while she was 10 and my extra weight only made me a bigger target for Brayden. But that didn’t mean I had to help her. “I won’t.”

“Pussy.”

I shook my head again, so she grabbed a couch pillow and hurled it at me. When I deflected it from my face, the pillow knocked our parents’ wedding photo from the small table onto the hardwood. I heard the small, sharp crack that meant broken glass.

Brayden laughed. “Asshole.”

“You did it.”

Brayden fixed her dirty blonde smirk on me. “That’s not how I see it. Only one of us is strong enough to have moved the couch.” She added in a childish, singsong voice. “When you shoved it, you weren’t very careful about the end table, Alex.”

“Do you really want to tell them we moved the couch?”

We both turned to what we had found. The iron ring of the trapdoor was rusted, heavy, and impossible to pull. After we’d discovered it instead of the missing remote control, we’d both tried lifting. The door was stuck. In between Brayden’s grunts from pulling, I had heard a low sound from below. The sound made my cry out and shrink down against the wall. It made Brayden try knocking.

“Our parents don’t know about it,” Brayden said.

“You’re messing with me. It’s your house. Your dad’s lived here for like 30 years, and you don’t think he knows?”

“If he knows, your mom knows.”

“She wouldn’t. You probably did.”

“What, you think this is some sort of family secret, Alex?”

“How could you not know? Brayden, you’ve lived here your whole life.”

“Yep,” she said. She stared down at me. She held her hips with her elbows sticking out, daring me to say something. I only wanted not to whimper. “You’re pathetic,” she said.

She stepped to the trap door in the hardwood. She stomped, and then she jumped on it: nothing. Angry, she gestured expectantly toward me. I shook my head. She snorted and unplugged the floor lamp next to her dad’s leather recliner, carried it to the trap door, and smashed the base against the iron ring. She struck again and again. She held the lamp aloft for another blow when we both heard the click.

The sound was brief but unmistakable. Processing it, my brain amplified the click so much it had an echo. Brayden still held the lamp.

“I think I knocked it loose,” she said.

“What?”

“That click. I knocked the door loose.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Of course it makes sense! What the hell else could it be?”

“It clicked while you were holding the lamp in the air! It couldn’t loosen when you weren’t hitting it!”

She set down the lamp and looked at me. Her face seemed soft. For the first time in our months as siblings, Brayden seemed uncertain, and I had an opening to sway her. “Brayden,” I began, but I didn’t have the next words. The mantle clock began to chime for nine; we listened to each of the tones.

She still hadn’t moved. “Brayden,” I tried again, “whatever that click was, it’s not—”

Her scream followed the knock of metal and wood on wood so closely that they seemed to happen at once. The dark paw or hand that had flung the trap door open had sunk claws into her ankle and ripped. Brayden collapsed on her shredded ligaments and screamed until the other too-long arm buried more claws in her side. Brayden’s eyes bulged wide and her ruined lungs guttered and gasped while the matted fur dragged her below, and I leaped to the trap door and I closed it. I pushed the heavy couch back over the iron ring, which couldn’t hold the thing but could maybe slow it down, and then I ran through the front door, headlong into our parents.

They stared at me quizzically as I panted. My mom knelt to look me in my eyes. “What is it, bug?”

I couldn’t make sense but I tried. “Brayden,” I said, “there was an arm that took her, she knocked and it—”

A strong hand gripped my shoulder. “Come inside, son,” my stepdad said. I shook my head frantically, but he repeated, “come inside and tell us all about it.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Don’t be silly, Alex,” my mom said, and they brought me to the door. When mom put her hand on the knob I nearly ran, but the grip on my shoulder felt firm.

Everything inside was quiet. I was still shaking, but I could see no blood, no signs of anything wrong except the picture frame facedown and the lamp in the wrong place. I looked to my mom. “Brayden’s gone,” I said, but now both my shoulders had a firm grip on them, holding me in place from behind, and Mom began to pull the couch. She turned her face to me as she finished pulling and I saw the iron ring. “Everything’s fine, bug.” She smiled.

after a line by Aleathia Drehmer

She looked on while one

cracked the eggs and

measured flour, and one tucked

candles into buttercream to light,

and then they sang for me—

daughter, daughter, wife.

I felt full without a bite.

Was 40 like this for you,

all those decades before?

Your wife and your son (my father

who fathered two in turn),

gathered about a glowing cake.

1964. Your chickens would have

given the eggs, your cows the cream.

You a farmer who had

come home from war,

married, raised my father, tilled

land many miles from here.

You are buried, now,

many miles from here.

I think of you anyway, how you always

touched the ground: feet planted or

hands in earth, solid and knowing,

certain of what you grew.

So Lieutenant Carver and his former partner drink cans of beer in the police station parking lot. It’s the final season of The Wire, so we’ve seen the officers make mistakes. A recent one ruined a young boy’s life—his foster mom gets third degree burns after a Molotov cocktail attack, and he ends up getting brutalized in a group home. That knowledge haunts Carver. He was a bit of a knucklehead in his early days, but he’s since grown to be a competent cop and a good man who really tried to help that poor kid. “We thought none of it mattered,” Carver says, “but it did.”

He crumples up this cheap beer can. He can’t let go of all the fuckups he must have made when he was young and stupid, and he can’t let go of the fuckup with the kid, and he can’t shake off the fuckups he has yet to make even when he tries to do right, so he just crumples up this can and hurls it onto the station’s roof, where there’s already a pile of a thousand other empties other cops have thrown.

I try to write the beer can.

I think I’ll have the blackened salmon.

My kitchen contains two bottles of wine that I have stored at 55 degrees Fahrenheit for nine years; I will store them at 55 degrees for at least another fifteen. I will open them on that undetermined date to follow a meal with an undetermined menu for undetermined guests.

My daughters and wife will be there, certainly, and several colleagues of past and future. I’d like to draft the list now, but life doesn’t work that way. Preparing for a dinner party 15-20 years in advance is an exercise in quixotism—who knows? I could be dead myself—but that’s the appeal, I think.

I bought those two bottles of vintage port first: Quinta do Vale Meao, 2011. I had read of the excellent vintage, and when a conference in 2014 took me to Albany, I shopped at a wine warehouse during a break and found them. I have held them ever since, occasionally pulling them from the temperature control to read their labels and daydream.

In centuries past, nobility bought cask after cask of vintage port to celebrate the births of their sons. By the time the children reached adulthood, the port would be ready to drink. Being a teacher in the 21st century, I have more limited means, but I can manage two bottles for my retirement.

I have not decided on the wine for the main course, but I have prepared a trial to help me choose. My wine fridge contains a quality 2007 Barolo and 2010 Bordeaux. Both remain too young to drink, according to Robert Parker’s vintage charts, but someday soon I will have to uncork them anyway and decant for a few hours. Which aged red will I prefer? My decision must come soon so I can invest in a half case or so of something very good. If I retire when first eligible, I only have until 2038 for the wine to mature. I feel less time pressure for the first course’s wine. I live in the Finger Lakes, one of the finest Riesling regions in the world. I can lay my hands on something good just a handful of years in advance.

Once I’ve made a final decision about my retirement date, I’ll make inquiries and hire a private chef, with whom I’ll meet and share the Riesling and the red. We’ll talk about the dishes the chef favors. I will be open to possibilities, but I’d like something with goat cheese to accompany the Riesling, and I’ve thought of braised beef or roast duck for the main course. As I am Irish, there must be roasted potatoes. A dark chocolate dessert must accompany the port.

If some of my former colleagues live out of state, I’ll offer airfare and a hotel; they will be surprise guests. Local colleagues will meet me, somewhere, and a limo will arrive to carry us to the location so past and present can come together, unexpectedly, as they usually do. When the server brings the first course I will raise a glass and acknowledge those who could not join us. I do not now know the middle bit, but I’ll have notes by then. I only know the closing: “Thank you for being there. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing a meal with me.”