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The Writing Switch

Where is the writing switch in my brain?  It’s been tripped to the “on” position in the last few days.  I do keep up some level of writing, almost daily, as this blog proves, even if it is only 17 syllables matched to some visual image I’ve come across.  Sometimes, though less often, the haiku starts and I go looking for the image, though I have at least one reader who can tell when I’ve snagged a photograph off a google search, rather than taken the photo myself.

But the last few days the full-out, constant visual feed to language framing switch has been on.  I notice how the fields on the drive home this evening have only patches of snow left, as if some giant in the sky has been splattering down goopy white frosting on the dull brown grass.  The puddle in the dip of the road before I drive up to my mailbox has split in two, making two lungs of water across the broad chest of the road.  Yesterday morning the mist rising off the many small brooks and streams around my house, and those glops of snow still on the fields, had frozen into crystalline icing on every brush twig and branch, glinting in the sun, which was finally rising, in spite of our tinkering with the clocks.

This doesn’t stop, the writing channel on unending flow.  I see anything and I begin to fashion that image in language.  And then what is the meaning under that language, how do I translate this set of words, derived from this image, into a connection with the reader that will make something bigger happen.  “I explode inside my own brain, I want other brains to explode,” is part of a poem from my manuscript about the year of grief after Eric died. What I meant there, is that I want what I write to explode in the reader’s mind, I want whatever is churning out of that online-all-the-time channel of mine to get so big it infiltrates and creates its own set of meanings in the brain space of the reader.

Did validation turn on the writing switch?  I got an email on Sunday that my poetry manuscript, The Truth About Death, has been accepted by Turning Point Books, an imprint of WordTech Communications.  I have a publication date and a contract, from a very legitimate poetry publisher!

Let the words flow on.

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And I Shall Have Some Peace There

“Who are you going to fight with after you leave your job?” a colleague asked me at a board meeting earlier this week.  I had been talking about preparations to testify to the NH House Finance Committee, opposing the total loss of state general funds for domestic violence services.  This cut is only one of many too many the Committee is considering that would destroy critical service programs that the state’s most vulnerable citizens rely on for basic survival.  Tough times these days, which I assume had me talking tough, thus the question.

“I’m going to stay on this board and fight with you,” I answered, but with a laugh, because this colleague is a man I mostly agree with, but who can engage in a good discussion.

“You strike me as an organizer,” he went on.  “What will you organize?”

“I just organized a new writing group,” I said, and I have.  “I have a lot of identities.  Being the Executive Director of the Coalition is not all of who I am.”  Very true.  Look at my bio here on the blog — you don’t get to my career identification until the end of the list.  But this week I’ve been exploring another woman’s life-altering shift in identities, and beginning to understand that as much as I’m embracing the coming change, it’s going to be BIG!

Margaret Roach is a gardener and writer, and until 3 years ago, was a top executive in the Martha Stewart empire.  Margaret’s gardening blog, A Way to Garden, is a treasure, and her new book and I shall have some peace there is also a treat.  I went to hear her read and speak last Tuesday night, and at one point, in describing her previous, jam-packed and wildly hectic work life, she held up her hands as if warding off demons when she talked about her need for time and space and solitude in order to figure out who she really is and how she wants to be in the world.  She left her high level Manhattan career and life to live full-time at her weekend home in the country, to garden and create and write.  While I am walking away from a much different kind of career, the pace sounds similar, and so I’m reading with anticipatory curiosity.

In her first months of her new life, slowing down is not easy.  Margaret describes still being on the spin cycle in fast and furious language that rings so true.  I’m getting a helpful glimpse of what my new life might feel like, when suddenly there isn’t somewhere I have to be and something that has to be done, right now!

The book’s title is from the Yeats poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.  It’s worth keeping the full line close in the coming months: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.”

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Haiku LXX

Rainwater racing
Tracks across the porch floorboards
Chasing winter’s tail.

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Haiku LXIX

Snowdrops flowering
Clumps of blossoms on bare ground
Spring visits then flees.

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Saturday Morning

It’s been a sad week — on top of the suicide of a young man in our community, and the sadness in David’s family of the failed relationship, a mentally ill man was shot to death by the police in Concord.  It’s not clear what happened, but with the changes happening in the public mental health system because of state budget cuts, there very well may be more events like this.  I can’t get used to how little people with no voice count, how easily they’re pushed aside in debates about funding and revenue and the trashing of budgets to take away the social safety net.  “It’s not a safety net,” a member of NH’s House Finance Committee said to our Commissioner of Health and Human Services at a recent meeting.  “It’s a hammock.  These people are swinging in hammocks and they need to get up and get to work.”  Sad.

Then David got the cold I had this week and was too sick and infectious to come with me to visit Adrienne and Matt and Emilio.  So I spent a bit of time being pouty and upset that here is yet another weekend David and I spend apart.  And then I got real.  We are both alive, we are healthy (except for our colds), we have smart, strong, healthy and highly functional children, and in three months we are going to have oceans of time spreading out around us in all directions (knock wood).  We’ll go kayaking.