What I’m Writing: “Turning, turning, will be our delight, ‘till by turning, turning, we come round right” goes the famous Shaker hymn, “Tis a Gift to Be Simple,” and after a challenging, even frustrating week on “Everyday Annunciations” I’m working hard to put my trust in that latter assurance.
The “turning” hasn’t been so much fun recently as I struggle to reorganize this chapter’s parts into a logical order, trying to make this thing into not just a helpful exploration of its topic, but something that a human being might actually enjoy reading. The middle is now the beginning; pieces are meeting other pieces they initially didn’t seem to relate to; children are being necessarily killed right and left (this is the playwriting metaphor for gritting one’s teeth and cutting chunks of a manuscript–or songs in a musical comedy–that one has labored over but that in the end don’t quite fit). New ideas and seemingly better ways of stating things are coming up in their stead, which in turn have to be integrated somewhere; unfortunately they themselves sometimes turn out to be red herrings.
It’s hard, slow work, frustrating and potentially confidence-shaking if a person allows it to be. But it’s essential work in this writing biz, which is not always fun by any means. Still, every time something clicks into place like it was born to be there, I feel a little jolt of joy and hope. And that’s good, because a LOT more clicking that has to happen before this thing is viable.
When the writing process sings, it can feel like magic. But this is writing is, too: this discipline to stay with something whose bones one believes in, honing and shaping it with all the tools at one’s disposal, rising each day with determination, hanging onto hope.
What I’m Listening To: As a musician (piano and clarinet in youth, vocalist ever since college), I’ve long believed in the inspirational power of that art. This morning as I centered my mind for the work session ahead by drinking coffee and knitting, I suddenly felt like listening to Renaissance English madrigals, music I’d listened to in grad school when the writing was rough. What a good impulse that was: the genre involves voice parts that go playfully in all directions, talking over each other as they voice lines of a poem/song at different times with different sub-melodies (and sometimes dissidence), seeming to veer toward gleeful energetic chaos. Then, as the end nears, they abruptly converge, concluding with a resolving unity/chord that seems to say, “See? This was meant to happen all along! We were never really lost.”
May that be true of my work, too.
Something Beautiful in My World Right Now: Speaking of “coming round right”! This week I took my one-year-old cat, the beautiful Flora, in for her yearly check-up. After I adopted her from a loving but hygienically-sketchy foster home last spring, I discovered she had several potentially-fatal problems. Thanks to advanced giardia, she weighed only one pound at two months, so critically underweight that her ear mites couldn’t be treated; a dangerous upper respiratory infection also threatened to end her life before it really began. How hard those first months were with this immediately-beloved kitten, especially since my two older cats immediately contracted those conditions, too. Don’t get me started on all the sanitation protocols, the pill-giving, the $$$ constant vet visits for everybody to keep running tests. When Flora’s weight hit 3 pounds in early June I did a happy dance; when everybody finally tested giardia-free and their eyes stopped running and wheezing disappeared, I cried with relief. Everybody’s been fine now for a while, and this week’s vet’s visit was a triumph for Flora: pronounced “in excellent health,” she now weighs in at a fluffy, bodacious 9.3 pound
