We come up with them all the time, don’t we? Reasons. Some good ones, some lame, for not getting on with the work, the difficult, enjoyable work of being a writer. Notice I’m not using that awful, dirty word, excuses. Kind of like the term, blocked, I’m not fond of the word, excuse, either.
 
We’ve all heard, or thought:  
 
I don’t have anything to say that anyone would want to read.
My life is boring. I’m too boring to writing anything interesting.
I’m too bored to write. I’m tired. I’m just not feeling it.
I’d rather do something else. Yes. Anything but write, right? 
I’m a writer, I think. I say I am. I think I am. But I’d rather
do almost anything but actually get to down to really writing.
Hey, I could straighten up my romantically outfitted writing desk
for an hour while my belly tightens into knots over the prospect
of actually sitting down and getting to work, right? Yes!
And my vinyl. Doesn’t my collection need an overdue alphabetizing?
Oh, look! Butterflies and puppies! Why is the sun already going down?
 
If we gave over to these tangent thoughts almost nothing would get written in the world of writing. All ideas begin from a zero point: from “no idea,” from “one day I was stumped, then then it hit me.” From that point, every little devil of a reason will inch way into preventing your victory, when you’ve completed that long thought of the story in your head you just couldn’t let go, when it's finally on paper, a story, poem, an idea you just had to get out into a world that needed it. We have to let the reality of that world you’re smothering with disbelief have some light, some air of belief.
 
Just a little. Begin with a little.
A little grows into a lot when you really want to let it. 

​Go write. 

I help manage an antique / vintage store and run a couple of my own booths there as well. I got involved just over a year ago and I’ve experienced so much pleasure from seeking out and re-selling what the world is letting go. I’ve been a history nut since I was an undergrad major in the field, but being amongst all this life material, with a constant eye for writing, makes for a newly layered appreciation of how the world gears itself up. I meet some of the most interesting people. Every day is writing worthy.
 
Like this morning. A lady walks into the store, appearing a bit distracted, in a mood or state we're used to seeing here with some folks who deal with issues that should make most of us feel very lucky with what few problems we really have. I ask if she needs help and she asks if I've got anything for fifty cents (probably not, I think). I wonder hard about it and muse that I could look around. But then she asks, as she pulls out a dollar and hangs it out in front of me, if I have a pen/pin.
 
I'm not sure what she's asking. The sort you wear? I ask first, referring to the glass counter cabinet which is full of pretty little things. Yes. Or to write with? Yes. (So it's yes to both?) Oh, I can just give you a pen to write with, I told her, handing her one of a thousand we have around. She seemed thrilled and grateful over something so simple, so mundane as an ink pen. I told her as she turned and immediately walked out: Everyone needs something to write with out in the world. And we do.
 
This something isn’t always a handy pen, which alludes us in times of need (and where do all those lot writing utensils go?). That something to write with may be the permission we need to express what we’ve got loaded up inside. That something may be a key to understanding, some epiphany. The pen – not a pen – might be some cathartic episode creeping up on us we’re not ready for, but isn’t waiting on our being ready. It comes anyway.  
 
When they claimed, way back when (and at the moment I don’t know who “they” were, nor when “when” was), that the pen is mightier than the sword, they weren’t including only quill pens and steel swords, of course. This was a reminder of how free expression can negate oppression. Sometimes.
 
I believe the very act of holding a pen in the hand is symbolic. Try it. Hold the nearest pen or pencil in a hand. What does it conjure. It calls up what might be said, but is only thought about in the safety of the mind. It calls upon an entire history of the written word and all its delights (and horrors). Having a pen close at hand makes us feel better, knowing we’re capable of tossing down important moments without the anxiety of forgetfulness. A pencil, with an eraser, is a little forgiving. The writing tool and the blankness of the paper meet on the level field, fight it out for expressive space. The pen is an extension of your power, however you define it.
 
We should all have something to write with out in the world, indeed. 

Talk about a metaphor.
 
Most of the writers I know are hardcore addicts. A hopeless bunch.
 
And not in the sense of substances ruling their lives (I’m glad I can brag how most of my close writing friends are pretty healthy people, though we imbibe heartily on occasion). But we all suffer a problem with writing and we’re all agreeably co-dependent upon each other.
 
When we get together, we don’t encourage healing. We don’t support each other by helping break away from our additions to the written word, our eternally anchored lives to the pen, page, laptop, and desk.
 
We gather in each other’s secret company, at conferences, festivals, residences, and writers groups, to load up, and stab the veritable needle into one another’s neck all day and all night. In person. Through social media. By e-mail. Via hand-written notes. By the books of poems, shorts stories, novels, and creative non-fiction we produce and circulate like so much underground illegal drug activity. We’re a hot mess, as they say.
 
We are addicts, indeed. Psychologically. Physiologically. Socially. Culturally. Economically. Religiously. Enslaved to the word, and the word to us. When we engage in these precarious acts, we experience a heightened pleasure nearly as delightful as anything the world offers. This is why we persist in our crazed life choices, come success or failure, clarity or confusion.
 
We learn to gather up our many rejections like the old adage: At least a bad day of drinking was still drinking (or was that a phrase about fishing?). When we’re not writing, or revising, or submitting, or reading, something feels imbalanced about life. It’s that craving that sends us off kilter until we’re back again doing that tasty thing that preoccupies us waking or sleeping, or in that dazed in-between world.
 
And it’s in our dreams, too. We dream about that good, sweet high. That one elusive poem we must eventually create. That lovely paragraph we’re chasing. That short story we lost in a fevered dream when coming down. The vision of a story just waiting around the magical corner.
 
We’re all chasing the same thing and something different all at once. An alchemical cocktail of words discovered by only us in the lonely night, tested swirling in our own bloodstream, boiled down and readied for a hungry world.  

True or false? A writer/poet must be able to write anywhere, anytime, about anything.
 
You might agree, or not. You might know it’s true, but can’t pull it off yet. You might disagree with every fiber of your writerly being.
 
Let’s talk a moment about writing about anything, and by that I mean more like: writing when we think there’s “nothing in the well.”
 
I’ve been trading a poem each day this month with a fellow writer. We’re close to the end. Having participated in poem-a-day month marathons before, we know the last week can be challenging.
 
Try this for generating new poems. In fact, if you’ve written thirty or more poems for April, the following strategy is an easy go-to way of writing another thirty if you’re daring enough.
 
I’m talking about translation.
 
And not translating your poems into a foreign language as in English to Spanish or German. This is a translation of a poem into another poem by analyzing your work by close reading and going beyond what might be a strong revision. More than simply the moving around of words and the clever use of a thesaurus. This is truly seeing what else your piece is saying besides what you’ve said, what more it brings to mind, how else the brain interprets the message first established by your original work.
 
Again, don’t approach it as revision. Approach it as real translation. If necessary, step to the challenge as if the poem is not your own. What was this person saying, but didn’t say in the language they used?
 
You might end up with a very different poem, indeed.
 
Who knows where the mind – the poem – goes when we go deeper into the word.  

​Partnering with a writer
 
I’ve noticed a few “What it’s like” blogs on “living with a writer” lately, whether that’s being married to one, dating one, or just being around one all the time. Allow me to jump on fun wagon as well.
 
First of all, if you’re with a writer (“with” equating to all the above arrangements), don’t fall for all that usual nonsense about them having to have complete and perfect quiet in order to work. You’ve heard how writers need to be great liars? Well, they’re lying about this, too, because not only are they never going to get the ideal calmness they think they need in order to excel, they probably know it and are only avoiding the inevitable. What they need is to learn how to function as a writer in the real world – the insanely noisy world that doesn’t care if you’re a writer.
 
So much of the world around us is either in chaos or is an agent of chaos. If you’re overly-sensitive enough, even the lovely little birdies inspiring your good mood as you stand on the back porch overlooking a field of sundrenched flowers will annoy you with their increased cacophony. The world is full of things destroying things in order to make new things. I once worked at a University that up and started campus improvements one morning that has yet to quit “improving” over a decade later, never a workday passing without the awful, detrimental sounds of diesel engines, trees being cut down, jack hammers, etc. And while that’s an extreme example provided by a group of disconnected leaders with zero empathy for students, faculty, and staff, it proves a point about having to live in a world that really doesn’t care much about what our romantic and artsy dreams might be.   
 
Though a pleasurable pursuit, and delicious when we can get it, what a lot of writers are striving for is a romantic setting that enhances the aesthetic of writing, the absence of which is too good an excuse for doing anything other than what we supposedly love – writing. A view. Smelly (often expensive) candles. Artisan note paper lined up in OCD fashion on the corner of the antique Victorian desk. Perfect lighting. Coffee at the ideal temperature. Or maybe that expensive bourbon. Hell, I’d be worn out and too tired to write myself after arranging all that. Perhaps we should ask if we love writing as much as we love the idea of writing.  
 
We all have our preferences, of course, and there are environmental extremes we should  avoid in order to claim some sanity. Three screaming kids in the middle of the day with the TV going and the dryer and dishwasher rattling and music going along with scammers ringing the phone off the hook? Not ideal. Maybe when the kids are napping and all the machines are finished with the noise. Writing your bestselling poetry collection in the middle of an artillery barrage? Not ideal. Maybe afterward, when you get your heartrate down.
 
Rather than practicing your writing where it’s perfect, also practice writing a little everywhere. All the more reason to have a notebook with you everywhere you go. Write in a café, on a park bench, on the subway, on your bed, at your desk, on breaks at work, in the parking lot, at the beach, near the airport, in quiet, in chaos, and in the in-betweens which make up the most of our time in life.  
 
Extremes be damned! Normalcy be welcomed! Write on!

So I’ve partnered up with a writing friend for another poem-a-day challenge for April’s “National Poetry Month.” We’re a third of the way through as of today, day ten.
 
Having done this every day for over a year once, you’d think this would be easy for me. It’s not. It really isn’t. Every day begins with that little shiver of anxiety we’ve all felt, that little voice hinting you might have written your last good poem a long time ago. That any spontaneity you possessed was used up long before this moment.
 
Yet you press on. You write. You create. You poet on.
 
We’ve talked a little about writing through the wall. If you’re writing a poem or more a day for a full month, really putting the work in, it’s easy to run out of steam. It requires more than five minutes over coffee while you’re waking up. If that’s what your poem-a-day experience is, then you’ve missed the point.
 
A strategy you can take with your poetry when you’re bogging down is writing to strangeness. A professor in my MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College offered once that we should push our writing deeper into the strangeness of the mind. That a certain disruption of meaning and / or intention in a piece can lift a poem out of the mundane – even if well written – and into something very different and special. But we have to be open to a certain oddness of language and vision in order to get things clearly to the paper (not gibberish, mind you). We also have to trust ourselves to work within what we can call the “blur of inspiration.” That “blur” is something we know right up to the point of clarity, but don’t quite have a full handle on, yet are still confident to try writing to completion.
 
That “blur” solidifies sometimes from a ten-minute free write. Or from a simple idea prompt. Or from continuing a single line jumping off point. Writing on a theme, perhaps. Other times you’re in the poem and it needs that certain something we’re always striving for. That “umph.” The juice. The perfect volta, that turn. An epiphany. That exhale of satisfaction at the end of a good poem.
 
Step into oddness, if only for a moment. Switch up your language. Go on a tangent in the margin. Change the subject. Make up a word. Go to the dictionary and incorporate a line based on what you find. Shuffle the lines you’ve written. Take a line and translate it, not into another language, but into what the line REALLY means, three levels down into meaning, lower into another part of your brain you seldom visit. Finish the poem from the perspective of another person, with their voice in your head. Change moods. Write it backwards.
 
Go strange. 

 
Must Poetry Hook Quickly?
 
While most of us agree that a poem should draw the reader’s interest in quickly, choices on how quickly and how to do so vary. We might also agree that there are successful poems that take their time in the seemingly mundane, but that reward lovingly by the end. Yet ending a piece leaving the reader with what Mary Carroll-Hackett (author of several poetry collections, including: Death for Beginners, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, and Trailer Park Oracle, among others) calls that sighing response, an indication you’ve startled the senses, is just as important and challenging.
 
Firstly, let’s talk about entering a poem.
 
While I’m the last to overly corporatize our craft (one of the reasons it was nice to get away from the deadly realm of higher ed bureaucracy), I was nevertheless recently drawn to a marketing article I thought might switch up our thinking on the topic of early lines in poetry: “How To Grab Your Target’s Attention in 8 Seconds” (Conran, Inc.com).
 
That eight seconds isn’t referring to riding a bull – though reading poetry might feel that way sometimes – but to our apparent average attention spans when surfing the net and other internet activities (from 2015). Really? Eight whole seconds. And, they say, it’s down from a whole twelve from back in 2000. Of course, our attention when deliberately reading poetry versus randomly falling down the black hole of information that is the Internet, are two different things.
 
Still, something tells me we might learn a thing or two from those desperate marketers that so need our attention.  
 
They offer four hints at maintaining meaningful interaction: Making it personal, letting photos speak, encouraging social media interaction, and keeping it simple. These obviously don’t fit perfectly into writing poetry, but we can easily adapt them to our needs, can’t we?
 
Even if the content / narrative of a poem strikes no early chord of familiarity, perhaps we can personalize a piece by drawing on the reader’s curiosity. Most lovers of poetry are curious people. Help them understand that whatever drew you, the poet, into the curiosity of this moment you’ve preserved / created is a universal enjoyment they can tap as well.
 
Replace the word photo in this advice with image and we have more sound advice. Let imagery speak to the reader. When reading poetry, we don’t think in words, but in images driven by word interpretation as filtered by memory and personal experience. That’s a long distance to travel for a simple line of poetry toward enjoyment. No wonder we can grow bored, or confused, by a poem so quickly. Imagery helps us speak a language the reader probably better understands. The old saying, Show, don’t tell, should ring a bell here.
 
Let’s skip social media interaction for now and talk about promoting our work at a later date.
 
Keeping things simple isn’t a cure-all for writing. I don’t claim this. But I do believe too much early complication / difficulty in a poem can be a turn-off. We have to remember that not everyone who reads / tries reading our work are every-day readers of poetry. We writers have a higher tolerance (sometimes) for what’s going on with an author’s intent. We must empathize with readers’ past experiences with the word and why they’re in front of our work in the first place. A somewhat simple door into a room, rather than an intimidating door covered in locks, or a door that doesn’t even look like a door at all, might be a better “hook” into some work.
 
Happy hooking!
      
Visit Mary Carroll-Hackett’s website here: https://marycarrollhackett.com/
Visit today’s referenced article here: https://www.inc.com/joshua-conran/how-to-grab-your-target-s-attention-in-8-seconds-or-less.html
​

Maybe you’ve given this some thought as well, but just as there’s more to the world than we see, I suspect more is happening with our work, and to us, during the submission of our writing than we realize.
 
We liken the sending off of our stories and poems to journals and magazines to sending a child out into the scary world. It can feel that way. Now if you subscribe to any belief in intentionalization then we’ll agree this is a terrible attitude to take with our work. Not that imagining our writing as extensions of ourselves, like children, as offspring, is necessarily bad, but that internal attitude of kicking them out of the nest into an uncaring world where they fend for themselves and will probably get rejected is only an invitation to the Universe for – REJECTION. 
 
In our cyclical realm of writing, revising, reading, and submission, the words hope and belief are not synonymous. Writers surely always hope their writing will be successful and accepted. But how many of us truly believe it? Believe writing success deep enough inside ourselves for it to be something beyond a rehearsed mantra? A natural acceptance that success is for the asking (only after, of course, lots of hard, hard, hard, hard work). Guess what? We also have to believe we can do the hard work required for successful writing.
 
Submitting our work gives us a break from a piece. We might be toiling over a piece up to the point of submission, perhaps right to a journal’s deadline. That work is on our mind and it’s difficult to step back with revisioning eyes when we’re so chronologically close. Most places will keep our work – taken or not – for some months. In my experience, about three or four months is the average wait for small batches of poetry. A little longer for short stories. So much is happening (should be) during that wait. New writing. Revisions to other writing. Other submissions should be coming back. And reading. Reading all the time.
 
By the time a submission returns, and if it’s rejected, you’ll have a fresh perspective from which to reconsider it. Ask the poem (I’m serious):
 
            What did you learn out there mixed among all those other poems?
            Who did you meet that changed your mind about what you had to say?
            Are you saying something different now? Have you changed your mind?
            Did what you see only reinforce what you are already saying?
            Did something out there show you how to say more with a little less?
            Did you learn more of your story while you were gone?
            Were you mistaken about something?
            Are you no longer a poem?
            Do you need to hang back here with us a while and hibernate?
            Are you ready to head back out there?
           
More thoughts on this to come…

It’s been a season of conversations about walls for a while now, hasn’t it? Socio-political talk about our southern border with Mexico won’t end anytime soon. The metaphoric walls between parties, while there for generations, seem thicker and taller than ever. Walls, whether physical or emblematic, and definitely depending on which side of one you’re on in the situation, can offer safety (or at least the impression of it) or oppression. They can hold bad things back or keep us from good things.
 
Coming up against a wall in our writing can be a paralyzing crossroad. We can find ourselves overwhelmed by the block we’re experiencing. It can be a temporary, easily mended delay in the pleasure of our writing, or a deep, years-long obstacle to overcome. How we get past The Wall varies, not only between writers, but each time we re-approach one ourselves. I doubt the same strategy works every time for us all.
​

1. Remember you’re trying to get back to writing. If you’ve been there before, writing, you can get back to it again - writing. Go write.
2. Writing of any kind, even your worst, is better than staring at the page. Revision can improve what needs work. Revision can’t help then empty page.
3. Make a list (yes, another list [sigh]) of all your fears associated with writing. There’s something about seeing your fears on paper. Bulleted out. Numbered. It’s as if a little of the power they’ve stolen from you is given back as you name them. Try it.
4. Somewhat associated with #3, deal with the fact that you’ve failed in that past, that there’s probably something you’re screwing up presently, and that the future will be full of failure. Sometimes we settle with the tradeoff that as long as we don’t do anything, that we remain safe, we don’t have to deal with screwing up or being told we’re not good enough. We paralyze ourselves.
5. Oppositely, without effort you’ll never have successes and opportunities to be excellent. We learn through our mistakes as well as getting it perfect the first time (though the latter really doesn’t help us much).
6. What’s on the other side of the wall? Is it frightening? Do you even want what’s there? Is that the direction you want to go? Is this the obstacle between you and what you actually need? Who built the wall? What’s it made of?
7. Try this: Do a ten minute free write only about “The Wall.” See what comes of it.
8. Go write. 

I’ve just returned from a final residency of my MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College, a program nested in a school and state I’ve grown to long for like a second native home. With nothing but a second round final submission of my thesis manuscript left due early next month, the work of two-and-a-half years is all but done. The endless hours side-by-side with my low-residency family are over. The long semesters of deadlines full of packets and reading lists and annotated bibliographies and critical essays and generative prompts are over. Reminders all over the house, that I’ve been engaged in something constantly present, something important and challenging, now change.

My work desk, waiting for my return home, a bit disheveled with various short stacks of papers and books, will change. Perhaps be a little more organized now. From around it on the floor, as my wife can attest, will vanish the occasional underfoot piles of short-term research materials. I won’t have half the number of scattered Post-It notes and calendar reminders lurking around. Though I’ve enjoyed the challenges of assigned prompts, I’ll be hunting conversation with the muse on my own for the most part. What I carry in my briefcase will change. Perhaps a few bills will get paid earlier than usual.

A regular reminder of this life within words has been the life of books throughout several rooms. The dozens of books for each new semester always stayed vertical for that work period. The books of past semesters, when done with, were placed, as we might expect, horizontally into shelves by loose semesterly groups for ease of location as the program progressed. But for the most part, any book – and there were always several – cover up, was a current interest: on the desk, the side desk, on the floor near the work desk, by my recliner, on the kitchen table, on a shelf waiting for another flurry of work attention, in the back seat of the car (perhaps not so neatly vertical) on the way somewhere to do more work. Those books will take on new homes this week as I begin moving into new routines of post-MFA life.  

I sat with a cup of coffee morning just staring down a wall of books. Scanning the titles, reflecting on how they’d all puzzled together, one-by-one, term-by-term, adding up into a full learning experience I can carry with me through the rest of my life. It’s a pretty full spot. I’m wondering where I’ll put this ending term’s books. It’s a good stack of new work to add to the old.
​
I can’t help but wonder where I fit into things, too. This new anxiousness I feel vibrating just under the surface must be something akin to what it’s like to be tossed sea-bound for a time and to then step upon sudden still shoreline. That instant change of expected balance. Something in the ear, heart, or mind, shifting. Vertical to horizontal.