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.
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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. 

​Sometime tomorrow, less than twenty-four hours from now, I will summons together a poem representing the 365th day of this long poem-a-day episode. I remember starting in the middle of the month out of fear that the crazy idea would slip away from me if I had to sit on it and wait another half month to officially begin. I remember the sensing that the ease of those first few weeks would not last, knowing the coming desert of ideas and energy would test me. I remember think: Half a year’s good enough, isn’t it? I remember wondering if even a single poem from the entire experience would be a good poem. I remember sometime along the way losing some self-judgement and better realizing that what I considered good, and good for me, usually didn’t have to match up to anyone else’s vision. I remember hearing my own voice, clearer and clearer, losing it, then hearing it again, over and over. I remember leaning on others to get through this.  
 
One Last Thought:
 
I don’t know if I’m able
to turn off this new habit.
What was once a clumsy chore
is a mostly working limb now
only I can see, reaching out
from the body,
                        like an alien
sensory organ only something
as alien as poetry could have
nourished from nothing:
 
Combining sight and smell
and a portion of spirit, empty
elements when alone, curious
and jetting out away from the self
when comingled, conjoined,
newly fabled creatures,
one hearing the other’s babble
about other worlds interpreted.  

​Tomorrow begins the last remaining fifteen days of my yearlong poem-a-day journey. We started on September 15th of last year and will end on that date this month. I say we because it’s been an effort accomplished only with the help of several fellow writers along the way. I’d team up with one or two writers every month or so, all of us encouraging each other to trade a new poem by midnight every day.
 
Was every poem a masterpiece after its 24-hour birthing? I hope not. Was every poem ready to publish upon entry into this often harsh literary world? No. Did every poem deserve a second look for revision when time allowed, to maybe get cut to pieces in the editing process down the road, to be melded with other poems to find its true self, to be turned, perhaps, into a short story, or just stared at after some months with wonder as to what one was thinking? All of the above and much more.   
 
One of those lovely partners along the way, Melissa Helton – a gifted poet and trusted friend – mused once that we’re all kind of writing the same two or three poems over and over no matter how many poems we write. I agree with her in one respect, but after having to find something to say well over four-hundred-and-fifty times (I’ve written more than one or two a day on occasions, especially when at residency and at generative writing events) over almost a year, I hope I’ve busted out of some of that habit’s pitfalls.  
 
And if I have, it’s only because I’ve managed it through the influence of these other writers I was cross-pollinating with through their writing styles, personalities, energies, reading preferences and influences, voice rhythms. All of it. (I’m pretty sure, however, in the end when reviewing the work as a whole, I’ll find, just as Melissa says, a few themes, over and over)
 
We give each other energy. We feed off each other in the creative world, whether writing, painting, or making music. I think we’d all agree on that. Moreover, we help one another with the material necessary, the raw material of creativity. Perhaps that’s the same thing as trading energy, but it’s a more tangible consideration, isn’t it? We’re in collaboration with each other even when we’re not “teaming up” to do so. But when we are specifically there to help the other persevere, to create alone side them, to suffer and celebrate along the way, we do a mighty thing.  
 
Fifteen days to go. And yes, I have a partner to help with what might be the most difficult days yet. Here we go. 

I’m struggling today. I’ve struggled on many days, but this morning is a fatigued sort of, dare I say, block. I dislike that term: block. I don’t believe in it. I’ve proven to myself over nearly a year that I can be bigger than some simple phrase like “writer’s block.” Yet, this morning, in a universe full of rich material, when things usually flow pretty well, I am challenged. This is when the learning happens, isn’t it? What would I deeply learn when process isn’t some painful? Discomfort helps along growth. I am struggling.
 
I just don’t want to write about Trump this morning. Politics. Or about crashing warships. Or the recent amazing eclipse (though I have lots of notes for that later). Or how there’s a tinge of early autumn working into the air these last few days. Or how deafening our friends the cicadas persist. Or how I’m looking forward to the pretty mums we’ll plant soon. Or the taste of smoky bourbon. Or another poem about something odd at the antique store. Or how my wife’s perfume lingers after an entire day along her collarbone.
 
I am not at a loss of “things” to write “about.” I’m staring through the computer screen, it seems. The poet’s “thousand-yard stare,” if we’re allowed to claim such an ailment. I’m not getting past a first line or two of inspiration. We’ve all been there. Have the ragged t-shirts tucked away to drag out and pull on occasionally. After 342 days of writing a poem or more a day, mine's getting pretty worn. 

I don’t quite remember when my dystopian state of mind sneaked in as a way of thinking. It was like a filter someone infiltrated into my mind over time, of course, partially of my own doing, I admit, and that I now deal with like a permanent pair of attached light and mood goggles, shading the world off and on oddly and darkly.
            It’s the result of a formula, no doubt, something akin to:
 
Early 21st century social political upheaval + the democratization of personal artisanship + generalized apathy + a zombie / monster / world failure pop culture fascination + Appalachian fatalism + a mind in constant fictional writing mode = interpreting the natural world alternately as dystopian / post-apocalyptic.
 
It’s a state of mind you really can’t turn off once you’ve arrived it. Everywhere you go, especially as a writer, invites the application of this aesthetic template.

I was writing zombie and societal collapse stories well before falling in love with The Walking Dead. Add this to a fetish-like attraction to urban and rural decay photography, and you can image where my aesthetic eye and mind gravitated to for years.

I grew up with easy access to the coal boom and bust culture, so a dying mountain town or an abandoned cabin or house was just around the corner wherever you wanted to look. When I was writing stories about a world, either naturally unraveling or tearing itself apart, I was looking to spaces around me for the raw materials, for characters and mood. In today’s times, of course, all I have to do is look to the headlines for evidence of political sado-masochism and perpetual chaos. 

Eventually, it was habitual to apply the template of disaster and decay over the mundaneness of everyday life. I knew something strange had turned when one normal day I was driving down a busy highway and wondered how I’d manage maneuvering through the traffic if all the cars around me were suddenly driverless or found abandoned on the spot. I was evaluating the road shoulders and medians and ditches in my head, laying it all out as a scenario for story plot, a man on the run, surviving, dodging through dead cars and worse. Or was I?This was how I was spending my daydreams apparently.

Maybe I was just becoming a dystopian. A proper definition, if we need one at all, of A Dystopian might be someone that expects the world to fall apart into misery, but I’m not sure that’s quite me. Yet. Perhaps I’m more of a psychological dystopian futurist, seeing the world for what it might become and not quite as pessimistic as one might need to be to give up completely on the world.

I want to hold on to some shred of optimism. I know that in many of my imagined scenarios and out there in popular culture, there's a limited roll call of heroes and the world is usually on fire, literally and metaphorically. Everyone hurts. Most perish. After all, everyone can’t play the main characters that survive in a good story. It wouldn’t be a plague then, would it? Zombies must consume. Vampires must drink. Wars must destroy. The world eats itself up. 

I do a lot of antiquing in search of oddities. Some of the coolest items I’ve found are out of thrift shops and Goodwills, buried among the knickknack discards of a million lives both living and dead. I can’t shop in these places without hearing these voices, without hearing their fading steps in the stores. 

People die. These widows and widowers, their children, empty their closets and out from under their beds and bring those heavy boxes of lives as donations. Out of sight, out of mind, right? It’s all spread out like ashes, across shelves, and the floors, on tables: shoes, suits, dresses, furniture, records, books, jewelry, figurines, brass vases, baskets, workout equipment, and quilts. And it sits, densely, waiting on a showering of skin dust of thousands of passers-by, browsed and evaluated for a second or third life. Or to remain in this limbo of suspended decay, just short of forgotten. 

Some of these places look like our homes and business will after it all ends (apply "ends" as you will). Leave your house unattended for a year and come back. See if it doesn’t look like the shelves of a thrift store, waiting on someone to happen in and breathe life back into each and every item. Or perhaps it looks like an  abandoned home, emptied of goods, ruined by the plague, everything left as it was when life was nice and tidy. 

Maybe that’s why I love about hanging out in these places. It comes easy for me. It doesn’t require that imagined layer of dystopia. It’s here already. Whatever’s coming is past and here’s the evidence. There’s a new story in every aisle and I seldom go home without a new voice in my head from the world of the fallen, someone refusing to give up where the world feels given up on. I think they suspect I’ve not completely given up them, though only a thread of civilization hangs on. 

​The fifteenth of June was the nine month mark of my poem-a-day trek. A poem. Every day. Not just some tossed off few lines so you can get through it. A solid poem with revision and potential. Every freakin’ day.
 
As you might imagine, the experience can be a mental obstacle course, with plenty of walls to get over. That’s code for running out of things to say and the energy to generate the work.
 
But a recent eleven days on the North Carolina coast re-enthused my inspiration.
 
Sometimes we need new raw material to dwell on when creating.
 
There’s a point on the seven hour trip from Johnson City to Kure Beach when the mountains vanish. Appalachia melts away into a flatness that creeps up and is suddenly alien. It signals something drastic has happened geographically, topographically. Even culturally.
 
Drive long enough east and all the senses solve the mystery. Salt air. New species of flora and fauna. A morphing of accent. Names of towns. Then the immeasurable ocean staring your mortality in the face. The constancy of water beating the sand.
                                                               
This is the sort of new material we need as a jolt to the senses when we’re hitting the wall in our writing.
 
I’m still “riding the wave,” so to speak. The coast: beaches, sand, the sound of waves. The land of flatness. It’s all a different planet than the mountainous dwelling I usually run in. Upper-East Tennessee provides a world all its own. Just as your unique world does.
 
We need to get out of our comfortable worlds on a regular basis. Breath new and challenging air.
 
I remember the first time I traveled to Arizona and the desert. I exited the filtered and false environment of the plane into the filtered and false environment of the indoor airport at Tucson. I had no idea what to expect. I exited the building through the automatic double-doors and was hit in the face with that “dry” hundred-degree heat along with that distinct desert scent. My senses overloaded. It was so foreign to me. Pleasurable, yes. Stunning. I was instantly in love with the desert. And I’ll never forget that first, literal, in-my-face experience.
 
When I write of my desert times I start back at that first assault on the senses, when I fell in love with that new world for me, something I could have never done just reading about the desert, about Arizona and New Mexico. Of Mexico. Of Death Valley. Vegas. The Yuma dunes. The graves of Boot Hill at Tombstone.
 
Hitting a wall with your writing? Get out of your literal comfort zone. Travel somewhere that changes the raw material you depend upon, be that a thousand miles away or ten miles down the road. 
 
Happy travels. 

The act of submitting your writing is a mixed bag of emotions. 

Well, hold on. Let's establish something first. You ARE submitting, right? You're not pouring yourself into these worlds you're creating (that applies to poetry, too) and then hoarding all the fun for your own? 

Do you have journals full of work that's "just not ready"? Writing that "just doesn't feel right"?  

Ask yourself a serious question: In all that work, is nothing ready, or are YOU not ready? 

Sending our writing out is an act rendering us quite vulnerable, especially as the fragile writerly being we often are. Our work might be criticized, rejected, misinterpreted, lost, or ignored. All that will happen. Often. That's the inevitable life of a writer. 

You might be waiting to submit when everything feels perfect: the perfect top tier journal, your perfect poem, the perfect timing, the perfect needs of the journal based on their space and themes, your perfect mood and confidence, the perfect arrangement of your writing space aligned with the moon and stars and the weather, etc.

I'm afraid that's a formula for a thin-skinned let down. Most of that's never going to come together for anyone. Not for me. Not for you. 

Submitting successfully is about getting over our fear of "the send" or "the mailing." The actual doing of the act. Most writers, I believe, have work that can go out NOW, but are sitting on it, hesitant for every reason necessary NOT to send it out. 

This is not to say send work that's not ready. Never. But there's a difference between work that's ready and a hesitant writer. What's wonderful is that once we realize that the world doesn't really come to an end no matter the outcome of a submission, we can do it over and over, revising at our leisure, learning how things REALLY work out there in the land of publication. 

Send out something today. Today. 

Yesterday (the 15th of April) marked seven months of my poem-a-day journey. 

I'm feeling the weight of this self-challenge as of late. I'm staying on task, but I'm realizing more frequently, "Oh yes, I've done that. Let's do something new." 

Who wants to be a broken record, even if it's a good song? A one-trick pony? Even when deferring to what comes easiest when the idea of digging deeper and deeper every single day for another many months feels suddenly impossible?

I think my current pause in confidence has a lot to do with not wanting pieces birthed from a mechanical roboticism of the task. It would be obvious to the right eyes. To me later.

At the same time we need to be able to write when we don't feel like it. When we're not inspired. Sometimes we write inspired. Sometimes we revise inspired. Tenacity, when it hurts, is a poet's friend. 

I'm not without prompts. Ever. No one is: 

The spider struggling right now, out on the deck, to strap down its flopping web in the wind.
How perfect today's weather seems for an Easter day.
The combined scent of bacon and eggs out of the kitchen at this moment.
The milk chocolate cross someone bought us for Easter (how freakin' strange).
The white blooms of a dogwood falling like snow flurries in bright sun.
The cat purring on my wife's lap so loudly I can hear it, almost feel the vibration, across the room.
The disappointment of coffee cooled lukewarm after I'd forgotten it trying to knock out this blog post. 

Or a combination of these, some piece placing any of these in juxtaposition. A loving of any of these, or hating. An attempt to understand them, or to simply smash them into ugly abstraction. 

None of us are ever without material. Inspiration? Perhaps. Energy. Perhaps. But learn to keep writing we must, come storms or perfect alignments our needs.

Today - Easter - a day representing renewal - begins month eight. I'm ready. 

Isn't it great when you end up talking yourself through your own frustration?