Bulletins from the outposts of writing.

Perhaps I haven't bumped into you lately, and so you have not heard me recite the saga of the Summer of 2018 and Its Epic Activities (most of the activities still to come--it's only June, yo). Oh boy can I regale you with this story, which has the following key plot points:

• Summer has come, by which I mean 'the cessation of winter semester and the academic year,' and lo the Season of the Little Lows has crept upon us, even though it so creeps every damn year, and still it surprises me
• My esteemed colleagues and I got a big ol' NEH grant, and lo in little more than two weeks, the two dozen participants in our Institute will be arriving in Salt Lake and whoa.
• My roses are blooming their heads off!
• I am going to learn SO MUCH from this NEH grant and all the things that will happen in the four weeks that our two dozen participants are here.
• After the NEH extravaganza, there will be a family extravaganza, with children coming into town from far and wide and across an ocean!
• Man, that NEH extravaganza seems massive. And awesome! (also: massive.)

I think academics have mythologies about the summer, which usually include stories of writing and research and progress on projects, etc. I know I do. I always imagine that there will be loads of writing in my summers, and this belief is both a promise and a little whip I flagellate myself with when it proves harder than I thought--again, happens every summer, and still it surprises me--both to set aside the time and to make the time pay.

All this is to say that this week, I found a way to lay hands upon three days without commitments, and thus I committed myself to write. 

Here how it went:

via GIPHY

To be more specific:

• On Monday:  

 ...which I did.

• On Wednesday, I felt vaguely like I might be coming down with a cold, or, like a cold was on the doorstep, or maybe it was driving by the house. Yes: a drive-by cold that also was making me feel sad. Sad and tired. Making me feel like the best of mylife was over for me, and all the people I loved might love me back, but probably they had better things to do. Better things than, you know, being present at this very specific moment, making me feel less lonely. Also, I felt lonely. I sat at my laptop and wrote in a desultory fashion, some lines that had flowers and a balcony in them, and a pink house (the balcony was part of this pink house), the kind of crap writing that is basically just going through the motions. The poem I felt simultaneously calling to me, rather sternly, and simultaneously signaling that I probably wasn't up to writing it--the poem leered at me, and suggested that I was probably a failure, and without discipline, and a lazy writer, to boot. So I lay down in my bed and reread a novel I have read one billion times, then fell asleep. And then cried about it.

Oh boy.

• Today, I put on some smart-ish clothes and went out to the new Roasting Co. (verdict: nice new place, much less food, the new second story makes one long for the old second story), and wrote some notes toward the forbidding poem. 

In between Wednesday and today, though, I went to therapy, which was useful. I have at this point in my writing life had loads and loads of experience with The Zero, which is what I call the feeling that I'm starting again from scratch, I know nothing, and various even more judgmental versions of these ideas. Judgmental of myself, of course. 

What I know now is that I am currently gathering what I need to write this poem. I might be gathering for awhile longer. And this summer might not have all the space in the universe for writing in it, but writing will still be there when the various splendid, massive, challenging, unpredictable and superb projects and delights of the summer have passed. Writing will be there, and so will I, and I will have gathered more of what I need to write this poem, to imagine this next manuscript, and even to align my life so that future Lisa will have more time to write, to gather and to deploy, and time to lie down with her feeeeelings, too. Because writing, for me, calls for all of that.