Supporting your writing life

making shit in a good space, but also, any space is fine

I recently read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how sometimes you just need to throw the entire man out. I’m really grateful (and extremely lucky) to have a super supportive spouse. (He says, when he sees men behaving badly, that sometimes you have to put the entire man into the woodchipper, to borrow from Fargo). I feel like some of my friends have supportive spouses and others don’t and how useful it is to have someone who edits your work and supports your career and also makes great food. Ori’s a poet. We met in Iowa City many years ago. Here we are at the Field of Dreams in 2006, a few months after we started dating the first time (yes, we broke up for a few years in between—we both needed to become adults and figure out how to live in the world, then started seeing each other at AWP each year...yes, he is my AWP boyfriend).

I know some people don’t need or want or have the benefit of their spouse as their editor, but for me it’s really helpful, especially now, as I’m attempting to make real headway on the new book. We try to be explicit about our needs, especially as it pertains to our creative lives. Ori’s in a poem a day group and I know not to interrupt him when he’s on his phone in the evening (he writes on his phone). He will periodically come through the apartment and collect all the coffee cups and bring me another one. Or he makes dinner and brings me something. Or I make dinner and bring him something. We try to be a team about things.

I haven’t sent real pages to anyone yet, just fragments to a few folks. For me a lot of writing is just stumbling around in a dark room, attempting to identify the furniture. Some of the sections have lists or other prose experiments and I am not sure if I want to keep all of them. Some sections take place in timelines that may not be relevant to this particular story. I have maybe 40,000 words I like, and a lot more that I don’t like, and it’s due January 1, somewhere in the 60,000-70,000 word range all told. So I will get there. I may need to take some time off the internet for a while to get it done, and may try to find a cheap place to have a brief DIY residency this summer or fall. I am surprisingly less worried about any of this. Mostly I am just making the book. I’m a little feral, but probably things are fine. My goal this summer is to have a draft I feel good about so I can really revise this fall. But it’s possible also this fall I’ll just do all the work while crying, as one does.

The other thing I’ve been up to recently is assembling a space where I can work again. I’ve mostly been curled up on our couch or writing in the car up until now. I used to work in our bedroom during the pandemic, but then we had a leak on the outside of the building and I had to replace the drywall in the ceiling and walls, so I migrated to other places in the apartment. I finished the job, and we’re back sleeping in our bedroom. I’m so happy to have this space again. Our apartment has a den, kitchen, Ori’s office (for his day job, he’s often on a zoom call; we also put our bed in there while remodeling), and our bedroom, plus a little entryway, so making a desk area in the bedroom was the way to go, and also helps partially remediate our Book Problem. (I’ve since put even more books in here.) I don’t even have to work here every day, but I love that there is a place for me. And yes, all those hot pink post-its are different topics I’m working through in the book. The little note facing out on the bottom shelf is from my new editor (she sent me books she edited! I’m so delighted. They are all incredible books).

This sounds silly, having spent the entire prior paragraph talking about where I’m going to be working, but: another way I try to support my writing life is by trying not to be fussy about my workspace—I just need a place to make pages. I find you can’t really afford to be fussy and if you are, the work probably won’t happen, because you will think you need x or y met in order to make the writing. When I was in grad school, we all met in the morning, quietly, and wrote at a coffee shop near where a bunch of us lived before we went off to teach. My friend and I continued that tradition at a coffee shop nearby, until the pandemic started and everything shut down. Then I had to learn to work at home. I lived. I revised Cost of Living. It came out in 2022 and in paperback early this year. We made it into Paperback Row in the NYT, which was absolutely thrilling. And she’s still finding readers, which is great (if you are inclined, please review on Amazon or Goodreads). Right now, I’m writing on my little IKEA desk. Maybe at some point I will replace it, but it’s serving me so far, has since graduate school. I know some people write on their phones, and that’s great. I write mostly by hand in a little notebook, then transfer to the computer, or do a combination of notebook and MS Word drafting. I am just starting to put some bigger sections together, to figure out the shape of the thing. Sometimes I write in bed, on my laptop. Someday I dream of building a little shed to write and make pots. But for now this is a great place to work. Just find a place that makes sense for you—a desk or a chair or a corner of the couch—and write there whenever you can.

Speaking of making pots, my other goal this summer is to make 500 mugs, at least half stoneware, and the rest probably porcelain. It’s a lot of mugs for me, especially since I usually make work in tiny batches. I’m sort of scared of that number, but maybe that’s what goals are supposed to look like. I’m firing in the gas kiln at a community college this summer and really happy to be doing that again. When I was in college, we had assignments where we made a hundred of something or fifty of something or whatever. It’s a good practice, to try the same shape over and over again, and it helps with consistency. You weigh out each ball—13 ounces of clay for each, then throw the same form again and again. I’m executing a few designs that I’ve been developing and try to sell them this fall and next year, mostly online, as I’ve done before. If you buy a mug, you will be directly supporting me, firing costs, and material costs, and help bridge the gap between book payments and other work. I also have a few one-offs and weirdos that I’m selling now, mostly on twitter, at a discount, free shipping in the US. I will post some porcelain demitasse cups soon.

A few other books I’ve read and loved lately:

Happily: a personal history-with fairy tales, by Sabrina Orah Mark

Chain Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma

The Light Room: on Art and Care, by Kate Zambreno

White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link

Do you have summer goals? What are they? If you write, or make art, how do you support your creative life?