Crossing wires
Figuring out the intersection of creative writing and life organization
As I write this letter, I’m getting ready for a small weekend gathering of workshops that has been carefully curated by a group of friends who collaborate as Sundae Theory. This gathering is called Sundae School(!), and I couldn’t be more excited for the flurry of activity ahead. I’ll be contributing a workshop I’m calling “Flexible Means,” about creative organization tools for life and writing. My premise is that there are ways to create (and constantly re-create) structure—whether literary or quotidian—that work for those of us who think and move through life in a non-linear fashion.
Putting my approach to creative writing into explicit contact with my obsession with organizational systems has yielded some surprising results. I realized that though I’ve learned about, worked with, and taught narrative patterns beyond the Aristotelian arc—inspired by books like Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode—I hadn’t considered the organizational systems I use in my daily life through that same framework. The process has also clarified what I’ve learned and am learning about how my ADHD brain works and how I best work with it. It feels good to decipher and articulate the mysterious nature of organization and focus into discrete elements like shape, momentum, constraint, purpose, visibility, and accountability.
As a part of the workshop, I’m putting together a proto-zine about those frameworks. This zine feels like a promising project—definitely one I’d like to keep working with. It’s exciting to imagine extending tools that can be used beyond writing and creative practice, but which draw heavily on them (and are versatile enough to be relevant to them as well). I’ve scaled back my coaching and teaching offerings since the winter, in part because I haven’t had the energy or time to devote the attention they need, and in part because I needed to figure out what I am really trying to (and want to) offer. This workshop and its accompanying zine have brought clarity to that process. It’ll be a little while still before I’m back out in the open, but I have a hunch that these ideas are going to play an important role in shaping the resources and support I put out in the world.
Hanging out with this workshop’s topics and with the term “flexible means” (borrowed from Miranda Mellis) also reminded me of the unwelcome appearance transcendentalism and extremism so often makes in regards to goals and creative practice. That pressure is the unstated backdrop of the workshop—this idea that there is a right way to do things, or that things must be done in a certain order or to a degree of intensity in order to yield the intended results. In that spirit, I pulled out a letter I’d written about the topic of extremism and mystification around writing, and the overlap between writing and dysphoria, to share with you this month. This letter was sent in May 2021, when I was just a few months into this newsletter. Much has shifted for me since then— academia and fitness culture continue to gracefully recede into the distance—but the questions and desires this letter articulates still ring true to me.
Creative practice as sustenance (redux)
First sent May 2021
If you’ve been reading these letters, you know that questions about literary community and sustainable creative practice have been on my mind. I’ll be finishing my MFA at the end of this summer and plan to step away from academia in favor of offering my services to and rooting into creative community outside of it. Because of inhabiting this “twilight zone” of being still inside the institution, but seeing beyond it, I’ve been thinking a lot about my likes and dislikes of institutional learning. Some elements feel deliberate and beneficial, and some feel more incidental to its bureaucratic structure—products of its forceful linearity, faculty overwhelm and overwork, and a lack of deliberate community-building.
For example, I love that academia provides an opportunity to give so much attention to a text, whether a peer’s or a published work. But despite this intensive scrutiny on writing—the words on a page—the literal, day-to-day work of making a text come to life is barely discussed.
In the absence of a deliberate discussion about what a writing practice actually is or can be—in all of its vast array of possibilities!—I’ve found that all kinds of mystifications proliferate. The most dramatic writing practices tend to attract attention, so “being a serious writer” comes to connote staying up all night writing or uninterrupted hours of focus—letting oneself be struck with lightening and setting aside all other obligations. Staying up all night or waking up before dawn.
As I write that, I feel like I’m transcribing like an antiquated, already-dethroned notion of creative production. Like, is this really still what people think of as the work of writing?
But I do think the myth persists, though what actually produces it—or where I have succumbed the hardest to it—might less about, or not only about, an inherited notion of what a “real artist” is. Instead, disordered cultural relationships to fitness and embodied ambition play out in creative ambition, too. These relationships value the most extreme form of effort, and devalue gentle movement practices which are flexibly adapted the other constraints of one’s life. For a handful of years I’ve been working to discard those attitudes. In a recent conversation about writing with some friends, it hit me that my relationship to writing has, at times, been similarly fixated on extremes. I don’t just mean metaphorically, but literally: my relationship to writing has been directly influenced by that same value system.
Lately I’m not around as many people who parade around their extreme fitness or eating habits as badges of honor. But I definitely have definitely experienced the parading about of extreme writing habits as badges of honor. In that aforementioned conversation, one of my friends relayed that a visiting writer to our MFA workshop described going through transcendental bouts of writing that stretched over the course of multiple days. And it had seemed everyone else in the room nodded along when she spoke of choice between “eating a box of donuts” and "sitting down to write," as if there is a binary between the hedonism that frightens us and doing the work we feel called to do.
One thing I’ve realized through establishing a healthier, more balanced relationship to movement is that just because you see someone doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually working for them. Someone’s boast or smiling fitspo selfie doesn’t rule out the possibility that they are trapped in their own pattern of self-punishment. Their extreme habits could easily be reflections of their own dysphoria or unhealthy expectations, so I’ve learned that I can’t use other people’s habits as the baseline against which to evaluate what works for me or what is healthy for me.
The same is true of writing. It’s felt freeing (and a little mind-blowing) to merge the intellectual infrastructure of body positivity with my relationship with creativity. In addition to empowering me to establish habits and routines that work for me where I’m at right now, I also think about goals and aspirations. Embracing body positivity hasn’t required me to wholesale reject goals and aspirations for what I hope to be capable of doing with my body. But it does mean being radically open to the present and also radically questioning the origins of those goals and aspirations. It feels spacious and gentle to move with myself through a process, and to resist sacrificing myself in the present for fantasies of what accomplishment might do for me. It allows me to let go of performing commitment, and instead engage with commitment on the terms that I set: I get to choose what I want to do through my writing, and what that work looks like.
In practice this means not rushing through the unfinished, messy parts of my writing to prematurely sew up all the holes and make it “look nice.” It means giving myself the space to freewrite when that’s all I feel up to. It looks like celebrating spending 20 minutes on my work instead of kicking myself for not spending 2 hours on it. It means taking care of myself if and when I do have an open stretch of hours to delve into it. It means taking days (or weeks or months) away from the work when that’s what feels needed. It means being curious about how other people structure their writing practice, while actively reminding myself I don’t need to compare my practice to theirs. It means acknowledging my need for nutrients, time, and/or resources in order do the work, instead of pretending I can exert myself without inputting energy. I am still working on all these things, because I want to experience writing itself as a form of sustenance, something I do to take care of myself and stay embodied and whole, not something I do to “stay in the running.”
This letter was originally sent in May 2021. I’m slowly (very slowly) migrating my Mailchimp archive over to Substack, where you can read some past letters. The Mailchimp archive is here, though the formatting of published letters can be pretty awful. 🤷🏻♀️
Episode #2 of Experimental Practice is here!
I had the best time talking with Selah Saterstrom about literary form, divination, and cross-pollination of different parts of her self/practice for episode #2 of Experimental Practice. (And as a matter of fact, things I’ve learned from Selah over the past year through Four Queens events/offerings sparkle throughout this letter.) It’s a joy to share this conversation! You can find it on Spotify or Apple podcasts (etc), or listen online.
For your consideration
My website — Learn more about my writing and opportunities to work with me.
Writing in Unknown Shapes — A course for ambitious writers working in ambiguous forms.
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice
Practice Space — Drop-in guided writing sessions — On hiatus while I sort out my health/energy, but I look forward to writing with you again soon!
Follow me on Instagram — I’m there sometimes!
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters