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Listing Creative

Listing Creative

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I usually write blog posts early in the day, and that’s for a reason. They take advantage of my first blurry minutes in the world — sometimes good for musing. By this time of the day, I’m like most other folks — going in scads of directions and about as creative as a wood post.

Which reminds me of something I often think about: the divide between creativity and  efficiency.

Efficiency is brisk, a snap of the fingers and click of the heels. It thrives on lists and crossing tasks off of them.

Creativity is slow and sinuous. It doesn’t like lists and it doesn’t like timetables. It will not be hurried.

Most of us have a little of both tendencies, and how we behave depends upon what is being asked of us. For me today, it’s efficiency. So you’ll have to excuse me now. It’s time to cross “write blog post” off the list.

Into the Future

Into the Future

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Yes, we counted down the seconds last night. A room full of people with noisemakers and champagne and funny hats.  Out with the old and in with the new.

But for me, 2017 started with this winter morning, with the run I just took along familiar routes, waves to neighbors, music and talking in my ear.

And it started even earlier, with a cup of tea and my journal, reading last year’s entries, pondering resolutions, writing my way into the future.

Notes to a Future Self

Notes to a Future Self

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I’m reading Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior, a memoir of mind, a book that reconstructs the awakening of consciousness. In the course of doing this, Auster laments the fact that, though he wrote stories as a child, none of his early scribblings remain.

He never much saw the point of keeping a journal, he says. The problem with the journal was that he didn’t know who he was addressing, whether himself or someone else. And if himself, he muses, then “why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal?”

I bristled a bit reading this passage. As a longtime journal-keeper I’m hypersensitive to journal-keeping being considered an idle or superficial exercise.

But Auster comes around. Here he is again, writing in second person, as he does throughout this book:

“You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self.”

With Pen in Hand

With Pen in Hand

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The late Oliver Sacks was called “Inky” as a boy because he always had ink-stained fingers. He began keeping a journal at age 14 and had completed more than 600 of them by the time he died at the age of 82 in 2015. 

Sacks ended his autobiography On the Move with these words about writing’s importance in his life:

The art of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place — irrespective of my subject — where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupation or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and I have been writing all day. 

 Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun,  as when I started nearly seventy years ago.

In fact, he was writing with great clarity up until days before his died, his collaborator reported. “We are pretty sure he will go with a fountain pen in hand,” she said.

I can’t think of a better way.






(No photos of pens, but here’s one of paper!)

Found Time

Found Time

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Sometimes when I wake early I think it’s because there is something I need more than sleep. That something would be time.

I’ve never been a prima donna kind of writer. I fold personal writing into my day: dashing off a post before dawn, scribbling thoughts in my journal on Metro. I have no backyard cabin or artist’s garret (I wish). The living room is my “office,” and my writing time is whenever I can find it.

Still, there’s never enough time. So every week or two I don’t fight the early waking as much as I might. I come downstairs and grab the two hours or 90 minutes or whatever scrap of time insomnia has given me — and use it to read and write.

I might start the day a little tired, but I’ve filled a greater need. I’ve lost sleep — but I’ve found myself.

Outside Office

Outside Office

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Working on the deck for a change, breeze blowing, crows cawing, Copper (newly shorn and feeling frisky) resting near my feet.

It’s clouded up here, and there’s enough moisture in the air to make me sleepy, even at 10 a.m.

After almost three months of working inside an overly air-conditioned building, it’s good to work with the sun over my shoulder and bird song in the air.

And good too, to lift my eyes from the screen and page to admire the day lilies and cone flowers, the begonias and the pot of campanula.

It’s summertime and the working (outside) is easy.

The Accidental Calligrapher

The Accidental Calligrapher

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For the last couple of evenings I’ve been learning how to write. Yeah, I know. I’m supposed to be a writer already. But I have been learning to write, to form letters slowly and carefully, and it’s been alternately painful and exhilarating.

Through a series of events too long and complicated to explain I’ve been trying my hand at  calligraphy. At first I used a regular gel pen. Not good! Next an inexpensive ink-cartridge calligraphy pen I picked up at an office supply store. Better.

I’m not about to take up a new hobby, but I’ve been amazed at what a meditative process it is, especially for someone who makes a living from words. That I’m being forced to think about every stroke, every ascender and descender, the width and height and heft of each letter — is, in a strange sort of way, liberating.

It’s bringing me back to first principles. To the letters that form the words that carry the thoughts. It’s a cleansing of the mental palate, a reminder of how excruciating and precious each letter can be.

(Art: Modern Western Calligraphy, Denis Brown, 2006, courtesy Wikipedia)

Glass Houses

Glass Houses

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I work in a box made of glass. Glass windows, glass doors, glass walls. I worry that one day I’ll be daydreaming and walk right into one of them. Where are bird stickers when you need them?

The glass begins in the lobby, where two sets of clear doors must be pushed or pulled to enter or exit. The lobby is so bright that I slip on my sunglasses the minute I step out of the elevator.

The glass continues upstairs where it’s easy to see who’s in or out, who’s meeting or on the phone. It’s that kind of place, which is to say transparent and modern and open and good. We’re all the same here, the glass box seems to say. We understand each other. We do not throw stones.

Except that the writer in me wants to be tucked away in a study carrel on the least used floor of the most arcane library in town. The writer in me wants shelter and coziness, dim light and nonreflective surfaces.

May Day

May Day

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Ours starts out with rain, and not even warm rain. A cool 50-degree soaking that I hope hasn’t shocked the ferns, which I moved up from the basement yesterday.

It is, however, a green and portentous day, the beginning of a new month, a lovely, flower-filled one.

In the distance a cardinal sings. I can imagine it puffed up against the chill, delighting in the moisture as birds do.

The rain is making the companionable sound it does when it flows down the gutters and into the grass The yard is seeded and needs to be weeded. The rose is (mostly) trained. There are scads of to-dos on my list. But on this quiet Sunday morning, I sip my tea, make a list — and turn to words.

Building Stuff

Building Stuff

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I work in a law school. Every day I use words to build articles, web stories, press releases and emails. The work I do is achieved with a click, a flick of the wrist.

Meanwhile, a block away, guys are roofing a major highway. For more than a year they’ve been moving utility lines and driving pillars into the ground. Now they’re using a giant crane to hoist huge  steel beams. Eventually, they will entunnel this stretch of I-395 and build a small neighborhood on top of it.

And I — I will continue building towers of words, the sometime dwelling place of ideas but often just ephemeral constructs that vanish the moment they’re sent.