Snowy coffee shop day
Hello!
At any given time, the dozens? hundreds? of coffee shops in my part of the world are packed with people who sit huddled over laptops and notebooks and books and coffee, or having hushed and apparently very important conversations involving much gesturing, and I take my place among them and mostly eavesdrop and spy. No, I don't really. But the people-watching here is really particularly good, and on this snowy February day it almost seems like a person could make it through the long last months of winter simply by hiding in a coffee shop and letting the waves of chatter and laughter carry one directly over February and March and straight into April, when the tulips bloom.
Today, the coffee shop finds me alternately working on and despairing over the book on spirituality. My agent once informed me that I actually hate writing. She is not entirely wrong. As Mark Twain said, "I do not like to write. I like to have written." And so today, when I'm still at the confuddled point of the process where I'm figuring out such scintillating tidbits as structure and thesis and through line, I think it's entirely reasonable to alternate between working and despair. The only fun part of writing is when you stop thinking about the fact that you're writing, and just bloody write. But I am not the only writer I know who spends an insufferable amount of time trying to figure out what I'm doing rather than simply doing it. So to I am mostly refilling my coffee cup, chewing my pen, scribbling things which make sense until I re-read them, and putting my head on the table in hopes of a quick nap.
A friend of mine told me the other day she sometimes dreams whole poems. I was very jealous. Sometimes I dream I have figured out some particularly knotted-up part of a piece or a plot or whatever, and wake up much relieved, and then find I have not figured it out after all, and am very cross. I want to dream whole poems. In fact, right now I'm wishing I could dream whole books, and avoid this writing business altogether.
Apropos of nothing--anybody know the band Semisonic? Marvelous band, and their lead singer, Dan Wilson, lives around here and frequents this coffee shop and always looks very cheerful and disheveled.
February is a very, very, very long month in the north. That it is only February 2 is somewhat discouraging. But--as I have said in previous blogs--I am on a mission to live each day fully, rather than trying to rush past it into the next and the next and the next, and therefore this February 2 will do just fine, regardless of the wretched slush. This year is off to a pretty wonderful start. I have a new magazine column that's lots of fun, a long theater piece came out last month, the spirituality book goes well, and I'm noodling my way through the novel. Poetry continues apace, going well, I think, but one can never tell, and it might all be perfectly awful. In any case, a few new pieces coming out in journals soon. Reading A.S. Byatt's fantastic new tome The Children's Book, which will take me the next seven years or so, and Jim Harrison's The Farmer's Daughter. Harrison is one of the midwesterny sorts of fellows, and his writing is so precise and spare and gloriously imagistic it just comes alive as you read. Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road was highly silly and a jolly read.
A few notes of interest: I'll be doing one of the keynotes at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance's annual conference, which will be held April 30-May 2 just outside of Chicago. Also speaking will be the fantastic Kay Redfield Jameson, author of many books, including An Unquiet Mind. For more information, go to www.dbsalliance.org. It would be great to see you there. (Also, there will be a podcast interview with me online sometime in late February--go to the website to check the date.)
Also--for Wasted readers, please see the next blog entry for an opportunity to participate in a really interesting survey about why and how people read memoirs on eating disorders.
And now it's back to work with me. Thanks so much to all for all the mail recently--I'm scrambling to get back to you as fast as I can!
Here's to a happy February for you all!
Peace,
Marya
At any given time, the dozens? hundreds? of coffee shops in my part of the world are packed with people who sit huddled over laptops and notebooks and books and coffee, or having hushed and apparently very important conversations involving much gesturing, and I take my place among them and mostly eavesdrop and spy. No, I don't really. But the people-watching here is really particularly good, and on this snowy February day it almost seems like a person could make it through the long last months of winter simply by hiding in a coffee shop and letting the waves of chatter and laughter carry one directly over February and March and straight into April, when the tulips bloom.
Today, the coffee shop finds me alternately working on and despairing over the book on spirituality. My agent once informed me that I actually hate writing. She is not entirely wrong. As Mark Twain said, "I do not like to write. I like to have written." And so today, when I'm still at the confuddled point of the process where I'm figuring out such scintillating tidbits as structure and thesis and through line, I think it's entirely reasonable to alternate between working and despair. The only fun part of writing is when you stop thinking about the fact that you're writing, and just bloody write. But I am not the only writer I know who spends an insufferable amount of time trying to figure out what I'm doing rather than simply doing it. So to I am mostly refilling my coffee cup, chewing my pen, scribbling things which make sense until I re-read them, and putting my head on the table in hopes of a quick nap.
A friend of mine told me the other day she sometimes dreams whole poems. I was very jealous. Sometimes I dream I have figured out some particularly knotted-up part of a piece or a plot or whatever, and wake up much relieved, and then find I have not figured it out after all, and am very cross. I want to dream whole poems. In fact, right now I'm wishing I could dream whole books, and avoid this writing business altogether.
Apropos of nothing--anybody know the band Semisonic? Marvelous band, and their lead singer, Dan Wilson, lives around here and frequents this coffee shop and always looks very cheerful and disheveled.
February is a very, very, very long month in the north. That it is only February 2 is somewhat discouraging. But--as I have said in previous blogs--I am on a mission to live each day fully, rather than trying to rush past it into the next and the next and the next, and therefore this February 2 will do just fine, regardless of the wretched slush. This year is off to a pretty wonderful start. I have a new magazine column that's lots of fun, a long theater piece came out last month, the spirituality book goes well, and I'm noodling my way through the novel. Poetry continues apace, going well, I think, but one can never tell, and it might all be perfectly awful. In any case, a few new pieces coming out in journals soon. Reading A.S. Byatt's fantastic new tome The Children's Book, which will take me the next seven years or so, and Jim Harrison's The Farmer's Daughter. Harrison is one of the midwesterny sorts of fellows, and his writing is so precise and spare and gloriously imagistic it just comes alive as you read. Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road was highly silly and a jolly read.
A few notes of interest: I'll be doing one of the keynotes at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance's annual conference, which will be held April 30-May 2 just outside of Chicago. Also speaking will be the fantastic Kay Redfield Jameson, author of many books, including An Unquiet Mind. For more information, go to www.dbsalliance.org. It would be great to see you there. (Also, there will be a podcast interview with me online sometime in late February--go to the website to check the date.)
Also--for Wasted readers, please see the next blog entry for an opportunity to participate in a really interesting survey about why and how people read memoirs on eating disorders.
And now it's back to work with me. Thanks so much to all for all the mail recently--I'm scrambling to get back to you as fast as I can!
Here's to a happy February for you all!
Peace,
Marya
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