91º feels like 97º ~ not yet 10:30 a.m., needless to say we’ve entered SCUBA weather again, meaning to breathe outside is to breathe in liquid air and to wish for a SCUBA tank and respirator ~ on the plus side, the robins have 4 chicks in the nest on our front porch and we have taken to walking the long way round the house to avoid startling the adults away from feeding the wee ones

This morning, I finally had time to read “Why are so Many Poets also Artists?” a feature from yesterday’s Literary Hub. In this interview-essay, Maggie Millner offers insight from a handful of poet-artists in their own words. As I’ve become more and more engrossed in collage, I am more and more interested/concerned/curious about how my visual work influences/detracts from/explodes my writing, so this gathering of voices was a must-read.

Cruising through the piece, nodding my head in affirmation, I came to Paige Taggart’s contribution. A poet and jeweler, Taggart states, “The most practical thing is not to be an artist at all. The idea of practicality feels tied to capitalism. I don’t like being practical and most practical people bore me because they make all their life decisions based on a certain set of principles that ties into ‘the system.'” Then Taggart ties practicality to the patriarchy.

This brief passage brought me up short and lit a fire under all my insecurities as a poet and artist. I felt my non-hip, middle age severely, and my imposter syndrome kicked in full force.

Here is the key question: Are being creative and being practical mutually exclusive? (And the mirrors to that question: Have I been kidding myself this whole time? Am I too practical to be an artist? Must an artist live an impractical life on the outside in order to create?)

I mean, come on. I drive a 10-year old Honda Civic that still gets 35 – 40 mpg highway and 25 – 30 mpg in town because I keep diligent track of its maintenance (and routinely do the math on gas milage).

After years of college and grad school requiring some student loans and credit card debt, I spent the first decade of my working life paying it all down to 0.

I buy basic clothes that I wear for years and years, and I don’t wear make up. Some of this has to do with feminist principles (if men can succeed without being prettified, why can’t I?), but mostly, I’d rather not spend time trying to figure it all out, as I’m not naturally gifted at or interested in fashion and style.

The list could go on and on, but it will always add up to this: I am a practical person. I’ve worn this badge with pride and connected it to my Midwestern background as the daughter of the children of farmers. I’ve listed “efficient,” “organized,” and “able to meet a deadline” as positive traits when applying for jobs. And now, I’m re-evaluating it all.

Let me say here that I’m thankful for Taggart’s words for giving me a chance to look again at the idea of practicality in the artistic life. I can see why she ties this descriptor to the patriarchy and “the system,” but I resist the idea that practicality must be tied to capitalism and “the man.”

I confess that my practicality might hinder me from taking my wildest leaps, and that worries me greatly; however, having grown up in a working-class family of unstable finances, my relationship to financial security is probably more conservative than some (others who have grown up in this situation lean the other way…to each their own). I know that I’ve done my best work as a poet as I’ve matured financially and have been able to put “paycheck-to-paycheck” behind me. I understand that for others, living a more precarious economic life isn’t as stressful, but for me that unease is a block to creativity, not a sustainer of it.

I also see a clear benefit from my practical nature when working on sending my poems out into the world. Being organized comes naturally to me and makes me happy (when I’m most stressed I love to clean my file cabinet drawers and send loads of paper through the shredder to recycling). This skill set has helped me keep track of submissions and publications, and I think it helps me persevere after rejection as well.

In the end, I am probably a person who would bore Taggart; however, I’ll make a claim here that my practical nature serves my art. I’m not going to be the one to downsize and put all my belongings in storage so I can go on a life-changing trek; I’m not going to be the one to leave my academic job and open a bookstore/art space; I’m not going to be the one to take the massive, visible leap. But, I’ll feel secure enough physically and mentally to take those risks on the page.

Still, I’ll keep Taggart’s words in mind when my inner-voice reaches too quickly for practicality, especially during the great incubation period of inspiration.

74º ~ a morning of drizzle with the sun now trying to break through a heavy layer of white clouds, all is humid and soggy

Getting back into the swing of my writing life in earnest means getting back into the swing of submitting poems to journals for possible publication. While poetry receives the least attention and the least compensation from readers and editors across the board, there is a perk. We usually have tons of “pieces” to submit. A novelist may work on a book for years before getting to the process of finding an agent and publisher. A short story writer or essayist can only send one piece at a time to a journal or magazine. Not so the poet. Yes, we labor over our one- to two-page poems for hours, days, months, years, etc., but we build up a stockpile of work and we are able to submit 3 – 5 poems at a go.

Yay, us!

Well, a subdued yay, anyway because the flipside is thickening one’s skin to a slew of rejections.

After being out of the habit of regularly submitting, I have quite the stockpile of unpublished poems. I’ve spent the last week or so combing through those poems and making final polishing tweaks. After polishing, I grouped the poems into batches of 3 – 5. Then, once the piles were ready to go, I had to go back to my time-worn Excel spreadsheet of journals and start looking for places to send the poems. No matter how much research I’ve done in the past, I still have to do more. That journal that has always read in the summer? Nope, they’re taking this year off. That lit mag that used to refuse simultaneous submissions? Nope, now they take ’em, meaning I have to shift my stacks. And onward the process goes.

*This process only works because I’ve spent years being a reader of lit mags and learning which journals might be receptive to my style. There are no short cuts, not even submission-bombing all the currently open markets listed in Duotrope, which takes even more time, and I don’t believe yields greater results.

After much work, I have submitted mini-manuscripts to 14 journals in the last week. Most of the packets were 4 poems each.

Here’s a new observation for me about the process.

I have to be bright-eyed and energetic (read: first thing I do for the day) or the doubt seeps in through the slog of preparing files and I decide the poems aren’t ready. It’s a hard balancing act. I want to be as careful as I can to send poems that are “ready,” but I started to notice that the later I went in the day, the more poems were labeled “not ready.” Looking at them the next morning, I had a new confidence.

Now, only time will tell if the confidence is well placed. Such is the poet’s life.

76 º ~ gauzy sun, true spring temperatures finally arriving, privet blooms moving from white to brown on the way to seed

As most of you know, but for those who don’t, after over a decade of teaching at a community college, I “leveled up” to a tenure-track job teaching creative writing to undergrads and graduate students at the University of Central Arkansas in August of 2015. Please note, I mean “leveling up” only in terms of now having different tasks and responsibilities. I do not mean that there is anything “less than” about teaching at the community college level. It has its own challenges and rewards.

That being said, this first academic year at a new level has been demanding, mostly in the best ways possible. At the community college, I taught Comp I and Intro to Creative Writing, almost exclusively. There are community colleges out there with broader ranges of creative writing classes; mine was not one of them, for the most part. This meant that, after 10 plus years, I knew the class material down in my muscles and bones, so I spent most of my time interacting with students. The biggest “shock” of this past year has been the shift to teaching many different creative writing classes and looking forward at the many different classes I’ll be teaching in the future. This translates to hours and hours of prep time outside of the classroom as I attempt to organize and absorb all new materials. Of course, I’m well versed (hee hee) in poetry and in the rigors of creative writing in general; however, I’ve never had the time to get specific about transmitting my knowledge and experiences to others.

While conquering new class material has been the big challenge, it reminds me that I’m so thankful to all of my students and colleagues from the past. Spending my formative years as a college professor in the composition classroom taught me valuable lessons in classroom management that have served me well in my new environment. Those years taught me who I wanted to be as I interacted with students and colleagues. They gave me the chance to create and improve my professor persona. As one of my grad students put it last month, “You have a shtick; all good professors have a shtick.”

Aside from the workload that stretches my mind and my stamina, there is one other big difference that I’m just now noting. I have a new relationship to my students. At the community college, we experienced “swirl and churn” in our student body. While I might have a few students follow me from Comp I to Comp II (when I taught it) or from Comp I to Intro to CW, these were rare exceptions. Mostly, I knew a student for one semester, often I knew a student intensely given the nature of writing classes, and then that student would swirl and churn away, either to other core classes or to transfer to a different institution. Now, I am in a program with a strong undergraduate major/minor in creative writing (that’s stand-alone cw, not as part of an English major with emphasis) and I am part of the Arkansas Writer’s MFA Program.

What this means is that I now have the opportunity to see a writer’s work progress over several years rather than over several months. And while I’ve only just begun forming relationships with my students, there is a deeper level of engagement on my part, as I’m investing in longer-term goals with each writer. Again, this is not to say that deep levels of engagement don’t go on at the community college level or in the first-year writing classroom. It means, that was not my strength in those classrooms.

Finally, I’ll wrap up by saying that this year has been exhausting and sometimes frustrating, challenging and mind-expanding. It has been the most rewarding year of my teaching life and the worst year for my writing life (a whole other blog post). I am looking forward to gaining more sure-footedness in the coming year and to working toward a goal of more balance between teaching, writing, and homelife.

71º ~ bright sun, a few high lazy sheets of white, the cool/wet spring means all the trees are leafed and the privets blooming an allergy-inducing white, a mourning dove nest in the tree outside my window

At the beginning of the fall semester, things go from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye, in nothing flat, in the “name your cliche for speed.” While there may be slight variations in intensity, things pretty much stay at 60 through spring graduation (with a slight lull at winter break just long enough to regain a bit of sleep). Now, I’m in that shifting period, trying to downgrade from 60 to zero. Zero is my creative sweet spot. Zero means long swathes of time uninterrupted when my mind can roam, when the words can tumble together, striking and sparking new images, new lines.

You would think that after a decade of not teaching in the summers, I’d have figured out how to make this transition smoothly. This is not the case. Every year, I am stunned by the amount of time it takes me to slow. Every year, I am faced again with finding the balance between “me” time and socializing with friends. Every year, I have to battle the desire to simply sit and stare at the TV for days and days.

Let me say that I am not against “down time.” I’m all for taking a break and watching Law & Order reruns or the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory. I’m especially all for reading the latest J.D. Robb books in the In Death series. However, my personality  is one that will quickly turn watching one episode or reading for an hour into a binge that lasts four days. Even now, I’m resisting clicking on Season 2 of Frankie and Grace on Netflix because I can so quickly tumble down that rabbit hole. In other words, at 45, I still struggle to find my balance.

Side note: I didn’t learn to ride a bike until first grade b/c physical balance eludes me as much as emotional balance seems to most days.

So, here is my goal: to practice balance.

Practical subgoals:

• to write daily
• to blog regularly…whether I’ve lost you all, dear readers, or not, you keep me balanced when I tell myself you are out there and reading me
• to continue to meditate daily
• to be kind to myself when I fail

Upcoming blog posts:

• What I learned from my first year at UCA
• The C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference
• Reading full-length manuscripts for a contest
• Self-Ekphrastic Poetry: or, my summer project
• Reports on my progress

Until then.

56º ~ spring has sprung, all the pollen abounds, all the leaves are greening