Tag: artist’s life

Posted on

The Artistry of Julia Child Part 3: Improvise, Salvage, Play

“A good cook is consistently good—not just a little flair here and there—she can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough experience to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn’t moose [sic*]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice and patience.”

*I love this typo.

Julia Child, one of the most renowned cooks of the last century, doesn’t define “a good cook” as someone who’s well-known, who cooks every day or has a cooking regimen, who cooks for many people or just for herself, who can make anything well every time. To Child, a good cook is someone who:

  1. Is consistently good (which we don’t start out as being—Child herself was a flop in the kitchen into her thirties).
  2. Isn’t necessarily showy (“not just a little flair here and there”).
  3. Creates simple dishes.
  4. Creates complicated dishes.
  5. Adapts.
  6. Can turn something around—“has enough experience to change a failure into a success.” (Sounds a lot like revision, don’t it?)

To me, these qualifications can be chalked up to experience (“practice”) and attitude (“patience”).

She emphasizes experience, firstly—a good cook isn’t a one-hit wonder or a wunderkind. No baby geniuses for Child. A good cook needs a track record; to me, this implies a good cook likely has a history of failure so that she knows when something’s not right. It also means that she has enough dishes in her repertoire—she’s tried a variety of meals—that she can turn one thing into another. Her experience cooking is transformational; experience transforms her into this good cook, and a good cook then can transform one plan into another, one dish into another.

This is a fairly democratic view: Anyone can gain experience. Experience is simply a matter of repeated effort.

But in points 5 and 6, she seems to land on a specific kind of experience—not merely the repetition of going through the motions or following a recipe, but repetition with play, what a musician or actor might call improvisation.

Masters and amateurs

So what’s the difference (besides product) between a good cook and all other cooks? Between a master and an amateur?

A master starts with an idea, some ingredients but lets the creation become what it becomes. Masters play. Amateurs force; they serve liquified fish and call it “moose” [sic] and feel disappointment and make others eat their disappointment and complain about how hard writing is (woops) and how much they hate doing it.

This reminds me what poet Mary Szybist has referred to as avoiding “willfulness” in writing, not forcing an ending (or a middle or anything else) before we start. She meant this in the context of a poem (e.g., if I want to write a poem about my mom but it instead jumps to the garbage man and a dog, let the garbage man and the dog in—don’t shoehorn an ending about my mother in). It can be applied to genre, too, though. If it starts out as an essay but I realize it’s better as a poem, it’s a poem now. If I sing a wrong note, I start singing the harmony rather than overcorrecting and drawing attention to what was once a mistake. I use my senses and feel my way through. And finally, the concept can be expanded to process: Some days are hot, some are cold, some days I mangle words (words? what are words?), some days I sing them, but no matter the situation or my skill level on a given day, I can show up and play.

When I’m playful, I’m a good cook. I can serve a disgusting mousse because the menu says mousse or a delicious soup because that’s what the meal became.

The special attention of play

Play requires much more attention, besides just laughs. It demands that I listen, observe what’s there—what’s really there—on the page or in the pan, not just what I want to be there, not just following a recipe with abandon. Play lacks a formula. So while play might sound childish, like a lack of diligence or responsibility, in fact it requires a different, if not deeper, attention than a workaday mentality.

Of course, I don’t believe in good cooks and bad cooks, good artists and bad artists. I believe in behavior. Some days I’m a good cook, some days, not so much. It has a lot to do with my sense of humor. The best days on the page (and in life) I am myself without apology but with humor.

Most of my materials are salvageable (ideas, images, music) or easily replaceable (paper, ink). Even if the work’s subpar, if I play, I learn from it. Or at least I have a good time. When I hammer it into something it’s clearly not meant to be, all I’ve learned is disappointment without the benefit of experiment. The next time I’ll be no better off.

The most electric performances, the best players, are those who’ve practiced enough, failed enough, to improvise and improvise well, which is a more positively connoted word for salvage. It’s Charlie Parker. It’s Julia Child.

And so in life: that balance between perseverance and the primrose path. Having a direction but remaining adept and open. Not forced—lived. “It’s a matter of practice and patience.”

Me? I’m gaining the former and working on the latter.

In holiday celebrations and in art, may you be creative enough and summon the humor to soup your moose.

In 2020, I’ll be sending an Artist’s Devotional entry once a week to your inbox to help you explore your relationship to your writing. Like a religious devotional, we’ll consider the parables, lives, paths, and vows of those who have come before and consider how to construct our own; unlike a religious devotional, we’ll be faithful to our art, writing.

If you’d like to join in, simply email “Yes” and your name to Lindsey@LDAlexander.com, and I’ll put you on the email list.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

P.S. Here’s my favorite writing about moose—no, it’s not Julia Child’s or Elizabeth Bishop’s.

Posted on

The Artistry of Julia Child: Late Starts and By Nows

“Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day.”
—Julia Child

childhed
Julia Child wielding a knife| from PBS (via Mental Floss)

If, like me, you sometimes (panic) Google “what age was [insert idol here] when they [insert formative experience or creation of work of genius here],” maybe you too have felt under the gun. That gun being one that exploded for a race right above you minutes ago, and people are making the third turn for that first lap, and you’re still trying to get your feet set right on the blocks. (And aren’t these blocks a little awkward? Are my feet too big or narrow or inflexible for these blocks? Whose idea was it to have runners use blocks anyway? Aren’t we beyond this, technologically?)

Shouldn’t I be in the town I’m meant to be in and settle down in and love and invest in by now? Shouldn’t my career make more sense to me by now? If I haven’t created a work of genius by now, does that mean my art ain’t worth shit? Shouldn’t my kid exist by now? Shouldn’t my marriage go more swimmingly? Shouldn’t I be married? If this person began playing an instrument when they were seven, why should I pick it up at 31? Ah, the “by nows.” I know them well. I can recite them by heart and improvise on their melody to add some spice to each of its dishes.

Hadn’t Wendell Berry always known he wanted to live in Kentucky? (No.) Hadn’t Johnny Cash known he’d wanted to be a musical icon since the death of his brother, Jack? (Not really. He didn’t even learn to play guitar until he was an adult.) Hadn’t Patti Smith been cultivating her eccentricity and black coffee and toast diet since birth? (I mean, maybe.)

Hadn’t everyone I look up to as an artist, just, well, kinda known? Or hit on something when they were younger? Or had more confidence in themselves or faith it would pan out?

So imagine, in the midst of an interstate move, pregnant, having to rehash my career plans to meet my spouse’s, landing on a cheery biography that makes the “by nows” seem bygone. Even the idols have them. No thoughtful person or interesting path comes without worries and regrets.

In that beautiful way libraries work, where something you’d never thought of reading is right against some sort of reading assignment you’ve given yourself, I found a biography I needed to read.

Might I introduce you to the slim Julia Child by Laura Shapiro?

Howdy do!

This is the first of a series I’ll call “The Artistry of Julia Child,” in which I share some of my favorite wisdom from Julia Child (care of Laura Shapiro), and how it might apply to creative life.

“‘I got an awfully late start,’ Julia reflected once. She wasn’t talking about marrying at 34, or beginning her life’s work at 37, or launching a television career at 50. The start she had in mind was the moment when her childhood finally ended and she could feel herself coming into focus as the person she wanted to be.” (Shapiro)

I felt so relieved reading this.

A friend and I recently discussed this unending thread on Twitter of middle-aged people sharing their hope and despair, the feeling that, in one’s thirties and forties, life seems like it’s really winnowing (for better or worse) for the first time*, and the decisions we make (or avoid making) really start to shape things. Reading them was case study after case study in resilience, people’s willingness and need to start over: people leaving or entering marriages, relationships, singledom; having or trying to have or not sure about having or not being able to have children; people starting over on careers, looking up from careers that they find are not what they seemed and not seeing anyone, people finding their right livelihoods; and so on.

Weeks later, I thought of Julia Child.

Or, as Child puts it:

“Cooking is one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn. You’ve got to have what the French call ‘je m’enfoutisme, or ‘I don’t care what happens—the sky can fall and omelets can go all over the stove, I’m going to learn.’”

So with life.

This zeal for learning was essential to Child’s life, and I’d argue, to just about any creative person’s life (though many dress it up or down with some curmudgeonliness). It’s this spirit of learning that connects all of us, no matter our media, and so I thought it might be nice to share some of the nuances about how Child set about learning. Age didn’t factor in, which isn’t to say Child didn’t have her doubts.

“I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” Child wrote after some of the recipes that would become part of her seminal work Mastering the Art of French Cooking were rejected by multiple American magazines. The book itself was sent back for an overhaul (basically a rejection); after tons of work, Child turned in an 800-page manuscript that only covered meats and sauces, with more volumes to follow.

Hell’s bells. I guess Child didn’t know by a certain age either.

Everyone has doubts (even deep doubts) about her creative work, even (especially?) years in and post-rejection. Continue to work anyway.

In Child’s case, the rejections led her to reconsider her audience—she had promised a book for housewives, who, at the time, were trying to limit cook times with frozen meals. But, really, harried housewives (in the marketing sense of that identity) weren’t her audience. How would she convince someone with barely enough time to thaw a freezer casserole to master a different country’s cuisine? Her audience, she decided, somewhat boldly—as this wasn’t a proven market, was cooks who liked to cook, regardless of occupation or gender.

Yet even the hobby cook, the enthusiast, likely would not want a Bible-length tome on two kinds of food with the promise of more Bible-length tomes to follow. (Even God must’ve had an editor.)

Thus began her revision, and in her revising, she became clearer on what was essential and what superfluous.

The book, of course, would go on to be one of the most transformational cookbooks (and really, philosophies of cooking) of the 20th century. But I like to imagine that even if her book had gone belly up, she’d still be the kind of person who enjoys life, because that, in my mind, is real success. And that kind of success is available to most of us.

I just tacked a note above my desk: Je m’enfoutisme! I don’t care what happens. I’m going to learn.

Who’s your favorite latebloomer? What’s their story? Share in the comments below. I’d love to learn from them.

Next month, I’ll share some wisdom from Child, poet William Stafford, and writer Anne Lamott.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly letter, and get essays on the creative process, plus some sweet jams, poems I like, and other tasty tidbits. Order my poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, here.

*Yes, this reminds me of that bit in The Bell Jar where a young 20-something laments about all the fruits on her fig tree and not knowing which to pick. So it’s a feeling that probably has less to do with age, except, for women, the pressure of whether to have children, than with personality and culture and circumstance, etc. Feelings feel real and acute whether they represent reality or its opposite. A story of family lore: Me, coming home dejected from kindergarten? second grade? sobbing. “Do you think I’ll ever get married?”

Posted on

What Oak Ridge Public Library means to me

*This is a slightly revised version of a speech I gave on April 4, 2019 as part of National Library Week celebrations at Oak Ridge Public Library.*

IMG_3384
This is a photo from the reading. (Here I’m reading from Rodeo in Reverse.) It felt pretty cool to read with my kid inside me and with a bouquet of the daffodils I mention in the speech. (Photo credit: Virginia Spence)

Thank you to the Oak Ridge Public Library for having me and for having been such a special place to me the past four years.

I was asked to speak about how libraries nurture creativity. I can’t speak for everyone, so I thought I’d talk about how this library, ORPL, has kept me going, what this library means to me, and a few of the lessons it’s taught me about how to be creative.

First, I must confess I’m predisposed to a love of libraries. You’ve been warned.

I first moved to Oak Ridge four years ago, and I awaited my mail eagerly. Did I have a love of junk mail from local churches and car lots? No. I needed something with my name on it with my new address that I could present to get my library card. I’ve never felt home without one. That January, I got my no-nonsense yellow library card from this branch; I’ve been around, and usually they’re covered in some sort of clip art, an outdated logo or something meant to look punchy. Those aren’t for me. I loved that this stood out in the bottom of my purse, that it had no pretense. I checked out Alice Munro and The Girls of the Atomic City, returned to the short-term lease my husband and I had at the time, and began to make my home here.

Oak Ridge is a beautiful town, but not one that’s easy to break into as a 26-year-old. That first winter I drove around to estate sales and new-to-me museums. I parked and stared at Melton Lake. I hiked and was grateful to live near mountains. After four years in northern Indiana, the winter here felt not too like winter at all, and I liked that. Yet, I did most of these things alone. As you might imagine, writing is mainly a solitary pursuit, and so there weren’t other people to meet on the job. My husband and I bought a house, our first, and I loved it, but also didn’t know where to begin. That season was beautiful and difficult and lonely. There were times I regretted our decision to move here, away from everyone we knew, times I worried I was incapable of making new friends. It took a toll on my marriage, my self-confidence, my business. But not on my writing.

Many readers will tell you you’re never alone with a good book. Maybe it’s because I’m a poet, I’m not sure I feel the same way. But I do know I’ve never felt alone at a library.

True, it’s a public space; there are always at least a few other people here. But it’s not that, is it? It’s the feeling that here, anything is accessible, there’s help available, there’s humor and sorrow, and old and new, tattered and pristine; there’s discovery—always discovery—and surprise. Libraries, maybe even more than nature because of my proclivities, remind me how much surprise is in the world. I come in to check out a gardening book and leave with a book about gardening and another about wolves and another about Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo.

Or, after a volunteer shift in spring 2016 where I had been wondering what it meant to have on the returns cart Maya Angelou and Mein Kampf side by side, what kind of world I lived in, to walk outside and see the daffodils’ bright yellow against the concrete exterior of the building, a blue sky, up before any other bud or testimony to spring. Surprise.

At its best, art works this way, too. Art surprises. One of my favorite living poets, Mary Szybist, says it’s important not to be too “willful” in a poem. By this, I think she means not to know at the beginning where you’ll end up, to let the process of writing take you for a ride, rather than steering.

Similarly, this library specifically taught me an important lesson that I found on its shelves but not in a book. The year I volunteered, I came in to help tidy shelves after the presidential election, which was a travesty. I felt bereft, listless. I couldn’t unglue myself from the news but also couldn’t summon the creativity or strength to do anything about it. It’s one of the few extended periods in my life where I couldn’t sit down and concentrate well enough to read—and therefore, I wasn’t writing well either. I came here. For my shift, I took an aisle in the reference section. A typical shift involved straightening the shelves, putting away some books, making sure everything was in the order it should be in. Reference seemed like it would be easier—1) because I doubted it got as much action as the new fiction section and 2) because the books had an inherent order—by year, for instance.

As it so happens very rarely in this life, I was wrong. I reached Butler’s Lives of the Saints, a series organized by month. Me? I’m inclined to say January, February, March, and so on. But Dewey Decimal had other plans—leave it to the saints: alphabetically by title. This meant shelving the books April, August, December, February. My lesson was one I suspect I’ll be learning a long time: Things may appear out of sorts when they’re in order; they may appear in order when they’re out of sorts. It was exactly the lesson I needed from the library that day, given on the spines of books by saints, no less.

To me, the creative process is similar; good artists know this—a thing may appear not to come together at all until suddenly, after much work, an inner logic is on display, gleaming, like the innards of a clock. Sometimes what a writer may be working toward may look like a total disaster mid-way through. A painter staring at a streak on a canvas for weeks. Julia Child, in middle-age and years into a bad 800-page draft of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, rejected by a publisher, feeling like a failure.

Sometimes, April first, not January.

The library is a place of such generosity. Just think: in thousands upon thousands of communities across the whole country, tax payers who can’t agree on healthcare, welfare, security, sidewalks, zoning, or stoplight placement put aside their differences to say there should be one building full of knowledge where all the knowledge is free. (If you’re me, it’s never quite free because there’s always a late fee, but that’s another story.) Everything in this building anyone who lives nearby can have. During the day, anyone can come here and find respite—from the cold or the hot, from home or from work or from the street, from parenting or parents, from noise. We can come use the computers, the public meeting space, listen to a CD, stream a movie, get a redwagonful of books. We can play chess or ask bizarre questions. We can meander. Librarians are so generous they not only have dedicated their lives to helping us answer questions—from how to check our email to where the bathrooms are to when is it exactly a new title will be on the shelves; they also do the unglamorous work of discretely cleaning up a chair after someone’s had an accident, and yes, of making small talk with lonely people like myself. It may be one of the few places we’re truly safe and truly daring at the same time. No telling where our minds will go, and, as Eudora Welty said, “All serious daring starts from within.”

The best artists are generous, too. Probably not as good as libraries, but if I could aspire to be anything, it would be to be like a library and the people who inhabit it. Artists who are great aren’t even necessarily the artists who anyone will ever know—even in ORPL, a relatively small library, we’d be hard-pressed to make it through every book on the shelves. But to me, great artists are those that give generously and humbly, like a library and its people. They keep their doors open and let information and ideas flow freely; they share seeds. At any moment, a book or fact or image could be found by just the person who needed it.

This bureaucratic-looking building, lit in fluorescents, seems an unlikely place to host such a miracle. But the library, as an experiment, must be one of our most noble human endeavors, one each one of us takes part in any time we drop by ORPL.

This leads me to my last but maybe most important way the library has been such a good place for me to think about creativity. It provides a kind of sustenance, renewal—if you’ll pardon my pun. In each of my stories here, the library has offered me a place to go to feel refreshed, revived, capable, curious. When we approach art, as creators or as audience members, we seek these same things. Or at least I do. If we keep ourselves open to its lessons, if we aren’t too willful, are willing to be surprised, and are generous, I have no doubt that art, and the libraries that hold it, will give and give. The perfect imperfect (which is to say, human) system.

Leave a comment below naming a favorite library (or memory from a library) and why its earned that position.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly letter, and get essays like this, my thoughts on the creative process, plus some sweet jams, poems I like, and other tasty tidbits. Order my poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, here.

Posted on

Seeking, Stopping, Finding: How My Word for the Year Changed Me

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
— “What to Remember When Waking,” David Whyte

Inspired by Susannah Conway, I now choose a word for the year, or a handful of words, instead of making a list of resolutions. For 2018, I chose “Connect.” I chose it because I craved connection; I wanted connection to guide my decisions. I sought connection, searched for connection, hunted for friends, for happiness, for purpose. I picked the word connect because it was scary and because I felt disconnected.

Truth be told, 2018 kicked my hind-end into outerspace and back again a couple times. A long-term friendship ended; my grandmother died the same week; six months of freelance work evaporated unceremoniously; I had two asthma attacks a day for 20-some-odd days. I couldn’t even stick with my breath. That was the spring. As I pulled into therapy one day, The Mountain Goats’ “I Am Going to Make It Through This Year (If It Kills Me)” popped up on Spotify. Uproarious laughter. I never lost my sense of humor, and yet, for a while, I was calling this year “my unwanted lesson in impermanence.”

I went on fabulous vacations and smiled and laughed and danced and ate oysters on the half-shell and learned and promptly forgot all the facts I could learn and forget about the Colosseum and drank wine under the stars and stared into dozens of famous stony faces and had my first book come out and loved my life and grieved and got angry for reasons I couldn’t explain and woke up in the middle of a few nights wracked with panic.

But some time, somewhere, with connect, something happened. I didn’t notice when it began, but later, driving long hours through the South, listening to the radio, singing so loud in the middles of so many nowheres I thought were just beautiful. I realized—twice—that as a song came on that touched me, I was holding my hand to my heart. ((It was this song.) Which, honestly, what?!)

Rather than seeking to connect, I saw all the connections I’d been unable to see before.

People who were already my friends, the richness of those friendships, the place I could call home, the interests I’d been too shy to claim, how writing connects me to the world, how all of it both roots and frees me.

For years, I thought my writing was part of what kept me lonely or maybe that I kept myself lonely to devote myself to my writing. But through others reading my writing, my small but intelligent, generous audience, I’ve found, especially through my book tour, that writing is what connects me to others, to kindred spirits—not what separates me from them. Writing brought me to New York, where I spent a whole afternoon talking with my cousin on a patio and a whole day walking with another cousin sharing our deepest selves; it brought me to Mary Corse’s work, to Central Park, to meeting a man who has kept a picture of his wife in his wallet for 40 years—since they told each other they couldn’t remember why they’d gotten married, so now he always remembers; it brought me to nachos and sushi with an old friend; a porcelain duck named Spinoza; to a dog that could dance; to my great-aunt’s property and finally meeting her llama; to recognizing my friends in East Tennessee, some of whom even braved a torrential downpour to support me. Writing has brought me close friendship with a baker-writer and weekly walks with her. It’s brought me to the mountains in the cabin of a country civil rights activist, watching squirrels shake leaves from the trees.

Without writing, I would’ve forgotten the details; without writing, I would’ve lived different details. Writing, in connecting me more with the world, has brought me back to myself, to my senses. I’m not one to say art can save you (or me). It can’t. But art can remind us who we are, and we can save ourselves and each other. Thank you for being here with me, for connecting with me and continuing to read. Thanks for being patient with me. I see you now.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly letter, and get my thoughts on the creative process, plus some sweet jams, poems I like, and other tasty tidbits. Order my poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, here.

Posted on

Ancestors and Self-Acceptance, Honor and Joy

Forested mountains

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.

—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.

—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou

Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (in this excellent episode of On Being)

Forested mountains

The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.

But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.

Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)

You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”

The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.

A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).

But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.

In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.

They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.

I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.

Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

I Prefer My Poets Dead: Why ‘Making It New,’ or Anything New, Is So Dang Hard

The movie you watch in English class when you have a sub is not called ‘Living Poets Society.’

Virginia Woolf on why we prefer our poets dead:

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

—A Room of One’s Own, p. 14

Stan, from Mad Men:

Everything good I have is from a long time ago.

When an earnest thread on Facebook emerged asking for good work by contemporary poets, I responded by paraphrasing the Woolf quote above. When the friend who started it asked me for recommendations, I came up with a list of favorites and highlighted what might be a best fit, only to have A Random Dude respond that Bob Dylan and Tom Waits were better than any contemporary “self-identified” poets. (Please insert eyeroll here and also a note that I am pretty sure Bob Dylan would lose it if he could no longer walk out to the “Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll” introduction you know he approved.) This annoyed me, but also gave me a good laugh, because clearly Random Dude, according to Woolf, who has earned more of my trust, might say he just longs for how Dylan and Waits were able to make him feel a long time ago.

With respect to Dylan and Waits, many of us can only keep our dead poets alive in our hearts. It’s what brings us such magical imaginings as Mary Ruefle’s “My Emily Dickinson.” It’s why some poets (asininely) opine about dying young, like Keats, or part of why Plath skyrocketed to fame quicker than some of her contemporaries. (Dead longer.) And it’s why those of us poets who still count ourselves among the living are awful cagey about the subject. “We’re working here!”: a rough translation of so many Twitter posts and essays on the non-death of poetry. The dead poets are rich compost people can use to make their daily lives flower and give fruit; us living sods’ works are the pile of eggshells, mown grass, and aromatic vegetables left in the back of the fridge too long, waiting to help. One’s a tool; one’s an eyesore that will someday be a tool. (And if you love Dylan, which, ugh, I do, you’ll know his “folk process” often involves churning up the words of obscure dead poets in his own lyrics, only to be called a poet while he’s living.)

Maybe it’s unfair that readers ask death of us to consider our poems as ones that have “passed the test of time.” But so it is. It’s nice to be a martyr.

As a modern (lowercase m) poet myself, I can even feel this way about my own work. Longing for old writing styles of when I felt or perceived differently—almost as if by another person. Often, poets at readings will say something like, “Many poets will tell you their new work is their favorite; I am no exception.” I guess I am an exception. Which I’m recognizing especially now as I begin work that is not for my debut collection, Rodeo in Reverse. I’m suspicious of new work; sure, loveable maybe, the sounds it makes especially, but I long to do work as good as my old work—and sometimes worry I won’t.

Yes, I worry I peaked at 17 when I wrote a sexy villanelle about hooking up in a car that inverted lines about volume, wheel, up, down; the lines were short—two or three words apiece maybe? My teacher, a favorite, not an effusive praiser, read it out loud to the junior class, which made me elated—my poem was good and maybe the junior class would not think I was a virgin. To me, it’d felt important not to seem like a virgin but also to try and be one then.

Been chasing the ghost of that poem, which is lost to floppy disk and trash heap, for years since.

And if nostalgic for my own past work, one might imagine the case for others’.

Maybe 5 years ago I read an essay on the internet that argued every book you read before age 25 affects you more deeply than those that come after. This is an unfortunate view. I’m not far enough out from 25 to a- or disa-gree, but I wonder how many people are able to read many books after age 25, by which time career and family and responsibilities are likely to be settling in.

I count myself among the lucky few and look at each blank page, each new title askance—in suspicion and flirtation. Who knows? This might be the one I’m looking for. If not, it still does its work in the compost pile.

Besides, dead poets have everything going for them but life, which is a great advantage. Whatever you make today will be old in no time.

Support a living poet! If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

Misaphonia and the Needs of an Imperfect Artist

Recently, I discovered a writer I admire (who happens to be a friend) cannot stand mouth noises. For the uninitiated, mouth noises are those ones people make while eating. They include but are not limited to vocalized swallowing, an exhalation of “ahh” after sipping from a Coke, clacking a spoon around in a jaw, or scraping the tines of a fork against a ceramic bowl. When I found out, I howled. Another person on the good side of misaphonia. I also cannot stand mouth noises. Even when my dog makes them. I love dogs with abandon, but no infatuation can overcome this defect. Ask my husband.

When my sister and I want to get on each other’s nerves, we text videos of ourselves, internet animals, or our pets making mouth noises. (Lil Bub is particularly good for this.)

To concentrate, I require silence. Much like the fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock in The Phantom Thread, merely buttering one’s toast too loudly can ruin my whole morning:

“Please don’t move too much.”

“I’m just buttering my toast. I’m not moving too much.”

“You are. Don’t move too much.”

“Maybe you’re paying too much attention.”

“It’s like you just rode a horse across the room!”

(You can read an interview with the sound designer here that is fascinating. Apparently white toast and sourdough are the most annoying.)

I do not want to be this way and work hard not to be, but I cannot deny that my husband has eaten breakfast in the bedroom instead of the dining room for fear of interrupting my writing with crunching or clinking. (And it is hard work.)

In the movie, when Reynolds is hard at work on a wedding dress for the princess, closed in a room by himself for hours on end, Alma, Reynolds’ live-in girlfriend/model/sewist, makes the mistake of bringing him a tray with tea. What would be a kind act for a high percentage of humans is, in fact, an unkind one to someone in a flow-state. Or, as Reynolds says less politely but more succinctly:

“The tea is leaving, but the interruption is staying right here with me.”

Confessing that I relate is embarrassing but also a fact. People who are trained to be sensitive their whole lives (and who often enter creative professions because of this sensitivity) have a tendency to be, well, sensitive.* My sensitivity, which I regarded for most of my life as the worst part about me, is the part that poems and songs and empathy come from. It’s not good or bad. It calls me to who I am. I’m called to observe, so it’s difficult when the task is to ignore or let go.

I think of vocation, which we often call “a calling.” In the South, people often say “God called” them to do a thing, to stop doing a thing. It’s the best shorthand for what’s inexplicable but necessary. What calls you? When that calling is a siren song, the work can be done most intensely, and it’s absorbing but fatal. I once stayed up for three days seaming and rearranging quilt squares and writing poems. I felt satisfied and also like hell afterward. The come down is intense. Still, I miss that feeling. Alma loves Reynolds best in this mode, or maybe better put, is able to love him best then—caring for him, nursing him, snuggling him, being still. When he will not cease, she poisons him with mushrooms. Not enough to kill. She makes him sick so she can make him well. Maybe she makes him sick so he can be well:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help. And then I want you strong again. You’re not going to die. You might wish you’re going to die, but you’re not going to. You need to settle down a little.”

It’s in sickness he sees how ugly the dress he’s made for the princess is. It’s in sickness he’s reunited (through hallucination) with his dead mother, whom he’s missed desperately for decades, whom his work honors. Of course, lovesickness is equally torturous and transformative. Figuratively speaking. I don’t plan on eating any questionable fungi.

Our work calls to us, and we need something (or someone) to call us from it.^

It isn’t easy to make space for another love in a life. In mine that’s a husband, a dog, a home. The work—doing it and thinking of doing it and preparing for it and reading for it and finding what belongs in it—can take up ceaseless days. It can take up all the flat surfaces in a house. It can invade meal times and the will to exercise and conversational skills beyond enthusiastic monologues and grunts. The work is selfish; it may be made for consumption but it consumes.

Still, the work, the part of the artist that needs to create, needs a protector. Cyril, Reynolds’ sister, protects his creative space and his time, eating silently, arranging his schedule, and breaking up with girlfriends once he’s through with them. Of course, I don’t mean a woman to deal with all the details; a protector could be a person in your life, or it could be an autoresponder on your emails. It could be Saturdays you’re unreachable. Un. Reachable. It could be as simple as a closed door. But the protector doesn’t suffer the artist’s complaints. The protector wears blood-red nail polish and, just like Alma, will knock the artist out when he tries to argue with her, “Don’t pick a fight with me, you certainly won’t come out alive. I’ll go right through you and it’ll be you who ends up on the floor.” It’s worth noting that Cyril is protecting Alma, not Reynolds, in this conversation.

Cyril likes Alma, in spite of their disagreements; however, Cyril can enter breezily and slam doors, seen as a necessity, while Alma, even tiptoeing or seductive, is seen as interruption. For artists, maybe, or at least for me, the protective part is like a sister, a relative, blood of my blood. We share DNA. The love that interrupts, however, is foreign, my cells don’t recognize it. It’s bewildering and requires attention, attention to its oddity at the very least. Not a muse. A necessary distraction. Or maybe, the work is the necessary distraction.

One kind of love draws us closer to the work, the other away from it. Both knock us out cold when we cross them.

Romantic love, other interests, responsibilities take time from the work, and they may not make the work better. But love demands we rest “open and tender.” It clacks its spoon in its teeth and goes dancing without us if we sketch dresses on New Year’s Eve. And love does respect the work; Alma rescues one dress from a ruinous end.

Rather than a New Year’s resolution centered on productivity, this year, I am wondering how to eat the poison mushroom delightfully and to appease the person who makes my omelet.

Work can draw us inward to the deepest place, protected and dangerous like a fable forest; but something (or someone) else must draw us out—call us out—homeward—serve us a dish we won’t forget.

A garment, a painting, a book; none of it is because of one person’s genius. It’s because of a genius spirit that dead mothers, lovers with toast, sisters with teacups, teams of women in white jackets with pockets for shears, and whole houses foster. In this way, I believe the film can be seen in a feminist light—showing the difficult work many women do to help a man create a single dress (though I’m interested to read more on gender roles in the movie).

Sometimes the myth of the artist, particularly maybe the writer, is one of loneliness. Sometimes I like to buy into this myth. It helps me to believe I’m so good or so rotten, as is my work. But of course a truly lonely person would be unable to write. Literacy necessitates a someone else and a before; it presupposes an after. Sometimes our friends are our sisters, sometimes our lovers, sometimes models or muses or ghosts we can’t conjure. They’re all here. To quote Oprah paraphrasing Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.”

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

 

*This predisposition isn’t an inevitability, however. Sarah Bakewell notes in her biography of Montaigne, How to Live, for instance, “Even when Montaigne went off to his tower to write, he rarely worked alone or in silence. People talked and worked around him; outside his window horses would have been led back and forth from the stables, while hens clucked and dogs barked. In the wine-making season, the air would be filled with the sound of clanking presses.” (173) Terrible. Terrible.

^My husband read this statement and asked, “Why?” I do not know why; I only know this statement to be true. It isn’t as a muse, really, or for amusement—though I’m sure it can be either. I guess maybe to live a life?

Posted on

Title Changes and Impostor Syndrome

Concrete donkey statue behind a wire fence.

Hi. My name is Lindsey Alexander, and I’m here today to talk about impostor syndrome.

In August, I found out that my manuscript, after seven years of work (and rejection), will be published with Hub City Press as a New Southern Voices Prize winner.

Once the prosecco wore off, I dove into revisions. I reworked, rewrote, and tinkered with poems, based on the suggestions of my editor, Leslie Sainz, who is brilliant and who should also be sainted. (Follow her so you can read her poems first.) The biggest suggestion was to change the title. Leslie sent 10 new potential titles, and then explained several that piqued my interest.

After much fretting, I sent back the manuscript revised, retaining the original title, which included the word “impostor,” and sounded like it belonged in a different genre. I hit send with a smug, comfortable satisfaction.

My publisher responded to (kindly) explain its reasoning for the change, in the way one might try to talk down a hissing cat from a tree, and at that moment I knew I had to kiss it goodbye. I emailed them that I understood and was ready to “come to Jesus.” And then I sent an immediate follow-up email to clarify, the hallmark of true confidence and sanity.

Meanwhile, instead of acknowledging to myself that I’d been wrong in trying to keep the title, I worked at convincing myself I’d been right. (As Kathryn Schulz writes, being wrong feels a lot like being right.) It took a while (and this in the Bible Belt) to find Jesus. I went for a long walk, fuming, certain my dog, who is a food mercenary, was the only one I could trust. It did not initially occur to me that (duh) my publisher wanted my book to sell well (likely sales matter more to them than to me). It did not initially occur to me that a team of smart people who were dedicating hours of their lives to sharing my work and who had read my book could understand its context, especially in the market, better than I did. No. I had selected the hill I was going to die on: Having the word “impostor” by my name on a cover. This is how overidentified I was with seeing myself as a phony. (I swear I must’ve read Catcher in the Rye too early in life.)

After an afternoon sulking, I was assuaged by a well-reasoned email from a friend, pointing out some of these fallacies. Oh, right, I had been granted a wonderful team, publication with a press I admired, and a big opportunity, and I wasn’t letting myself feel the glory of that gift.

I created word lists and theme lists and began creating titles I’m sure a bot could’ve come up with based on keywords from the manuscript. I conducted straw polls. Finally, a friend (fantastic writer Natalie van Hoose) with fresh eyes landed on Rodeo in Reverse. There it was: it had been between the manuscript and the word list and Leslie’s suggestions the whole time. I loved it. My publisher did too.

*

The only editorial work left was responding to a few new comments on the manuscript in a final round of revisions. A couple weeks later and I was receiving emails—you know the ones: polite, asking how a project was going, the kind from a kind person after you’ve missed or pushed a deadline.

Thing is: I was pretty much finished with revisions on the manuscript and had been for several days. At this point, I had a couple (just two) lingering small edits (whether to cut or retain a line, whether to add or leave out a short stanza), and in both cases I knew what I’d end up doing. I was creating false dilemmas for myself.

Chief among: searching phrases from my book to be sure they weren’t plagiarized. Taking small phrases and whole sentences and running them through Google, with quotes. If it didn’t return results, I’d look it up without quotes. If it did return a result—even a coincidental match on a random blog, I’d spin out, having proven to myself I was a fraud, not a real writer, much less a poet.

Which phrases was I searching? Any phrase I thought was good.

Why did I do this?

I felt uncomfortable. I mistook that discomfort for guilt, for having done something wrong, one of the grave sins of writing being plagiarism.

*

After some consideration, I recognized it for what it was: impostor syndrome.

I couldn’t be convinced I came up with anything good; therefore, if I like part of the book, it must be from somewhere, and someone, else.

I had insisted (gritting my teeth) on holding onto a title that my publisher felt it would be best to change. It had the word “impostor” in it.

Luckily, I’ve spent the last few months reading all the Brené Brown. (I don’t mean that as Internet speak. I mean I read all of it.) So I knew that “shame thrives in secret.” I needed to name it (impostor syndrome: done) and tell someone.

Being a good Millennial, I chose to share on Instagram Stories (which is private and only my really good friends and the occasional bored scroller would see), then after 24 hours it would disappear. Oddly, this medium mirrored the anxiety I was feeling: once named and shared, my shame (in this instance) no longer made sense.

Many friends reached out with an encouraging word—one even to say she’d had the same issue when she had a story accepted for publication at a Fancy Magazine.

Reading a section from Rising Strong helped me understand why I battle impostor syndrome in the first place: I have trouble accepting gifts—from others, from the universe. Like many women, it’s hard for me to accept even a compliment without reversing it thoughtlessly or mentioning where I got my dress for how cheap. A gift that’s a talent, unearned, an inkling honed into something bigger than the self—which I believe each one of us has—well, that’s nearly impossible to accept.

The thing about gratitude is, it isn’t hard to feel grateful once you allow yourself to feel joy, to accept goodness (including your own). But that means actually that gratitude is tough to access until it isn’t. Denying gifts isn’t a higher plane of maturity or understanding—it’s the road to ruin. Being kind to myself is oddly brave for me.

*

The title of my debut book, a poetry collection, is Rodeo in Reverse. I get to work with a caring, badass team of women to make it. I’m a writer and no more or less of an impostor than anyone else, which is to say, I’m human.

I wake every morning trying to lean into and learn from joy, to feel my gratitude. This means I am working on things like “being a hugger” and doing things like tearing up when I see my husband reading or thinking of how good my friends are. I say “I love you” to friends and acquaintances who are used to me not saying anything at all, or maybe “yeah, man.” I go to parks and sing with strangers at jams. (Okay, I did this once.) I thank the roof above my head for holding steady. I thank my stars for bringing me here. It’s the hardest and most embarrassing work I’ve done, and I don’t know where it will lead, but I trust it.

*

Have you ever experienced impostor syndrome? When? How were you able to turn the corner?

*

Want to stay in touch? Sign up for my newsletter (only one or two emails a month) at the bottom of this page.