Tag: creative living

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Monty Don’s “Big Dreams, Small Spaces”

Monty Don smiles in behind roses and in front of a water feature in a garden.
Meet Monty Don, British gardening guru.

If you’ve run out of new episodes of “Great British Bakeoff,” have I got a TV show for you. This holiday season, a friend has introduced me to my new favorite show starring British gardening guru Monty Don. In “Big Dreams, Small Spaces” (available on Netflix), I get my beautiful landscape fix, my pedagogy fix, my misty-eyed optimist fix, my accent fix. Served best with tea.

Don (who I’ll heretofore refer to as Monty Don because he requires both) helps people create the gardens they’ve been dreaming of (sometimes in crayon) in their actual yards. This is urgent pleasant viewing. He sprinkles in sage advice between practi- and techni- calities.

My favorite Monty Donism so far? A compliment he gave a couple on their gardening, that they had “seriousness of intent” and “pleasure in the process.”

Wouldn’t that be lovely, to feel those two things, that paradox, with our writing? (Related: What Julia Child says it takes to be a “good cook.”)

Most of us have big dreams and small spaces for our art. We write spent after our day jobs. We watercolor, but we have to choose between better groceries or a few new tubes of paint. We dance without a studio. We practice the fingerings for our electric basses unplugged after everyone else is in bed.

On “Big Dreams, Small Spaces,” one couple turns their plot into a “small holding” (British English for tiny farm) and develops an obsession with chili peppers. One man totally busts his hump to get a pond, a pergola, and more than 50 varieties of flowers in a lawn with the foundation of an air raid shelter and a ton of bricks under the sod. A widow replants her roses, what was good from the home she shared with her late husband, into a brilliant, wild-looking cottage garden. A couple figures out how to plant seedlings in the crags of Welsch hillside.

A million purposes: pragmatic, whimsical, heartfelt, rest, work, relaxation. But all for enjoyment. 

The mistake most make when they start out is forcing: forcing plants that aren’t suited, forcing plans too quickly, forcing a particular desire for a particular beauty where another is called for, forcing something to be hidden that needs sunlight. The forcing dampens the enjoyment factor.

Monty Don (or learning the hard way) convinces them to move greenhouses, to change plans, and most often, to dig. But all this to the end of resourcefulness: Growing not what we wish we could but what thrives. Funny thing, a thriving, well-tended garden is a beautiful place no matter what variety, no matter how different from what we thought we wanted.

Not forcing does mean “settling,” but “settling” has gotten a bad wrap. Feeling unsettled, I can tell you, is not great. Settling is setting down roots. Healthy roots make way for green, meaningful stretching—growth.

I prefer this show to its American counterparts because it features the work, the frustration (less often dramatic than stultifying), and the honest results of what the gardener is able to accomplish. By the end, the garden matches the gardener and her landscape; the hard work and resources blossom given the right conditions.

Often as a writer I’ve made the mistake of seeking right conditions (if only silence! and hours! and a writing group of great readers! and inspiration!) for what I want to be rather than assessing what I can grow well as who I am. When I first moved back (home again) to Indiana, I spent hours trying to find websites that would tell me I could successfully grow what I’d cultivate in Tennessee: cypress that require 12 hours of sunlight to maintain their blue, fig trees in the ground, noisettes acclimated to heat; I’ve wished I were a novelist instead of a poet. I’ve wished I wanted to be an accountant or lawyer or anything else really. I’ve applied to jobs and cried when I got called back for interviews because I didn’t want the job but felt I should want the job. I’ve drawn up many plans on graph paper of who I might be if not me, if only a different me.

But I don’t get enough sunlight for that; the fall’s too wet, the spring colder. Rather than seeking right conditions, I need to seek the right plants.

My friend, watching with me, kept saying, “You need to listen to this.” She was right.

I’ll save Monty Don the trouble this time and begin again with more openness to what is and more imagination as to what could be. I’ll first map the sun across the backyard, research native plants, figure out how to get rid of all that poison ivy on the slope, and, if I’m honest, try to think up a project that requires a digger, because those seem pretty sweet.

I’m considering now what I can cultivate in my writing that will thrive and lead to enjoyment. My 2020 wish for you is the same.

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.

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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.

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“Take the 🦆ing donuts,” or the Womanly Art of Becoming a DONUT PERSON

In high school, I worked at an unimaginably greasy spoon, The Donut Kastle, with my friend Cassie, and it remains one of my favorite ever jobs. We sold donuts, talked to regulars and fielded their (regular) complaints, cleaned (inasmuch as that was possible), glazed and dipped donuts, rolled out donuts, restocked donuts, listened to Death Cab for Cutie and the Jayhawks, and once, when we ran out of glazed and told our boss, heard our boss say, “If I make more, they’ll just sell out again.” So he didn’t.

Photo by Beth Truax (Armstrong) for the Manual High School yearbook. From the story: "Senior Lindsey Alexander mixes a chocolate glaze for her donut creations. Mixing glaze was just one of her many responsibilities at the Donut Kastle. 'The most fun I have is making the weekly donut burger, even though nobody has ever bought it,' Alexander said."
Photo by Beth Truax (now Armstrong) for the Manual High School yearbook | From the accompanying story: “Senior Lindsey Alexander mixes a chocolate glaze for her donut creations. Mixing glaze was just one of her many responsibilities at the Donut Kastle. ‘The most fun I have is making the weekly donut burger, even though nobody has ever bought it,’ Alexander said.”

I ate a lot of donuts. And whatever extras were left at the end of the shift, we were welcome to—so I brought them to theater practices and my then-boyfriend and my friends who didn’t wake up early enough to visit me on my shift. (Our boss took the rest to the homeless, because he may have been a god-awful businessman, but he was an excellent baker and a good person.) The tip money was negligible, and several weekends, Cassie and I spent it buying cheesy tots and slushies at the Sonic next-door.

Before a redesign, we also received the best shirts ever. Despite the pit stains only a teenager in a hell kitchen could create, I still have mine and wear it with no small amount of pride: “I AM A DONUT PERSON” it proclaims, rightly, above a stick figure drawing of donuts wearing crowns and capes on a stick figure castle.

Even after having to give up gluten (shudder), I remain a donut person. (Finding a gluten-free blueberry donut is what led me to work at a bakery in Knoxville. I follow the donuts.)

In a discussion of judgment of how artists make their money or pay for their art in Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, Palmer brings up Henry David Thoreau. She notes that some people call Thoreau a poser—he isn’t a true man of the wild; he got land from a friend, was close to town, had regular dinners with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and every Sunday, had the audacity to accept baked goods from his mom and sister, including the occasional unforgivable, totally decadent donut. This seems like the kind of gossip that floats along in art school (“She’s only able to do that because her spouse supports her/Her mom has a trust fund/She knows someone/That opportunity was only open to [insert often racist comment here]” and so on), typically out of envy, to negate someone’s work by saying they didn’t do it all on her own.

But who among us has done it all on her own?

Palmer talks about DIY versus “maximal DIY,” saying true DIY is doing truly everything on your own—no help, no donations, no phone calls, please. True DIY, she says, requires ingenuity. “Maximal DIY,” however, is asking for help and accepting it. She argues this requires ingenuity (knowing how to ask and what to ask for, plus balancing confidence with gratitude) and trust. (You’re not totally in control. You’re dependent on other people.)

Maximalist DIY-ers take the donuts.

Palmer’s point? If Thoreau had been saving to buy land, hunting for food, making meals from scratch, and starving, chances are he wouldn’t have been writing Walden … or anything else for that matter. Whether Thoreau fails some sort of grit test because he ate some donuts and went into town, he still wrote one of the important pieces of American literature of the 19th century.

If someone offers you donuts, in the words of Palmer: “Take the f*cking donuts.” If you can afford to take time off to write your novel, take it. If your friend offers to give you studio space to record your album, take it. If a pal Venmos you money for gas for your tour or for refills of paints, say thank you, and take it.

For a long time, I’ve tried to be a true DIY-er, which, frankly, is a path I respect but, for me, has been a lonely road. That changed with the publication of my book, which depended on an excellent designer, a fabulous editor, and a publisher I would work with again without question. It continued to change as I asked friends if they’d help me with my book tour—and, remarkably, they did, offering spaces to read, audiences to read to, classes to teach, couches and air mattresses and once a real bed to sleep on, their company when I was passing through, meals, interviews, sharing reviews of my book—you name it.

Maximal DIY is the way to go, IMO. And I did not come by that opinion easily. (Us hard-heads never do, unless we are bullshitting in the middle of a debate over drinks.)

There’s no glory in refusing a donut. Or in refusing gifts, which I tried to do several times in the publication process for my book Rodeo in Reverse.

I’ve turned down some pretty good grub in the past because I didn’t have the humility to eat—avoided opportunities or publications for fear of nepotism, not accepting invitations because people are “just being nice” (uhhh, let people be nice to you?), been resentful of my husband because his career lets me have the (lower paying) career I want (and then not got much writing done because of handwringing over my lack of financial contribution), and I could go on.

But you know what? I love donuts. Life is hard enough without refusing its most perfect circular treats. I want a t-shirt with Thoreau’s face on it that says “Take the donuts” (because I am too afraid to wear anything with the F-word on it in public).

High-school me knew what was up: I AM A DONUT PERSON.

What donuts can you take to get some creative work done?

What’s your favorite donut shop where you live?

Let me know in the comments below, or email me at Lindsey@LDAlexander.com.

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.

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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.*

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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.