My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Alison Barker for tagging me!

1. What are you working on?
Long answer: article edits, syllabi, comprehensive exam prep, a memoir, a novel, some journal articles

This week: comps prep essays, notes, and reading

2. How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

I guess it depends which genre you're talking about. Academic writing is an interesting one, because I straddled the gap between college and my MA at NYU obsessed with theory and its jargon. I think I thought that I could only be a successful academic writer if I wrote like that, and I also thought that I needed to pretend I understood it. In my Ph.D years, where I am now, my writing is much clearer, I think, and I'm less attached to slippery, polysyllabic words. Ultimately, I guess, I'm much more interested in how to make my writing elegant and clear than how to make it sound fancy.

Where memoir is concerned, I'm working on a grief memoir about my mom. What I don't want it to be is just that - I want to include as much or more of her happy, healthy, amazing life as I do of her illness, her death, and my experience soldiering forward without her. 

3. Why do you write what you do? 

Most boringly, I write because it's expected of me, but I wouldn't have chosen a career path so centered on it (academia) if I didn't love it. It frustrates me routinely, but then, so does love.

More profoundly, I write to honor my mother, who died unfairly, painfully, and too soon, and who gave me a voice and a desire to use it. She was one of the most poetic and clear writers I have had the pleasure to read. (Her personality was like that, too.)

I write because I feel most like myself when writing is part of my day.

I write because I can't stop - I have written on the walls of my bathroom and I write when I run (I pause and I take notes on my phone). 

4. How does your writing process work?

I could write a dissertation about that. I try to write at least 750 words a day, my favorite motivating tool for which is 750words.com. (It's free! It's fabulous! You should use it.) I don't always get that many down, but I like having a no-frills platform that I can access on any browser. I write on my iPad a lot, since I'm often in transit between home and campus and/or yoga studio or what have you.  

Lately I have been rediscovering my own handwriting. I carry a small notebook now to jot in, rather than my usual habit of using the app on my phone. (I do both, actually.) It's very nice, and I'm rediscovering the ways in which my thinking is facilitated differently by different technologies. DragonDictation fits into this nicely (also free! You should also try!).

My dear friend Valerie Wetlaufer, an amazing poet, did this awesome process tour as well: check her out!

The (Over)-Interpretation of Dreams

Last night I dreamed that I lived in a two bedroom apartment owned by my real landlord, I guess in Brooklyn, but I don't know. I had a roommate, who I think was L, a friend of mine from my mom's hometown. L threw a lot of my stuff down the stairs, including the cat's litterbox. I went down and collected it while someone was seeing another apartment in the building. It was one of those dreams where I yell a lot: that if L had an issue with my stuff, she should have brought it up with me; that you don't just throw someone's stuff down the stairs; that I was the one with a good rapport with the landlord, so he'd back me up. At one point that roommate must have become another friend of mine, P, because I thought of the (real) text that P sent me about getting together this weekend, and sending me love.

This dream in particular makes me think about the dreams in which my anger tends to come up. Often it's rooted in a real incident, which makes this one interesting, because it didn't actually happen but it draws on past emotions from bad roommate situations. It isn't a rocket science observation that I must be filtering my rage at my mother's loss through other things. I'm intrigued at the fictionality of it, though - like why would I be mad at P? She is a dear friend who knows from grief, and has been quite an ally in my part of that process. I don't think I've been mad at her at all in the years I've known her. For that matter, the only thing I have to be mad at L about is that she hasn't offered any condolences. I'm trying not to be angry at people for that, because I know it's a tough subject and a lot of people just don't know what to say.

I'm still gathering my thoughts about Mom's first memorial on Sunday, and I've got some academic thoughts to work through, as well. (I'm trying not to turn this into a blog about grieving, but since it permeates my thoughts and life, it'll be part of this no matter what I intend.)