Down and out in Cripplegate Ward

John Rocque's 1746 map of London, showing Grub Street in Cripplegate Ward, above and to the right of St. Giles and the Cripple-gate churchyard--running from Chiswell to Fore Street. Public domain, via Wikipedia 

I'm afraid there was no wondrous golden time for writers--oh, there were times when disparate talents came together in one region and vied with one another, but even then there was often jealousy and insufficient reward. Look back, and you find Robert Greene railing at that "shake scene" and "upstart crow," a Shakespeare "beautified" with pilfered feathers. Or look at the denizens of Grub Street, journalists and poets struggling to feed and house themselves in a poor bohemian quarter, only to be pilloried by that clever and amusing cripple, Alexander Pope.

In an essay for The New Republic, "Down and Out in the Gig Economy," Jacob Silverman (lovely name!) lodges a complaint that "freelance journalism is a monetized hobby," that it is nearly impossible to do more that "serve the whims of capital." Not only has he not found a secure, salaried perch, but he has learned a truth that many writers know--that it is quite possible to write a book that critics love but that does not sell, for reasons out of the writer's control. Well, I sympathize with his lot and agree that journalism is in a parlous way, that there were some brief, better years for essayists in the last century, and that it's difficult for a writer of any sort to find a happy niche. Publishing tends to be a winner-take-all scheme. Go to any airport bookstore and check out the Top 10 books on sale. There you go. Winner-take-almost-all!

Though I'd love for the writer's life to be easier and more straightforward, it is not these challenges that make me uneasy with "Down and Out" but the essay itself as revelation of how such disappointments may harm the writer, either for a period of time or permanently. Many, many writers have challenges like the ones Silverman names, and there are other, unmentioned disappointments that pop up unexpectedly--quirky, oddball twists of publishing fate. In the kingdom of writer-dooms, Melville has long been a hero of mine. Years after any notice was paid to him, an old man, he pursued the work it was given him to do, writing poems, writing Billy Budd. He endured the agony of being ignored and thought mad (and perhaps of being mad from neglect for a time), and yet he kept harrowing his piece of literary ground and planting new seed, even when no one remained to believe that what he made would mean anything in the world. He persisted. He won a victory, although he had no earthly reward for doing so. But I have known writers in similar situations whose minds and spirits were bent by lack of notice, lack of support, and who did not have the resilience to unbend. I won't say their names, but some drift into mind.

The dream of creating something strong and true matters to the soul. A strange joy, it burns in the mind. Resentment and bitterness will never help a work grow and achieve beauty. Putting words together in fresh patterns is a kind of alchemy that transforms the inner being of the writer--creation may make the self larger and more resilient on the inside. Yet self-poisoning by resentment and bitterness remains a risk for any maker. To a writer, young or old, I'd say that there's no shame in pursuing some other dream if resentment becomes a blight, just as there's no shame in keeping on despite self-judgment or the world's judgment, and in striving to pierce the cloud of bitterness...

* * *

Not lolling...

I'm not being a lagarag, to pilfer an old East Anglian word... Still working on a deadline, but I'll be back soon.

* * *

Faulkner on writing, though the words apply to many other activities: "Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

*

Image: 

Gerard Terborch 

Dutch Baroque era painter, 1617-1681 

Woman Writing a Letter, 1655 

Wikipedia, public domain

The rage against tips!

An interior illumination
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for my long-poem and epic adventure,
Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing)
Amazon reviews: paperback
Hardcover only here

Why on earth do I sometimes fiddle around an answer a question on Quora when I could and probably should do a blog post? Who knows? Here's a Quora question I answered a moment ago, perhaps partly because I'm in a good mood and just wrote a poem when I should have been doing something else entirely, and perhaps partly because I still didn't want to do what I should have been doing.

(And here you can find more Quora-fritterings by me.)

"What are some tips on staying motivated enough to finish writing a book?"

Marly Youmans, novelist and poet
Answered 2m ago

I’m feeling a bit allergic to the word tips: no tip can make you finish writing a book. Only whatever it takes for you can make you finish. And only you can answer the question of what it is that might be whatever it takes for you. That is, you will (or will not, as it turns out) make use of your own inner drive, passion for playing with words, impetus, dogged refusal to stop, anger, joy, or whatever it is that lives and burns in you and will take you to the close.

But I will say that I have known some wonderfully gifted people who began many books and stories and never could finish anything. This was a sadness to me, but they lived other lives, and perhaps it was not a sadness to them. They gave writing books a try and then moved on.

The grand thing about finishing is not having a completed manuscript; it is that you are somehow larger on the inside than you were at the start, and also that only bringing a thing to completion teaches you what you need to know in order to write that book. That sounds circular, and it is. In the realm of making books, much is mysterious.

Short thoughts

Cherokee black ware by Joel Queen.
Collection of potters Joan Byrd and George Rector.
Bardo Center, Western Carolina University
Thanks to Michael for the phone snaps!

Jiggedy-jig

Michael and I are in New York again after fifteen days in North and South Carolina (Cullowhee and Aiken, where I was born), in which we hiked, stared at art and scenery, visited my mother, feasted, and set a few disorderly things in order. I have been away a great deal this year--Paris, Worcester (a stay at the American Antiquarian Society, MA), three trips to the Carolinas, and Japan--and am glad to be back, stocking up on candy for All Hallows. May you all make it safely through that night to All Saints Day!

Writing news

News will be upcoming first in the next Rollipoke. Must say that I do like good secrets! And will share when I have leave to share.

The hinterlands

I've been thinking about what it means to be a writer in an isolated region. Most of my contacts with writers occur on Facebook or twitter. My close friends in Cooperstown have been painters.

Of course, a long-dead writer takes central place in Cooperstown. Tourists still troop over to Christ Church to stare at the tomb of James Fenimore Cooper and the stained glass in his memory. But even though many shops and locales are named for figures and locations in the Leatherstocking novels, it's not a particularly bookish village. That said, occasionally I am asked to read in the Village Library series or visit a book club. We do have some word-related events.

Cooperstown is more an opera-and-painters sort of place. Oh, and baseball, of course. The Baseball Hall of Fame. The BHF has its own little baseball arts gallery, so they support the arts to that extent. We have Glimmer Globe's summer theater by the lake, the Glimmerglass Opera, the Smithy Gallery, the Cooperstown Art Association's galleries, the Farmers Museum, and the Fenimore Museum. I'm glad of those institutions, though baseball is wasted on me. They are a great deal more than most villages of 2500 can muster.

But now that my third child is progressing through college, I have more freedom. Perhaps I'd like to go back to Yaddo again, or somewhere. Perhaps I'd like to feel that I am not the only one of my peculiar kind left in the world.

Thought on Ezra Pound's birthday, October 30th...

Though we would like to think it not so, artists are not immune from folly. The wielding of words is a power. Like all powers, it can be unstable and dangerous.

Robert Heinlein quote for the day

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

"This is known as 'bad luck.'"

Triple Falls, DuPont Forest,
Transylvania County (no vampires observed),
western North Carolina

To make or not to make--

This post is especially for Tim Davis, a retired professor who often visits here, and who just wrote a post about why writers write. He also linked to a Huffington Post article about the same. I started to answer him on his post and then realized my response was not a comment but a post itself and probably could be a book, though luckily I have no desire to write a book about the subject. Out this post goes with best wishes to him for better health.

Of course, I don't know why the group called writers write. I only know why I write, and why I did not stop when having my third book come out at FSG within two weeks after 9-11 destroyed my so-important "numbers," or why I didn't stop when various editors orphaned my books by leaving FSG or LSU or Godine before pub date, or why I'm still writing today. Those things don't make me special; every published writer has a collection of such stumbles and pieces of ill luck, and plenty of us have made wrong choices along the way.

So here it is: my plain truth. No varnish. No trim.

* * *

Making is joy.

Playing with words can feel like joy streaming through the body.

There is little that is stranger, wilder, and more thrilling than to go to what feels like a fount and to bring back a pail brimming with golden water.

The call is to bring a shaped thing out of the welter of things and names: to create using the materials of Creation.

A strange part of all this leaning toward shapeliness is that a writer is also made, enlarged, changed and transformed. She may fly into ethereal realms or trudge through the underworld, may die on the phoenix pyre many times. She experiences redemption, loss, debasement, courage, all wax and wane--a whole gamut of ways of being. She loves the unloveable as well as the much-loved. Like a fantasy object, a writer becomes bigger on the inside through making poems and narratives.

Giving a made thing away in the form of a book and having it be received is also fine. And lovely. And makes a writer pleased and glad. But when the book goes out from the writer, it is just that: gone out. Whatever flame it has may continue to burn elsewhere. Something new needs to be born. Yeats's Wandering Aengus chases his silvery trout lady until he is an old man; he will go on till times and time are done.

You ask about money and writers. Expecting to be rewarded financially for art in our current times is dangerous to the self: see all those annoying studies on black swans for evidence! Almost nobody is rewarded with a consistent living wage; as in many arts fields, a few (and often not the best) take home the main financial reward. I know people who were deeply harmed by not understanding this brute fact. Expectation of financial reward broke them. Expectation of easy publication broke them. Expectation that others would support their work out of love broke them. (Publication is, of course, easier now, with so many new modes, but writers of my generation did not have so many choices. Having many choices presents new problems and unintended consequences, but that's a different rabbit hole to be explored.)

In the comments, you question whether art or "readers and filthy lucre" matter most to the writer. One writer is not all writers, but maybe the life of one writer can shed light on your question. Earlier, you mentioned Hawthorne and Melville; the latter is an especially instructive example. Melville suffered mightily from the withdrawal of readership and encouragement over time, and he lived so very long without it. In the face of people who thought him nigh-mad, in the no-face face of being ignored and forgotten, he kept on making art, writing poems and fiction. He persisted. He died with Billy Budd in the papers on his writing desk. That's courage. Despite whatever flaws a biographer might gleefully unearth, that's human nobility. That's deep-diving devotion to beauty, truth, goodness, and creation.

"tremendous beauty and continuous revelation"

"Exploring the Psychology of Creativity" (click for the video.) Below are some quotes from a conversation between Marc Mayer, Director of The National Gallery of Canada, and Dr. Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. March 9, 2017. I liked the video; you might also. Peterson has a Jungian perspective, and he leaves room for the dignity and freedom of human beings.

Professor Peterson, University of Toronto
Photo via BBC News Toronto

The known world inside chaos: "Imagine that the world is basically explored territory inside an unexplored territory.... Every world is like that."

Where artists live: "The artists like to be right out on the edge. That's the edge between chaos and order.  They like to expand the domain of order out into chaos. They do that first by transforming perception."

Artist on the edge: "You can fall into the chaos at any time."

Artist as dream: "Artists have always been on the frontier of human understanding. The artist bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life."

More artist as dream: "The dream mediates between order and chaos. It starts to make chaos into order, so it's half chaos. That's why it's not comprehensible. And artists play exactly the same role in society."

Old and New Worlds: "The beauty that the Europeans have produced, it's infinitely valuable.... People go from all over the world on pilgrimage to Europe just to look at beautiful things. It nourishes their soul. They're priceless. Paris is priceless. Rome is priceless. And it's all beauty that drives it. It's phenomenally valuable! And Canada is just ugly as sin. Really. Really. We should be ashamed of ourselves."

Ugly as sin: "Hell is a place of drop ceilings and fluorescent lights."

What there is other than worldly success: "One of the things that pays off big for creative people is that they get to be creative. There's great aesthetic joy in that, and depth."

Jung and the arts: "The reason Jungian psychology works is because it works for creative people. It doesn't work at all for non-creative people. It just falls dead and flat for them. It isn't how they think."

Power of art: "It speaks of the ultimate depths...."

The start of a great explanation of how publishing works according to an airport book shelf, and how winner takes all: "Half the money in the publishing business goes to Stephen King."

Openness as a personality trait for artists: "Creativity loads very high on openness."

The artist's gamble: "There's a high probability you will lose."

Teen telling parents about a desire to be an artist: "It's like discussing color with someone who is color blind."

Artists and society: "Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people."

On regimentation in schools: "They're factories. You don't produce creative people in factories. You produce factory workers. That's fine except there aren't any factory workers anymore, so we should probably stop doing it."

The pepper grain in a salt shaker: "Creative people are as rare as the winners of races."

Worldy success for artists: "You have to be more creative than everyone else, and good luck with that."

Stylish, heartfelt Stevenson

Stevenson's tomb on Mount Vaea, Western Samoa

Clip from a gorgeous letter by Robert Louis Stevenson: Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. IS IT WORTH DOING?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist. Read the rest HERE.

Fragile, perishable things--

"Sunset shot taken from the east side of the Baton Rouge levee, 

at 7:22, 3/20/2008." --Claude E. Nall III

My most important memories of early childhood are of Gramercy and Baton Rouge, places that seem in memory bright with color, drenched in light, alive with beauty. They are, I believe, memories that have fed me and made me the sort of writer I am. By the age of 13, I had lived in many places--South Carolina, Louisiana, Kansas, Delaware, North Carolina--but somehow those early memories of Louisiana have remained touchstones of the beautiful for me. The levee, the little mud towers under the house, the moonflowers at night, extravagance of blossom by day, the pink-throated lizards dangling helplessly from my ear lobes, the sugar garden in our backyard, the plants that spired up into the trees, the plums and bamboo, the shrimp in the rock pools: all these and more changed me. Did I regret leaving a place that was, to me, magical? Yes.

Back then I did not know that fragile, perishable things--civility, courtesy, respect, truth, goodness, beauty, order, civilization that allows the arts and human beings to flourish--are always at risk in our world. Though small, I knew death, even in the heart of my own family. But I did not yet know that such things as murder, chaos, and moral darkness could be.

And now we all know, over and over again, even on this very day, how fragile and perishable things are swept away. In Baton Rouge and Baghdad, in Dallas and Nice. We know lives lost needlessly to shadow. It is up to us, each one, to stand up for those fragile, perishable things, to praise them, to mourn when they are swept away, to do our very best to keep and protect them.

Father and son. Officer Montrell Jackson,
one of our public servants murdered in Baton Rouge today.
Dormit in pace.

I wrote this post especially for Greg Langley, the former (and the very wonderful) Books Editor of The Baton Rouge Advocate.

Becoming what we eat

Carlos Sillero of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil,
Old Books, sxc.hu

The content we devour on the internet really can have a lasting effect on our cognitive abilities. At least, so says a new study published by the International Journal of Business Administration this May.... it may not be the screen time that’s at fault for lessened abilities—it’s the low quality of most online content. The IJBA study suggests that people who read more low-quality content had lower sophistication, syntax, cadence, and rhythm in their own writing. ... If you really can’t resist, all is not lost. The authors prescribe a heavy dose of literary fiction or academic journals as a countermeasure to fight the mental fatigue of listicles and tweetstorms and their super-ultra-meta offspring.                      --Chelsea Hassler at Slate. 

 So. So go. Go on now. Go get a book! Me too.

Wishing for Randall Jarrell

I've been thinking about Randall Jarrell, one of the poets I knew well as a child--I had a copy of The Complete Poems in high school (soon after it appeared--thank you, mother-librarian!) and knew them well at that time. He wrote in many different genres, and so I trailed after him into novel, children's books, and criticism. I believe his was the first criticism I enjoyed. I've been thinking about how strongly he felt about about the changes in culture, back in the 1950's, and how much of what he says could only be repeated or made stronger now. He was certain very able to empathize with the person (or the bat) who was lonely and desperate, longing for more in life and for change. ("Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!") And he thought that a poet's role was, in part, braving and living up to the lonesome idea that being misunderstood might be part of the call: "If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries, you will never look just right to posterity. Every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself."

Here's a comment from Suzanne Ferguson that shows how critical Jarrell was about the trajectory of cultural change. (Elsewhere, he lamented, "The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced."*)

The magnitude of what had been lost in American culture reaffirmed for Jarrell "the final, important, intense value" of art, of poetry for making sense of that loss. Paradoxically, his depression about the political climate, the devaluation of art in a consumer culture, and the plight of undereducated, oversocialized*** children created a need for him to write the tales, the now-classic children's books, and the late poetry in which he gives voice to the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people trying to transform their lives that are "commonplace and solitary." More and more it is the strength of this last creative work, after a struggle with what he saw as "ominous" changes in "the climate of our culture" (Sad Heart 86)*, that makes Jarrell a central figure in mid-century letters, one who cannot be relegated to the margins, where off "in a bright spot somewhere in the corner / Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth" (CP 333).* --from Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co: Middle-generation Poets in Context

*A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.
**The Complete Poems
***Somewhere he complains about American children being raised on applause, rather like current complains of an "everybody gets a prize" sort of schooling.

There's a grand bouquet of flowers to chose from when we think about American poets. But who is the most important critic in the states? It might be Eliot, though he left us. Or Auden, who is ours and not ours. But it just might be Randall Jarrell. I hope we grow some more poet-writer-critics of his kind.

The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
            --from "A Girl in a Library"

Maze-mapping, etc.

Maze

The Maze of Blood page has been revised and updated with clips from new reviews. Forthcoming is a new interview about the book from Suzanne Brazil--up soon!

"The Child and the Night Gaunts"
Did I say that I have a small story in the very attractive Dreams from the Witch House? It is an anthology of Lovecraftian tales by women, edited by Lynne Jamneck, and with by Daniele Serra art for every single story.  Stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and more.

Bad and good
1. Bad: reading another writer's post on appealing to readers to post Amazon reviews and realizing once again that I am completely unable to ask (thanks to a large bolus of inherited Southern genteel politeness fed to me in childhood) anybody to do anything at all for me and so am not at all fit for the current material, commercial day with all its marketing liveliness. 2. Good: two talks in Florida in the next year; The Book of the Red King swimming along nicely, though I got stuck on revising "What the Fool Whispered to the Wentletrap" for three whole days and will probably dither over it a bit more; lots of poems coming out here and there, in print and online; lovely requests, even if I'm too busy to fill them; movie bite (though I don't really regard these, as I have been getting them since 1996 without much progress); possible trip to L. A. in June if I wish, and perhaps I do; snowdrops and aconite in bloom.

Writing child
And if you haven't seen this (I've posted it everywhere, it seems), go look: lovely BBC video of the late 18th-century writing boy automaton by Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel.)

St. Patrick's Day
St. Patrick's Day dinner, made by my Irish-Dutch-Akwesasne husband: corned beef, cabbage, salt potatoes, honeyed carrots, Guiness chocolate cake with Bailey's cream cheese icing. Today is my mother's 87th St. Patty's Day birthday.

You Asked, no. 11: a painter's words

Mary's studio windows and chest of drawers.
Click to enlarge the images.

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series will be composed of our questions to each other.

Youmans: We met in college, in a writing class taught by R. H. W. Dillard. You still write poetry (and I still think you should put a book together.) Talk about the ebb and flow of your own writing, and how its course (a tidal stream, maybe?) moves through the lands of your painted work. 

A motto for
Mary's studio

Bullington: Marly! You have given a question here that I could write a book or 2 about—or at least a chapter or two. So I propose answering this question in parts. We don't want to overwhelm our dear readers!  
     My first impulse was to say that I find writing poems and painting really don't mix. In fact, I wrote out a rather petulant first draft of an answer saying how antithetical the process of working on each of these art forms is for me. True!  I find that writing of any kind—and the analytical thinking that goes with it--gets in the way of making visual art, and therefore I try NOT to mix the two. On the whole, I find that the act of writing activates very different parts of my brain from the act of making visual art, so I consciously try not to get too verbal or analytical when I'm in my studio, especially when beginning a new work or radically revising an old one.

Mary in the studio, c. 2010

      I was also going to say that the "course (a tidal stream, maybe?)" of my literary thinking or writing process that "moves through the lands of painted work" comes mostly after the fact, or in the later stages of making visual art, or in titling finished pieces. Once I cross the studio threshold, I try to block verbal (much less literary) modes of thinking. If I turn on the radio too soon, the words of the D.J. or the lyrics of music can get in my way. I like to get down to work most often in utter silence. I pick up a tool or a color, look at whatever I have on the table, and decide if I want to fool with that today. If I have a blank sheet of paper in front of me, I start to make arbitrary marks and see what happens. Sometimes I'll write down an arbitrary phrase of two, or the names of the colors I'm using—not to stimulate verbal thinking, but as a mindless way of drawing. Because writing, especially cursive writing, was the first training I ever got in drawing. To write words down
on paper or canvas or wood is, at the most literal level, to draw! And our handwriting is so ingrained in us by the time we're grown that writing with a pencil, crayon or other graphic tool is a kind of drawing that we do without thinking—or at least, without thinking of it as drawing per se. So I begin by making marks or writing phrases or screwing around in some way that makes the paper less clean. In short, I begin by doodling.
     

The rainbowed shelves
of acrylic paints.

     Fact is, I love doodling. All through grade school I doodled; all through college and graduate school. Not one of my spiral bound notebooks is free of awful and godawful doodles and woodles and woogs. It's the only way I survived all those words coming at me! (Mind you, all my formal education, right up to the Ph.D., is in English.) But I confess that doodling during my classes helped me weed out the stuff I wanted to remember from the rest. Without it, I'd have died of boredom. Nothing made of paper was sacrosanct--not even the family telephone book; not even the mimeographed poems in our creative writing classes; not even my F. N. Robinson 2nd edition of Chaucer's Works. At 40-something, I decided to buy another copy

"The Studio, Early September" 2011

of that sainted edition because I found the doodles I'd done in the margins of my old one in my early twenties distracting and downright embarrassing.
    
     Ah! But here I DO see a marked similarity between my process in writing poems and my process in making visual art. The years of creative experience I had of writing poems was of sitting down in front of a typewriter or a blank screen and doing a kind of mental doodling. This was not drawing, but simply letting words come, and come totally at random. When I start writing a poem, any word will do. My first job is—and always has been--to pay attention, and to type the words, phrases, and sentences almost as rapidly as they come into my brain. And the kind of attention I pay—rapt attention—is key to this process. I can change the words later, but at the start, I dare not break the chain that brings them, one after another, sometimes filled with surprises. I'm not making a poem at this point, not at all. I am simply recording a rhythmic, hypnotizing thought, a thought I didn't necessarily know I could have, and to have it I have let it come, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence.

Mary's poetry table, downstairs.

     My life-long penchant for doodling in tandem with this process of waiting and letting come what may is a strong common current that runs through both my poetry making and visual art making. When I go into my studio, I'm not there to create a picture—much to less to create Art with a capital A. I am there to make marks on a surface, draw from thin air or perhaps from a photograph, cut and arrange shapes on a surface. Whether the marks or arrangements will be any good is not, at this point, any of my business. My business is to make marks, cuts, and arrangements and pay attention-- rapt attention--to whatever ensues.   

***
Click on You Asked in the labels below for the whole series thus far. Click on Bullington-Youmans interview party for just the Mary-Marly yack so far.

You asked, no. 10: children and books

Mary Bullington, "Creation," 2013
Mixed media collage of painted papers
on monotypes and painted paper
(acrylic, gesso, oil pastel, india ink)
25" x 22"

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series will be composed of our questions to each other. This question is rather close to You asked, no. 1, but as that one is collecting a lot of readers, the yoking of motherhood and the arts is clearly a burning question for many. So here goes, though there will no doubt be a bit of overlap.

***

Bullington: 
How on earth did you find time to write all those books while having and raising 3 children?

Youmans:
I wrote a book with my first baby on my lap. Once I had two children, that idea didn't work so well. At times I have dispensed with sleep, though I don't recommend this as a way of proceeding. It probably impairs baseline health and will make the books more wild. I drafted The Wolf Pit on very little sleep because for several years prior, any spare time had been taken up by general over-busyness, two long-distance moves, and a problem pregnancy. My lively youngest child wasn't yet in school. Nor was he particularly sleepy. A little more sleepiness would have been helpful and obliging of him, but it wasn't in his nature, and so that was fine.

The questions of finding time and whether to have children are important to any artist who is a woman. It is essential to remember that children have no need for a writer (or other sort of artist) in their lives. It is essential to recall that they have a deep need for a mother. Not infrequently, children present syndromes or issues that turn out to be quite time-consuming. Of course, many of our great, now-historic women writers were childless--Woolf, Austen, Dickinson, Wharton, Emily and Anne Brontë, George Eliot, etc. On the internet, one can still learn that young women sometimes mourn that their children stop their writing, or diminish their ability to write. We live in an era of falling birthrates in the West, particularly in Europe, where many people are choosing to have no children and to enjoy the subsequent leisure time and increased wealth that comes with living without them. Having children is a decision, one with a cost.

For me, having children meant having a bigger life, a more challenging and profound and beautiful and even more painful life. After all, without life, there is no art. The question was whether I was willing to patch together scraps of time and quilt together books in them, whether I had the mental concentration to write books in that scattered way, and the discipline to write late at night. And yes, it turned out that I did. I should add that three of my books were impelled by the obsessions of my children. Also, fragments here and there ought to have footnotes to their credit. But even if those things were not true, the simple yielding to a larger life was transformative to me.

A final tribute: I would not have thirteen books and a batch of nigh-finished manuscripts if my husband did not cook dinner most of the time. He took over much of the cooking when my middle child was two, and life became busier than before, and he never quit. He's a stellar cook and baker. Am I properly grateful? Yes, I am.

Fair warning

Marly Youmans, free of smirks
and tiny emotions
for what seems a zillion years.

At once I am irresistibly impelled to write a novel in which you will find giants and bears, tea and rats, long Faulknerian sentences, and complicated actions and emotions i.e. feels in current parlance. I predict absolutely no smirks and egregious facial expressions, no technology whatsoever, no crime, and no mystery to solve.

Can readers embrace such a book? I shall not worry but shall clutch the giants and bears to my non-bestsellerdom heart or bosom or some such, and rejoice. I suppose that's rather perverse--not the clutching to bosom, heart, etc. but the rejoicing in foiling the work of digital text analysis--but it's me all over. Onward!

Over the past several Saturdays, the French-language Montreal daily has conducted a competitive experiment in using digital text analysis as a way to change the way writers write. The paper asked five established Quebec novelists to compose a story of about 1,200 words using guidelines produced by .txtLAB from a study of 200 titles from the New York Times bestselling fiction list.

Common features of American bestsellers, according to .txtLAB director Andrew Piper, are short sentences (11 words on average), simple actions relayed with active verbs, frequent descriptions of facial expressions and characters who are into technology and have a mystery or violent crime to solve. These books avoid complex emotions, uncertainty and nature description, he says, as well as tea, rats, giants and bears. --Robert Everett Green, Can Computers Teach You to Write a Bestseller? at The Globe and Mail (Montreal)

More Bullington-Youmans frolics coming up soon. No quantitative analysis allowed.

You asked, no. 1: motherhood and the arts

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Maze of Blood

The reflections about more life (motherhood) being helpful to a writer (and an artist) might be good to have out there, too. When I was a new mother, it seemed like my hands might be tied forever. It made me scared. Two more children later, I realized how much more material I had, and how many more things I felt strongly about. Reassurance from seasoned creative mothers could be so helpful to a new creative mothers who might be feeling the panic, or helplessness. I remember looking online at the time for artist mother role models who were pulling this off successfully, and having trouble finding examples. --artist Kim Vanderheiden

I often notice writers or artists talking about how their children are keeping them from work. Just last week I read a piece by a highly successful young writer with a Guggenheim and several books in her bag. But now she has a baby and can't seem to write something she likes. Well, really, is that a huge surprise or a tragedy? I doubt it.

You know, this idea that we have to do our art every day is an idea custom-made for men. Made for men! It does not fit the average mother's life. If a mother cannot manage it, fine. She will do what she can. Mothers are needed by children, while writers and painters and so on are simply not needed by children. Not needed. At all. Oh, children might enjoy spotting a mother's book or painting in a shop or gallery, but it's not important to their lives. A mother is deep down vital to their lives.

Some of us are obsessed. I seem to be one of those. There's no particular virtue in being obsessed, just as there's no particular virtue in not being obsessed. I wrote my first book (my first published book) with my first baby on my lap. My second book was written on the landing of the stairs. We were in a condo for a year, and I could see into the sunken living room through stair railings, and sometimes I encouraged my children to play there when I wanted to write a little. I also used nap time, and I stayed up late to write.

Obviously, I wrote that book in little bits and pieces. No doubt that affected the book. And no doubt having small children affected the book. I've had people tell me that Catherwood made them cry, or made them stop reading for a week because they were grieved. Somebody told me that they were amused to see that an Amazon review of the book said it was almost too heart-wringing! Why? Because I had a son of two and a baby daughter. To love more (and in a new way) is to be bigger than before. I had more to care about, more to lose, more to feed my writing. All my intense mother-love rained down on that book. More life should never be a mistake for an artist of any sort because art craves a sense of life and energy.

But if a woman simply can't do her work with small children for an extended period, that's okay, too. She's getting bigger on the inside all the time (and I'm not talking pregnancy, though that sometimes happens as well.) Motherhood stretches us. It's joyful and wild and full of work and difficulties and exhaustion. Children sometimes turn out to have syndromes or deficits a mother never expected. And even without those difficulties, children and parents learn that the song is right: growing up is hard to do. Always. Challenges can be good for us as artists, if we don't insist on having our own way. Because children aren't about letting a mother have her own way. But they are about growing, and they will make a mother grow too. And that's good for the work.

Sometimes even the obsessed can't manage. I have to confess that it was harder for me to write something sustained when we moved back South when my children were small, and it wasn't just because I wanted to go outside and play. Some passages in life are simply more difficult than others and impossible to plan for. My children needed me in new and different ways as they grew, and they slept less. I kept writing, but I think of the years between the second and third book as years when I wrote a lot of work that I threw away later or stockpiled. Lots of poems, lots of sketches. My husband was doing some intense training that meant I didn't always have a lot of help. My father became quite ill with the disease that would kill him ten years later. And I was very sick during my third pregnancy and afterward. We also moved three times in the space of five years. I sold two houses as a result, while my husband left for new work a thousand miles away, well before the children and I moved. That was a whole lot of upheaval and change to manage.

Extreme measures can occasionally feel possible for short bursts of time. When we moved to Cooperstown, I unpacked the whole house, all but my writing room. I put my computer on my writing table and wrote a novel, The Wolf Pit. I wrote it after my three children were in bed, after I had finished the laundry, after everything else that needed to be done was done. My husband was already a grand cook, and he really took over when we moved. So I didn't have that job to do any more. Managing was still hard. I sometimes finished a night's work at 4 a.m. Then I erupted out of bed (seemingly about five minutes later) to wake my children at 7:00, in order to see the older two off to school. When I was done with my draft, I caught up on sleep, unpacked my writing room, and started tinkering and revising in little bits of time during the day. The book came out from FSG right after the tragic day we call 9-11. It got a nice national award and some great attention, but the timing was terrible, of course. I've never quite recovered from the bad timing because publishing and book-selling are governed by numbers (so thank you for supporting my in-print books.)

Now when I am not writing, I don't worry. I think of myself as fallow. I am like a field that will produce in a great explosion of spring. But perhaps it is not spring yet. Perhaps in a month I will be writing a novel, wishing to be with it all the time. Perhaps I will be having a crazy sluice of new poems. I am old enough that I have faith that what has drifted away will return again because I know my own patterns, and how I work best.

A good parallel example of how to keep going and manage to work daily shines through Luisa Igloria's post about daily writing on The House of Words series: it's here. Luisa has four daughters and a busy professional life, and she has managed at least a half hour per day for her writing for years. I don't know if she could have managed it when her children were younger. I expect if painting had been her thing, she might be doing a tiny oil painting or a sketch or a small woodcut in her bits of time, as she likes to complete something each day. And she would be, as a result, able to do better and better work on that scale, and be more ready for any bigger work as well.

We all need to have threads running to others who love what we love, and those threads can steady us and give us someone who has sympathy with our situation. People like Luisa have been important to me. I want to make beauty, do the occasional teaching gig, and be a mother, and Luisa's life is a kind of parallel to mine, except that I quit teaching full-time long ago, and so she juggles even more than I do. Luisa and I chat frequently, and we share woes and joys that come with motherhood and being writers. We're happy or sad for each other, depending on the event, and that's wonderfully helpful. I live in a place with few writers, so it's especially sweet for me. Similarly, my local friendship with painter Ashley Norwood Cooper is one where we get together to talk about a life in the arts, leaping about from children (three each) to work to goals. We live in a fairly obscure place, so it's lovely to know someone living a somewhat parallel life. I have many other friends in the arts, but knowing a good number who are trying to be mothers and also make their art feels helpful to me.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for both men and women in the arts is the fact that most of them are to varying degrees invisible as artists, so that their work is little known, or less well known than it should be. We live in a winner-takes-all time where few are pushed and promoted. Artists look around and often see that lesser work is puffed and promoted and feel that it is hard to go on. Plenty of women feel that the game is tilted toward men, but plenty of men are left out of the inner circle of marketed and promoted artists, too. A woman who feels that way and also has a few children may feel her path is just too difficult, that she is too alone in what she longs to achieve. That's another reason why constructing a circle is so important--to spend time with other people who want to bring art into the world. Because the danger with a degree of invisibility is disappearing. To know and be known by others the artist respects is a way of having the work become bright and visible, and that is always encouraging. After all, no art is quite finished without its right audience.

"Better than yourself"

I had forgotten this wonderful Paris Review interview until Brenda Bowen quoted a line from it on Facebook. I just found and reread it. So brilliant, so fascinating. Read the whole thing; it's full of wonderful, often unexpected responses that still are full of meaning for readers and writers and just plain old human beings.

When I was a teen and in my early twenties, I was passionate about and read virtually all of Faulkner. I was mad about Spotted Horses and The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom and more. I am sure plenty of what I read was not properly digested, and certainly time has wiped much of what I read from memory. But the books were a fine diet for a dreaming, aspiring Southerner.

My father, who rose from being a Depression-era Georgia sharecropper's child to a professor of analytical chemistry, disapproved of and resented Faulkner's depiction of poor Southerners. I always remember him when I think of Faulkner.

Some clips to entice

Ninety-nine percent talent . . . ninety-nine percent discipline . . . ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

*

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

*

People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.

*

Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

*

His obligation is to get the work done the best he can do it; whatever obligation he has left over after that he can spend any way he likes. I myself am too busy to care about the public. I have no time to wonder who is reading me. I don’t care about John Doe’s opinion on my or anyone else’s work. Mine is the standard which has to be met, which is when the work makes me feel the way I do when I read [Flaubert's] La Tentation de Saint Antoine, or the Old Testament. They make me feel good. So does watching a bird make me feel good.

*

The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

*

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it. Since none of my work has met my own standards, I must judge it on the basis of that one which caused me the most grief and anguish, as the mother loves the child who became the thief or murderer more than the one who became the priest.

*

INTERVIEWER Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them? FAULKNER Read it four times.

It's all worth reading. Read it! Or, as in my case, reread it and find it just as good and intriguing as before.

The unguessable current

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass

Three days in Vermont for the graduation at The Center for Cartoon Studies, lots of long track meets in far-off places, deadlines, an Antioch Midwest independent study, a month jammed with events for a high school senior... I've been busy and off in the wilds. And I suppose that was good because I was a little weary of the online world. All that flogging of books coming up on the twitter feed! All those links to advice about getting at least 15 Amazon reviews for algorithm visibility, all those "Top Ten" things to do in order to sell, all those cries of hawkers! Somehow it can be disheartening to see so many people striving so hard to be what we call visible and commercial and successful. I'd rather not see what appears frantic. I'd rather know that those people were working and playing in joy, twisting words into beautiful shapes and sounds.

When I was younger, I felt conflict between what the world seemed to want and what I wanted, but now I feel clear on the odd times that are ours. The over-focus on commerce and unleashed torrent of new books are just facts of our era and our cracked culture, nothing to do with what happens when a writer sits at her table and lets the words stream forth.

In the end, I am a solitary maker who is dreaming something into being, spinning the straw of the world into what I hope will be gold, true and beautiful and doing justice to the marvelous, tragic, lovely Creation. And I am mad enough to think that the gold-spinner dreaming along in the room is what an artist should be.

Also Clive, a portrait of Thalia
for Thaliad

Many of my strongest relationships tend to be with artists in other fields, and I often find the words of a composer or a painter pertinent to what I do. This morning my favorite online words about making come from my longtime collaborator, painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

I begin with an underdrawing, sometimes faint like smoke, sometimes confident, usually a bit of both, mostly fluid at this early stage. Then the painting and the rendering begin. It feels as though I'm attempting to produce a mosaic from thousands of glittering tesserae, each one of them a different micro-thought flashing through my brain. When I'm working away I have to make the image one tiny tile-of-thought at a time, and it's as though this flood of thoughts and moods spreads across the board. The thoughts/voices/poetry at this point are a cacophony, and I have to try and catch at the most insistent ones to fathom their meanings, all while listening/watching for the next to emerge. Each takes me where it will. I get buffeted in one direction by playful zephyrs, carried smoothly for periods on the dazzling surface, or dragged down into deep currents where all is shadowy and cold. Sometimes everything slows and then halts. I trace the curved route for the stem of a tulip, graze a petal with the striations of its markings. Becalmed, I drift.

Then something pulls at me again, the insistent and unguessable current reasserting, the line of poetry that lightning-flashes in the head, the breeze though the open window that sends all the fragments of drawings and poetry flying, and in a moment I'm away again, off into the unknown.

Into the unknown, leaping off the edge of everything one has created before...

***

Coming up soon: events at Hanford Mills in central New York and at the Culture Care Summit at Cairn in Philly.

Desire in a time of chaos:

To be whole and make whole art in the midst of a broken culture.

Makoto Fujimura, Golden Fire II

Mineral Pigments, Gold on Kumohada 89x132"

"Fujimura continues the theme of "Fires of destruction and sanctification" that he began with Water Flames." 

Blues and resolves

Under the tree for Canadian artist Marja-Leena Rathje!
Love being on Christmas (or any time) wish lists...

It's the 6th day of Christmas, and I am feeling a wee bit, just a tad depressed. Maybe I need to spend less or more narrowly focused time on the internet because I am heartily sick of bumping into language focused on creative entrepreneurship for artists, on how every artist has to be a business person now, on art as "product," on sales and marketing, on attention-wresting hooks, on the leveling of taste in contemporary democracy, and so on. It packs my head with lint!

In that context, in that world, perhaps I am simply insane. I felt a call. Twelve books so far are my passionate answer to that call. I am devoted, obsessed, committed (another insane word), enraptured, and bound. Playing with language is my great joy and a very large part of what makes my life meaningful to me. Having readers complete the work by reading is splendiferous. (That said, my least favorite part of my life is the weariness of travel to promote books, though I love doing events if people turn out for them in good numbers.) Clearly I do not fit particularly well in the bright-and-shiny-and-brave new world of self-promotion, entrepreneurship, and business. Maybe that is what "insane" means for me, then...

And here's a copy at the house of nihongan
painter Makoto Fujimura. I'm wondering
about the book underneath--Conversations?
About form, it seems.

But who cares? I'm not going to stop, am I? Not at this late date, surely... And so here are my word-related resolutions for 2015: I will

• Pick up extended work that has been sitting, almost finished, for years. Finish it! Particularly The Book of the Red King. Maybe cobble together another poetry manuscript out of the mountains of poems lying about in disorderly fashion. Maybe finish the book for young people, The Aerenghast Trilogy, which has been almost done for long eons of the sun and will be dedicated to my youngest child. He'll probably be of legal age before it's published!
• Begin that secret, utterly enticing novel that is in my head.
• Quit festering (as I don't normally do but did this year) and enjoy readers and friends in the arts more. (Thanks for the mail and tweets and messages, kind readers.) Go to lunch with painter and writer friends more often.
• Make more effort to keep up with the friends in the arts elsewhere who are inspiring to me (and I to them, equally important, as tossing thoughts back and forth is fruitful.)
• Get Catherwood into ebook form without using any of the kind publishers who have offered to do it for me.
• Figure out the right amount of help that a book needs. Don't go nuts trying to get the word out about Maze of Blood next fall--it's a university press book, after all, not a mass-market paperback bestseller.

All right, now I must do that not-very-writerish but quite humanish thing and get back to cleaning house for my in-laws. (True blues source? Maybe. Still trying to reconcile truth, beauty, and housework.) And I must do it with a will and then have a merry 6th day of Christmas...

Questions from a young artist and writer (answers from a young crone!)

Chapter header vignette
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for my new novel, Glimmerglass

I always imagine that if one person asks questions, there are others who would like to find out more. Here are questions I received today, followed by glances at possible answers... I claim no more than "possible answers" because I am just one small person on the face of the planet, and every artist would have a different set of answers.

How often do you feel inspired to work? How do you feel different when you’re writing than when you’re doing other things that need to be done in life? And I guess how do you get yourself into that place when you’re not there already.

*

If you sit around waiting for inspiration, you’ll stay a dabbler and never get to where you want to go. Search through the simple pleasures of drawing or inking or painting or writing, even if you have no idea where you are going. Move your hand--the mind may well follow. Inspiration might come from doodling and playing and jotting down notes. Inspiration might come from collecting your materials and then waiting in quiet.

Oh, it doesn’t matter “how often” you feel inspired. It's not ever about numbers. It just matters that you try to do your work—that’s the path toward the inspiration.

*

You're young. It's good to have humility before the great masters of the past. It's fine to look at work by your peers. But it's also good to have self-forgetfulness when making art, and that includes a kind of forgetfulness of all you admire--all that makes you feel small and that you cannot "get yourself into that place" and begin.

*

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” I don’t recall that line from Van Gogh's letters, but I bumped into it on the web (so it may be truly his, or not) and think that’s a pretty good assessment of how to make art or any other thing in this life.

*

There’s a scene in one of my books that people have pointed to and asked about many times. A young girl is peeling an orange, a thing she has never done before, and the passage looks at an orange, the fragile veins around the segments and the inner lining with pith and the pebbled exterior and the seeds that seem to float inside the flesh. In terms of the writing, it’s all about seeing like a child. But that passage came about because it was the middle of the night, and I was trying to get work done but felt exhausted and blank—I wanted to get more done because my children were all blessedly asleep, but I would have to be up with them by 7:00 a.m. At that hour--at any hour--they would want a mother, not a writer. So I didn’t wish to waste an hour that I could use to either sleep or write. I went downstairs to the kitchen and fetched an orange and began to peel it slowly in front of my computer. I stared at that orange until it became magical, mysterious, seeded and alive with secrets. I then put the spirit of that orange in the hand of the young girl who had never seen an orange before.

That was how I started that night, by staring and seeing and forcing myself to move forward. Because I was a woman with three small children who had no time to waste on being inspired beforehand. The staring inspired me. The playing with words inspired me. The sitting down in the chair with intention to write inspired me. Inspiration is like a fountain—it will rise and flower into drops and flung water if you give it a chance. But to do so, you need to hush, look, and dream.

*

A feeling of richness and rightness often takes over when I’m writing. If it’s a poem, I might be surfing on Disch’s “lyric gush.” If it’s the first draft of a piece of fiction, I might be dipping and flying, following the thread of story. Then I’m a zany flying fish, skimming and swimming and reveling in the sea of words. So you’re right in saying that making art is just not the same as daily life.

At the very best, it’s being open to the Muse, the pouring life of the world, the Holy Spirit, the water from the fount at the end of the universe… (Mind you, golden moments sometimes come in ordinary life, and if you wish to do so and are quick, you may seize and make something of them.) As you go on and grow in your chosen pursuits, you will more and more be prepared and readied to catch the Muse, snare life, embrace the Spirit, or dip a pail from the fount. But the mere hunt for these precious, frolicsome things will lead you into the lands where inspiration trickles and streams.

And as a human being, you are made to find joy and truth and wonder and a thousand other contrary and tumultuous elements in creation. It’s that simple. Some find a creative satisfaction in teaching, some in reading, some in needle and thread, some in the unfolding mysteries of science, some in sacrifice for others. But we human beings are all meant to participate in some aspect of the ongoing creation that is our universe—the universe that is perhaps just one of many universes. So sit down in the chair and move the pen or move the brush: begin.