Art – The Green Study

Staying Technicolor

My week off from blogging served no particular purpose. While I wrote about reading more and chilling, I also had to hit the road to do a two-state tour of family members I hadn’t seen in years. We visited Iowa and Kansas, which welcomed us with open, sweaty arms and no pretense. It was 102 the day we headed home from the Sunflower State.

canstockphoto1370502 We stayed in a cabin on a lake near Lawrence, Kansas for a few days to avoid a hotel, furtively dashing from car to cabin in an effort not to melt. I did a fair amount of reading and writing and got my butt kicked at cards and Scrabble, but did alright during lightning rounds of Taboo. There were ticks, spiders, and turkey vultures. Everything lovely had hidden to stay cool.

We thought traveling north would give us some relief, but we arrived home in Minnesota, disheveled and sweaty, to 100°F/37°C. So I am home, not with a refreshed perspective, but sticky and irritable.

While I avoided the news more than usual during the week, I received my New York Times updates. Byte-sized reminders of badness. I inwardly groaned, then turned back to reading the latest issue of The Paris Review. I read a long interview of László Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian writer, who talked about his work as a novelist and his experiences working under a Communist regime.

It’s no coincidence that I have a curiosity about artists working in repressive regimes. I think that we are headed for some high times with authoritarians in this country, where the pall of killjoy conservatism will hang over us for years to come.

There was an editorial by Dave Eggers in The New York Times yesterday talking about our White House being devoid of culture – empty of poetry, music, books, art. These are not valued by members of the current administration. Joy only comes in “winning”. To paraphrase one commenter: I’d feel sorry for the man if he weren’t destroying the world.

canstockphoto29686267 I can’t imagine living in a world without music, words, and art to inspire, lift my spirits, and inform my humanity. Appreciating art is about empathy – letting in the words, images, and ideas of others. For people like me, who would rather pretend the world isn’t run based on who has money, art seems less grubby, like I don’t need to hide my greed for it. Unlike the current occupant in the White House, I want my world to have windows, not mirrors.

No matter how coarse, cruel, and dull our political life is, art will always matter. Even if stripped of tools, public exposure, and freedom – art has always been the lifeline to the soul of a people. That we are being overrun by soullessness is the irony of the rising power of religious, cash-heavy politics.

There are those who would argue that money, food, health – these are the things that matter and art is secondary. Sure, if you’re dead, you aren’t painting landscapes, writing bad poetry, or fumbling your way through a song. But what’s the point of being alive, if you are soul-impoverished?

I push myself to read and take in culture above my pay grade, while feeling a degree of squeamishness about high-minded snobbery. Growing up poor meant that, with the exception of the public library, much of what is ascribed to culture, was out of reach. It wasn’t until college that I began to branch out, see live performances, go to readings, etc. As I clambered into middle class, had more disposable income, and more access in a metro area, I have taken advantage of the opportunities to see musicals, orchestras, plays, and exhibits.

B canstockphoto53549768 ut art is not just museums, string quartets, and Broadway. If you go into any small town, there are people creating intricate quilts, experimenting with photography, playing with other local musicians. It might just be one weird dude creating sculptures from cow dung, but art is as ubiquitous as our human imaginations.

And it can make a difference.

In Lawrence, Kansas they shot a 1983 film called “The Day After”. Until 2009 was considered the highest rated television film in TV history. It has been described as a cold-hearted, fictional depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear attack. In President Reagan’s autobiography, he wrote that the film was effective and left him greatly depressed. But it changed his mind on nuclear policy and was reflected in the negotiations of a treaty with the Soviet Union years later.

canstockphoto5432485 But what if your art isn’t going to change anything on the world stage? What if we’re all plodding along with our bottle cap art, our soggy word missives to the world, our plaintive bloggy bleats? What if the internet is suddenly no longer available to the common person? Or cultural knowledge is limited to what the state wishes us to see, hear, and read?

Do we cease to exist as creators of art? Do we stop imagining a better life, a different life? Do we stop self-entertaining, telling stories, making bee-bop-chicka-boom sounds with whatever we’re banging away at? Hell no. If anything, art becomes more necessary than ever. It becomes resistance to the dull gray repression. It is the color and sound that keeps us human, reminds us of the world beyond suited, greedy men and pious, malevolent women who pull strings to create a world in their image.

canstockphoto6658146 While I have not renewed my spirits, I still have fire in the belly to write, to create, to be part of the bulwark against these flat, angry humans who seek to make the world smaller and fear-based. I think we, the poets, writers, musicians, painters, dung sculptors, are going to have to up our game. In the words of Chuck Wendig, we need to art harder. Vote, but create. Resist and protest, but imagine and design and sing and write and dance. It’s on us to keep the world from turning gray.

July 1, 2018July 1, 2018

Michelle at The Green Study18 Comments

Between Mr. Coates and Me

canstockphoto3093097 I enjoy listening to interviews of one of my current favorite writers, Ta-Nehisi Coates. He frequently answers I don’t know to questions. I think the nature of being a writer should be one of perpetual curiosity and not, as some would have us believe, endless fonts of wisdom. This pet theory of mine ran into a wall when Coates said Kevin Williamson can write his ass off and that he’d read him because he’s good.

If a writer like Coates is so curious and willing to read Williamson, why aren’t I? Is it my unwillingness to show deference to the mighty gods of ART? Kevin Williamson has been in the news because The Atlantic just hired him as a writer. It’s a short hop and a skip on a search engine to find this guy’s most egregious public statements, which involve transphobia, racism, and misogyny. While these tags have become nearly ubiquitous and synonymous with politics, they bear the larger mark of being cruel, arrogant, and rather incurious.

Lately I’ve been having conversations with my daughter about writers, artists, and musicians. It’s the old Wagner argument – do you listen to the music of an anti-Semite? Do you separate the art from the artist? How do you separate Salinger from his Roy Moore-like predilections for teenagers? Or Hemingway from the shit father and husband he was? Or Picasso for the way he treated women?

canstockphoto17242096 These are difficult, subjective questions. But when the content of your art is your opinion, how much easier does that question get? As I’ve gotten older, read more, and developed an awareness of the vast landscape of art beyond the traditional literary canons, I have begun to draw my own lines in the sand. I have choices. There are skilled writers who don’t advocate for the harm of others. There are eloquent writers who can make their points absent deliberately provocative statements.

Maybe this is my coming of age with writing. I don’t revere art the way I have in the past. I don’t see artists and writers as being above the basic expectations of civility or decency or compassion because of their art. The hyperbolic clarion call of the classics or geniuses or brilliant writers no longer beckons me nor defines my reading list. I don’t feel the pull of must-read blurbs or the anxiety that I might be missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime compilation of words.

My husband often gets annoyed with modern music because of the vocal gymnastics – those long notes that warble on forever, only because they can. I feel something similar about writing. I don’t give a damn if a writer does the verbal equivalent of two quadruple Lutz jumps. If those jumps involve rationalizing their hatred or fear or contempt of others, then they are still a purveyor of dumpster-writing, no matter how eloquent.

canstockphoto8705409 I’m sure part of this subjective reckoning in my reading list is due to the era. Provocateurs are a dime a dozen these days – just tarted up versions of reality shows. They might be writers or actors or politicians or that guy in the grocery store with a t-shirt that says No fat chicks. We’re a nation being led by a gold-plated, thin-skinned provocateur. Outrage is addictive. Two sides of a very easy equation. It keeps us off-balance and unfocused.

While exposing oneself to a range of ideas is admirable, the range of ideas seems to be limiting itself to one extreme or the other. It is moderation that has suffered most in this country, while the vendors of extremist one-liners and memes and impulsive Tweets are put on rotation in the media. That some writers need a sledgehammer to make a point, rather than using skilled reasoning, is a reflection of the times, not of literary merit.

I took some time to read a few of Mr. Williamson’s articles, because I am a curious person and I think it would be wrong to dismiss someone out of hand. This is where Mr. Coates and I part ways. The writing of Kevin Williamson was no better or worse than any other national columnist. That is to say, there was nothing about it that convinced me to look past this writer’s uglier sentiments, nothing that makes me want to provide material support to his career by continuing my subscription.

Perhaps it is that I hunger for the restoration of civility and dignity to the public sphere or that in those magical reading hours, I do not want the tight, angry politics of extremism. It may be that I have the unrealistic expectation that art and writing should endeavor to make the world better, not just angrier.

Update 04.05.18: The Atlantic fired Kevin Williamson when his views on hanging a large percentage of American women for abortions proved to be more than an errant Tweet. Lesson #1: Due diligence should be part of any hiring decision. Lesson #2: Don’t advocate violent shit ideas.

April 4, 2018April 5, 2018

Michelle at The Green Study20 Comments

When You Only Have So Many Words and None of Them are Adequate

The Green Study is taking a break until December 1, 2017.

canstockphoto5847421 Last year, I went to a lecture where journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen spoke about her writing practices and career. One of the things she said was that while she was working on a project, she limited how much time she spent answering emails and engaging others. “I only have so many words.” I’ve thought a lot about that phrase, wondering if there really is a limit to my creative reservoir.

I’ve made a habit over the last five years of posting personal essays. Most of the time I was circumspect, able to write them at a distance and not when they were raw. Lately, though, I’ve been feeling tapped out personally, too enraged politically, and unable to rein in my emotions. It’s probably time to stop doing that for a bit. Maybe I was just scraping away the layers until I hit the gooey core, but the gooey core is here and it’s messy, disorienting, and raw.

I’ve written frequently about depression over the years, but there are so many different kinds. It might have been turning 50, or watching my child become who she is supposed to be – in contrast to my own paralysis, or just the flip of a neural/hormonal switch, but this year I’ve felt a drag on my daily life, this weight pressing slightly more each day. I’ve become habituated to repressing emotions, repackaging them in a logical manner, presenting them as if I have my shit together. All the while, I feel a sense of grief and rage and disorientation just burbling beneath the surface.

We do this – we rearrange and rationalize and give 45 degree corners to those emotions that make us uncomfortable. We turn them inward and that rage, sadness, bitterness morphs into a low-level depression, until a phase becomes a lifestyle. Creative people put rawness into their art and maybe that shores them up, makes it tolerable.

canstockphoto5423745 I used to believe that I was a creative person, but I’ve spent too much energy trying to look put together. I’ve spent a lot of time being responsible, keeping myself controlled, and rational. I’m living in a world where I’m not allowing room for my own messiness, surrounded by a culture that will look at sheer lunacy and say well, that’s different.

canstockphoto21530517 It has hit me that art requires messiness and rawness and vulnerability, because art requires an elemental sort of truth and you can’t land on it by keeping your shit together all the time. As I said to a friend yesterday, I feel like a complete and utter fraud. She’d read somewhere that feeling like a fraud means you’re getting somewhere, because you are operating outside of your comfort zone. And that means growth.

It’s been a surprise in midlife to realize that those issues in the first decade or so of life follow a person. They have reverberations through the following decades of your story. Many of us spend our entire lives trying to resist, change, or rewrite that story, but it’s our core story. Messages for better or for ill burrow inside our brains and many of them are just plain wrong. But they’ve left their mark and they influence our behavior and perceptions. Until we are deliberate in challenging those messages that do us harm, they will rear their ugly heads over and over. And we’re stuck.

canstockphoto1074433 I’ve been stuck for a long time, but things are uncoiling. My emotions have told my mind that it can just fuck right off. It’s “Feeling Time”. If you’re relatively smart, your rationalizing skills are likely top-notch. You can intellectualize the hell out of any morass of emotion, produce a white paper and a TED talk, and not feel a damned thing. It’s the feeling part that’s messy, that makes you feel like an unhinged nutter. It’s not comfortable, but it’s necessary.

I see it as analogous to what is happening in our country right now. It’s messy. It’s extremely uncomfortable for many of us. There’s fear and anger and anxiety. My optimistic self says that it’s evolution – all the cultural and social shifts are happening in a relatively short period of time. Resistance to those changes is normal and natural, but temporary for all but a diminishing minority. This is the ebb and flow of growth.

People are in a hurry to make nice. To smooth out the wrinkles, repress dissent, legislate away the angry voices rising up, to make it look like our patchwork quilt of a country isn’t coming apart at the seams. It is and it isn’t. Some things are holding strong. Some people are emerging as real heroes and some of us are more enlightened than we have ever been before. I believe there is hope to be found, but it does mean turning away from the headlines and looking below the fold.

canstockphoto40402861 Personally, I am dissolving into a bit of a mess. I’ve begun to disintegrate mid-conversation with friends and feelings are rising in me that no amount of editing can rearrange. I know it’s a good thing in theory, but for now, it feels like absolute shit. It’s not “normal” for me when normal was keeping things squared away. It’s not normal for me to keep manically humming Moby songs like some deranged hipster. I don’t want to talk out loud about it. I don’t want to repackage it for the consumption of others.

Sometimes in a world where everyone is saying everything for the benefit of an audience, there’s no time to tend to our inner lives. If we’re lucky and I think that I am, our inner voice becomes so loud and rancorous as to demand our attention. My inner voice has hopped up on a table, stripped off its clothes, and insisted on dancing Gangnam Style. It feels damned embarrassing and uncensored and not intended for public viewing.

I like to wrap up a post with some rationale, some message that says to a reader Hey, she’s not a headcase. She has her shit together. But why lie? I don’t have it together. I might, but I don’t right now. See you in December.

canstockphoto11539176

October 12, 2017October 25, 2017

Michelle at The Green Study23 Comments

Empty Noise is the Gravedigger

607px-Rain_Landscape_MET_DT4465 I’ve been living a summer in quiet desperation. Fall is creeping in around the mornings. I smell it in the air and see the frantic scurry of squirrels hiding their winter stores of food. Usually, it brings with it a sweet melancholy that makes me more creative and introspective. This year seems different.

I turn 50 shortly and it’s clouded my mind in all the expected ways. Ways that seem like stages of grief. I’m in the bargaining/rationalization phase. Initially, I mourned that there was less ahead of me than behind me. Then I tut-tut-tutted myself. At least I’m alive. It seems a banal reassurance, because if I weren’t alive, I’d hardly be agonizing over the fact.

This could be the beginning of a long diatribe about the visceral signs of aging now creeping up on me. It’s all been said before – gravitational pull on body parts, the decrepitude of the mind, the regrets of a life half-lived. But I stop myself mid-wail. That is not my story, because that could be anybody’s story.

My story, my peculiar little piece of navel-gazing, is my disappointment that nothing has changed. No grand epiphany about grabbing life by its nether regions and hauling off to Nepal. No reawakened sexuality turning me into a feral alley cat. No heartwarming reunions with high school chums or estranged relatives. No grand realization that turns my nonexistent career into a lecture tour, Times book review, or even a paycheck. It’s still just me.

That’s a little disappointing.

Improvisation_31_(Sea_Battle) Everyone has a life narrative that they tell themselves. Mine was always that I was a late bloomer. It was an easy pattern to see – everything always happened with my friends first – college, marriages, babies, careers. I started college late after a stint in the Army, married in my early 30s and had a child when I was 37. And I never had a career, just jobs. I could joke about how my whole narrative was one long procrastination.

At 50, the late-bloomer story is starting to wear a little thin. And I have to ask myself, if 50 years of action (and inaction) didn’t lead me to where I want to be, is it time to change the destination? And shouldn’t the journey be a little more enjoyable?

It’s funny when you’re younger. You assume by 50 that things will have been settled, that where you end up is where you intended to be or at the very least, where you’re okay being. But just as society has begun to write me off, I’ve started feeling my oats.

Hatred and empty noise! Old, faithful companions of the strong, the essential.

Hatred is the murderer.

Empty noise is the gravedigger.

But there is always resurrection.

Vasily Kandinsky, On Understanding Art, 1912

Over the last few months, wallowing in a micro/macro depression (woe is me and doesn’t the world just suck?), I’ve realized what a coward I’ve been. It’s a harsh, but necessary realization. I’ve been so distracted by the empty noise. And I’ve wanted to be distracted, because if I weren’t paying full attention, I wouldn’t have to take full responsibility.

450px-Vassily_Kandinsky,_1923_-_On_White_II If I were to describe the perfect me of my intentions, it would be a physically fit polymath with strong, loving relationships, charitable works, and a steely sense of integrity. If I were to describe the real me, the one I live with everyday, the picture is quite a bit lopsided, inconsistent, and always, irritatingly, a struggle. That damned human element.

One would imagine I have grandiose plans moving forward. My opening gambit on turning 50 is a real gob smacker. I’m going to stop taking vitamins.

Now hear me out. People say that taking vitamins is like insurance for nutritional deficiencies in our diet. The science doesn’t support that, yet even knowing those facts, I have still been taking a multivitamin and flax oil supplement for years. Does taking those pills make me less diligent about eating a nutritionally dense, well-balanced diet? I would say yes. The backup plan has become the plan.

500px-Wassily_Kandinsky,_1903,_The_Blue_Rider_(Der_Blaue_Reiter),_oil_on_canvas,_52.1_x_54.6_cm,_Stiftung_Sammlung_E.G._Bührle,_Zurich I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea – all the insurances we put in place. I’ve been so set on being safe, carrying all the right insurances, having backup plans to the backup plans, that I’ve filled my life with safeguards for a life I really am not living. Because while I fearlessly fail on a daily basis, I’ve not allowed myself to fail spectacularly. I’ve not put anything on the table worth losing.

So today, I take no vitamins. Tomorrow I submit a short story to a lit mag. Or at least I eat some leafy greens.

Lately, I’ve been reading Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. Vasily Kandinsky began his professional career in law and economics. He chucked it all at 30 to begin painting studies. All art in this post is his – a testament to his openness and intellect in exploring art. I bet he didn’t take vitamins, either.

August 28, 2017

Michelle at The Green Study30 Comments

The Marauder’s Map

It canstockphoto3397850 ‘s 2am and I’m wide awake, as I have been many mornings in the last week. There is no end in sight to the destruction of the country I thought I knew. Moves are being taken in every quarter to quash protests, disenfranchise voters, eliminate safety nets, knock the legs out from under air and water safety, gift power to the already empowered. The baby, the bath water and any ethics are right out the window. The Doomsday Clock will likely click one minute closer to midnight.

I keep thinking about history. And how nearly every move being made by the Trump administration is out of the authoritarian playbook. Even on the state level, legislators are taking their cues, ramming through bills to ensure that power stays with them. The people who talk about small government and self-reliance are delighted that Big Daddy is going to save them and stomp on anyone who dissents. A man with a personality disorder, someone who can be flattered into giving unqualified and malevolent people an immense amount of power, is in charge.

I’ve been struggling to get back to novel rewrites. It hasn’t felt important or useful to spend my time there. Instead, I wade through one news article after another. For all the rallying cries, I’m torn between the despair of nihilism and the burning frustration of impotency. This is also not useful and certainly deleterious to me.

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble sleeping, I put on a Harry Potter audio book. Jim Dale is a soothing narrator. On the surface, Harry Potter seems a simple child’s tale of good versus evil, except that the good people aren’t always good and the bad people aren’t always bad. And all along the way, no matter what laws and rules are put into place, subversion happens. Sometimes it’s small bits of sassiness and other times it is downright anarchy. But no matter how many rules are put in place, no matter what destructive forces roam the hallways, the students find a way to dissent. And this is a hopeful message.

canstockphoto19169321 I’m feeling pretty powerless and afraid for the future, especially for my daughter. The flurry of robber baron malfeasance is overwhelming and in truth, there is nothing, much to the delight of the angry mob, that I can do about it. I voted. I paid attention. I gave a damn. But it did nothing except get me characterized as a snowflake, an elitist, a lazy liberal living off the government teat, and urban (used as an insult). A woman who wouldn’t even get rated a 4, because my nubility ended about 30 years ago. In the scheme of things, I am nothing and no one, powerless, not wealthy, not influential.

When I think about the dissident, camp, and protest literature I’ve read over the years, I am reminded of the power of the story. And the importance of telling it. A lot of nobodies painted, wrote, invented, composed music, even through the worst of times. And the worst of times is yet to come, I believe. It takes a little time for the ball of shit to gain momentum and size, as it rolls down the hill towards us. Everything that seems like hyperbole and anxiety today will be the norm tomorrow. History tells us this will not end well.

canstockphoto17352389 How far it will go, no one really knows. The angry mob will likely crush many of us. People arrested, businesses destroyed and jobs lost, committees designed to suss out dissidents. Neighbors will turn each other in. Troops will come down our streets to round up the next targeted group. Revolts will rise and fall and take its casualties. It seems unthinkable, but authoritarian rulers, no matter where they are in place or time, are terrible in all the same ways and exploit the population’s fears and anxieties in such a way that the snake eats itself.

In an age when the common good sounds like a quaint, old-fashioned idea and the Ministry of Alternative Facts is dominating the news, it’s hard to know what to do with all this anxiety. The anger reignites itself daily. And we keep getting admonished to grow up, get over it, it’s not so bad…and we bargain with ourselves. Some of us are still detoxing from the campaign. Some of us are in an emotional coma. I alternate hourly between righteous indignation and a desperate need for more action.

canstockphoto3194419 Getting stuck in this loop is crushing me and writing has become my only way out. I’ve written essay after essay in the early hours. Some angry, some tearful and bitter, trying to find that crack to let the light in. And on the Marauder’s Map of my country, I can imagine the dots revealing themselves, one after another. Writers and poets and artists all working away, seeking the light and, ultimately showing us the way forward. In an age when bad is good and lies are truth, we must solemnly swear that we are up to no good.

January 26, 2017January 26, 2017

Michelle at The Green Study45 Comments

Snipe Hunting for Writers

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve wanted to be a writer. For years, I’d daydream and talk about writing, but it was fantasy. It took a dash of midlife angst to make me, the Writer, a reality. In the last two years, I started writing for this blog and finished the first draft of a novel. It feels like I’m getting close to something. Or at the very least, I’m in the process of becoming something.

I used to imagine myself as a writer, hunched over a little wooden desk, pen gripped tightly in hand, sweating out each and every word. The floor would be littered with crumpled up paper. Perhaps I’d even be a little self-destructive and there would be an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts or a bottle of Glenlivet whiskey stashed in my bottom desk drawer. My mental picture was always an odd combination of the tortured artist and the hard-boiled detective.

In my writing fantasy, there was no husband, no child, no laundry, no lunches to be made, no other job that I was beholden to and no sense of obligation to anything but my art. I’d be writing from a taverna in Greece in between lovers (Efharistó Shirley Valentine) or up in a mountain camp, writing by firelight, while howling wolves served as white noise (someone read too much Hemingway). There would be no interruptions, no emergency phone calls to the dentist or plumber. There would be no stopping to answer work emails or texts from play date moms.

And the suffering…oh, there would be much of that. Tragic love affairs that would leave me no appetite, but plenty of material about which to write. Loneliness that would leave me looking haunted while madly productive. I’d be miserably poor, wearing shoes with holes in them and having to depend on the kindness of strangers (Will write for food). My art would be real because I suffered. No one told me I’d be a well fed, financially stable, relatively happy person with a loving family. How can I write with no hunger, no grief, no unending solitude?

My alma mater, the University of Iowa, is home to the nationally known Iowa Writer’s Workshop. While I was getting a degree in Russian Studies, it was like dating someone when I had a yen for one of his friends. I would read over the requirements for getting into the workshop repeatedly and longingly. Kurt Vonnegut once taught there. Many of my favorite writers were alumni – Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner, Jane Smiley, Robert Penn Warren. I daydreamed about that program while suffering through courses on Russian Morphology and Semantics. Perhaps I lacked the commitment to be a writer.

And then there’s the smorgasbord of writing workshops, classes and online courses that I halfheartedly rambled through. I’ve found reason after reason to not like these venues, whether it be the deep/indecipherable work of others or my thin-skinned thoughts/obscenities upon getting critiqued. Or getting a signed copy of the teacher’s work, only to discover that what they had in teaching affability, they lacked in basic editing skills. I’m a spelling snob and rank amateur with a fragile ego. Maybe I don’t have the durability or collaborative skills to be a writer.

All of the above goes to say that these ideas of a writer’s life can be more discouraging than the actual work of writing. When I think about all the things other writers say they do – the groups and workshops and degrees, I feel like I might be missing the point. The dogma that bleeds through writing advice articles intimidates me. I would never refer to my art except in a mocking, falsely pompous voice.

This mythical creature, the writer as artist, has disappeared, only to be replaced by a multi-tasker writing frantic paragraphs between trips to the grocery store and school and appointments. I write when I can. And lately, I write because I can’t imagine not writing. It’s an emotional realization for me. Is this what being a writer means?

When I read a book that thrills me, I flip to the author bio. Part of me wishes I’d read “Jane Writer hasn’t done jack with her life up to this point and still managed to get published. She now lives in a little ranch house in the suburbs with her loving, but argumentative husband, messy child and ill-behaved cats. She has no writing degrees or work experience as a writer and she’s not planning on getting any.”

This idea of being a writer is surrounded by urban legend, misconceptions, romantic representation – a mythology that has, until recently, eluded me. Writing isn’t a cult of personality or accumulation of degrees. It’s like singing off-key in the shower – the true joy is private and in the doing. When I write, even if I’m struggling, I’m in a sacred, satisfying space. It’s the only place I’ve spotted that magical, elusive creature known as the Writer.