Process

That day in high school when I took out my No. 2 pencil and filled in the bubbles on the career aptitude Scantron sheet, the last word I expected to see on the paper which came in the mail was the word, "nun". What the fuck?  That is what I would have thought had that been in my vocabulary in 1986.  ++++ I didn't write during the recent long holiday weekend.  I didn't listen to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast and I didn't think about where my story was going.  As I drove to my neighborhood Starbucks I didn't acknowledge, though I felt the presence of a hitch hiker I'd picked up somewhere along the way.  The hitch hiker named, Doubt.     I'd had a rotten night sleep.  My dog, Ike, kept jumping on and then off the bed at 5:30 am, just close enough to my 7 am alarm that the pressure I felt to get back to sleep quickly, made it impossible to do just that so it wasn't surprising that I argued with myself as I approached the tur...

The night I told Juliet was a Friday.  What I recall most is a feeling.  It was like those long distance road trips we took every summer as a kid.  Thirteen hours from Southern Florida to the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina.  When we hit the winding roads with the hairpin turns I knew we were getting closer.  The trees grew taller, the roads narrower.  There was no passing except for short straightaways intended for the brave or for vehicles with 6 cylinders.  On the hairpin turns, my dad was a believer in the use of the low gears.  I held my breath when I saw him reach for our sedan's gear stick, certain one of these days he would throw it into reverse as we accelerated down the mountain.  It was during these stretches that I'd move to the middle of the backseat so that I could look forward out the window and onto the road ahead.  I pretended I was driving, as I'd been told that's what I needed to do if I didn't want to become car ...

Juliet was the first person I came out to.  She was an old friend.  Not really, but having known her for 4 or 5 years made her my longest running friend since moving to Western Washington.  She was the only friend that I saw with any regularity outside of work.  I guess she was my only friend. Every other Friday we had dinner together after work.  It was the Friday that my kids went to their dad's.  Spending that time together made the night a little less painful.  Still, when I arrived home there was no denying the lonesomeness of the empty house.  All that unoccupied space.  That's not quite true.  It was full of stuff - dishes needing to be done, mail piled on the kitchen table waiting to be opened, boxes of things from the move waiting to be culled through, gotten rid of or put away.  There were boxes of the drawings my children had completed from our lives back in Texas before the cross country move, before the separation, be...

      The first person I wanted to come out to was my therapist. I’d been thinking about my sexuality for 3 years. Was I or wasn’t I? Is it possible to be 40-something and have not figured that out? It took a lot of research, reading, writing, watching, trips to the library, contemplating interactions I’d had throughout my lifespan. It took 3 years to grapple with it and to come out the other side, ready to live honestly and shamelessly. I don’t know why, but in order to do that, there had to be a proclamation, “Hello world! This is who I am and I won’t hide it one more minute!” I imagine standing with my feet apart and my arms outstretched so that they make the letter X as I scream it in the middle of the street. It reminds me of the person who has decided to give themselves to Christ. Why is the ceremony of baptism so important? Can’t a person let Christ into their heart and that be enough? No. No it is not but not for the reason that the nuns in my C...

“What is this rigmarole?” my mom said. I didn’t know what a rigmarole was, but I knew from the tone of her voice that it was not good.   Recently I found myself writing that word, pulled from somewhere in the depths of memory.  I was uncertain still, exactly what it meant but it felt like the right word for the sentence.  Just to be certain, I typed it into the Google search box.     rig·ma·role (rĭg′mə-rōl′) also rig·a·ma·role (-ə-mə-rōl′) n. 1. Confused, rambling, or incoherent discourse; nonsense. 2. A complicated, petty set of procedures. That was exactly what I was trying to say!  Much of my vocabulary was learned in this fashion, by word usage.  I couldn’t give you the dictionary definition, but I knew what it meant.  I knew how to use it and when, but words are more than that.  Words have a sensual quality and a connotation.  They paint pictures that a different word would not.  I cannot hear o...

     Hemmingway advised, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the time to stop writing was when you knew what was going to happen next.  I had to Google that.  How I remembered it was to stop writing when you knew the first sentence of what comes next.  I came across that quote a couple of weeks ago and I've held it in my mind as something to practice because that has been the biggest obstacle for me in continuing a larger piece of writing.  I stop when I've completed a section.  It feels like a good place to stop.   I feel satisfied because I can close my notebook or my laptop with the knowledge that I completed something.  The problem comes when I come back to the writing the next day.  I don't know where to go from there.  I don't know how to get back into the flow of what came before.  Inevitably, I set it aside hoping to wake up one day knowing what comes next.      I am on the final pages of my curre...

Jessica sat facing me in her green armchair with a mug of water on the small table next to her, the one that held the Kleenex and the small clock which faced her. I sat in the middle of the couch and looked at the floor trying to get up the nerve to spit out my words. I had decided that this would be the day that I would tell her but now that I was there the words wouldn’t come out.  It was like like the time my mom stopped me in in the hallway.  I was naked with a towel wrapped around my little body. Perhaps I just felt naked or perhaps I’m remembering the black and white snapshot of me, naked and bent over sideways with a towel wrapped around my shoulders, and have inserted that snapshot into this memory.  I had just gotten out of her bathtub and was making my way down the hall to my room when my mom called to me from behind.   “Were you the one who left the heater on?” she asked in a tone. You know the one.  It's the tone that says she already kno...

Today I am distracted.  Something has preoccupied me and slowed me down all day.  On my way to the Starbucks after work, I thought about turning down the street towards home but then I remembered the word "discipline".  That's what it's all about, right, doing something regardless of how you feel.  It's a routine, something you train yourself to do again and again.  Then one day it takes on a life of its own.  It may not feel great or inspired, but the training continues.  The work goes on.  The creative muscles must be flexed and stretched and molded.  The practice, the focus, the word searching, the cutting and pasting, it becomes a tonic and a structural support around which all else may fall away. 

I've known intellectually what it means to "murder your darlings", that is to cut precious sections of your writing when they don't add value to the story.  I haven't had to cut sections of my writing that I've felt fondly towards until recently.  It's hard!  It's painful!  I didn't want to chop it, but it didn't belong.  It was intended for another story with a different tone and perhaps a different writer.  It lent itself towards fiction.  It was fun and imaginative!  It needed to go. I couldn't bare to "Ctrl X" it and have it forever gone, banished as though it had never born, so I gave it a new home.  I created a new Writing sub-folder and named it, "Murdered Darlings".  In it I "Ctrl V'd" so that it didn't have to end on a "Ctrl X."  There it lives happily waiting for a new story to be a part of, but if a new story isn't meant to be, it is content as long as I come to visit every on...

This commitment to share something small every day is kinda scary.  It doesn't give you the luxury of tucking something into your drawer for two weeks and then coming back to it to decide if it lives or dies.  This is like, BAM! You have to throw it out there naked and bloody like a cut of beef freshly off the carcass that hasn't been washed or had the fat trimmed off. So, I've come back to an old piece, a couple in fact.  This one in particular is short, less than 600 words.  It came out of a journal entry.  I'd decided to write about whatever came to mind after taking my dogs for their daily walk.  I was supposed to do that for a week or a month or whatever.  I did it this one time and then forgot about it, but I felt quite inspired by where it went.  That is to say that I liked it until I shared it with my significant other who was uncomfortable with the content.  I'll admit that I felt insecure about it after that and put it aside....

It all started with the YAWP Fall Writer's Residency at Fort Warden State Park, Port Townsend, WA.  What started?  I'm not sure exactly, but something, a change like a fire under my but.  I'd been all worked up about work and then I went to the residency, a long weekend gathering of writers, of quiet and solitude or companionship to write and to share our writing or not as we so chose.  Something clicked -  the schedule.  Every night from 7-8pm there was a one hour gathering to write, no sharing, no talking, just a gathering of people writing.  We sat on folding chairs, rocking chairs, arm chairs, kitchen chairs, and couches arranged, roughly, in a circle.  There was something powerful in that, something that said, "We can do this".  It has been 2 weeks since the residency and every evening after work I stop at my neighborhood Starbucks for an hour and re-enact our evening gathering. I started a new job in June.  I live 5 minutes away,...