On getting a marketing email from Ten Thousand Villages: I thought: I’ve bought some things I really loved from Ten Thousand Villages, and the little dopamine-hungry part of my brain then wanted to repeat that experience: it was good once, surely it will be good a second time and a third time! Herein lies the trap. I love things, I love aesthetics, I love style: but I don’t want to be sold to anymore. I don’t want to just consume. I want to actually use things.
What does it even mean to use a thing? I started wearing the clothes I like best, in my house. I work from home: I wear them sitting in my mess of an office; I wear them lying on my yoga mat doing stretches and trying to recover from work nonsense. I wear those clothes I like while cooking dinner and getting cooking smells in them. I learn so much about a piece of clothing by doing this. Mostly I am paying attention to how the garment feels and only minimally to how it looks. I mean, I probably bought it based on how it looked. Wearing it at home, by myself, over and over, tells me whether my appreciation is more than skin deep.
This is also a good way to decide to get rid of something. Sometimes when you see it on the hanger in your closet, you like it; but once it’s on your body you understand why it gives you a vaguely bad feeling.
I unsubscribed from Ten Thousand Villages.
I got a haircut this past week and it was just… a disaster. I rely on my haircut looking good most of the time and it does. not. look. good. I feel unsettled. I have an appointment to get it colored and I think I’m going to hit pause on that. Sometimes I examine that urge for aesthetic newness and think: Am I redirecting my creative energy into creating myself, rather than creating some piece of poetry or prose or just random art? And I think this is something women certainly like to do and are also encouraged to do. Sublimation of creativity into forms that serve the outer rather than forms that serve the inner. And I’m saying: you need both; but often they get very unbalanced.
I produced a couple of new drafts of poems this week and somehow, didn’t give myself any credit for this at all. Why not? Was it easier to feel aesthetic success in a haircut than in a piece of imperfect writing?
I was thinking about how the style-adjacent YouTube creators I most and least enjoy are the ones with Big Main Character Energy. I subscribe, I watch them, I get fed up, I unsubscribe. Now, I like a strongly held opinion. I respect some opinions even when I don’t agree because it tells me a story about that person. But there’s a fine line between navel-gazing that’s – strangely – helpful and relatable vs navel-gazing for navel-gazing’s sake. This type of creator gets big enough and suddenly, their comments sections are just filled to the brim with a level of parasocial worship that sets my hair on fire. Is this their fault? It really isn’t. But I can get lost in other people easily and I prefer to be my own main character.
See also: The abysmal way Chappell Roan is being treated. I can’t cope with participating in that discourse and now I just read it and won’t engage with it. Social media gives you this portrait-formatted video of a person and your dumb brain starts to tell you “this is my pal.” And that’s not your pal; that is a person you don’t know and it’s weird to feel like you know them. I’m starting to think that – for me at least – it’s weird to even have such a strong opinion about them. I dream of excising all the para- from my social.
I don’t know what differentiates between a Main Character Energy and The Rest of Us; I have thought for years that it has to do with ego, and my own inability to develop the kind of ego I need to have to be a successful artist.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Trends I Do Not Like. Herewith:
Just WHY. Wearing a sweater as a scarf (or as a belt); putting a sweater over your shoulders or around your waist with no actual need or intention to ever actually wear the sweater on that day. We have a piece of clothing that does this… it is The Scarf.
In honor of the apparently out-of-style scarf, I sorted through my scarves this week. I really considered the colors and patterns I keep collecting and realized I still enjoy most of them. I put four in the donate pile and moved the rest to a folded situation rather than a hanging situation. I’m not saying this will get me to wear them! But I will get to enjoy seeing the colors and patterns. And I would not be any more likely to sling a random sweater around my neck.
I wish Quiet Luxury would shut up. I think “quiet luxury” has taken over every style discourse to some degree and it always just reads as preppy to me and thus I have no patience for it. I think it’s great if your style actually is on the preppier side and those clothes make you feel like yourself, but I also just have a hard time believing every single person only wants to wear plain white t-shirts from Cos or Uniqlo or whatever the current zeitgeisty shop is. It could be that I watch too much of a certain kind of fashion video and read a certain kind of Substack style dispatch and so I have accidentally surrounded myself with these things.
Despite hating a style uniform that mimics everyone’s obsession with The Row/Toteme/Khaite (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), I have lately gravitated back to: jeans, and a black top. Dark blue denim and a black shirt have just never let me down. I don’t feel it’s the most out-there, weird, or creative outfit, but I always feel good in it. Is this my version of a “style uniform”? Oh god. I’m just as bad as everyone else.
A thing that happens when you try to take care of an un-take-care-able person is: you lose yourself. I say “you” – second-person – because there is only one first person in this equation. The only subject is the person in need. The needs are bottomless. Will never be fulfilled.
The object, acted-upon and perpetually in action, the do-er, is secondary.
.
You, in this instance, is someone who shops as a defensive undertaking. Almost desperate, this activity. Shopping is a restatement of
opinion,
aesthetic,
point of view,
taste
that arises from the choices second-person can make in the space inside a TJ Maxx. Here, no one is asking second-person for anything, no one is berating her, no one needs to be cajoled. Second-person sorts, second-person chooses, and in this way second-person constructs a self. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a thin layer of self, the distance from floral blouse to skin. It’s still a self. Unique, distinct.
.
It’s not a coincidence, maybe, that the only thing about me which gets my mother’s attention, in these years, is a thing I’m wearing.
.
I come to reckon with the closet, whose doors stand perpetually open so I am constantly confronted by its contents. The closet is what it holds, just as I am. There is a row of matching hangers; a sea of muted blues, greens, berries, dusty pinks; and the shelf above so packed with folded clothes I can’t tell what’s up there. Those stacks always start out tidy, they just break down over time. This is the risk of having simply too much to manage. The life that got totally unmanageable, over years, and all at once.
The closet is in progress of being dismantled. Next to it, a growing pile of donations.
.
Being plus-sized in the nineties and early aughts was a different experience to now. At risk of sounding like an Old: Online shopping did not exist in those days. There were two stores in the mall that sold “extended” sizes, and one of them was for teenagers and deeply unwearable for an adult with a corporate job. So a person developed certain tactics when clothes-shopping:
if the thing fits, buy it
especially if the pants are the right length, buy them immediately, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars
if there is more than one of it, buy two
if the thing is not perfect, still buy it. You will not see it again and what do you see next will be much worse.
Nowadays, one can look at this state of mind and call it “a conviction of scarcity.” But the thing is: the scarcity was real. I was right to have that conviction.
.
(One time a well-meaning straight sized friend opined that I needed a pair of green pants. I had to keep from hysterically laughing. One did not simply buy a pair of green pants. One gathered one’s mental and emotional strength to look for pants – the hardest garment to fit – and if one was so lucky to find a pair, one pounced on them, regardless of what color they were. If one was really lucky, they were black.)
.
I imagine a lot of people who struggle with over-shopping have lived some version of this conviction of scarcity. And now that we can finally push back on that lack, we are going to: all bets off; enter retail therapy, baby!
But the behaviors that served me then do not serve me now. In the intervening years, more stores have started carrying women’s plus sizes (at least up to a point; they still tend not to serve beyond a 3x, which omits a massive number of people). After years of cultivating the shopping habits of a determined and starving hunter-gatherer – shop constantly, try everything, make a thing work even if it’s not your first choice, go way outside your comfort zone just to stay dressed – we have – I’m not going to call it an abundance of plus-size clothing, but at least a bit more of a selection.
I was in a Boscovs a couple of years ago, and the amount of clothes in the women’s (aka, not misses) section was so great the clothes were actually falling off the racks. I was in shock. I also made a lot of bad decisions that day because while there was volume, the quality was dismal. This was before I got serious about fabric content.
But my point is: it did get better; it is better. There are more choices now. And so, my two decades of being a professional-grade shopper is now hazardous to my mental health, and to a degree my bank account.
[However: Vogue reports that many brands are now scaling back their plus-size lines, so I suppose I’d better not get too sanguine.]
But here I am now: I have a closet full of things I actually love, but they are fighting for their lives against a bunch of other things:
things I do not love
things I used to love and can no longer truly see for what they are
things another version of me loved
things a me that will never exist would have loved
things I needed, but don’t love: ie, corporate clothes, work clothes, event clothes (weddings, funerals)
.
We ask a lot of clothing. It is supposed to a) cover us, b) signal our acceptability to others, c) signal our uniqueness and specialness to others, d) make our unacceptable bodies acceptable. Especially if you are fat, your message about clothing always involved the word “flattering”; flattering just means “as thin as possible.” So a lot of fat women my age ended up with a mostly black wardrobe, because it’s true that black swallows light and recedes, especially in photographs, whereas white expands and reflects light. (Light colors take up space. Interesting.) It took me a lot of years to consider whether I even like black as a color, as opposed to just finding black useful. (I maybe don’t like it? But I’m not there yet.)
And this idea that clothing is self-expression is lovely, but I promise you, self-expression is secondary. If you are finding self-expression through clothing, you have already negotiated with a, b, and d above. You may have negotiated it without even thinking about it, but it was a labor nonetheless. But because humans are essentially creative little wild-cards, we want clothing to be self-expression. We keep trying.
.
Well but. I wanted to talk about the clothes. The things themselves. (Impossible to talk about the clothes without the ungovernable body intervening, but okay.)
My overfilled closet is evidence of my coping mechanism – all that compulsive searching, all that desperation. The habits that, as I said, served me well until they didn’t. I have enough clothes I like now that I don’t need to “just buy it, you might be able to make it work.” It’s been the work of these past few years to re-frame my behavior to match reality: I don’t need to buy things I don’t actually love. I don’t need to buy things that are poor quality. And I maybe don’t even need to buy a thing I love, because I just have too much at home that I already love, and too much is a cause of actual suffering.
.
My mother never liked my clothes, in a general way. She did not like my hair long. She used to confidently state that short hair is “more becoming,” and signalled that my clothes did not align to her preferences. She is very preppy in a born-that-way way. I am the inverse of preppy. When I was small, my career aspiration was “sorceress.” Izod polo shirts became popular in the eighties, and I just instinctively hated them. Teenage me loved thrift stores and the men’s section of department stores; my favorite item was a summerweight wool tuxedo – secondhand – that I wore the pieces of constantly for years. Once I wasn’t straight-sized anymore, all that creativity and freedom just disappeared and I struggled to find anything I really felt at home in.
At one point in my thirties or early forties I wore a slightly more corporate-esque printed black-and-white blouse, and my mother exclaimed “that’s what I want you to wear to my funeral!” I was like… well, it’s going to have worn out before then; am I supposed to keep it pristine and hope it still fits many years from now? I cannot even remember the shirt, because as I say, it was not quite my style; I donated it years ago. Don’t ask me what I’ll wear to her funeral. Will I try to slake her taste in my clothes one last time?
.
What are the things in that get-rid-of pile? The things that pilled, the things that pulled, the things that were the wrong color and I only bought them because they fit. The things with too many embellishments added to an otherwise okay garment (this is a particular risk of plus size clothing, as if the designer was like “how do we distract from the body? I know, SPARKLES!!”).
What are the things that get to stay in the closet? The colors that appeal to my eye, the cuts that appeal to my sense of volume. And I find out: when I buy only what I love, somehow it all goes together pretty seamlessly.
The mistake most of us make in curating a wardrobe is to pick up and look at each item of clothing separately. When we do that, we see: possibilities, of this thing, right here. The way to look at a wardrobe is as one evolving creation, and how it’s serving you. Not just how is it clothing you, but how does it all make you feel. If you feel overwhelmed, or excluded, then that’s a real stressor you are enduring every day. And so I am realizing that if I have 30 shirts – even if they are all good shirts – that overwhelms me and I’ve finally grown tired of being overwhelmed. Maybe I’m just weaker now and can’t tolerate overwhelm the way I used to.
.
After a couple decades of not liking my clothes, she softened a bit. As I said, she does comment on the the things I’m wearing now; recently she said she liked a lilac-colored shirt with a ruffled sleeve. It’s almost as if I won her over with decades of just being my actual self.
.
There is still some self-preservation in me. If I ever considered dressing to please my mother, it was more of a passing concession. I still hate preppy clothes, except for highly specific Talbots sweaters with giant hearts on them. In this way is the sartorial function of “preppy” undermined by the existential function of “ridiculous.” And in fact a lot of my favorite clothes are very funny to me.
Many days, I am so stressed and overwhelmed that I don’t perceive my existence as a contiguous thing; the few minutes when I get dressed is the only time when I feel like myself. When I am working, trying to answer the competing needs of many people; when I am trying to keep all the parts of another person’s life from falling apart; when I am driving from one doctor’s appointment to another – my outfit is the one thing that asserts I exist. The clothes I choose, the pieces of carefully collected jewelry – are the last part of me to go down in the sea of other people’s needs. Other than that, I vanish. I was trained to be this way, and it is maybe in my nature to be this way. This disappearance is my bête noire; it is also my secret superpower in my career, this ability to sense-what-you-need, to bend into any shape.
.
Who do we serve when we abdicate ourselves? The other person may after all be delighted in your abdication. And abdication of a style sense is something you do for a viewer: as you wear the clothes they would have you wear, you reflect them back on themselves, you reinforce their sartorial opinions, you reassure them everyone wants to dress this way: to look smaller, to look more professional, to mimic in the elision of your body some norm they have done no work to unravel. But this abdication does not end well. The things in my closet that are not “me” are the things in danger of going to the donation pile (and let’s be real, very likely to a landfill, although I can hope they spend time on a person’s body first – someone who likes them!). My point is not to assert to you “long hair is good” or “polo shirts are bad” or even “your clothes should amuse you” – my point is that we ought to arrange ourselves less for the hyper-critical eye of the other and more for us and what we want to feel, the stories we want to tell ourselves.
The self cannot in fact be abdicated. She can only be put aside, or hidden under a thin dense layer of the wrong thing.
I realize I am always seeking images of spaces that feel secret, hidden, that invite you inside them, that are human sized or even child sized. I think this is the space of poems and the space of fairy tales.
What do such spaces do? They feel enclosing, safe, even if they are in some way strange. They echo an interior world even if they are exterior spaces. Shadows are necessary to such spaces. Rain really helps to create such spaces inside the larger landscape.
I imagine how happy the first small bands of humans were to discover caves in the limestone of a mountain; and farther back, how our earlier mammal ancestors were tree dwellers. We want to be sheltered and also have a space for mystery, or a space to peer out from. The atavistic body does not forget. What feels like safety, and also like hidden knowledge? The imagination digs deep into those dreamed memories.
Jenkins Arboretum (the last year the paulownia bloomed)
Chanticleer Garden
Chanticleer Garden
Chanticleer Garden
Jenkins Arboretum
Likewise: Whenever I make a trip to the Phila Museum of Art, I am drawn back to the medieval* section.
For me these paintings harbor a very specific emotion in their depiction of space. I love the interiors – how everything is foreshortened, and flattened, and the space feels – for lack of a better word – cozy. It feels human sized. It feels big enough to house the idea and nothing but the idea. You’re going to kill me for assigning “cottagecore vibe” to important works of European art… but, the same things that attract me to the cottagecore décor aesthetic also attract me to these paintings. It is a kind of closeness, of built or imagined space which actively holds the inhabitants.
Then, beyond those interior spaces, there’s always a landscape – presumably, the landscape of medieval Italy or the Netherlands – but it’s completely magical, hold the realism. Because of the medieval approach to perspective, the exteriors – the landscapes – have the same sense of nearness and enclosure as the rooms. Even though there’s a misty distance with mountains, oceans, all of it is somehow flattened in the same way that the interior is flattened, so that you see all of the world at once. You see what you know or believe is there, rather than what you can visually assess is there.
These paintings have a foreground, and a background, but no middle distance. Everything is collapsed in a way that feels almost childlike: there is no vast space that cannot be enfolded in towards the viewer. And it has the same effect that the interiors have on me, mystery yet accessibility, relatability.
(I am making quite an assertion here, about perspective and space broadly, and art historians might have a fit. Maybe it’s more correct to say that the middle ground is simply being foreshortened, rather than lost entirely. Either way, the impression of closeness of the distant landscape is what strikes me.)
This is one of my favorite examples at the PMA; there’s so much realism to the sitter’s face and hands, and then the space he’s in makes almost no sense, despite the perfect straightness of the room’s lines. Beyond the two windows, the views of the landscape are both unconnected and entirely imaginary; a mountain here, a castle there. Rather like that Andrew Wyeth painting, what you see beyond the frame is a composite.
Portrait of Ludovico Portinari, ca. 1469
Andrew Wyeth, Night Sleeper, 1979
This anonymous Annuciation (Netherlandish, 1440-1470) has both the truncated interior space and the expansive landscape beyond. Look how the ceiling is right over their (seated) heads! Yet I don’t feel cramped by it; I feel there’s something very safe here. It might help that even though the Angel Gabriel is male**, as a kid I read almost all angels in these paintings as “female” and thus in my eternal child’s calculus (very difficult to extract from your adult brain), this is a painting of two women exchanging important secrets.
**I know, yes, technically Biblical angels were asexual in some weird theosophical fashion.
Another great example in Crivelli’s Annunciation (1486): there are interior rooms (spaces? cubbyholes?), where the walls have been helpfully removed so the viewer can peer inwards, almost as if in a child’s dollhouse. Then you have this courtyard on the left, which is – presumably – outdoors (the artist decided it had to be, in order for the Holy Spirit to descend from heaven!) yet is framed as if it’s a room. And the space is not just restricted from foreground to background; it also has that typical side-to-side collapsing (necessitated by the size of the altarpiece?), so that all characters can fit into the tableau.
(Also I feel like I’m looking at Remedios Varo’s major inspiration here? And maybe that’s why I love her work too… the spaces are very similar; they are not about realism, but rather about a felt reality.)
Remedios Varo, The Creation of the Birds, 1958
Two more landscape details from PMA:
And finally here are two images I’ve saved in my Pinterest board under “cottagecore.” (I told you we’d come back to this.)
Credit: [dunno]
What’s going on with this aesthetic? It’s definitely about green spaces, but not wildernesses, no; it’s about cultivation of a particularly human-mediated space – a meadow, a trellis with roses growing up it. Cottagecore is certainly a reaction – analog as a reaction to the constant sensory offense of digital; person-sized spaces as a reaction to our imposed identity as numberless “consumers.” But I also think there is intrisic affirmation in the cottagecore ethos – we exist in the natural world and are of it, we cultivate it and negotiate with it but are not masters of it. And now I also see how these particular images, which I saved years ago, are explicitly spaces for creation – one for writing, and one for painting.
This kind of space – these interiors and interior-exteriors – have always, always appealed to me, as I can see now, across various art historical eras, and into my own created landscapes. When I manage to re-invent it – or re-discover it – in a photo, I feel I am getting a glimpse into something magical, and then I try to figure out how to transfer that feeling into writing. This space always calls me back. It invites; it is the opposite of “sublime.” It is sized for a person, though it opens out on some kind of infinite.
[*Late Middle Ages? Early Renaissance? The dates are confusing but you’ll know the change in style I’m talking about; after this period, interiors and exteriors did not look like this.]
Another favorite “interior-exterior” photo, Meadow at Ashbridge Preserve
Wear cheap colorful jewelry and wear it quite seriously. Wear expensive jewelry and wear it lightly. If you have diamonds, put them on for every event, such as: washing dishes, reading the news, napping.
Never wear high heels when expected to.
Never wear high heels at all. Wear comfortable shoes. Consider that every event in life calls for your feet to feel good. Your feet are how you connect to the earth; they carry you on all your adventures. Honor your feet by making sure they are supported.
Use every beautiful thing you own as if beauty was an infinitely renewable resource. Save nothing for “later.”
Never go anywhere with any expectation. Treat all outings like you are just going “exploring.”
Meander.
Don’t be afraid of a lot of sleep. Sleep resets the brain and delivers you into a slightly new, strange reality. It’s useful for artists to be altered some of the time.
Enthusiasm is one of the most plentiful and valuable natural resources. There should be at least one topic you are irredeemably obsessed with, but preferably more than ten.
Corollary: Don’t fuck with people who repeatedly crush your enthusiasm.
Be a little bit undependable. Even “dreamy.” Otherwise people may think you are staid. It’s good to keep them guessing.
Speak to children as if they have an entire inner life you will never know the richness of.
Whatever your most dramatic feature is, play it up to the nth degree, no matter whether it’s considered a “good” feature or not.
Do not underestimate the power of small treasures such as the things children collect. Pebbles, seashells, plastic animals. Hide your treasures in a special box. Keep other adults away from them.
Cut your hair short at least once. I once cut my hair short out of inspiration from a photo of Ines de la Fressange. I do not look like Ines de la Fressange. It was not a good look. However, growing it out and getting to see my hair at every possible length was worth it, and also I could put my desire to look like Ines de la Fressange to bed.
Do not under any circumstances vote Republican.
Remember that all labor has dignity, and is meaningful and valuable to the world. (Except if you are laboring to give yourself unwarranted power, or to hurt other people. Don’t do that.)
It’s really helpful for your lifelong happiness to have more than one thing that you’re super invested in. It helps if they are wildly divergent. This way whenever you are failing at one thing you can think to yourself, who cares? I’m still great at [other thing].
Make your life a single minded pursuit of beauty. Do not make your life a single minded pursuit of good grades.
You may often find yourself short on time; but in your heart, resist being in a rush.
Be grateful for something every day. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that you actually feel humble gratitude in your heart for it. If you can’t actually feel the sense of gratitude, act as if you do. People are extremely suggestible and in this manner you can stealthily change your own mind.
As soon as you start losing hope for the world, it’s time to avoid your news feed. Listen to funny podcasts instead.
Write letters. Even if your recipients never reply – and understand that not everyone can bring themselves to – they will keep your letters for 20 years and feel great fondness for them.
Occasionally, but not obsequiously, tell a stranger you appreciate their personal style.
Appreciate your body and support it like it was your best, dearest friend.
If you cry frequently, over random things, accept this about yourself.
Pay attention to old people and don’t automatically erase them from your mind’s eye. Someday you will be old too, hopefully.
Whenever you are tempted to be smug, go ahead and be smug, but only in your own head. But then try to think of something generous as well. Hold both ideas in equal measure.
Learn the names of the flowers, trees, insects, and birds that live in your part of the world. They are your neighbors and your relatives. I’ve learned the names of hundreds of flowers and then promptly forgotten again but this doesn’t deter me. I just keep starting over again.
Have a favorite flower.
Consider that it is your remit to fall in love with all things, eventually.
When you have thoughts you would put on social media, consider just writing them down for yourself instead.
Julia Cameron writes a lot about Artist Dates. If you’re not familiar with Cameron’s books, she proposes two major practices for artistic recovery. The first is “Morning Pages,” where you write 3 stream-of-consciousness longhand pages every morning and then put them aside without re-reading. The second tool is what she calls the “Artist Date” – which basically means you take yourself out of the house to do something you enjoy. (Cameron later added “Take a weekly walk” as the third tool.) The idea is that Morning Pages let all your ideas and anxieties out, and the Artist Date is meant to let inspiration in, and you need both.
I will just admit right now that I don’t do morning pages. I tend to write in my paper journal at night. During the day I put my random thinky-thoughts in my phone’s notes app, from whence they eventually make their way to a 60-page-and-counting “drafts” document on my laptop. Sometimes in desperation I’ll add things in my work laptop’s OneNote, which is probably inadvisable but then again it’s kind of amusing to go looking for one’s notes on the Portuguese health authority approvals and find stray lines from poems about the sky. On weekend mornings I can easily lose 2 hours to writing in my current notebook. But Cameron’s assertion that 3 pages of longhand writing only takes 30 minutes is, in my case, laughable.
Anyway back to Artist Dates. It surprises me to realize that I’ve been a lot more consistent about doing Artist Dates than Morning Pages. Every time I go to my favorite botanical garden is basically an Artist Date, and I do that at least once a week. I was trying to describe to my therapist what exactly I do there and I said you know, a lot of it is sitting and just kind of existing in space. (And I guess all the flower pictures I post on Instagram are really just the side effect of an Artist Date.)
Like a lot of self-help language, “Artist Date” sounds a bit cheesy. Must I date my inner artist, really? Can’t that bitch, like, toughen up and run on willpower alone? But Cameron was definitely onto something here, namely “be nice to yourself” and “follow your bliss.” Creative people need more space than you might think for the creativity to emerge from under the daily nonsense of work emails, housecleaning, submissions managers that all require different passwords, Netflix queues, laundry, and the inescapable fact that a lot of the country seems to be more enamored of a Nazi Germany analogue than of a Weimar Germany analogue. (Yes I watched Babylon Berlin and yes it fucked me up, thanks for asking.)
What I’ve found is that an Artist Date doesn’t necessarily have to mean getting out of the house. You can fill up the inspirational well via (re-)discovering music, or online archives of the occult, or re-reading a book you forgot you loved. Sometimes you just stumble on things that are inspiring while, say, faffing about on the internet.
So in no particular
order, here is the weird shit that inspired me this week:
Shakespears Sister’s video for “Stay.” Circa 1992. It’s the early days of music videos where there’s, like, a painfully clumsy storyline being acted out? But whatever – it’s the aesthetics I love here. I’m pretty sure this video is a gateway drug to dyeing your hair black. The extreme smoky eye on both Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey. Detroit’s haircut and perfect profile. Fahey being an absolute over-the-top weirdo in black sequins, rolling her eyes and, I like to imagine, generally putting the fear of god(dess) into a whole generation of glam/goth boys. Shakespears Sister: where the demons are angelic and the angels are demonic.
2. Similarly sparkly and dire, this necklace and charms from Waxing Poetic. Pyrite is the best – it twinkles but it also keeps its secrets. I will manage not to dye my hair black but this is a good subsitute.
3. This low-fi photo of a rainbow my mom took with her little non-smart-phone. I love how blurry and emotive this picture is and find that I often prefer images like this, that are more felt than precise. This obsession with weird qualities of light/out of focus pictures was already in full swing when I got my first Polaroid camera, but now there are apps you can use to mess with your perfect smart-phone photos (see TinType, Phonto, etc).
4. This NPR interview with Sleater-Kinney where they talk about social media:
<<< Corin, you mentioned the word “despair” as something that runs through the music. On this album, some of that despair relates to technology and how it affects us. The song “Can I Go On” is pretty self-explanatory on how technology can be toxic: “Everyone I know is tired / Everyone I know is wired / To machines, it’s obscene / I’ll just scream till it don’t hurt no more.” But you also have a song called “Hurry On Home,” where the video takes the form of a series of text messages.
Maybe this just exemplifies all of us — how you can, on the one hand, understand what’s bad about the technology in our lives, and at the same time clearly derive creativity and inspiration from it.
Tucker: I really think we’re just on the verge of understanding the consequences of our relationship with technology, with social media, with those little screens that occupy so much of our time. I think there are some really negative aspects of it: It shortens our conversations with each other, and brings out a real antagonistic element. So maybe the album is asking for us to reevaluate our relationship to technology and say, “Is there a better way to do this?”
Brownstein: I think where I feel empty is in the space between hitting send, or posting, and then realizing that I have now set myself up on this very tiny stage and I’m waiting for all of this applause. I just think, “How have we all gotten to this point in our lives where every aspect of it is a performance?” That, to me, feels very dark. And I think there is a loneliness that comes from standing on a stage every day, waiting for applause. How could we not feel empty there? >>>
And that’s all for now. Goodbye from my very tiny stage*!
*Very Tiny Stage is the name of my all-hamster Andrew Lloyd Webber cover band.
Here, a little bit late, are my final numbers for 2017:
Rejections: 62
Acceptances: 9 poems (in 8 journals)
Total submissions: 95
Submissions still open: 14? something like that?
I didn’t quite get to my goal of 100 submissions, oooooops. But, so what? Overall feeling:
I’m especially happy that the first of my “fey/strange girls” poems found a home at Gingerbread House. (See the “Writing” tab for all recent publications.)
And it’s become pretty obvious that I’m working on two separate book manuscripts. Nooooo problem.
I’m currently working 50 hours a week, so I’m confident that will end well.
But I learned something valuable from all the submitting this past year, and that’s that I need about 8 revisions to really get a poem to where I want it to be. It’s hard to define how much gets changed in 8 “versions”; since doing all my editing in Word, I’m much faster, more likely to trash whole sections, quicker to rearrange things. But regardless, I think it’s key that I go back to the poem with an exacting eye about 8 times. Less than that, and it’s not as polished; more than that, and I start to de-edit, mistrust myself, and lose all the weird parts. The poetry cleanse exercise has been huge in helping me learn how to jump over the weak early drafts faster.
My general feeling about the months of January and February are:
So… I haven’t submitted anything yet this year. But I did get one acceptance from a 2017 submission! And I need to take a look at my Spreadsheet O’ Doom and see if it’s time to update the format.
Happy writing and any other hobbies you might have!!
I was pretty confident, in the depths of my Eeyore-esque soul, that I was going to finish out 2017 with no other acceptances, but then I got 3 in one week and now I have to do the other kind of reality testing. I.e., rejections are a part of life, but so are acceptances. (So are three thousand dollar plumbing fixes that have to be re-done, at great damage to one’s dining room ceiling and one’s sanity, but that’s another topic.)
I will not achieve that goal of 100 rejections in 2017. Whereas submitting a packet is something I have control over, whether I get a rejection in any particular time-frame is something I have no control over. Once I hit “send,” it’s in the hands of editors, readers, and slush piles; some of these processes are speedy, others are ponderous, and it’s not up to me how that works; I have to let it progress in its own time. So in thinking about this, I’m now recalibrating my goals. I don’t care so much if I get the rejections, but I’d like to get to 100 submissions this year. It’s doable, and I’ll be really happy to achieve that milestone. And as for 2018? I’m thinking 150 submissions.
The thing that holds me back the most from submitting is a lack of confidence. I have windows of positivity where I feel strongly “I’ve got five good poems,” and I put the packet together, and the only thing that keeps me from sending it out is a time constraint. But what’s much more likely to stop me in my tracks is feeling that I need to revise some more, and not trusting myself to know how to do it, or not able to concentrate, or not possessing a belief in the work and an excitement about it. And that’s a different challenge from just not being able to make the revision work or not being happy with the result. Looking back on my writing career, an insufficient ego has probably been my biggest stumbling block. I think in the project of pushing to get rejections, I’ve been able to confront this to some degree.
Sending out a lot of submissions has also forced me to finish poems faster, to let go of them sooner. I think overall this has been really good for me. But in some ways, I’m also kind of pushing back against it. Sometimes a poem really does need to sit for months or years before you can look at it with clear eyes and see where its structure needs to be rebuilt. A writer friend of mine said recently “I’m a slow writer and I need to understand that and be okay with my process.” I don’t ever want to publish something that I feel is not whole or ready. So my 2018 tactic needs to take that into account. After all, my end goal isn’t just to publish anything; it’s to create a small and lasting structure of meaning.
And that’s all the news from my Spreadsheet of Doom.
That breaks out to 23 poems being read by editors (or undergrads in charge of slush piles) a total of 207 times.
Total submissions last year at this time: 0
Meanwhile I am still doing a one-week-per-month “poetry cleanse,” and that’s the main way I’m generating new work and working through revisions.
Reader, may I be perfectly frank about this experience?
It’s fucking exhausting.
…
Some organizational issues that have come up:
It’s getting harder to keep track of versions. There have been a couple poems I sent out where I find I’m relieved when it gets rejected, because I’ve since revised it. I suppose this is a known hazard of Poet Life.
The spreadsheet has become a bit unwieldy. In the process of putting together packets that are appropriate to each journal, I’ve gradually lost my neat “Group A / Group B / Group C” logic. At this point I’m just keeping one poem at no more than 10 places, though, in looking at Duotrope’s data on acceptance rates, I am highly unlikely to have to pull a poem. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the spreadsheet now:
“Hope: A Conceptual Artwork”
But you know, I can deal with all that. The real issue is that I feel I’ve lost any sense of joy in this process. I feel beaten down. I’ve often approached burn-out in my day job, but to come up against it in my writing practice is a fun new experience.
…
I was watching a documentary on the making of Sense8, and the cast and crew were talking about the way the Wachowskis work:
“It’s really incredible to watch how they work. When they show up on a set, they use everything.”
“They are constantly open to inspiration, and taking inspiration from wherever in the atmosphere, the soil, the people, whatever that’s there at the moment, and take what they have on the page… as a blueprint. They allow it to come to life and be alive in that moment.”
“They enjoy putting things together; they enjoy trying things. We, often times, we’ll cut things one way, it’ll work, but let’s try this way. Let’s try something like this. Let’s try it like that.”
“Let’s just try things, because that’s what we do.”
“We try things. Yeah. Let’s try this.”
As I listened to this (and rewound it like three times) I thought, yes, this is what the work looks like. And what I’m doing now feels like the exact opposite of this. And I realized that I don’t need to keep up with some arbitrary goal. And I felt a weight lift off of me, a weight I didn’t even acknowledge I was carrying.
…
What is creativity? It’s labor, for sure, sometimes difficult labor. But it leaves you with more satisfaction and ambition, not less. In the past months, I’ve really lost that lightness in the midst of my dark, stressed “submit all the time” mood. “Let’s just try things” implies a sense of deep confidence in your process. It says that possibility is as important as the numbers. That progress is not always linear or planned.
Being rejected repeatedly is also a kind of labor. It’s good to approach it as a game, for sure. But it’s also demoralizing, and I have to acknowledge that.
…
Am I just not cut out for this?
…
I could do with less torture, and more trust.
Film editors discussing Wachowski sisters’ process
While I’m not yet on track to hit 100 rejections in 2017, I do have exponentially more submissions out than I did last year at this time.
What my submissions spreadsheet looks like:
Rejections so far: 3
Acceptances: 0
Total submissions: 21
Total submissions last year at this time: 0
I currently have three separate groups of poems out to journals/contests; each packet has between three and five poems. I guess you could call this cheating as far as the 100 rejections project goes, but I figured it’s more important to get things circulating than to have each packet be the maximum possible size.
As I send poems out, I’ve been putting them on a master list called “finished.” (Let’s accept on faith for the moment that anything is ever finished.) I added a column for category or theme… which is cool.. now I can see, for example, that I have more Greek myth poems than I thought I did. I have no idea if this means I’ll ever have a themed manuscript. I generally feel that I write too catholically to ever produce such a thing, despite how popular they are right now. But as far as the next iteration of the/a book, well, it’s not exactly “in progress”… but I’ll call it “closer to existing” than it was a few months ago.
What my “finished poems” tab looks like:
What I look at when I start to lose energy:
In other news, a poet friend made this book cover art out of my recent hand x-ray. In honor of International Women’s Day:
Friends, 2017 is here. Is it ever. And each day brings some new offense against democracy, good sense, and human kindness. The kleptocrats insist they will make everyone rich; the body police say they will free us from government intrusion; the grandchildren of immigrants are deporting other immigrants; and the biggest fake of all keeps calling real journalism “fake news.” And as if that weren’t enough, there is growing evidence that our executive branch has been compromised by a foreign dictatorship. We’re living in The Upside Down, complete with Cold War flashbacks. Maybe a few of us will find out we are super-powered like Eleven, but in the meantime, we have to get on our bikes and fight the monsters with little more than unearned confidence, friendship, and breakfast foods.
Eleven, with the Waffles Of Victory.
I will admit that I got to the point of exhaustion way too quickly. Having a day job and a job-for-love is already a juggling act; now I’m also integrating my responsibilities as a citizen. One way is to put my money where my mouth is, by supporting institutions like The Washington Post and the ACLU. Another way is to raise my voice. Although I’m sure my regular letters to my weaselly Republican senator go ignored, it does help me to be a high-information voter, aware of legislation as it unfolds. It also feels urgent to put this historical moment into words, and I’m honored that my work has found a home in Thank You For Swallowing and Cleaver’s Life As Activism series.
My recent writing has become much more “political.” But something I think we often forget is that every poem – every piece of artmaking – is a political act. We live in a culture that does not value art except as a commercial endeavor, but creativity has a profound value outside the marketplace, in the lived experience of Americans. Poetry says “what I do matters” and “how I feel matters” and it says “I am paying attention to the world.” Through poetry we have the power to see each other, to practice empathy, to recognize injustice and call it out. The poet and the reader of poetry is not a consumer; she is a citizen; this is our honored role going back to Whitman and Dickinson both.
Many days, I wake up saturated with a feeling of vague horror. But what I try to ask myself is: “how do you want the next four years to look for you?” As writers, we are called to record this moment in time; if all you are doing is writing it down in a journal, you are part of the resistance. Among my writing goals for 2017: be a witness; read more poetry, even just one poem a day; continue with monthly poetry accountability exercise; and collect 100 rejections in 2017.
In solidarity,
Jeanne
50,000 people at the Women’s March in Philadelphia
Resistance flair. Because jewelry is never not relevant.
