Category: Inspiration

The Lying, The Which, and the Wardrobe: Musings on a Closet Cleanout

Jeanne Obbard

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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(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.)

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Weekly inspiration

Jeanne Obbard
Hello, please hand over your soul, thanks

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:

  1. 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.

Rejections Update: Abandon expectations, all ye who enter here

Jeanne Obbard
  • Rejections so far: 57
  • Acceptances: 4
  • Total submissions: 87
  • Total submissions last year at this time: 5

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.

Just kidding, I love my Spreadsheet of Doom. 😀

The very, very, very long view.

Rejections Update or: The Speadsheet That Ate My Life

Jeanne Obbard

Where I’m at:

  • Rejections: 22
  • Acceptances: 0
  • Total submissions: 48
  • 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.

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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.

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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.

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Am I just not cut out for this?

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I could do with less torture, and more trust.

Film editors discussing Wachowski sisters’ process

Rejections Update or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spreadsheet

Jeanne Obbard

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:

What’s next?

Jeanne Obbard

I’m still in a state of desolation and shock. And, if we’re being honest, I’m also afraid. The number of anxiety attacks I’ve had in the last day alone… sheesh.

But I like order and I like lists. So here are my plans as they’ve evolved in the past week.

“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it” – Goethe

Take action.

And this is important: take action in a way that you can sustain. Not everybody is cut out for the kinds of action extroverts feel comfortable with. I’m all for stretching my abilities, but choosing a method that goes against your essential personality will make you miserable, and miserable people give up. I truly believe that introverts and high sensitivity folks have something unique and necessary to contribute. Stay open to the ways you can leverage your particular strengths. (I’m so sorry I used “leverage” as a verb. We’re in dire times, okay?)

Choose some things you can do and keep doing. Set up recurring donations – some good organizations are mentioned at the end of John Oliver’s show (and he has other bracing things to say as well). Volunteer, in any capacity at all. Get engaged in local politics. Put your representatives on speed dial, because emails and social media might feel good, but don’t seem to impact much.

“Garbage in, garbage out.” – Apocryphal

Stop reading, and sharing, crap news sources.  Keep your critical thinking skills honed. Try not to get sucked in to either too-optimistic or too-pessimistic predictions.

“The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”  – Hugo Black

Support the free press.

Donald Trump has shown a consistent hostility towards journalists and the free press – his campaign revoking press passes willy-nilly right up to the moment I’m writing this. He has stoked actual physical violence against journalists. That’s in keeping with his intentional policy of obfuscation (eg, the non-existent tax returns, his ridiculous cribbed doctor’s letter). So fight back by supporting transparency and good reporting. Buy a subscription to a newspaper – national, local, or both.

“Put on your own oxygen mask first.”

Get enough sleep. Get enough to eat. I know there are approximately four thousand articles to read and ten thousand comments to make and eleven bazillion mansplainers out there on social media, doing their mansplainy thing. In the long run, though, 85% of that will fall by the wayside. Better to read a book or watch TV and gather your strength for the next action.

And by the same token…

Resist predictions. I know there’s an entire industry built on breathlessly predicting what will happen next. NPR and everybody else is spending a ton of time talking about the kind of president Donald Trump might be. I understand journalists have to have this discussion, but I don’t. I want to stay informed, but there’s a fine line between informed and wasting my energy freaking out about things that haven’t happened. We don’t know exactly what will happen. And for sure some of it will be very bad. But the best way to be prepared for very bad is to stop anticipating it, and instead build up our reserves of energy and determination.

“What you focus on expands” – Oprah Winfrey

Here’s an unpleasant truth: We’ve given Donald Trump way too much attention. I’d even argue that that attention is what got him where he is. The sheer spectacle of rightwing batshittery; those stupid, sixth-grade-reading-level tweets. He’s had practice being a character in a reality TV show; it’s his favorite role.

I have given Donald Trump all the focus I intend to give him. I don’t want to spend any more time thinking about him; I don’t want to spend time looking at him or listening to him. There is nothing he’s going to say that will be outside his norm, which I’ve become an unwitting student of. Have you heard this man speak or read his tweets? His communication skills are, how best to say this… streamlined. He seems to use about a hundred words tops, and unlike a poet, he hasn’t even gotten the good out of those hundred. On any given day, you can get the news about what he and his professional hatemonger buddies are planning in about five minutes. Is there nuance? Sure. But not nearly as much as we’ve been conditioned to believe by the 24-hour news cycle.

Here is who I am paying attention to instead: our Democratic leaders. The ones who have been fighting this a lot longer than I have. The ones who have read the briefing books, written their own books, taught law school, community-organized, put in the intellectual and emotional labor necessary to have some thoughts worth listening to: Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton; Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Tammy Duckworth. And all the other leaders I don’t know about yet, who are going to emerge from this crucible.

“some chick says thank you for saying all the things I never do / I say you know the thanks I get is to take all the shit for you
it’s nice that you listen / it’d be nicer if you joined in / as long as you play their game girl / you’re never going to win” – Ani DiFranco

So you’re a member of the “majority” and you want to be an ally. Put on a safety pin, don’t put on a safety pin. I think there are legitimate reasons to do both. But white people: The point here is not to imagine yourself as Social Justice James Bond, swooping in to save the day so you can feel great about yourself. Of course you should research de-escalation and peaceful intervention techniques. (And this wise cartoon on how to defuse harassment.)

But what’s equally important is to be the white person who speaks up to other white people. Be the white person who disrupts the dominant narrative of whiteness. There are times when I’ve heard things that are just not okay. And I was so surprised by it, each time, that I didn’t say anything. Because I wasn’t prepared. I can get prepared. I can figure out some standard phrases to address sexist / racist / xenophobic comments. I can wear a safety pin, but also a Black Lives Matter pin. Because the place where I might have the most impact is in conversation with other white people, with other white women.

Standing up for the underdog and being a hero is such an appealing notion. Engaging your own people in difficult conversations is a lot less appealing. And here’s where I’m gonna go against my previous point and say: focus on the hard thing and not just the easy thing.

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” – Toni Morrison

Writers: keep writing. Write how it makes you feel. Write what you see. If you’re white, write how whiteness informs you and break it down. Write how misogyny informs your life and disassemble it. Re-read all of Angela Carter’s short stories and remember how to be subversive. I know this comes naturally to you. And know this: Poets and outsiders have always been essential to the health of the body politic. Writing is self-examination and is action. As Nigella Lawson put it in an interview recently, “I prefer to be paid to think, not to worry.” Don’t worry; think. Don’t worry; make art. (Don’t boo; vote.)

A man with fascist tendencies just got handed the most important job in the world, after a campaign in which sexism, racism and xenophobia were a feature, not a bug. A man who felt fine stoking racist and anti-Muslim hate and has made no apology for it to date. A man who explicitly said he feels entitled to sit down  next to a woman and put his hand up her skirt. That guy. All of our worst nightmares. The Pussy Grabber in Chief. He’s probably going to go down in history as the worst president of all time (sorry, W, to knock you off your pedestal). I’ve known people like him and they don’t change, because they simply don’t value change. We’ve seen the real him. So here’s my last piece of advice:

Don’t ever, ever, let this become normal. Maybe you were always in this fight or maybe you just started or maybe, like me, you’ve always felt useless. But if you were useless, then why were he and his merry band of misogynists so eager to knock you down?

When you’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, thinking,”Oh my god, what are the next four years going to bring?” ask yourself instead “What do I want the next four years to look like?” Because like Hillary Clinton said,

our constitutional democracy demands our participation, not just every four years but all the time. So let’s do all we can to keep advancing the causes and values we all hold dear; making our economy work for everyone not just those at the top, protecting our country and protecting our planet and breaking down all the barriers that hold any American back from achieving their dreams.

… This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.
 
… I believe we are stronger together and we will go forward together. And you should never, ever regret fighting for that. You know, scripture tells us, “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

Poetry Grind #2 Update

Jeanne Obbard

(Read about Poetry Grind #1 here.)

Poetry Grind #2 is in progress, instigated once again by the amazing K.T. Landon! This time we have 9 members; some of us are the same as last time and some are different.

It’s… different. I’m having a harder time generating new stuff. I think that’s just… life, honestly. A lot more static interfering with the signal.

On the other side of that, I’ve been using the grind as motivation to go back to older stuff that needs revising. Like, neeeeeeeds revising. Or needs to be summarily DELETED.

Do you ever just delete old work? I was always like “Save All The Things!” But in the process of moving house, I  ended up donating and throwing away bags and bags of stuff. It was easier than I thought it would be. And it was a shock to the system that I’m still recovering from, but that I needed. So now I’m doing the same thing with old drafts that never went anywhere. If there are one or two good lines in a draft, I copy/paste them into an “inspiration” document, then delete the rest.

I think the reason this works for me is that when I re-read things I don’t like, I have a really strong emotional reaction to it. I can’t stand the self-indulgence and pretentiousness. It makes me depressed and irritated. And since I’ve been keeping a journal for [redacted] years, it’s not like I don’t have those same thoughts written down somewhere else.

So I’m kind of feeling less precious about every single piece of writing.

 

Some art stuff

Jeanne Obbard

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Life gets increasingly complicated over time. I tend to take on multiple little projects, and since I have a day job, I sometimes have to cull my activities so I can refocus on writing.

So thank you to the friend who suggested I should have a crafting room in my new place. I had been thinking of it as a writing room, but it should be more.

Over the years I have undertaken a lot of amateur art projects. Lithographs and artist’s books, pottery and collaged valentines. I like to lose objectivity in the embroidery floss aisle at the fabric store. I have a mild obsession with sewing handbags. For several months, I kept a florid visual journal using colored pencils. I used to take weird Polaroid photographs for kicks (good times, good times). I’m not saying I’m good at any of these things – that’s really not the point – just that part of valuing creativity is that the creative thing tends to leak out everywhere. Packing and moving the detritus of all these projects (or, when I was desperate and out of time, throwing them in the dumpster) forced me to think about the nature of art-making.

And this is my conclusion: art is essentially – well, disposable isn’t the right word – let’s say in transit. It passes from me and out to the world. I don’t mean that the product is worthless. My nephew wore the bracelets until they fell apart, my friends seem to love their valentines (thanks for humoring me, guys!), and somebody at the Goodwill store is going to be happy to discover that bag I made out of batik turtle fabric (uh, I hope). And yes, my mom still keeps all my pottery.

But art, the product, has meaning as we give it away.* It starts life inside us, but it’s really complete when it’s gone into someone else’s head and rearranged things a little.

 

* Or sell it, if you’re a professional.

The Writing Process Blog Tour

Jeanne Obbard

Thanks to K.T. Landon for tagging me in the Writing Process Blog Tour! Here we go.

 

What are you working on?  

1. The first draft of this post. It was lengthy and pretentious, so I deleted it.

2. a. Unpacking.

2. b. My current journal is an all-white Moleskine, to inspire me to be a minimalist. (So far I’m not inspired to declutter, but I’m very inspired to complain about decluttering.)

2. c. Praying to Hermes, god of communication, that Verizon fixes my internet before Poetry Grind #2 starts on Monday.

3. I was in a boring day-long meeting, so I wrote a poem about spiders and whether or not to kill them.

 

How does your work differ from others of its genre?  

I don’t really want to answer this question. Does anyone really want to answer this question? Don’t we all think we’re in a category all our own?

My thing is, I loved studying the arts in college, but my experience of the academy was that it was a lot easier to take something apart than it was to put it together, and that the two practices – both worthy – required utterly different mindsets. So I try not to let “comparison sickness” creep into my thinking about writing. If I read a lot of Milosz, I start to sound like Milosz. But eventually I just write like me again. I’m inescapable. And the only way I can define myself better is to keep evolving.

 

Why do you write what you do?  

I have such nifty, clever ideas about what to write poems about… and instead I write about what I keep stumbling over.

I keep stumbling over approximately 40 boxes of packed books, so I’m thinking a lot about their relation to life as a writer. The carefully packed boxes from ten years ago, labeled with their exact locations on the shelves – “upper right,” “lower left,” “poetry.” (It’s kind of cute how organized I was.) The new boxes I packed more haphazardly – the books signed by my dad; the book with an ancestor’s inscription and a crumbling spine; that weird little book about wabi-sabi that I keep re-reading the first half of.  

I was a better packer in my 30s, but a worse writer. I wanted everything to be finished, to be polished off. I’d labor over one poem crankily, obsessively – open with a good idea but manage to strip away every spontaneous thought, every strange locution, until it became a hollowed-out version of what a poem should be: all the parts, no heart.

And I think about how I could easily fill up my bookcases with the books I already have. But how I need my bookshelves to not be full. They can’t just be proof of where I’ve been. The poet can’t ever think she is finished. She has to keep some open space. I try not to become too rigid, too aligned, and too full of my own history and my own certainties.

I didn’t answer the question… I think the point is, I’ll probably throw away the poem about the spiders and find it was just a way for me to get to my real topic.

 

How does your writing process work?

I keep a journal, full of unrestrained self-pity. I cherish it as proof that I got through each day. And sometimes it also functions as a first draft.

Sometimes I decide I’ll write one poem each night, which is a great way to be productive, but not as good as…

…I’ve done one month-long poetry grind, which is an incredible way to be productive.

I used to think I could only compose on paper, but the grind taught me that I can also write first drafts on a laptop, and that I can let go of things, and be looser. You never know when you’ll get to the good stuff, so the key is to just keep writing.

I like it when other people participate in the same project because it alleviates my existential suffering.

 

So that’s all there is to say about me… My nominees for The Writing Creative Process Blog Tour:

Sarah Hand is a paper mache & mixed media artist and teacher. Exploring and spreading wonder and making stuff keeps her going. She lives with her husband and unruly cats in Richmond, Virginia.

Julia L. Mayer has been a Philadelphia area psychologist, specializing in women’s identity and relationship issues for over twenty years. She’s worked with numerous young women struggling with bad boyfriend issues.

 

Poetry Grind update

Jeanne Obbard

So, I’m on Day 20 of the 30-day Poetry Grind exercise. I haven’t had time to post about it because I’m writing every day and I’m worn out! Woo!

There are ten people in my group. We’ve only lost one person along the way. That means nine people have been consistently sending out a draft a day, to all the others. This is completely amazing to me. These people are serious about poetry.

Some observations, in no particular order:

1. The generosity of the medium.

You can write a poem about absolutely anything. I can’t talk about what other people have written (wish I could!), but some of my topics included:

migraines

hearing aids

cosmetology school

death

my day job

12-step programs

the Poetry Grind itself

 

2. Community.

It is really, indescribably great to get to read other people’s poems every day. This will make you look forward to your inbox. Getting to see “invisible” work: the daily work of exploring a form or a theme, the daily work of hammering away at something. I get familiar with other people’s preferred forms, and I start paying more attention to my own. I see that somebody else is willing to write about x thing, and I feel like I have permission to write about x thing.

Thinking about this experience versus the classroom/workshop experience, there’s just no comparison at all. There is real value to reading someone else’s work over the long haul, in an intensive way, especially seeing the false starts and the different angles we all try in order to get inside an idea. It opens your ears to ways of thinking and approaching the work that I haven’t gotten anyplace else.

3. Conservation of energy.

You are not allowed to respond at all. GENIUS. I find it exhausting sometimes, in a workshop, to give feedback. This way, I get all the intellectual engagement but I get to reserve my energy for my own writing.

4. Discipline.

I am forced not only to generate, but I also feel motivated to get things to a respectable place. Having an audience, even if they aren’t reading what you send, pushes me to write better things. I put a lot more effort into these drafts than I would without that impetus. I don’t give up as easily. Because I feel like, if I’m asking someone to even glance over this thing, I can make it a little better. Not perfect, just a little better than I would have otherwise left it.

A friend of mine recently quoted somebody as saying that overcoming writer’s block is about the patience to keep writing even when you’re writing terrible stuff. I’ve become willing to start over and over until I get something that starts to click.

5. Cutting your losses.

Because I’m on a deadline (midnight each night) I’ve started abandoning things that don’t work, very quickly.

Having to do it every day encourages me to let go of the previous day’s effort and move on. I know I’ll come back to a lot of these pieces, but right now, I don’t have to. This is writing as a process, not a product.

6. Poetry First!*

I love my real-world writing group, but it’s a mixed group of poetry/prose, and I often write prose in it. There is nothing like having a group of just poets.

7. Conservation of momentum.

There is no slacking. Some days, you write a three-page rant. Some days, you write a three-line blurb that you wring out of your brain at the last minute. It doesn’t matter. You keep your hand in.

 

* This reminds me of Portlandia’s Women and Women First.

women and women first