THIS

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”

― Toni Morrison

 

A slew of Patricia McKillip's book. McKillip was always a favorite read. The first book I read by her was Winter Rose, a sort of retelling of Tam Lin. After that, I bought her Riddle-Master books and then bought everything she wrote. I am rereading her at the moment, while I pause and relax. It was such a loss to lose McKillip in 2022. Covers are by artist, Kinuko Y. Craft.

Taking the rest of the month off.

 I made a post on Twitter/X that I am having a difficult time working right now.

In fiction, tone, mood, voice, and style interrelate, — things I am learning to improve. So at the moment, writing is hard work for me. All learning and practice is. But I crave process. That's the artist/creative/messy in me. [MJ]

I posted an image of Francesca Woodman in her studio for several reasons, but to hint that emotionally, I am exhausted. I attribute some of this fatigue to winter and illness, to what it simply is as seasonal depression, but there are other reasons, too. My process as a creative is very messy and immersive and I've been working for months, relentless. Even obsessively. I tend to neglect other aspects of living when I do this.

I have been sitting in this creative corner since last November. In December, I made strides, but they were costly. Francesca Woodman always sat in this corner, metaphorically and it destroyed her. I don't do that. I am too self-aware. I know then to pause, to rest, and yes, I should not wait to do this when I am this flat and lost in feeling. Pausing is not a failure. It's a salvation. During my pauses, I usually go to handwriting and reading, to reflection. To a sort of reinvention of the work in my mind and notebooks. These allows me spaces. I need these spaces. I need to be alone. I need to be away from social media, but it all just becomes noise to me, chatter, and I become overwhelmed as though the images and words of so many people are:

 'abnormally rapid and even auditory.'

 That's a metaphor but it fits.

  

I have to do something. I have to make a change. And I do.

Alan Garner is a rare mind.

"I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option. "Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. "It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth." 

                        — Alan Garner

                     The Voice That Thunders

Failure is part of a writer's daily life.

 

"If you are writing well and failing and submitting and persevering, there is no more that anyone can ask of you, even yourself."

— Stephen Marche

Berthe Moriset, Girl Writing

(Writers are always making decisions. Some of them are failures and will be cut, pasted, and moved, or even deleted. Some will stay and be published. But failures and mistakes are part of the writing process. Revisions are like purgatory. Dante's.)