Volume 4, No. 5: Something New at Almost Forty

On poetry and fallowness

Greetings, book and treat people! I have a personal essay for you today, but first, a few things:

• I’ve been enjoying Hanif Abdurraqib’s weekly Songs I Loved playlists. I am not a big music person (there’s a whole essay there but I’ll save it), and so I find these playlists delightful. They introduce me to music I never would have heard of otherwise, and they also take all the choice out of it—sifting through all the music in the world is too overwhelming for me. Also: I love when people get excited about what they love.

• This is a stunning collection of love poems by poets of Palestinian heritage.

• Maybe you want to print some of these out and post them around.

• I wrote a mini series on Martyr! on Instagram. It has become a defining book of my life. It came to me exactly when I needed it and it hasn’t let me go. I don’t think it ever will. I’ll have more to say about it when I’ve finished rereading, but for now, you can read my original review; some thoughts on queer earnestness; a story about my experience with the ending; a close read of two brilliant lines in the penultimate scene; musings on collaboration, identity, and structure; and my attempt to articulate (some of) what the book has meant to me.

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I’ve written a poem every day this year. I’ve never thought of myself as a poet. I’ve considered myself a writer since I was a teenager. For years, it was my defining identity. It was how I understood myself. In high school I’d get up before class and write without stopping for 45 minutes. I filled notebook after notebook after notebook. It was not really a hobby. It was more like one of the ways I knew how to breathe.

In my twenties I started writing fiction. I wrote many short stories and two partial novels. I was serious about those novels, although I never finished either of them. I spent hours and hours working on them. I wrote thousands of words. I made charts and maps. I drove around talking to myself about them. The characters took up all the space in my head.

I finished a draft of a novel—a different one—in 2019. It was an unwieldy mess. It was about 400,000 words. Do you have any idea how many words that is? It’s somewhere around 1400 pages. I’m laughing as I type this. That manuscript will never see the light of day. This is not a bad thing. This is not a sad story. Not all books are for the world. That was not a book for the world. That story was not the story I needed to tell. I have no interest in ever revisiting it; it’s done. But I have no regrets about the time I spent writing it. I do not feel embarrassed or ashamed by it. I feel nothing but tenderness for the person I was when I wrote it.

I finished that draft in the spring of 2019. I started revising it that fall. Then the pandemic came, and I stopped writing. In 2020, the book…vanished. It went from something I thought about constantly to something I never thought about. I don’t know how else to describe it. It just went away.

I haven’t had a consistent writing practice since then. I’m always writing. I write in my journal every day. I write this newsletter every week. I write book reviews on Instagram and elsewhere on the internet. What I mean is: I have not been able to sustain work on a creative project since I put that book in a drawer. It’s been four years.

I tried. I started writing a romance novel. I wrote vigorously and furiously for a few weeks and then stopped. It just went away. I’d open up the document and type: no. I took a playful, genre-bending class with a writer I love, thinking it might reignite my atrophied creative muscles. It didn’t. I dreamed up a book of linked short stories and went on long walks, plotting them out. I started doing a daily freewrite about the birds I saw around my yard. It lasted a week, maybe two. I wrote a short story but couldn’t bring myself to revise it. I started a new writing document, called it Play, told myself I’d open it every day and mess around. No expectations. I just wanted to make something. That practice lasted eight days, tops. At the beginning of 2023, I made a chart in my planner. I would write for 300 days out of the year, I told myself. I would not manufacture a project that didn’t exist, but I would write: fiction, nonfiction, poems, it didn’t matter. Anything in my heart. Anything that wasn’t work. I would write. I inked out 300 blank squares.

I filled in three.

And then, finally, sometime last spring, I stopped trying. Words kept pulsing through my heart: I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything to say. Even reading about writing made me feel weird and unsettled. Over one weekend in May, I reread a beloved heart book, Alexander Chee’s brilliant essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I’d started rereading it back in January, but I kept setting it aside because I had also told myself I would write a reflection after reading each essay. I didn’t want to write. The book sat on my coffee table.

Reading it that weekend was like pulling off a bandaid. I did write a reflection after each essay. I also spent most of the weekend crying. After reading one of my favorite pieces in the book, ‘100 Things About Writing a Novel’, I wrote my own list: 100 Things About Not Writing a Novel. At the time it felt like a rant or an elegy, but it was actually a seed. That whole weekend made me feel bereft, like I had lost something innate and precious that I would never get back. But now I can see it for the gift it was: that was when I let myself claim fallowness. “You don’t have anything to say,” the writer-part of me said. “Okay, fine,” I replied. “I won’t say anything.”

So I let it go. I let go of the idea that I was destined to write a novel, that I could force a book into the world with willpower alone. I let go of the idea that if I just pushed through, if I just kept stabbing at the page with a blunt instrument, I would find my way back to the story I was meant to tell. Most of the time, resistance is how I know there’s something important on the other side. But sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes, when something in your body says stop, it actually means stop.

It was weird. I’ve been working on a creative writing project for my entire adult life. Even in the early pandemic years, when I wasn’t actively writing a novel, I was thinking about writing one. I was preoccupied with the fact that I needed to be working on one, that something in me wouldn’t be complete until I found the next, right project. Accepting fallowness—welcoming it, even—that was something I had never done.

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I always spend the week between Christmas and New Years reflecting on the past year and thinking about my goals and dreams for the coming year. I scribble ideas into my planner, and then, in early January, I go through them, noting what excites me and what feels overwhelming. A lot of what I scribbled down last year was predictable: Keep a list of all the birds I see in my yard. Have one adventure—something that connects me to where I live—each month.

Also this: Write one epistolary poem every day. A letter, in poem form, to anyone or anything.

I don’t know how to explain how deeply I have resisted writing poetry throughout my life. Poetry is everything to me. I adore it. But—until, apparently, a random day last December—it never occurred to me that, perhaps, sometime in the future, I might become a poet. Language is it for me. All I want to do is spend my life rolling around with words, making them do magic tricks. Everything about language makes me shiver all over, and poetry is all about language and still—I have been adamant, for basically as long as I can remember, that I am not and will never be a poet. A writer? Yes. A novelist? Hopefully one day! A poet? Not possible.

I don’t know where it came from, this scribble, this project. It is still wildly and beautifully mysterious to me. “How about you do this thing you’re not trained in, have never studied, do not feel you are qualified to do, and have always defined yourself in opposition to?” the writer-part of me said. “How about you do it every day next year?”

“Okay, yeah,” I replied. “Cool. Sounds fun.”

I mean. What the fuck?

It is February 7th. I have written 38 poems so far this year. I have not been overthinking them. I have not been dreading the writing of them. I have not been wondering whether or not this makes me a poet. Sometimes they come like waterfalls and sometimes they are so rote, so bland, I laugh out loud at myself. Writing them rarely feels like a chore. It often feels like a routine. Sometimes, it feels revelatory.

Every day, I write a poem.

I missed a day in early January. I don’t remember why. I was grumpy and tired and swimming in work. I forgot. The next day, when I realized this, instead of chastising myself and abandoning the whole project (a pattern I am working to break), I just wrote an extra poem called ‘Dear Yesterday’ in addition to the day’s “official” poem. I kept going. A few weeks later it happened again. I kept going.

A few days ago I wrote a poem and thought: Oh. This is something. Not a finished something. Not everything. But I could feel it, its shape in the world: something. Something I wanted—needed—to follow. The next day I wrote a poem I knew was dribble and laughed about it and the day after that—another something. I can’t remember the last time I felt that something brewing inside me.

I don’t know where any of this is going. All I can think about is poetry. I’m struggling to concentrate on reading novels. I blew off work early the other day because I was so desperate to get back to revising that something. I’m pulling beloved poetry books off the shelves. I’m thinking about sonnets. Punctuation follows me on my walks. It’s been days since I listened to an audiobook because instead I’m listening to silence and working out knots in line breaks. I feel a little bit drunk. Like there is too much sunlight pouring through my skin.

At first I was hesitant to share any of this because it still feels so miraculous. I was afraid it would vanish if I admitted it was happening. I am not afraid of that anymore. I will write a poem tomorrow; nothing will stop me. I don’t know if these poems will turn into a book, or many books, or simply lead me back into my life. I don’t know. I’m sharing this with you because making art is sometimes lonely. In those long fallow years, when I was still trying to sow into the fallowness, I often felt like I would never find another word ever again. There were days I was certain I’d never make anything. Maybe these words will help ease your loneliness a little. Maybe they will help you ease into your own fallowness, or out of it.

It’s been a little over a month of whatever this is (it’s joy) and I know enough about myself and art to know I haven’t arrived anywhere. Writing poetry! I don’t know how to do it! But this doesn’t scare me. It fills me with excitement and hunger. Writing poetry! I am doing it! I can learn to do it better! Maybe I will learn to do it so well that, with it, I’ll transform a little piece of the world.

Here I am, at almost forty, doing something new. Something new that sprouted when I tossed a novel in a drawer, and blossomed when I accepted that I didn’t have anything to say.