🌒 Breakthroughs for that Summer Writing Fog
The picture above and below is of a beach on Prince Edward Island, Canada, where I went this summer on an epic, decades-in-the-making Anne of Green Gables trip with my best friend. We'd literally been planning this since high school. More on that in my next newsletter!
Dearest camerados,
Happy New Moon, my friends! This is the lunation for new beginnings, for dreams being born, for corners being turned. It's that time once a month where the universe kindly nudges you, saying "remember, you are a maker of things."
What wants to be created during this season you're in? What's got your fingers itching?Â
It's possible you don't have an answer to that question. It might feel as though you're in a hazy in-between where you want to make something, but nothing has caught you.
Has anyone else felt that their writing weather is a bit foggy this summer?
Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the usual push-pull between wanting to be present for the summer and wanting to get words on paper - very uncomfortable, like a wet swimsuit that you can't change out of. I suspect, for many of us, it's that the world is literally on fire and it's just tough to concentrate, to believe that the work we're doing is a valuable use of our time.Â
I don't dislike the fog, actually. I've found it to be a good, if bemusing, container for contemplation, for assessing where the water of my experience meets the shore of who I am now. It's a little foreboding, but it calls to me anyway. What's behind all that mist? How deep will I let my feet sink into the sand?
I've taken nearly all summer off writing and my whole self, including my work, is better for it. No laptop on my vacations, no pressure to complete anything. I had one awful weekend where I was convinced I could revise an old book and sell it--my wisdom mind finally kicked in and put a stop to that nonsense.Â
For the most part, I've just been reading, letting my mind wander a lot, enjoying the season, and people, and good beer. I've hung out with my cat, swum in the Adriatic, walked the cobblestoned streets and alleyways of Dubrovnik. I saw the lap desk where Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables and walked through the Haunted Wood. I picked Queen Anne's Lace beside The Lake of Shining Waters. I chose to re-name a red-dirt road The Red Way (because Cliffords Lane just wasn't cutting it). I sewed cocktail napkins, watched some fantastic Midwestern summer storms, baked bread, meditated in the ways that felt good to me. In short, I've been paying attention and letting the world speak to me. I've been listening.Â
What came out of my exploring and rest was the shape of my new WIP, a memoir I have been too intimidated to write, but which has been tapping me gently on the shoulder for some time. It has been coming to me in fragments the more rested I get, the more I let go of expectations: bits and pieces that I line up in my mind and re-arrange like the many pebbles and seashells I've accrued these past few months.Â
Some part of me must have known that this was coming because when I look at the books I've been reading, the questions I've been asking, the particular flavor of my inner work, and the leaps and bounds in my relationship to the people in my life and to my Zen practice...
I can see the shape of this book lowly walking toward me through the fog.Â
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The words of others have been lights in this fog for me, directing me to these fragments scattered all over the sand of my memory.Â
I just finished Katherine May's newest, Enchantment, and found it an interesting companion to my favorite spring 2023 read, Terry Tempest Williams's When Women Were Birds. Both have supported me during this foggy season where no clear story has demanded my attention because they are beautiful and because they are in conversation with landscape, noting how the earth speaks to the deepest parts of us, allowing--if we're listening--for insight to curl its way through the din of modern life.Â
Tempest says:
"Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the moon exposing the night. Behind the darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges."
I wrote in Little Universes that the answers are in the silence, and, for me, it's true. Fog dampens noise. Creates a cocoon of attention.Â
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I'm inviting you to journey further into the fog with me. To search for story fragments as though they are shells in the sand.Â
Through a series of what I call Breakthrough calls, I'd like to help you discover how powerful writing in fragments can be, what listening could look like in your particular life, how you might be able to cobble together a story amidst the fires and storms that come your way.Â
Not everyone has a life where they can sit for hours and write. Not all of us even WANT to. But in whatever time you have, how do ready yourself to receive what is coming your way? What shifts in your life, what skills, what tools are needed to thrive in the fog?
When a writer becomes receptive, Story responds. But that receptivity requires a letting go that can be so hard in our product-driven culture. The partner that mentions, once again, that if the writing doesn't bring in money....what's it for? The pitying looks from family when you say your book isn't finished...yet (it's been five years). The news that a good friend got an agent...and you have only rejection emails. The shame over your work, and what others might think of it. This is not fog you can float through: this is a relentless storm. All you want to do is find shelter. That shelter, it turns out, is play.Â
In Enchantment Katherine May writes (emphasis mine):
"The skills of deep play took far longer to learn than anything I'd studied before. They meant asserting the awkward right to time, space, and solitude; making a shameful claim on my creativity. They meant learning to trust my long-forgotten gut instinct and to feel a yearning for my own work.
They meant putting aside time to do things that seemed pointless to the outside world. They meant confronting my stultifying terror of failure and learning to enjoy eviscerating mediocre, mistake-ridden work. It was long and slow and uncertain, and often quite boring...I felt like someone fighting their way through undergrowth to reach a place they only vaguely remembered. The place was the core of me. Every moment was worth it."
Deep play looks different for all of us, but you know it when you find it--a foghorn, bellowing. Here, here, here. Or maybe it's like this tiny lighthouse on Brackley Beach in PEI, sending its bit of light through the mist so you can find your way to where you need to go.Â
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The fog can be a gift. A sign from your body and spirit that it needs rest and requires soul sustenance. It is asking for repair.
The words will come when they come. They always do. In the meantime, how can you listen? Where are the pockets of silence you can tuck yourself into each day, like a crab returning to its shell? What is calling in the mist?
Yours in doing right by the miracle,
P.S.
In case you missed my last missive: I got permission from the dean of the creative writing program I professor at to share a term's worth of the mindfulness for writers sessions I led for our grad students. May they be of benefit!
Here are some of the books that have been my best companions in the fog this summer. I hope they will be good travel buddies for you, too:
I've been reading like a fiend this summer, but THIS BOOK was my absolute fave. It's a gorgeous story about Deaf resistance, filled with great characters and set in the fascinating world of Deaf culture. True biz: you gotta get this book. We need more stories like this and I am so grateful that my good friend Betzi put this one in my hands.Â
P.S. I took a deep dive into mindfulness for Deaf folks for a paper I wrote for the UCLA mindfulness teaching program I'm in - I've linked some helpful resources below for those of you who are as passionate as I am about mindfulness for ALL. Please share with Deaf friends!
This meditation video on YouTube ( I love seeing meditation in ASL!)
Deaf mindfulness resourcesÂ
One of my dearest friends, Jinzu Minna, gave me this book as a gift when I received my Zen dharma name this June (more on that later). From the cover, I had no idea why they chose it for me beyond it being an interesting mashup of topics - but then I read the first few sentences. OH MY BLESSED. This is one of the most beautiful and intriguing books I've ever encountered. I don't really think I can explain it because it's working in such profoundly new and interesting territory. You won't regret getting a copy for yourself.Â
Wow, wow, wow. As someone who is working in memoir, this book is a gem. And if you're not, then it's still a gem. I've never seen a memoir written in precisely this way, although I've seen some really great departures from narrative form. Because Maggie Smith is a poet (she wrote "Good Bones"), the language sings, but it's the structure that I'm so fascinated by. These little snippets, fragments that add up to a whole. It's pushing me as a writer, and supporting my current practice of writing in very small, fragmented bits. This one is especially great if you only have small pockets of reading time.Â