Still A Weirdo
“The vague itch returns. What shall I write of and what shall I vow? I promise to be good.”
Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
Camerados!
I write to you on the other side of graduating with my Master’s in Social Work. I am now officially a therapist, licensed and all, ready to support my fellow creatives in These Very Trying Times. There was a very funny moment when my class and I were walking towards the auditorium to line up and the person organizing us called out, “Master’s of Science, Social Work.” A friend turned to me in panic and said, “This is a science degree?” I stared at her in equal horror: “I’m an artist.” This was news to us. No one had ever said this was a science degree. Our other friend, a few people behind, threw out in their deadpan, world-weary voice of having been in the trenches as a youth social worker for years, “It’s going to be okay.” We dissolved into laughter.
It’s technically not a science degree, though we are part of the health sciences college. Social work is it’s own degree, so when we walked across the stage, it was simply announced as “Master’s in Social Work,” but the moment reminded me that I was in awfully new territory. This was so different from when I’d gotten my MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we’d named our class the Allies in Wonderland, read from our fiction throughout the week, wrote master’s thesis projects on things like the Ecstatic in Fantasy Literature. While I’ve so enjoyed getting to know my peers and colleagues, I am an odd duck in the social work world. It’s not that there aren’t creatives in my field—I just rarely meet them. Certainly I haven’t met anyone like me, who has had a serious professional career in the arts. I’m sure I will. My dear friend, the author Camille DeAngelis, is halfway through her social work degree, so there’s one.
The Zen Master gave me the perfect graduation gift, Phaidon’s Great Women Artists, along with a card that was a reminder: yes, I’m going into this new field in a support capacity to my fellow artists. But I am, first and foremost, an artist myself. It has been difficult to retain that sense at times. I am sure you have all been there: life pulls us, has its demands. There are seasons where the art must take a back seat. We work to keep this part of ourselves alive and it can feel like a shadow self, and we are so afraid it will become a memory, that we’ll look back on it as we do our younger self, dancing in a fountain, smoking a forbidden cigarette, jumping a fence with a No Trespassing sign. The grief settles, we push it away, we want to keep this alive, this part, but how, when every day we lay down and not a word has been written and the story ideas seem to go back out into the ether, collected by someone else. We walk into a bookstore and there is our idea, on someone else’s book cover, facing out, with sprayed edges.
We need people in our lives to remind us who we are. When you’re an artist, the world is very happy to tell you that you’re not.
This weekend, I finished reading my Christmas book from the Zen Master, another perfect reminder of who I am—Patti Smith’s new memoir Bread of Angels, her follow up to the incandescent Just Kids. It’s been the perfect book for me this year, because a major plot twist in her story is that she took a break from being a rockstar to be a mom, to pursue writing in the margins, to be a “traveler who never traveled,” despite having spent many years traveling the world. She put a pause on it all, moved to the Midwest, and had a total reversal from her previous life:
In my longing for travel, to walk other streets in other lands, I converted small areas in my mind. The corner of the bait shop at the end of the block, with its whitewashed walls and empty lot was my Morocco…
Sometimes I feel that way, too. I went from living in New York City and abroad, traveling all the time, publishing one to two books a year to moving to the Midwest and pursuing a social work degree. I bought a condo, got two cats, and lots of plants. I grew roots. I haven’t been abroad in three years. (A huge privilege that I got to travel like that in the first place, though it had become such a huge part of me, my creative life, and how I engaged with the world and my own burgeoning identity).
I didn’t grow up that way. Through luck, grit, and, yes, privilege of my skin color and where publishing was at when I started my career, I was able to build the writing and creative life I longed for. A whole life of yearning led to dreams made manifest, a self that felt safe and far away from the traps I was terrified of falling into.
Travel, living in big cities, and being a full-time artist was one way I tried to heal my trauma and seek worthiness. One way I tried to avoid regret, disappointment, a bitter deathbed.
But, like Patti, I realized it wasn’t enough. And also, like Patti, I felt that I wasn’t very good at playing the game. She spoke of ways she could have been more successful in the music industry and, due to her artistic visions and distaste for certain kinds of marketing and ways of moving through the world, she wasn’t able to hold onto the potential at her fingertips. Of course, I was never in Patti’s position. I never hung out with the likes of Bob Dylan and Susan Sontag. I never hit the list. But I feel such a kinship with the story she tells in Bread of Angels. Being pulled in different directions, longing, too, for quiet even though the soul yearned to roam and parts of her wanted to make noise. This period of her life in the Midwest is where find myself in now. It’s exactly where I need to be. It’s also a little weird.
Cloud Dwellers
Right after graduation I took myself to Tybee Island in Georgia for a few days. I journaled and walked on the beach and read and thought. I didn’t know if I would write, but was surprised how, just a few days after all the pressure of clinicals and school and graduating were over, the words came back.
Just before bed a few days into my stay I got an idea for a picture book based on something I’ve thought a lot about, how Stalin called Boris Pasternak a “cloud dweller” and how, being someone who is an artist with their head in the clouds literally saved his life. I’ve wanted to write about that for a long time, how being an artist has saved my life in more ways than one.
Whether it’s being able to imagine my future or dissociate in a healthy way, having my head in the clouds has not only allowed me to survive, it has been my main source of thriving.
The next morning, in less than an hour, I’d written a picture book. It had been a year since my last one, almost to the day. It had also been a year since I’d written much of anything outside this beloved newsletter, papers for class, and charting for my clients. I was filled with such joy. It felt so good to create something I was pleased with, to play with words, to make something.
As Patti Smith wrote, “I felt blessed with the aspiration to produce worthy work.”
I have always felt blessed with this aspiration, although it can sometimes feel like a curse. It certainly doesn’t bring in money that often. High standards rarely do. It can make life difficult. It can feel like pressure. Most of you know that phrase that came from my novel Little Universes - “do right by the miracle” - which has become my own mantra and vow. Yet, I can see, with clients and others, how, if you don’t have such an aspiration in your life, existence can be very hard indeed.
I share this—all of this post, really—because I know the suffering of the writer who doesn’t write, the traveler who doesn’t travel.
Many of you reading this are feeling these things right now. I continue to have the best book I’ve ever written languishing on my desktop, unpublished and rejected. No one wants a book about two female war correspondents that is honest about the brutality of war and includes scenes of male rape, the murder of a child, and mass graves. Strange, because these things are in the news every day. God forbid we write about them.
As of this week, my agent and I have parted ways, amicably. After almost fifteen years, I don’t have a literary agent. She was my second. This was the best decision for my career, I appreciate her honesty in being a fan who simply has not been able to place my work, and it’s also another transition I must work with, which is a lot.
One of the reasons I work with creatives is because of experiences such as this. It’s not just about career challenges, but about those larger issues of feeling powerless, and needing tools and strategies to stay in your own power, no matter what. To know your worth, to see what’s really happening. To be awake.
I don’t see my work not selling as in indictment on my talent: I see it as a lack of courage in an industry that has sold its soul to corporate overlords.
We writers here in the US aren’t being sent to gulags for what we write, but we are being sent to the hinterlands of unemployment, where our voices are being muted by capitalist greed.
Right now, I just need to spend some time in the clouds—I think a lot of us do. In the clouds there are:
Words
Flow
Poetry
Other cloud dwellers
Bach sonatas
Picnics in the sun
My cats
Journals with good paper
Fountain pens
Good books
Picture books (especially my new favorite one)
“I became acutely aware of my hand resting on the edge of a blank page. Fate and experience traceable in the mystical anatomy of my open palm, heavily lined and young simultaneously. I grip a drying pen and seek to unearth a kernel of truth, accomplishing very little. Subjective truth cannot change the course of things nor dispel the fury of nature. It is the direct result of horror morphing into shame…
Later that night, preparing for sleep, I feel a warmth spreading across my face. At first it frightens me, as if overcome with fever, but then I empty myself in a rare moment of surrender. A dialogue seems to fill the room, unbidden, enlightening.
—What is God?
—Presence in the face of suffering. "
Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
When I write, I am bearing witness. This is how I do right by the miracle. This means that I get really fucking pissed when editors and publishers lack courage. All this holy fury needs a place to go and it goes into my writing, but if my writing doesn’t get published…you see where I’m going here.
—What is God?
—Presence in the face of suffering.
Becoming a therapist for writers is a gift to myself—it allows me to be present in the face of our suffering as creatives. In turn, I am bearing witness to my own suffering, reflected in my fellow creative. It is a holy moment, creatives coming together to heal. It reminds me a little bit of when I used to give blood platelets for the cancer kids at Boston children’s. The machine takes your blood, gets what it needs, then gives the blood back to you. I am a therapist, a coach, a healer for artists. I am also an artist.
This is a time of great upheaval and uncertainty. It is unsurprising that most of us are experiencing that in the microcosm of our individual lives. To have that in miniature while also have It All Happening in the macro background is a lot.
We’re making adjustments to our writing careers as the industry is changing, as our bodies and families are changing, as our finances and goals are changing. We’re trying to meet the demands of technology, navigate self-publishing and its possibilities while also acknowledging that it asks us to be so much more than writers. Fascism is on the rise, AI is on the rise. English departments are closing. There is less support than ever for artists. It feels apocalyptic.
How many of you feel like you’ve just been hit by a bus and have no idea what to do with it all? Or you are trying so hard to ignore it and work, work, work? How many of you are where you want to be? (I’m seeing very few hands on that last one).
For this summer, what if we all decided to be cloud dwellers, to really lean into that part of ourselves?
We need our cloud dwellers.
And if our cloud dwellers need some time to go be in the clouds to take care of themselves, to search for things to inspire them to bring back down to earth, then take that time.
What if took care of our creativity, our craft, made space for our writing in the margins and, if we have more than margins, then explored what we can do with that time that would fill really delicious?
I’m sending this out on Memorial Day, the official beginning of the season, where so many writers wring their hands and worry over how best to use the time. And every summer I drag out my reminders to be gentle with yourself because summer always tricks you into thinking you’re going to be productive and then you forget how the time just…warps and slides and slips and it’s gone.
Take out journal and explore the following questions. They might help you suss out what this summer could look like for you if you rejected hustling for your worth in the outdated late-stage capitalist model that publishing keeps promising writers and failing to deliver on.
What is in the clouds for you?
What would being in the clouds this summer look like?
How does a cloud dweller move through the world?
Do you identify as being a cloud dweller?
How has it saved your life?
Could it save your life again?
Do you want it to?
Do you need it to?
What I think is really in the clouds, if we spend enough time there is what Patti Smith discovered, and so many cloud dwellers before her: the bread of angels.
This is what the writer craves, in a café in the earliest hours, in an empty drawing room of a hotel, or scrawling in a notebook in the pew of a silent cathedral. A sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment…These are the bread of angels.
Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
You can’t find that without a leap of courage or, if you’ll notice each place she mentions…silence.
That’s what led Patti to leave her rock band in the middle of their success, move to the Midwest, and start a family with the love of her life. She knew she wanted to write, she knew the stage wasn’t where she needed to be right then, that it wasn’t good for her, even if it was so cool, so badass. It’s what led her down strange paths, to saying no when others would have said yes, to collaborations of all kinds, to deep ties with those she loved and pursuing what she cared about, no matter what.
I titled this post Still A Weirdo because of the song by KT Tunstall that has always been a cairn on my journey. I offer it to you, as a reminder that, no matter where you are on your path right now, you get to still be a weirdo.
I’ll see you in the clouds. ☁️
Yours in doing right by the miracle,
P.S.
Since I chose to join a private group practice, I’m slowly building my client list, which means I unexpectedly have time to do some critiques this summer! If you’ve been wanting to work with me on a manuscript, now is the time, as I’ll have very little once my schedule is full. Contact me for more info!
Need some help cloud dwelling this summer? I love jumping on the phone for coaching calls. We wouldn’t be able to do therapy unless you’re in MN, but we can do work that goes quite deep, as well as brainstorm, untangle knots, dream and scheme.
Beautiful...AND....congratulations on this monumental, purpose-driven accomplishment.
If it's any comfort--when I was training we read the classic book by Anthony Storr (now updated by Jeremy Holmes) "The *Art* of Psychotherapy." I think many of us appreciated that title!