My office is s space near the only window. I have a long L-shaped desk with my computer at the L’s foot. The riser on the L has a small shelf that allows a row of paper files underneath and stacks of reference books and a huge peace lily over top. The window sill is covered with mother-in-law-tongues which are growing so well that their top spears are bent over by the low ceiling. There is a small wall cut-out just over the end of the L of my desk which looks into the kitchen. Underneath that a small rolling shelf holds more reference books (non-English languages) and my scanner. Other than that, there are book shelves.

I catalog my books at LibraryThing.com and currently I have 1,865 books in this tiny “garden” flat. All the wall space is taken by books. I’ve had to put 4 tall book shelves back to back to make walls down the length of the living/dining room. I do have a small table but it is backed into a corner between a reading chair and another book shelf. The table holds plants which I water once a week and which the cats eat then disgorge in interesting places during the night.

There is always something that needs cleaning and my sense of obligation to that need is why I mostly start new ideas away from home.

When forced to think new thoughts at home, I retreat into my bedroom and start this way, by writing about something else altogether. Normally it would be just gobbledegook of the “I’m really annoyed at my fucked-up inner ears and why the fuck do I get dizzy every time I get so much as a sniffle and jeezus fuck I am upset because I really wanted to walk today and this means I can’t”. I keep going and more often than not something will surface that might turn into a poem.

On days when I can go out I will often just take my notebook. I prefer to write directly on a computer but there are days when I really just want to attend to what is around me so I leave books and computers at home and just take the notebook. I have learnt that if I don’t write down those phrases that surface, or those feelings, or odd images, then they will just float away and even if I can recall the sense they gave me, the specificity of the experience will vanish. So I take a notebook and pen.

On other days I will go to Waves or Calhoun’s with my my baby computer and just start typing what I notice. I treat reality like a dream and try to figure out what the dream characters (the table, the tree outside, the crow stealing crumbs from a cafe table) mean – and what this “dream” is saying. I wrote Rammstein like that, in a haze of migraine pain.

I only use music when working on a piece that has a specific feel to it. I’ve got the idea or phrase-seed outside somewhere and have brought it home to work it to what I call a first draft stage. Sometimes by the time I get home the feeling that came to verbal fruition as that particular bit of language has gone. If I can’t re-surface it, I go though my i-Tunes list and find something that is similar and write to that. That is often very successful. Other than than I prefer silence, or if noise, the kind you get on the street or up the mountain in a forest.

I seem to have two main areas of trouble when it comes to production. The first is that I am not a steady kind of person. I blow like steam in a high wind. I do not do routine well so some days I just walk, some days I just browse youtube, political sites, and photography blogs. Some days I read all day and stay under that particular sea. There are duty days too, in which shopping, cleaning, cooking things get done. So I can go many days without doing any serious writing. One of the reasons I started tailfeather was to make those breaks shorter. It works, but I still need to write more poetry.

I can say that writing poetry is hard, and that would be true. Revision is a bitch. But really, once I am in that quiet body zone, just attending to the world, the phrases surface regardless of whether I think I’m writing poetry or not. The trick is to go into the world prepared for that, to stop and write them down, to carve out time each and every day to shift from chore-world to attention-world. It really doesn’t take much to do that, but it does take at least intent.

For a number of reasons I’ve started a writing journal. I won’t be subjecting you to all my ramblings, but since I find other writers’ habits utterly fascinating, you may be interested in mine. So I’ve created a new category called “writing journal” and will be posting to it occasionally.

As always, I would love to hear your habits, thoughts, feelings on the topic. How do you manage that dark spring?

Comment here or email me at mary@tailfeather.ca