In Which a Writer Pieces Together Her Life

I realize from talking lately to friends that so many of us, as writers, live fragmented lives…we have writing lives, and work lives, and family lives, and maybe a couple of other lives as well. It’s really hard to keep giving to each different life, keeping them all going. It might well lead to fragmented selves. I’ve been at the task of piecing together a work life and a writing life that leads to some kind of reasonable balance, trying to get organized and focus on my long-term goals. While taking stock of the years from age 19-current, you know that the single stable factor was across all the years, more than the type of job, longer than my marriage has lasted, besides poetry? Volunteering. Mostly with teens and children, at schools, churches, children’s hospitals, writing workshops. I realized that this probably means that what I want to do is have a positive impact on the world, more than making money, more than any specific career goal. It’s something I hadn’t realized about myself. I mean, I need to pay off those student loans eventually, right?

I went through my giant three boxes of literary magazines and realized that some writers I thought I was just now discovering: Karyna McGlynn, for instance, whose book “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl” I reviewed for The Rumpus and loved, or Karen Carissimo, the wonderful perfumer, whose poetry I have literally had in my possession for over ten years in different literary magazines…these writers aren’t new discoveries, I’ve been reading them for years! I thought about how long it takes writers to make an impact. I was thinking I’m going to be on my third book next year and how it still feels like a struggle to even make a little bit of noise in the howling hollow of the poetry book world. The other thing these boxes made me realized is how many of these magazines had a sentimental value: my friend Natasha Moni’s first issue of Crab Creek Review as editor; an issue of a defunct magazine a bunch of my Seattle and blog friends are in; my fellow Pacific U alum friend Felicity Shoulders’ first story in Asimov’s. The first issue of A Public Space, which included a ton of contemporary Japanese lit stuff that helped me research my second book. A six-year-old issue of Paris Review that has an amazing AS Byatt story about contemporary mermaids. Heck, I still have my seventh-grade poetry textbook, with my loopy cursive handwriting notes on the poems.

So it would seem that though I think of myself as a poet who is pretty hard-headed, practical, business-y, (at least for a poet) I’m actually full of sentiment and care-taking impulses. Sometimes our physical possessions indicate something about our real selves, and unpacking forces us to realize this.