Time to Write
A couple of my favorite writing homes.
Yesterday I chatted with some friends. An old meeting invite popped up on my calendar, and I was reminded how out of contact I’ve been. So I see the alert, open and close an empty Zoom meeting, and send a text saying I’m thinking of you. During that time of catching up, I realized a couple of things. One, I really, truly miss these two smart, funny women. Two, I love to write.
Absence and fondness and all that
When I was studying and teaching writing, it became an artifact. Something I spoke about in abstract terms in my scholarship and with kind but removed precision in my courses. During that time, I mostly stopped reading for pleasure. Near the end of my time as a professor, I wasn’t particularly interested in learning anything new about writing. I still wrote a lot. A lot of email and reports and proposals and spreadsheet formulas. I actually enjoy technical writing, and I’m pretty darn good at advocating through emails and reports and proposals and spreadsheets, but it just no longer felt worthwhile. And while I love a sisyphean task as much as the next gal, my old lady shoulders could no longer bear it. I thought I’d write in Spain, but as I’ve said before, I found I’d rather just be in Spain.
Once we settled in Greensboro, though, and I had all this time to just sit and be, writing became a practice for me again, an avocation that brought me joy. I’ve always been interested in the everyday. As a scholar, I studied blogs (yes, really), television shows, and online dating and marriage. I once gave a presentation on Craigslist Missed Connections. I taught a class on rhetoric and pop culture. The unimportant things were the most interesting to me.
So when we settled in Greensboro, I became surrounded by exquisite mundanity. I could spend the morning deadheading a single azalea or researching how to dry herbs. I could take a walk in the cemetery across the street or read a bit of popular fiction. I found myself considering the camellias, if you will, and I was inspired by all of these extraordinary commonplaces. I just wanted to write about them. I started writing to document the garden and the bungalow, not wanting small changes to escape my memory. I chose to write in public because I’m not sure how many actual humans currently inhabit the world wide web, and it’s my tiny little act of rebellion to take up space here. Oddly, writing this blog feels just as old school as writing in my paper journal. Can you be a luddite online? Probably most importantly, I’m finding that I just love it. I knew I did, that's how I ended up in grad school in the first place, but now I’m remembering just how much.
In with the old, in with the new
While catching up with my friends, I realized that I’ve tried a lot of new things lately. I’m gardening, of course, something I’ve never done well. This week I registered for an introduction to pottery class. I’m revisiting past failures and trying new things. This requires vulnerability, not something I’m known for.
This experiment with vulnerability is part of why I think I’ve rekindled my love of writing. Emails and reports and proposals and spreadsheets didn’t require a lot of me, in both the sense that I create them with some ease and I wasn’t present in them. Writing about trying new things and being authentic when things aren’t going as planned (I’m looking at you, tomatoes) requires discomfort that I’m still getting used to.
