Ikkle Gangster!

This my son, in a three piece baby suit. Doesn’t he look bookish and literary? I think so. Pic care of the talented Amanda Bernsohn.

Lucky Baby red velvet cake....mmmm!

As you may or may not know, dear blog readers, I’m up the spout. Do people say that in America, or is it an English idiom? Let me translate, just in case. I’m knocked up. Got a bun in the oven. Preggers. I’m…preg-Nancy.

The baby is due at the end of July, and my husband and I are busy doing that nesting thing, by which I mean throwing away — or hawking online — everything we possibly can in order to make way for what is bound to be a massive baby (I’m 6′ and my husband is 6′4) and all his massive baby swag. And this also means the end of an era. Since 2006, I’ve been holding weekly workshops in our living room — but no more! Baby’s coming, and baby’s taking over. Well, taking over the living room, at least.

The salons that I’ll be teaching this summer will be hosted by my gracious mother-in-law, the poet Alison Jarvis, and I’m currently sourcing space for the fall workshops.

In the meantime, though, I have two workshop groups just finishing up and one of them was kind enough to throw me an surprise baby shower at the end of our last session together. I was very touched. Reader, I almost cried.

The photo above is of the awesome red velvet cake that we ate, and the photos below show the workshop group and the living room workshop space. (Please note — there are not usually open bottles of alcohol at my workshops, but this was a special occasion.)

A big thank you to everyone in the group for making this such a great workshop and for all your wonderful gifts!

The Workshop Group (and my color-coded bookshelf)

The workshop living room space (and that's me on the left, grabbing my belly!)

This is probably the exact wood violet that Glück was talking about in her poem. Maybe.

My father recently sent me a quote from the poet Louise Glück who, in her collection of essays, Proofs and Theories, writes that the fundamental experience of the writer is…

…helplessness…most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, not being able to write differently. It is a life dignified…by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.

Which is affirming, if you look it at one way, and see it as confirmation that your own struggles — and what writer does not struggle? — are par for the course, a consequence of the difficult art you have chosen for yourself, and not a symptom that you suck.

So many people that I work with think that their writerly torment means that they are doing something wrong, or that they shouldn’t be writing, or they believe that that no one else finds it so hard. Me and ole’ Louie G are here to tell you otherwise.

At the same time, though, jeeze, Louise. Bleak much? I replied to my father’s email with just such a sentiment. “I get it,” I wrote to him. “I experience it, but what’s the freakin’ payoff? Why do this?”

His reply: “Well, the reason for doing it is that there’s no other way of ‘getting’ it than by doing it. That’s the payoff: being in it. ‘Cos otherwise you’re not in it. And then where are you?”

That’s a prime esoteric father response right there, readers. I get it though. Do you? Is this your reason for writing or are you driven by something else entirely?

As a closing note, here’s a link to a Glück poem, called “April,” because we are in April and despite all the writerly torment that we all put ourselves through on a daily basis, the spring sunshine outside is glorious. This is not at all what the poem is about, though.

This interesting article from the Wall Street Journal should make anyone (like me, for example) who seems to spend hours in unfocused thought feel a little better. A couple of quotes:

…our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests.

And:

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

A third? If all is going well, I’ll spend longer daydreaming than that, mate. There’s nothing like a good daydreaming session to make me feel productive. The brain mechanisms that this article talks about might also be the reason that I get great writing ideas when I run. As I’m plodding round the park, sometimes, admittedly, I’m listening to 1980s rave tunes and reliving my clubbing days. But other times, my mind enters a fugue state and, well, I just realize something. That scene I have been stuck on, about my grandmother? It’s really about my father. Aha. Of course.

Haruki Murakami, a novelist I admire, is also a runner, and his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, contains his own treatise on why running is good for the writer’s life. In this quote from an interview on the Runner’s World website, he seems to describe the same experience that I have had, and that the researchers in the Wall Street Journal article are talking about. Murakami says:

I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometimes. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.

Our next challenge is to pay attention to that thing that has crawled in. Write it down. Follow where it leads.

In fiction, Berlin’s famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes, drawn from the pithy fragment attributed to the classical poet Archilochus (”The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) remains influential. Hedgehogs, in Berlin’s celebrated essay, see the world through the lens of one big, defining idea. They include Plato, Dante, Proust and Nietzsche. Foxes, who scour the landscape, drawing on a wide variety of experience and are indefatigably averse to a single explanatory idea, include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, James Joyce and, dare I say, Salman Rushdie.

McCrum doesn’t stop there, though. He also contrasts “history course novels” (such as those produced by Pat Barker and Ian McEwen) and the kind of “English course novels” that Martin Amis and Lorrie Moore write. Then, in nonfiction, there are the “mores” and the “differents.”

Mores are writers who, as the label implies, are immensely gifted and vastly superior to their fellows, but are conventional in their vision. Classic mores include Thomas The World Is Flat Friedman and Niall The Pity of War Ferguson. Your different, who might be a hedgehog or a fox, is a mould-smashing one-off, usually an original, and probably quite undisciplined, writer. Differents include Dostoevsky, Oliver Sacks, Naomi Klein, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell and Atul Gawande. As readers, we may be better satisfied, in the short term, by the mores, but it’s the differents we remember, and who will probably have the lasting influence.

McCrum’s argument is that “foxes” and “mores” win more prizes than “hedgehogs” and “differents.” It would take more of an in depth survey than I am prepared to carry out to prove him right, but I can certainly get on board with the idea that we live in a fox’n'more orientated society, and it’s these writers who seem to earn the most money. We demand versatility from our writers, and breadth of knowledge. It ain’t easy being different!

“It’s time to kill, and to enjoy the killing.”

“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”

I am here today to tell you about two pieces of software that, combined, might just be saving my life right now. Hyperbole? Not even. I’m deadly serious.

The first is called Freedom and I’m afraid it’s for Mac users only, though there may be a PC equivalent. What Freedom does is block your access to the internet for the amount of time that you specify. It’s that simple. Free yourself from your internet addiction! Ditch the distractions! Write without checking your email every five minutes! Get your Freedom on! Download it here!

Wouldn’t it be great if we had the self-control to limit our own internet use, without the need for a technological intervention? Sure — but when every coffee shop in the metro area seems to have free wireless, to do that you’d need the will power of a superman. I don’t know about you, but that just ain’t me. I’ll take the help, thanks.

Freedom is also, um, free. But please consider making a donation if you use it and like it. In the immortal words of George Michael: You’ve got to give for what you take.

The second piece of software that is rocking my world right now…

…is called Scrivener, and it’s designed to provide writers with the tools they need when drafting books. It was heartily recommended to me by two clients who have sold their books, and I finally gave it a spin myself. It’s pretty easy to use and has two functions that I absolutely love: the cork board, which allows you to see your book outline as index cards on a virtual board (and move them around just as easily) and the document reference tool, which allows you to embed any research documents with your writing files, so that you can access them easily, side-by-side. Awesome! And so helpful if you are juggling several different sources, as I am at the moment.

Scrivener isn’t free, but it’s not expensive either, and you can download a trial version to try it out before you buy.

Sometimes I just love technology…when I’m not fighting against it, that it. And, by the way, I got the link to Freedom through a tweet. Yes. I’m twittering now. Follow me.

I tried to embed the video and once again, failed. It’s not me, it’s WordPress…honest. Anyhoo, follow the link. It’s worth it.