Are You Making Writing Resolutions?
For those who are writing, reading, being, taking notes, journaling, reflecting, howling at the moon, walking in the rain, waiting for the snow, mixing a drink, mixing a mocktail, counting steps...
How are you?
Are you setting goals, reassessing your approach, taking note of your surroundings, hauling bags to the DONATIONS bin, taking inventory of good intentions, human weaknesses, shortcomings?
Are you re-reading W.D. Snodgrass’s poem, “April Inventory,” wondering if there really is any “… value underneath/The gold and silver in [your] teeth…”?
I’m not sure I believe in resolutions, but I make them all the time.
I blur the line between “resolution” and “self-imposed deadline,” because for me that’s what any resolutions amount to: a goal that I set for myself. I do it all year long. I think one of the best tools a creative person can have is the ability to set goals and follow through, regardless of the rest of life’s demands.
Writing is a lifestyle and a daily practice.
Sometimes I set goals and set them again. I’ll surprise myself by looking back, seeing how much time has passed since I first scrawled the first related note on a particular scrap of paper…but the important part is to keep going with one’s projects, following a vision, keep writing if that’s the focus, keep building a life.
I plan to crank up the writing this year.
I look forward to immersing myself in making work out of words, ideas and experience. I look forward to making myself laugh, cracking up, and finding the surprise on the page, the connections I hadn’t quite made before I wrote something down, the magical way metaphor and meaning is revealed through revision.
And in that spirit, I’m going to be teaching a couple of workshops.
Join if you’d like?
More information is posted on my website here: Book Online | Monica Drake
Also, I’m going to lead one online reading/discussion group also based on essays…because essays are exciting! They’re inspiring. Reading essays makes me want to write. Reading essays kickstarts engagement with the writing process and keeps it fresh.
For those of you who just read Best American Essays 2023 with me, this is the same again. I’ve heard from people who hoped to join but didn’t, and they asked if I’d run it again. You’re always welcoming to circle back around, but this will go over essays we read together.
Maybe this will be my year of essays.
What is it about essays?
They are such a lusciously direct mode of communication, yet even in that space for direct delivery, they make room to reach for all the techniques of fiction, including chronology, metaphor, scene, setting, dialogue, alongside compression, expansion, ambiguity, love.
Essays can be stylistically diverse. They can move in any direction at all….always circling back to interrogating the way we live, together, and finding meaning in being alive, being human, here and now, swinging through the interior world and the exterior, the personal and the larger social or cultural, the historic and contemporary, the real and imagined…essays are elastic and imaginative, in their clarity and linguistic magic.
Anyone can step in. We start with the first step, wherever people are, accommodating any aspect of the process from the idea, to the first sentence and onward. I invite you to throw words on the page, then find a shape, a composition, a way of saying things. I’m here to support the process.
The other cool thing about essays is that the size is usually compact, manageable, something a person can keep in mind, revise on a lunch break, and then again later…
Join?
It’s been a while since I’ve taught a workshop, a handful of months. I’m not sure when I’ll offer one again. For now, I’m looking forward to seeing the work of a small group of writers, talking about essays and making the work stronger. Also, we’ll talk about where to send work, how to aim for a publication.
The two workshops listed are essentially the same. One is online, the other will be in NE Portland.
My essays have been published in the Paris Review, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Northwest Review, New York Times “Modern Love,” The Stranger, The Portland Mercury, the Rumpus, Longreads with links to the Guardian and more.
To me, writing essays is thrilling.
Maybe you’ll feel the same.
M
The goal is to finish the project by the end of the year. But I believe its going to take 2. Have doubled my writing time per day when its possible.
Gosh I’m having fun with Substack! Writing a small essay a week. It’s taking up a lot of space in my head, though.