I’m trying to figure out what to do with this blog space.

Poor Steve, I’m always griping about / searching for what my next path should be. Post-school-school-school, not wanting to teach art, sort-of wanting to teach writing, pregnant, post(?)-first-manuscript, and finally feeling the space in my brain and heart to go forward.

My energy goes into lots of little things, but no big thing. I love keeping a blog. I had started it up again last January because I was talking to Jennifer, my always-inspirational writing companion, about what to do next and where I feel my energy, and she felt that, aside from a book or a gallery show or anything, she felt it was enough, it was plenty, to catalogue all these moments in my day. Because that’s what we do each Friday, we recount our lives and talk too long and write some and it’s always enlightening and funny. So my initial intention was to do that, to make my blog a sort of place for recounting small things — the penny I found, the flower I scavenged, the funny thing someone said, the process of making or burning dinner. I thought it would be more like notes–not thinking about audience or sentence-structure. And though each entry wouldn’t have plot, time passes and so plot occurs naturally.

But over time I think it has become too much of a written journal. And definitely it’s something I need, and it’s something that gives me energy. I love trying to write a piece that feels whole about something that happened — pumpkin carving or a funny interaction with Rosie — and trying to see the ’so what’ inside that moment and create a sort of mini-essay out of the moments of my life. And I think no writing is for naught–that energy of crafting sentences, of noticing something and transcribing it to the page is always valuable. And plus this is a place of problem-solving: I come here with an issue or question and I work it out on the page, which is how I like to deal with things.

But I think it has moved away from more of an artful catalogue of a life, and maybe has become too self-conscious. I think part of that was slightly inevitable because a good chunk of this blog has been grappling with infertility and IVF and IVF again. That’s a lot of plot, and a lot of exhaustion, and I wasn’t in a space to talk a lot about pennies I found and flowers I had scavenged. I was in crisis mode.

Being here at the Vermont Studio Center has lifted me out of crisis mode: it has allowed me to step back and see less near-sightedly, to see what I want to do next. My hope is to get a project underway — that sounds very hopeful, maybe too hopeful, but I want to explore the threads of projects that I’ve begun these past few years and to see if they have the strength to weave themselves into a larger project. Sometimes when I think about what I want to do next, I see a collection of poems. Sometimes I see an interaction of poetry and imagery. Sometimes I see something more like what Anne Carson does, where the genre isn’t singular in one book, so there are essays and poems and imagery. But I had so much satisfaction in creating the last manuscript, which, also inspired a lot by Anne Carson, tried to push the form of the essay–usually beginning with what was originally a poem and forgetting about line breaks. The act of writing it was so rigorous to me, but what created the drive inside of me was the essay form’s marriage with the fact that I had powerful material, a subject matter that I felt really needed to be recorded. I had an urgency in writing the last manuscript–this feeling that it needed to be written, I could not die without having written it. I actually felt at moments, absurdly, like I was invincible, like I was so meant to write it that I surely would not die until it was done, and that would keep me safe as I was driving or crossing a street.

I want to find that feeling again, and truthfully I feel the seeds of it most these days when I’m writing in the blog: infertility, pregnancy, the minutia of a marriage and a family, photographs and text, I feel an urgency in describing and recounting this. But also I don’t feel creative when I’m recounting it, or I don’t feel like I’m breaking new ground. Books about IVF have been written before; blogs about a family are all over the internet. I’m not a journalist, and I can’t write a self-help book, and my creative writing does not pointedtly deal with infertility.

Instead, here at the Vermont Studio Center, the material that is most inspiring is not what I’ve written for the blog. I’ve had more luck so far working with drafts of poems I’d begun with another site I created and manage, a password-protected site where my friends and I post two poem-drafts a month. I’ve also had more luck working with drafts of stuff I’d begun for twosuchmaps, another site I created and manage. The parts of this blog, courtneymandryk.com, that have been most inspiring for me this week so far have been the photographs. When I mark a photograph with the date as its title then it’s part of a photograph series: I photograph something that to me feels like a drawing. I don’t know how to describe that yet, but I know it when I see it. That transcendence of form is what I seem to like to think about, and the photograph-to-drawing transcription has been exciting for me so far.

Which leaves me unsure where to go on this blog or in my next project. If I’m going to put my time and energy into the blog, I want it to be great and I want it to feed me. I like the medium of the online world — it’s a fantastic place to explore the transcendence of materials. And I also love cataloguing the moments of my life. It makes my life feel real to me, it keeps me in the moment, and it helps me see the artfulness in each day. But it isn’t enough so far, I don’t think, and I don’t know how it’s contributing to my next project. I want to get more out of this online space, and I don’t yet know how.

November 12th, 2009 | Category: inward | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL