11/09/2023

Bedrooms and the Best of Intentions: Week 1 of November Writing Challenge

I love November. There's something alluring about the month before the end. It commands in equal measure the pitched mandate of disaster preparedness and a decadent sort of Masque of the Red Death need to party before the end. Few things in life delight me like cognitive dissonance. The air changes, the night gets thick with darkness as early as 5:30pm, and something in me wants to get all my shit together and ride the missile into the end of the year like the end of Dr. Strangelove.

How fitting then, that all my friends are cracking their knuckles and getting busy with the reason for the season: National Novel Writing Month. Thirty days of committed work and thirty days of my group chat blowing off steam and complaining about their word counts. I'd laugh and sip my lemonade from the Porch of the Unbothered but, here's the thing: I love a challenge. I love writing to a brief. Give me an assignment, a deadline, and a small chance of success and I'm sold. I see my friends mounting up like the Regulators and I long for a horse. But how do I ride beside them?

I've attempted to write long form before with minimal success. This is what I can best manage: thirty poems, thirty days. A poem a day. This keeps me apace with my peers and gives my November that essential doomsday feeling I need to feel alive.

So that's what I've been up to all week. So far, the process has been rewarding. Funneling my work into the bottleneck of a messy procession of days, forcing first drafts that must be edited later, I can feel these habits barnacle-ing onto my craft. It feels good to look at the past week and see seven little sprouting plants poking out and leaning towards the gray sun. It feels like accomplishment. Like progress.

Of course, the most daunting part of wrangling poems at this pace is that age-old writer cliche: Where to get ideas. Some of my poetry peers can swan dive into the month wihout a plan and trust the universe to give them 30 things to write about in as many days. I love these people. I envy these people. I am not one of them. I need structure. I need buckets. I need a project. I need to iterate. That means forms. It means scaffolding. I love scaffolding.

When pulling inspiration for series poems, the two main roads I've had any success with are variations on form and variations on theme.

I write mostly free-verse, but occasionally feel the call of a sestina or villanelle or pantoum. Perhaps it's the lapsed Catholic in me, still clutching her rosary with frail hands, but I find immense power in repetition. Repeating lines, repeating words, they build momentum and magnify intention like spells or prayers or music. Each repeated line takes new weight from its predecessor, forcing the reader to see the same thing but suddenly different.

Thematic writing or motifs help to tackle larger concepts a moment at a time. I think of the way my transition has changed me, so I start with the media I grew up loving that changes with me as I look back. I'm obsessed with the idea of home and the ways we build it, so I start with people's bedrooms.

These works can feel like the parable of the blind men and the Elephant, grasping at the too-big whole of a thing and coming away with pieces. Bedrooms have such significance. They're solitary spaces that we define by our living in them, but the mere mention of them conjures intimacy, sex, and connection. In her book, The Letters of Mina Harker, Dodie Bellamy writes that "1,000 bedrooms couldn't solve my problems." The line immediately made me think of all the bedrooms I'd been in, and the legend of a thousand paper cranes.

Maybe they would solve everything. Maybe there's value in the work itself. It suddenly became meaningful to attempt it. And so a healthy portion of the month's poems are going to a series about Bedrooms.

The first week has gone by with minimal incident. A couple of skipped days here and there but I'm on track. I'm happy with the poems and excited to write more.

I'll be putting up posts like this one weekly to reflect on my process thus far. A week of poems in. I feel pretty good. I feel like I'm working towards something significant, even if it's just the sense of accomplishment I feel looking at all the sprouting plants poking up from the garden so far. I put in the work, for no other reason than the work itself. I'm eager to see where the rest of the week takes me.

The world may be ending. The year may be shuffling towards a terrible, cold end, but I will work the winter until its soil freezes into bitter stone. I will tend to my hardy crops as the sun dips low and blue as metal. I will work.

And then, as the blue goes black and the last day has nothing left to say but "I'm sorry" and silence, I will look down at my table, my bounty of growth and smile. Piled on my table will be all my efforts, steaming and lovingly transformed from hard work to art.

And then, in the dark hall of December's shadow, proud as a parent, I will pull all my poems toward me with a satisfied sigh and I will do what December was made for.

I will feast as the world screams its last breath all around me. I will bite down on all my heard work and taste its blood in my red mouth.

I will smile.

I will feast.

Yours with an open mouth,
-B