5/7/2025

Art, Solitude, and the Comfort of Secret Projects

I stopped updating my blog during National Poetry Writing Month. I abandoned my daily writing practice twelve days into the month. I found myself pulled towards other pursuits like Jiu Jitsu, my penance, performing, and enjoying the improving weather. Normally April is an explosively creative month for me. I am trying desperately not to take too much stock in how different this month is.

Our country is in shambles. It’s been hard to enter the same headspace I wrote my previous work in. The ecstatic joy of my transness is changing into something cooler, more pensive. I write now and read back things that steelier, angrier, less aglow with the orange light of new flame. Things have been burning for a while. This spring I’m performing a one woman show celebrating the work I’ve been doing for my “tit poems” project. A part of me is excited to perform. A part of me is excited to begin the process of closing the book on that phase of my life.

And yet I still feel the spark to create. I still like making things. I still like writing. I find myself wondering why poems did not come to me, did not sit on my fingers and at my feet like the birds and beasts of St. Francis. Throughout my time in prayer during Lent, I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I occasionally had an audience, whether hosting out-of-town lovers or local ones, I had to excuse myself to whisper my thoughts to God and hurt myself according to our pact.

There were times I tried to pray aloud, but it never felt right. It felt like performance. It felt like posturing. My nightly prayers were for solitude. God could hear me. That was all that mattered.

I think I needed to be reminded of that. I think I needed to learn again to pray silently. To write silently. To create silently. To shut myself away and hammer in the dark. There’s a Tom Waits song on the album Mule Variations called “What’s He Building in There?” In the voice of a mounting neighborhood paranoia, the song speculates endlessly about the sinister secret machinations of a neighbor.

What's he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
He has subscriptions to those magazines
He never waves when he goes by
He's hiding something from the rest of us
He's all to himself, I think I know why…

As I ponder solitude, I think about the song again. Differently this time. This time I think of the Builder. Did the rumors bother him? Did it hinder his process? And then it hit me. As long as the neighborhood didn’t know what he was building, he could be building anything. Composers will sit at their pianos all alone, but the song is no less itself in their ears as it is blaring out of my iPhone while I cook dinner.

One of my favorite writers, Kevin Killian, wrote heartfelt, gorgeous reviews and stuck them, like prayers in the Wailing Wall, into the dross of Amazon dot com. My artist friend Sam is on pause from commissions to learn how to love her own processes again. My boyfriend refuses to tell me his handle on Ao3. My girlfriend insists on posting her own writing online without tags to make it harder to find. They build in the garage with the big door rolled closed. They carve their names on the support beams before the foundation is poured. They pray quietly.

Lately I’ve been hungering for that. I want to hide from the neighbors.

And so I have taken up some secret projects. Small, embarrassing stones I will worry into effigies with nothing but time and my tongue. Frivolous, serious, who cares? I think there’s something worthwhile in yearning for a peace with one’s own creativity. To discover the inner critic and find her smiling. Peace can be achieved. It can be cultivated like moss in dank caverns, in dark, blue solitude. In Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: Story of a Murderer (a book I reference so much it may as well be an implied silent quotation in every essay), the villainous Jean Baptiste Grenouille retreats to an underground fissure in a mountain for solitude. While he is there, his entire existence is put towards moments of memory.

“The setting for these debaucheries was—how could it be otherwise—the innermost empire where he had buried the husks of every odor encountered since birth.”

This time in the book means the world to me. I find myself returning to it over and over. I think because I covet it. Not just the characters supernaturally acute sense of smell (a dark mirror for my own anosmia) but his complete satisfaction with being alone, with creating alone, entirely in his head. I want that kind of gentle, dreamer’s peace. I want cathedrals of vapor to be enough to walk through with no one but God and my own soft shadow. I want to make things and feel the simple hitches and hallelujahs of failure and success all my own. I want to make with no audience in mind.

Last weekend I was offered the rare pleasure of reading to raise money for a literary magazine. I had made plans, had picked out my poems since my invitation weeks ago. I was going to read tit poems, to promote the upcoming book and the show at the end of this month (more on that in another post). But as I was assembling my reading packet in the days running-up, I found myself drawn to other work, newer work, angrier work. I called my girlfriend about it in a state of mild crisis (bless her patient and tireless love) about this and she told me simply enough:

“Baby, I mean this with love, fuck the audience. Do the ones you want. This is for you.”

And, when I think of her, and her buried treasures in the glittering deserts of the untagged internet, I know she understands some small part of that peace in Grenouille’s cave. I know she has felt the stares of neighbors licking her neck as she slammed shut her shed doors. I know, no matter what she was building in there, it was for her.

Spurred on by her advice, I changed my lineup. I read the pieces I wanted to read and they went over better than I could’ve hoped. Honesty and vulnerability honored. Listening to my own echoes in the cave guided me to light.

And so, I will send off this Spring with a kiss. I will perform for an audience. I will bare my soul and my breasts under a spotlight with a smile, but then. But then. But then, dear friends.

The next thing I build will be just for me.

Yours with an open mouth (and a locked basement door),
-B