Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

-- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Poets are people who are not content to say only one thing at a time.

-- Billy Collins

Monday Required Reading. While desperately searching the internet for something related to my thesis last night, I stumbled across this gem of a poem by Wendell Berry. Not helpful in the thesis-writing department, but a small respite in the wee hours of the morning. This is Wendell Berry's "How To Be a Poet."

How To Be a Poet

      (to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill - more of each
than you have - inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

This poem originally appeared in the January 2001 edition of Poetry magazine. You can find it online here.

Ivy: I know you guys are super successful now, but did you ever feel like giving up?

Julia: Um, I could barely get up to answer the door.

Ivy: I just don't know what to do. Now I'm going in for parts that I would have passed on two years ago. Maybe I should just quit.

Julia: I've been where you are. It's a brutal business. But just when I'd want to throw in the towel, something would happen to remind me of why I love it in the first place. And thus the dysfunctional cycle continues.

-- Smash, "The Fallout"

Tom, do you honestly think I have never thought about all of this before? I made a decision to do what I love to do, and I accept everything that comes along with that. Whatever happens next, I accept it. This is what theatre is; it is joy one day, and it's gone the next. It's like a religion, and I don't apologize for wanting to be a part of that, and I don't wish for something more. I really don't.

-- Smash, "Tech"

Art isn't therapy. We're not here to work out our personal problems. We're here to take those problems and completely exploit them, to hell with how much we hurt. Actually, the more we hurt, the better.

-- Smash, "Bombshell"

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it is only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

-- Chuck Palahniuk

[found by way of David Heavenor's tumblelog]

My friends' Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts:

"Look! Wedding photos!"
"Oh my goodness, we are having a baby!"
"Here's our little family!"
"We bought a house!"
"I got a real job!"

My Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts:

"My life makes me want to cry."
"Look! Another coffee/tea."
"Books, books, books! Books everywhere!"
"I'm writing. Yup. Still writing."
"STRESS!"

Ella is looking at her oddly.

"What's the matter, Morag?"

"I - don't know. Sometimes I get - well, scared. I don't feel all that normal."

Ella shrugs.

"So - who wants to be normal, anyhow?"

"I do," Morag says with passionate conviction. "Oh Ella, I do. I want to be able to talk to boys the way they want to be talked to. Only I can't seem to get the trick of it."

"Boys like that are schmucks," Ella says furiously. "But yeh, I know what you mean."

"You too?"

"Yeh. I went out with this guy a coupla weeks ago, and I thought Now this is It. Here is your opportunity, oh Ella bella. So what did Ella the schlemiel do? Did she tell him how masterful and handsome he was? Not she. Oh no. She began talking in her winsome way about Marx's theory of polarity. Why? Why? I'll never see him again."

"Well, then, why?" Morag is laughing, but not in mockery.

"I don't know," Ella says gloomily. "It just seemed so phoney, somehow, all that whole mutual flattery bit. And why should I pretend to be brainless? I'm not brainless."

"I know," Morag says. "And yet I envy girls like Susie Trevor so much that I damn near hate them. I want to be glamorous and adored and get married and have kids. I still try to kid myself that I don't want that. But I do. I want all that. As well. All I want is everything."

Ella strikes a theatrical wrist to her forehead. "Engrave it on my tombstone."

-- Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or because they're lucky.

-- Katharine Hepburn

[See Lisa Congdon's hand-lettered version of this quote here.]

If I stay long enough in the studio, just stay with the work even if it doesn't feel great or seem satisfying or directional or conclusive, if I just stay to tend and garden, then my mind gradually yields control to the more automatic labor of painting, and with that comes a sweet spot in the process further down, a worn groove, a sense of ease.

-- Anna Schuleit

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away.

-- Anne Lamott

She was one of those people who ran headlong into life, arms flung wide, mouth open, head thrown back.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?"

-- Joan Didion

I love sentences. This is why I am a writer. I love to make sentences. I even love punctuation. I love all this stuff that we are given, this little handful of equipment and raw materials. So, it is a joyous expression when you see something come together at last. Then the next day you look at it and you realize that you haven't done it at all. Then you do it again. It is in the rewriting where I find the exhilarating part of the whole enterprise. The writing itself, the first draft, the sort of hacking at the stone wall, seems to me such a difficult piece of work that it is hard to see where pleasure comes in this process. But once it is on the page and you start moving it around, changing words, moving sentences - so you get closer and closer to what you really want to say, to what you really mean. You never get it right, and I think you have to accept that as writer, that what we call “the golden book in our head” is not going to make it to the page completely. But we keep getting closer, and I find this exhilarating.

-- Carol Shields, in an interview for The Academy of Achievement in 1998

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out, or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure this out than anyone I know. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just gotta fight your way through.

-- Ira Glass

Monday Morning Required Reading. There are periods of time when it feel like my life gets in the way of my creativity. I get wrapped up in day-to-day things. My to-do list grows, constantly expanding with mundane things: laundry, vacuuming, dishes, grocery shopping, insurance calls, bank trips. And with all of this on my plate I wind up feeling sapped and empty, unable to even imagine writing anything. It's a strange mental space of exhaustion and blankness. When I hit these slumps, the best thing I can do is return to the comfort-food equivalent of reading for me: The Vinyl Cafe. Although, I must admit that these stories are perhaps best enjoyed by listening to Stuart read them himself. And so that is exactly what I am going to recommend you do. GO HERE and download the podcast in whatever form works best for you. Hopefully it works some of its magic on you as well.

Don't expect everybody will love your work. Rule of thumb is 35% will love it. 35% will hate it. And 35% will be indifferent. I know that adds up to 105%, but I'm a writer precisely because I'm so bad at math. My point is this: your job is to write, or blog, or design, or paint, or pick stocks, or whatever, for the 35% who believe in you and love your work. Forget about the rest.

-- Melanie Gideon, from an interview on The Everygirl

Monday Morning Required Reading. Many of you may have already seen this. I posted a link to it on Facebook as soon as I read it a few days ago. And then I posted a couple of quotes from it on this blog. It's a bit different than the normal readings I give you on Mondays simply because it's not a short story or a poem. But this is the kind of piece that touches my soul in the best way possible. As E - one of my best friends in the world and an actress - told me, it is "so great to read something oozing with such encouragement and honesty." Plus, Leslie Odom, Jr. is currently on the show Smash, which I am kind of in love with. So, here's something that will hopefully leave you encouraged to follow your passions no matter how impractical they may seem at times. Leslie Odom, Jr.'s "We Are Not All Artists the Same":

We are not all artists the same. Process and purpose varies. Success and how we define it can look so different from person to person. Gifts and talents make each of us so indelibly unique that competition is pointless but we get lost in it anyway... 

We are not all artists the same and yet...I cannot help but feel drawn to other artists. I cannot help but feel connected to others who consider themselves craftsmen, who devote their lives to creation. And I think that we all find ourselves drawn to those who seem to have direct access to that "God Thing." That thing that makes us want to believe again. That thing that encourages us one more day. 

Great men have the ability to make us feel as though we can be great also. 

[KEEP READING]

Tom: Tell me why we do this again.

Sam: Oh, you know. Art.

Tom: Art. What? Art is a sick compulsion. Art is an ego gone haywire. Art...

Sam: Art is beautiful. It brings you joy to write a song, brings us joy to sing it, brings an audience joy to hear it. Now get back to work.

-- Smash, "Bombshell"