“[The process of writing] is much richer and far more difficult to articulate because there are, in fact, unspoken pieces of it—the groping and grasping that we all go through…” -Sondra Perl, quoted in Hannah Rule’s Situating Writing Processes

                One of my favorite things that writing does in my life is bring me in touch with silence. Bring me to confusion, to the muddle beyond my meanings. I end up on a cliff beyond which oceans rise and birds call and currents move, except these are steepnesses that are not only cliffs, oceans that are not only water, cries that are not only voices and not only birds. Trying to write often brings me into silence as I stumble past what I thought I understood.
                I suspect this is true for lots of arts, and for many of the ways we try to collect thought and experience into meaning (music, choreographed dance, television; conversation, study, relationship, to name a few). I’m writing about this because I don’t think I’m writing only about writing.
                Take this, now. At several points in the last paragraph, I stopped. I deleted sentences. I tapped my teeth with my fingernail. I stared at the screen, not seeing. I don’t want to try and list all the things I was doing in that stopping, that tapping, that staring. I also don’t want to make those moments somehow mysterious in a way that leaves me to wait for inspiration. Writing, for me, is a kind of work. Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s exciting. But when I’m doing that work, I’m not just typing furiously. I’m also on the swings. At the window. On the floor listening to silences that I don’t understand. I think I forget that when I collapse work into productivity. All that difficult richness—the windows and silences and confusions, the doubts, the stutters, the pauses that stretch on to who knows where—is part of why the work is worth doing. It’s part of why, sometimes, the work manages something wonderful. So I mean, very funny funny, meme, but what do you think someone’s doing when they’re silent on the swings?

                “And one thing you learn as a poet writing a collection of poems is that every poem is a chance to recalibrate language for yourself […] I wanted every scene to have oscillations. So you have New England vernacular, you have essayistic, journalistic writing on butterflies and opioid facts. And I wanted it all. I didn’t want to blend them or have cohesion or evenness. I wanted all of them to be a sort of chorus sitting together.” -Ocean Vuong, discussing his book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

                This semester I’m working in UIUC’s Writers Workshop, which means I help different graduate and undergrad writers, one-on-one, for fifty minutes at a time. We talk about whatever they’re working on—job applications or dissertations or class assignments. We start at whatever stage they’re at: polishing a final draft or brainstorming or trimming back paragraphs. All that is to say, today I worked with a PhD candidate on an economics article, a masters candidate on a computer science article, an undergraduate putting together a story of their life up till now, and my friend, who I think has stumbled onto the first draft of her PhD dissertation. Six hours of meetings in all, and my mind is humming in a delightful and disorientating way.
                I think the disorientation is wonderful. Maybe it’s necessary. Walking out from my meetings, I started thinking about how my own language can insulate. They can help me follow the paths I’ve laid out, help me draw the lines I’m used to drawing on what I see. I’m not saying that’s wrong. Sometimes it’s quite nice. Then someone sits across from me quoting authors I’ve never heard on matters I’ve never considered, or someone spins around their Turkish laptop for me to type, and the comma isn’t where I’m expecting it to be. Today was tiring, as I expected it to be. I didn’t expect to spend so much time laughing with the writers who came in. We laughed while we tried to explain ourselves to each other, laughed as our understandings creased and bumped. And of course, to only think about these different individual’s disciplines would be to miss the point—I talked to people, each trying out the words they’d learned, each adjusting their language to see what was possible and what they wanted to say. I like when the cohesion pulls apart. There are so many melodies that we can’t sing with just one voice, melodies we can sing with a chorus.

                “Once upon a time, there was a man who did not know how to use a sword and was also very afraid of dragons, so he took the L.S.A.T., did pretty well, and ended up getting into a decent law school.” -Charles Yu, “Fable”

                Lately I’ve been imagining a planter pot of rich soil. The kind you might call loam, really, soft and dark, like when I tripped in the forests as a kid and wanted to lick the ground. It looked like chocolate cake. I might actually be remembering Margaret Mahy’s The Girl With The Green Ear, where I might remember someone making cakes for plants. That’s exactly what I want to talk about this week: the way my mind fumbles for stories, for images, for patterns that I’ve seen, and tries to put together what I’m doing now and who I am from those pieces.
                Charles Yu is playing with how our stories can be dislocated from where we actually are. Sometimes the fairytale with the sword and the dragon jostles against the life I’m living. “Hero” just isn’t a useful concept for anything about what I’m doing. I can try to fit the pieces together based on my myths (as the character keeps trying to do in Fable). I can decide that this puzzle isn’t a puzzle, that all the pieces don’t need to fit, and throw some of them out the window, and find other pieces, and make other pieces, and use them all as a garden path for a doll house.
                So lately I’ve been trying to add another piece. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed myself working towards deadline after deadline. I’ve found myself, again and again, feeling like I needed to rest but couldn’t until after the semester ended on December 15, after the performance on March 25, after I finished my novel draft in late April. I’ve noticed that after a deadline I tend to give myself another deadline. To pick up another project. To say, there next. For the most part I’ve really liked the places I’m going, the tasks I’m taking up. I feel lucky to have the chance. But at the same time, the sense of business, of can’t-pause, is something beyond any of the deadlines. It’s a way I have of being in myself. This fall I want to play with other ways. I want more quiet space with ladybugs buzzing by. I want more of the rich openness below trees, and leaves blowing. A space where I’m not hurrying to next. I’ve been imagining that space as a planter pot I’m tending. I’m not trying to grow anything in this earth. I’m trying to be aware of the dirt, the way its color changes when it gets wet and dries out. To feel this loam between my fingers.

                “My habit, when I take on a new client, is to learn what I can of them, so that I can tailor my offerings to their tastes.” -Mary Robinette Kowal, Forest of Memory

                When I was a kid someone told me that when you keep snacking and snacking and still feeling hungry, you’re probably thirsty. I remember thinking about that. Sometimes it worked: I’d drink a glass of water and that would seem, ahh, like what I wanted. Sometimes it didn’t. I also ate because I was bored. I ate because people around me were eating. I ate for the joy of it, the potato chip crunch, the crisp apple kiss, the sweet mumble of ice cream. For other wonderful reasons. I’m snacking while I write this. But still, when I was reading Forest of Memory, that moment came back—maybe because it was an early experience when knowing what I wanted felt all muddled up.
                I wonder what you want, in reading this. Why you’re here. Mary Kowal’s hero starts the novella by wondering that in specifically economic, transactional terms. What am I selling you? I wonder that, too. On Monday I’ll start teaching a new University course, and it’s expensive to be in that classroom. What do my students want? What can I offer? Beyond the insistent (insidious?) capitalism of that framing, there’s also this idea that I know. That I know what I’m seeking, and you could tailor your offerings to my tastes. Sitting here tonight, I’m struck by how little that describes my actual experience. I go for a walk and sometimes realize I want to be on my hands and knees, picking up ginkgo biloba fruit (and then realizing how hard it is to wash that stuff off. Not sure I wanted that part). I want to be left alone and then, when I’m left alone, I so don’t want to be left alone. I want to be out meeting people and then sometimes I’m overwhelmed. I suppose in an overarching way I want to be connected, to engage, to live in community, but in particular my wants aren’t clean lines and preferences. They’re more fluttering leaves and flowers and twigs from dozens of different plants, growing together in the corner of an abandoned lot. And I realize I like that. I don’t know what I want you to offer. I don’t want to say give me this. I guess I wonder, How are you? What’s going on? What’s here?

“You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.
This is but half the truth. You are also as strong as your strongest link.
To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam.”
-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

                Today I worked for a long time on my book, and finished moving out of my old apartment, and scratched a dog’s chin, and ate a breakfast my partner made for me, and walked through floods of warm August light and cool August shadow, and got sweaty, and lounged on the couch, cool, and met with a professor about different kinds of research, and washed some laundry, and stayed out talking with new friends. I think, for my part, that I want to let go of the language of weakest and strongest. In some ways I suppose my novel (I’m almost done with the eighth draft!) is an ongoing project and laundry, for example, isn’t. But in other ways the wash of water and the rinse of suds is in the book. In other ways, again, the book is about returning to my body and to the wash of water and the rinse of suds. Any hierarchy there seems like a perspective that will pick out some characteristics and obscure others, like saying a screw is more its shape than its metal (or more its metal than its shape).
                At the same time, if I am going to say weakest link, I want to remember Gibran and say strongest, too. A couple people have mentioned to me the week I “lost” while recovering from COVID. I understand what they mean. I’ve stumbled into that language sometimes, too. But that judgment of lost seems so strange when I stop and look at it. It was a week of feeling my community reach out to support me. A week of hot tea. A week of a quiet room’s quiet hum. A week, yes, of coughing and coughing until my sides ached. If I’m going to pick pieces and say they stand in for wholes (like we do when we say, “So that’s what you really think of me,” or when we say, “In the end the project didn’t pan out”), I want to see the foam and the ocean. The wave and the wind. The kid playing with their toes in the shallow surf and the vast schools of fish glimmering. A lost week, a found week, a week playing hide and seek, and who knows what else besides.

“The movement of your finger
Is not separate from your finger.
[…]
Observe the wonders as they occur around you. 
Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent.”
-Rumi, from “Body Intelligence” (trans. Coleman Barks)

                A little more than a week ago—last Wednesday morning—I told my partner, “I need to do less, but I’m not not sure how.” I felt tired. Rundown. But there were so many projects that were still unfinished. A few hours later I tested positive for COVID, and the last week I’ve been in bed isolating. I’m lucky to not have a serious case, and to have the chance to hunker down and a place to do it.. I’ve also been sicker than I’ve been in years and years. My thoughts have been sluggish and slow. Concentrating is hard. The fridge hums in the other room. I pull the blankets off me, too hot, and pull them back, too cold. I breathe steam in a hot shower.
                Last Wednesday, the Wednesday I tested positive, I was still determined to write an Uproar post. “I’ve written one for 365 straight weeks!” I told myself. “I can’t miss one.” I told myself, I need to do less, but I’m not sure how. Then a virus I breathed in somewhere put me in bed for days. If the movement of my finger is not separate from my finger, maybe the stillness of my finger is also not separate from my finger. If there’s running there’s also resting. Doing something for 365 straight weeks might be a reason to keep doing it, but it’s also a reason to pause, to lay down, to breathe. 
                I think Uproar #366 is something. It’s an inhalation. A pause. Be silent. It’s listening to the refrigerator while I realize that laying here is part of these wonders, just like moving. Silence, just like song. And this is 377. I trace my fingers over the weave of a blanket. I feel the threads and try not to claim them. How much of poetry is the love sound has for silence, the love silence has for sound?

                “Eyas sipped her drink. ‘You’ve found something that incorporates everything else you tried.’” -Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few

                A few days ago I went to my friend’s house to learn about making woodblock prints. Along the way we talked about music, video games, gardens, seasons, career paths, how lovely it is to go wandering off the path, mead, cooking, and dark-eyed juncos. Our conversation left our two glasses on the window sill, catching light, and wood shavings scattered across the floor.
                The block printing itself was not only ‘itself.’ We also sawed our blocks, and sanded them, which meant sitting outside for a while in the shade, and sharpened the chisels. At one point my friend said something like, “I like tasks that are so involved.” Printing that involves carving that involves sharpening that involves looking at references on our phones, sanding, sawing, and our two glasses on the windowsill.
                In Record of a Spaceborn Few, Eyas is talking about careers. Or vocations, I suppose— her culture practices an extensive version of universal basic income, so people work largely for a sense of giving back. (At one point a character says something like, ‘What do you do?’ becomes a way of asking ‘what do you do for everyone else?’) Eyas is talking about what her friend does. He sees all his different fits and starts and ideas as separate. Eyas sees them as coming together in what he does now. There are certainly moments in my life—emotionally overwhelmed while driving, but I just have to watch the road; an upset student, and I’m upset too, but I’m trying not to let my upset direct my response—where my life seems to turn toward a kind of separating, compartmentalizing. I think those moments are important. And as a way of thinking about who I am and what I’m doing, I like the idea of involves. Of incorporating all my different confusions and fears, my talents and practices, my curiosities and silliness into the kind of work that takes me outside and inside and outside again, with our water glasses on the windowsill.

                “I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.” -Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

                I’m writing this on a plane. It’s 6:41, or at least, we’d say it was 6:41 on the West Coast where I woke up this morning, and we’d say it was 8:41 in the Midwest where I’ll be landing in half an hour or so. There’s a different kind of tired, a different kind of out-of-place, that I sometimes feel while traveling. I often plan to get things done on a flight. Usually I end up sitting, listening to an audiobook, staring out the window if I’m lucky enough to have a window seat, feeling the engines thrum if I’m sitting somewhere else. Sometimes there’s a little shake, and it’s hard to imagine that’s the wings shaking, that’s the sky shaking, all around us.
                Yesterday, on my last full day visiting my brother and my nieces, we all went kayaking on a beautiful, calm stretch of river. I remember I used to hate paddling over flat water. Well, not hate—I guess I disliked paddling over flat water about the same time when I used “I hate” to mean “I’m not really into.” Say twelve or thirteen, which is also when I didn’t really get going for a walk with no destination. If you just move a little bit and then come back, I thought, then what is it you’re doing? 
                I like walks now. And I really liked the flat water. I liked watching my nieces paddle themselves along, and helping the three year old when she was paddling into the riverbank and the blackberry vines. I also like the current, or the lack of the current, so quiet beneath us it felt like we were balanced between moving. A little like I feel now, of course. Like a ball that isn’t rolling. Like the moment between breathing in and breathing out.
                Now the pilot says we’re starting our descent. Outside the clouds are thickening. The moon hangs. I’ll be back in my apartment soon, unpack my suitcase. I’m excited for that. I rest down into the seat. I want more of my family in my life, and more flat water. The sky and the trees and the reflection of the sky and the trees, and my fingers trailing through the river.

                A few days ago, outside my brother’s house in Washington, I sat a while with a raccoon. At first the raccoon surprised me. I went out for a soccer ball my niece had kicked by the fence, and looked up to see something, quick and big, coming down along a branch. It went from the branch to the trunk, and then climbed up. Smooth movements. Clever hands. A rump without a tail, which made me wonder a minute, which made me guess. Then from twenty feet up it paused and stared at me. Calm eyes. Ready for a long wait.
                I wanted to sit with the raccoon, but I didn’t want to scare it, and I thought standing there and staring might make it uncomfortable. So I came inside. Then a story came to me from one of my friends, something about a famous author (I don’t remember who) who said he didn’t think humans could have any real enduring connection with cats. Telling the story, my friend commented, “I know he lived with a cat, but I listen to him, and I wonder if he ever really just spent time with the cat.” My friend has spent a lot of time with their own cat, Simon. They’ve noticed a lot of Simon’s habits. They know a lot of the movements that mean back off, or more gently, some space, please. A different friend once asked me, “What animals that are not pets have you really sat with?”
                So I went back outside. I stood on the far side of the yard. The raccoon watched me. I watched them a little, but tried not to lock my eyes on them. I’ve heard sustained eye contact can often be read as a threat (is that true of raccoons?). I noticed the clouds, high and soft. I wondered what kind of tree the raccoon was in, and what the little fruits were they had been eating. I wondered where they slept. I noticed the breathing of the wind through the poplar leaves. I felt the grass. At a certain point I found myself scratching my cheek, and looked over to see the raccoon, grooming their side. 
                There’s something in this moment that highlights for me how much I don’t know. There’s also a spaciousness, a peace. There are two eyes looking out through the leaves at my two eyes. I’m going to spend more time in the yard in case this raccoon stops by again.

                “I love clowning. I love to—to—to do stupid things. And clowns need problems to live, so I love to be like, ‘Oh hey!’”
                -Mario Lopez, a magician on Penn & Teller: Fool Us

                I spent a lot of today making ‘obstacles’ with my two nieces. It started with little balance beams and towers for our ‘finger people’ to climb, and we took turns jumping a hand from block to block. Then one of them wanted an obstacle she could do. So we started crawling under things and balancing on things and laughing. We put all the chairs from the dining room into a line and tried to crawl under them. We built little block towers on each seat so we’d know if we bumped a chair. We stacked blocks with our toes. It was silly, challenging, delightful. I’ve done a very, very little bit of clowning in a theater class. It was so much fun. One question led to another, one problem to another, and the whole thing spiraled out—a something we were sharing. 
                Sometimes a day starts to feel like one problem after another, one distraction after another, one thing I messed up after another. It feels like Mario Lopez clowning around on stage, trying to stop the salt that’s magically pouring from his hands, his clothes, his feet. But look at his face. He’s laughing, awkward and sheepish and here with us. Scrunched between the chair’s legs and the carpet, blocks clattering down because I’d bumped the chair, I was having a wonderful time. Sometimes when I feel like I keep messing up, I start trying to arrange everything so I won’t run into any problems. But—well, clowns need problems to live. 
                My nieces and I push the couch so it makes a tight corner with the wall, and they go motoring through. I start after them. The corner’s going to be hard, of course, and that’s wonderful.