writing fog

I’m starting a new blank document and writing in it. I don’t know what else to do. I just read a reactionary tweet about how we’ve all unknowingly signed an agreement that A.I. will use the contents of our google docs for information. I opened this google doc anyway. It’s all for my desperation to live. 

I made a powerpoint for a class I was teaching, giving advice for writing about the personal. The only advice I could think of was: just write it. If you have worries about the writing, leave those aside. You can worry later. Maybe this advice is dumb as hell, but here I am, “just writing it.” It feels like a reminder of who I am when I allow my mind to appear on a detached document, elsewhere, taken out and realized. Warm release, it must feel good, doesn’t it.   

On my phone notes app, I wrote down a quote I heard a writer say on a podcast: “Could you forgive yourself if you didn’t write it?” 

I opened up my phone days later to plug in some random reminder and that note appeared on the screen’s rectangle in my face, a warning. 

I’ve lived in my apartment with the tiny stained glass windows by the 7Eleven for 10 months and I have not been able to write a single essay the entire time. My most recent works were written last summer and describe it: the murder of someone in dylan’s old neighborhood, walking around the botanical gardens with my grandma, working at two very different art camps, the flood that came to St. Louis and ruined my childhood objects, and my questions about death of childhood and death of self. I am still thinking about these pieces and working on them, adding parts and editing. Maybe this is my slow process I will have to learn to accept: a surge of pages for a couple days and then I take a break for a whole year or more and then I edit them for another spiral of days. By then, another set of writing can finally come out of the pit. 

Even if it hasn’t been “written” yet, the writing exists. It’s underneath me somewhere, molding. 

I imagine words and images inside my body like food. In this video I watched in health class in middle school, cherry tomatoes dropped down an esophagus and into stomach acid taken by a tiny camera in a real human body. I always think about the plunking of the familiar red halved shapes with seeds. I watched the tomatoes like watching a ball in a pinball game, going from one section of the body to the next, squeezing and becoming. What if experience and memory are consumed like that, mulled with my feelings? 

Recently I posted something on Instagram about how much I love tomatoes and a friend I haven’t spoken to in years replied that a visceral memory popped into his brain of me in our old elementary school, eating a tomato like an apple. The past rips open, it was there all along? 

In a county library conference room with tables arranged in a triangle, I explained to three teenage girls that “stream of consciousness” is a way our brains link everything together in a chain. Our thoughts keep growing as we are reminded of more things to write about as we go. But maybe the stream is actually “throw-up” for me. I wait until I feel physically sick and cannot wait any longer. To write. Everything must come out. 

I think it’s obvious to me that “writer’s block” is not real but what is real is fear. What if what I need to say is not enough, what if I do not have any idea of what to say anymore? But I do. I am scared of how it will make sense to someone else. My insecurities zap on top of the writing belly like a horsefly, unswattable. Cannot touch the writing today. What if my experience is illegible? What if my body is the block, darkening my ability to gather what I need to say in the correct organization, the distinct language to match the color of the experience?

Another writer on a podcast said that they showed their memoir to their family and no one had any issues with it. They said it’s because their writing is more about the feeling. It can’t be misconstrued with the truth, or anyone else’s. 

Sometimes I have a deeper fear, that something in my brain chemistry has changed since I’ve had c0vid three times, and I’m not able to write with clear words as I used to. The “brain fog” is more specific: writing fog. The words don’t bubble up anymore. This fear haunts me in a raw place: that I’m losing myself and my thoughts to a virus side effect that is invisible to even its hosts. What’s true is that c0vid does change your brain, and it also changes your anxiety. My heightened anxiety keeps me from the page, tells me that I’m not able to get there.  

I can’t see inside my brain and see if channels have been erased or lopped off. There isn’t a tiny camera in my anatomy that guides this work. I can only observe myself from the outside. Writing hasn’t happened. What else is there to say? When it comes back, I’m myself again. Who am I when I’m not writing? Just some figure in the dirt? 

In the conference room, the three teenage girls were the largest number of participants I’ve had for my “Writing Workshop” teen program all summer long, which I have been presenting at different county libraries each week. Normally, no one shows up or maybe one kid with their mom. But this group was ready, they had even brought their personal notebooks where they were writing novels and poetry, which I used to do, too. One teen had blue hair, one talked the most, and one was wearing a Korn shirt. Together, they answered my questions glowing faintly on the hanging projector, in the room with the lights off: what is a memory? Why write about our lives (at all)? 

I showed them an excerpt of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” and described him as a keeper of everyday experience. I said, “I think he died of AIDS.” Two of them burst out laughing (the Korn shirt teen was in the bathroom) and they said, “That was so random.” Two of them were friends and one was a home-schooled kid, but by the end of the class, they exchanged numbers. The more talkative teen wanted to let me know, they had nontraditional activities they did during the summer besides going to library programs: they hung out in the sewer tunnels of River Des Peres. I wanted to tell them, just like William Burroughs, but that would’ve been random, too. 

The home-schooled kid walked out the door to meet her grandma and younger sibling after the workshop was over. I called after her: You left your writing! Two pieces of printer paper splayed on the gray table where she had sat, with pencil fragments of words from the writing workshop prompt. She had asked the talkative teen to read it out loud for her during sharing time. The rhythm and longing of the memories felt like a long edited piece instead of something constructed in the past ten minutes. She turned back and looked at the paper and then back at me, answering nonchalantly that she didn’t want it: she already had lots of her own writing at home. This answer dumbfounded me (you don’t want your proof? of your life??) but I nodded to validate her and said goodbye. I let her know I would keep her writing. This somehow felt equally as unethical as throwing it away.

I stashed the pages in my tote bag. One piece of her paper was for the activity we did of “I remember” writing. Another page contained two sentences at the very top, in her pencil’s gray arches. I transcribe it here, without her permission or context: “Do you ever ask yourself, can I? The answer is maybe, maybe we can, maybe we will, just maybe.” 

Last weekend, I went to a workshop as a participant for the first time in a while. A famous poet was leading us in a poetry class about using the page’s full potential. She stood at the top of the room wearing camo pants, the desktop of her laptop exposed on the projector, her many tabs opened to show us. The room had a horseshoe of long tables, and we all got a special St. Louis Art Museum notebook and pencil. The room was divided up by different types of women, the main types being writers, teachers, and retired old people who love to go to free art programs. I got there a couple minutes late, the last one in, and quickly took my seat.

 The poet started to talk about poems as something we make, an artwork. A woman with white hair exclaimed, “Can you speak louder??” I shifted my eyes around the room, thinking, “Uh oh...” The library staff quickly scrambled and handed the poet a clip microphone that looked like a black pom pom. The awkwardness dissipated and the famous poet started to get into it, describing form to us and showing us examples of her poems on a red page with white text and a sun shape making the language have an indent in the center, the setting sun. An artwork.

She said that there are two parts to the poem: the content and the form, and they are like a bicycle that work together. She said something I needed to hear, which is that we never need to search too hard for content: the content is always there, no matter what. It’s the form that we need to figure out, to chisel at.

When she says, “the content is always there,” she pointed to her body, her chest, physically.

On the enlarged laptop desktop screen, she pulled up a project she did of a giant installation: a star quilt she made out of black paper, each fragment of quilt containing a word and each diamond of the star creating a poem that went down. The words were intentionally picked out from an array of audio interviews with women in her community. She said the poems were punched into the paper by a special laser cutter guy. It took us a second to understand: the poems were holes in the paper. They made shadows of light on the wall on the other side, the negative space of speech.

My mind opened up. I thought about how confined it feels to only write on the google doc, or even my notebook. I imagined writing small amounts of words on flash cards, like taking notes as an essay. I thought about research and collecting materials, a first step. I thought about taking bits of language and plopping them down somewhere else, the red tomatoes into the red stomach.

Towards the end, before we ate our free lunches inside the clear catering boxes like a corporate event, the famous poet gave instructions for our workshop exercise: to write prose about something we are passionate about. Then cut it up and rearrange the words into a shape, picking the words at random, like the I Ching. I wrote furiously. I have many things I could write about, but I wanted to write about the hole in space where I saw my friends in the back of the bar in the desert last spring. Looking on the outside, from afar, at people I love. The memory darkens around the edges, the hole. I cut the writing up hurriedly, with scissors passed around from the children’s section of the library, making quick decisions of which words to keep and which to crumble. I arranged the white pieces in circles, like a bullseye, using the gray seat of the chair where I had sat as the “page.” I picked the fragments randomly like she suggested. Somehow, the words picked each other. I looked down and realized: the poem circles went in and in and made a hole. 

The famous poet came over to my chair poem and started to read it in its circular motion. She said, “this is really good”, she pointed out words she liked, and she gave me a high five, which made me feel like a little kid. I told the famous poet: I wanted to write about a hole and then my poem’s form became a hole without my knowing. She smiled and exclaimed, “the content informs the form!” Instead of the high five, she gave me an elbow bump. I wondered if my facial expression before seemed uncomfortable with the high five, or if she looked at the mask on my face and thought about early pandemic ritual greetings and assumed I wanted one. 

It’s actually not true that I haven’t been writing, because I have been teaching, and any time I teach, I do the prompts, too. I always write the same things the students are asked to write, because it feels only fair. I filled up some pages of “I remember” writing in my notebook with the cardstock fading black cover. The pages hit against each other and other notes I take while reading library books. A lot of my writing is shit. The cure of writer’s block is accepting that a lot of what you will write will suck ass. Or the “shit” is too fresh, you always feel vulnerable about it, flies buzzing around the shit.

Someday I will make something that truly surprises me and makes me feel like the world has split and foamed. The famous poet said that the size of paper was originally decided by the length of the lumberjack’s arms who cut down the trees to make it. She lifted up her own arms: who decided that? And who cares? 

In the final teen workshop I taught, the teens read Joe Brainard and immediately explained to me what “stream of consciousness” meant. After writing “I remember” essays and sharing, one teen got up and started to put on a whole performance, using their pacing body and screaming voice (in a library!), to explain to me how someone at school asked them to be their girlfriend. How enviable is a kid’s ability to get up and say something? It’s unintentionally experimental. There’s that balance: trying to make something and also not trying at all. I said, you just made a creative nonfiction play! They said, yes!