By HD Silversmith
My poor neglected blog.
I had the best of intentions of updating two to three times a week, using Writing Down the Bones as a way to organize my thoughts about my own experience of writing. I used a similar approach last semester with a different book, and it worked (well, for me, at least, in that I wrote regularly and stayed in touch with that process).
This semester, though -- what's the deal?
This isn't going to be a satisfactory answer, but ... I don't know.
(Er, "I don't know" is not an answer I accept from my students. "Okay, you don't know. What's your educated guess? What do you think and why?")
My gut instinct?
I think I'm battling a sense of severe constraint that's a product of three things:
- The budget cuts and the fallout across the university system (ongoing)
- A certain amount of dysfunction in my department (I'll leave it at that, but that's ongoing as well)
- The usual sense of stress and weariness that a faculty member feels anywhere during the year before going up for tenure.
As I think about each of those elements, it occurs to me that, yes, these are things that are getting me down, so to speak -- but they're also the exact reasons I push myself to stay focused on writing in and through the more pedestrian difficulties of The Day Job.
When I make time for blogging, and thinking about writing, and writing my blog, I feel better. More connected to myself and to the process. It helps motivate other kinds of writing I have to do (that whole "publish or perish" thing of academia).
Natalie Goldberg talks about writing down the bones. I have to talk about writing through the malaise -- and I also simply have to Do. It.
And I will. Starting now.
