Reminder that monthly-ish, this newsletter publishes I Will Always Love You, an advice column for creative collaborations (inspired by Dolly Parton herself). You can read more about the inspirations for this column here.
I’m currently out of letters to answer, so REALLY REALLY I want your letters. Write to me about your studio-mate sculptor (who you wish was your bed mate), the drummer in your band who always talks over you, the cool kid poet who you wish would talk to you at readings, and much more. Send me your juiciest quandaries!
I got “journal ecosystem” #influenced this year, swept into the trend of keeping half a dozen journals, often bound together by the Louise Carmen-inspired leather traveler’s cover. I’ve kept a journal since I was fifteen, but they’ve now spawned into 5 or 6 at a time:
One for documenting the art I see
One for general thoughts/feelings
Three paper planners (one monthly, one weekly…I just added one daily)
One for therapy homework
A book of prayers and passages to hold on to.
The “journal ecosystem” trend is beautiful and precise. Each of these A5 Moleskine knock-offs rewards linear, subjective experience. They encourage me to tease my way through my thoughts, following a single (if meandering) line.
The opposite of the tidy little notebook is my giant newsprint pad. I use it to map the dramaturgy of stories in my writing group, to create maps of my community, to write agendas for organizing meetings in my living room. Sometimes, I attempt to sketch poorly, but the attempt is the point. Most importantly, I use it to brainstorm art projects that are too big, too messy to fit in a little notebook. I left this pad in a friend’s car for a month or two and grieved it.
Today, I pulled out the pad to envision a budding performance piece. A play with characters and a linear plot might fit in a Moleskine, but the kind of performance I fuck with won’t. I want to create work that requires the audience to open their eyes wider in soft focus, to swim in some uncertainty and abstraction. The performance I long for needs the big piece of paper.
My work exists in different “aspect ratios” and containers these days. This newsletter is loose writing within a clear box; it doesn’t meander too far. Pieces I’m pitching to magazines and my book proposal are bigger, but still clearly contained by formal norms. I enjoy these containers, but I give less time to the works whose boundaries are amorphous—to personal essays that dodge back and forth between themes, swirling time, space, and form; or to performance whose rules I get to create. These are vulnerable; the path is less charted.
Lately, I’ve dedicated Tuesday and Thursday mornings to writing. Four hours each week goes fast, and this newsletter, which seems to always want to be 1,700 words, takes up much of it. Lately, I’ve thought about the difference between writing that I go hunt for and writing that comes to me. When I’m writing an arts bullshit roundup, for example, I go get it: I look at the sources, I assemble my thoughts, I write it out. But to write more lyrically, to write about myself more intimately, to break form, I need to let the writing float towards me. I need to be still enough that it doesn’t spook. I need to let it arrive.
This little essay today is a recommitment to the big, blank, newsprint pad. To an empty space large enough to let the unexpected flow through it.
