The Loyalty of Water: Alphabet Fridge Magnets

Editor’s note: Kristina was one of the first people I asked to join this project (full disclosure: we were college roommates), and I was thrilled when she said yes, mostly because I know just how busy full time work can be. She’s also got a toddler. I wasn’t expecting anything of great length, but as anyone familiar with her writing knows, short forms have never held her back. I wasn’t expecting what I did get, however, which was a very excited text suggesting that we curate her Facebook posts. I was in love with the idea immediately.

As you’ll get to see, Kristina makes the most of tiny spaces and snippets of time. Everything you read below was a status update, no editorial privilege exercised beyond curating the collection. It was a pleasure to work with her to create this snippet of 21^st century writing in a time of motherhood.

Alphabet fridge magnets make me feel very much a mom. 8/26/13

In my last decade I learned to love ideas -- the complex, subversive, utopian kinds. Thus far, the present decade invites me to ground those ideals in the love of people -- the real and particular kinds. May my heart accept this invitation without restraint. 10/17/13

how can such a tiny, bright, funny, charming, loving, gorgeous creature instigate such a tremendous amount of exhaustion for her progenitors? 11/9/13

I was asked to write a personal mission statement: "I act now--no matter what--to cultivate a safe, inspiring, and happy world." What do you think? 11/21/13

Someone has learned to say "I love you." Heart melt. 12/4/13

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Loyalty: Gloria Steinem

There are few things I pull out more often lately than this quote, both for myself and my peers. I don't know that I would have found it had I not been unemployed in May, when this story ran in New York Magazine, since no one in the event lineup is anyone I tend to follow (excepting, of course, Amy Poehler). But I'm glad I did, and entirely for the Gloria Steinem quote in the final paragraph:

“In my generation, it was difficult to know that you could take control of your own life,” she said. “You thought your husband and children were supposed to dictate your life. Now I see young women who feel they have to be a total success by 30, which is very different. And both things are equally wrong.”

She wasn't talking about writing, at least not exactly. But she was talking about writing, and about how a particular subset of women in my generation--well educated, high-achieving, either middle class now or from that sphere in childhood, and tending towards social justice, or at least socially postive, professions--tends to think about ambition. I personally find it simultaneously an excellent reality check and effective motivator.

The Loyalty of Water: Living with the Scratches

Guest post by Allison Landa 

First off, thanks to Emily for inviting me to be part of this experiment. And it is an experiment, isn’t it? Everything is. The only time an experiment is no longer an experiment is when it’s dead, when it’s still and quiet and can finally, ultimately, be judged.

And speaking of judging, let’s look at the Mary Oliver quote from which this experiment takes its name: creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. I don’t have that loyalty. My loyalty is to other things: lying on the couch, for one. Buttered popcorn, for another. The Food Network, and I can go on and on – but these are easy loyalties, cheap and simply won.

The loyalty of which Oliver speaks is different. It is, I suspect, a matter of the creative process as willing entrapment. There are layers of entrapment: one must be committed to the project, the process and the present. Sometimes the layers feel like a favorite flannel shirt, slightly worn, completely comfortable. Other times they are that sweater you mistakenly wore on what turned out to be a ninety-degree day, defeating in their heavy insistence.

And what of my own loyalty to the process? It’s a fickle one to be sure. I write in spurts, without any sort of rhyme or reason or schedule. I write when I feel like it and occasionally when I don’t, but it’s typically at my whim, not because I have a cast-iron will. Sometimes it all feels great. Sometimes it feels like a burr in my ass, a prickly one.

It would be far too easy to say I happily choose to embrace it all. It would also be a bunch of crap. Of course challenge is harder to embrace than peaceful progress. Challenge is a bitch to wrap your arms around. It’s spiky, wriggly. But you hug it nonetheless, and you live with the scratches.

Allison Landa is a Berkeley, CA-based writer who earned her MFA in creative writing at St. Mary’s College of California. She has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Playa Summer Lake and The Julia and David White Artists’ Colony. Her memoir BEARDED LADY is represented by Naomi Davis at Inklings Literary Agency, and an early excerpt was featured in Salon. Stalk her at www.allisonlanda.com.

Loyalty: Carole Maso

Thanks to Melissa Sipin for drawing my attention to this.

"For a long time I had wanted a child, but the desire, attenuated, had passed, and other feelings had taken its place. I had become so entranced by the utterly hypnotic path I found myself on, so bleary, so consumed by my work, that I had lost track of whatever else I may have once wanted. I had wandered away into a kind of otherworldly bliss, a joy like no other, and the child further and further off on some remote horizon had become a shadow—like almost everything else in my world. From those weird, windy, solitary heights from which I worked now I watched the child wave, wave, and then finally vanish. Disappeared on a beautiful, curving planet—utterly out of reach. A distant, infinitesimal music.

"The Bay of Angels, a book I had just begun composing after ten years of note-taking, was to be the project for the rest of my life; I was quite certain of it—and the prospect of a life of such possibility and pleasure and challenge was more than I had ever dared ask or hope for. Over the years it had slowly grown in me—each book I had written was preparation for it. Time was passing and the urgency, as Stein said, "to write something down someday in my own handwriting" was pressing. The chance to get closer to the eternity in myself. I was ready at last. It was clear to me that in order to even attempt such an endeavor more sacrifices would have to be made. But they were well worth it—had always been worth it. The accompanying melancholy was just part of the bargain, the demands such work makes, the tolls it takes, simply part of the deal. I thought of Beckett's "sadness after song." Sadness because it was so imperfect and inadequate and fleeting, because it demanded absolutely everything. I watched the child recede.

"With every major decision there is regret, for the very act involves choosing one thing over another. I have always experienced a certain sorrow when any project I am working on begins to take a shape and becomes a stable, definitive text—because it excludes the thousand books it might have been. No matter how spacious, no matter how suggestive or fluid, I cannot help but feel the death of possibility all over again—the books that now would never be. I have never felt completely reconciled to that fact. This and not that.

"The sadness after song. I would not mind. If song it was I got to sing.

"How then to account for the wave of clarity that passed through me, propelling me into an utterly charmed and charged night to retrieve that little waving figure who was mine? The child I had spent years writing about in my Bay of Angels notebooks. When I look back I see that she is there in one way or another in many, many guises. My writing life, as always, so much further ahead of my conscious, rational mind. How had I been so blind? There she was at the periphery of every page, waiting, begging at the edge of language, calling my name. But I did not, could not recognize her—until it was very nearly too late."

From The Room Lit by Roses, 2000

Loyalty: Ann Patchett

Long ago I heard Ann Patchett talk about how she decided, at a relatively young age, that she couldn't be a writer and a parent. Since she knew she wanted most to be a writer, she has not had children, by choice. This has stuck with me as someone who has been a writer since I knew what pencils did--and as someone who does, in fact, also want to be a parent. It's interesting to note that, at least according to Wikipedia, Patchett's mother is also a novelist. I would love to be a fly on the wall if the two of them ever discuss this. For now, however, this is the best I can do.

The following is excerpted from an interview published in The Denver Post.

Q: Do you write at the same time every day?

A: How I wish I had a routine. I think I'm a very hard worker and productive, but I don't think it's about sitting down and hammering out a certain number of pages in a day. I hardly ever have a deadline, and no one sees (my work) until I feel it's ready for publication.

I am very parochial in my habits. I get stuck all the time and can't figure things out, but because I have all these obligations I get things done. I am so grateful I am not a procrastinator.

Q: Do you work on multiple projects at once? Novels, essays, articles?

A: In general, I'm very careful with my brain. I don't think I can do it all, which is why I didn't have children. [Long ago] I understood that I could be good at certain things, but not at 20 things.