Tag: COVID-19

IWSG, June 2022, and Some Poetry News

John Winkelman

Yesterday afternoon, for the first time in about three years, and the second time in over 20, I got up in front of an open mic and read some poetry. The reading took place at The Sparrows cafe in Grand Rapids, as part of their monthly “Poetry and Pie” event which takes place on the last Tuesday of every month. The poems I read, “Afternoon Traffic” and “Percussion,” had been previously published so I knew at least one other person had considered them worthy of public exposure.

Two other poets read, and there were at most a dozen people in the cafe, not all of whom were there for the reading. Still, I would call it a success, and the couple of people I talked to enjoyed the event.

I felt somewhat self-conscious, as (due to certain properties inherent in the passage of time) I have always viewed open mic readings as a young person’s pursuit. I have ample evidence to the contrary, of course, as the majority of such events I have attended in the past have included people older than I am now. Or maybe it’s because many of those events have also been slam poetry events, and the participants and audience therein definitely skews younger.

But I plan to read again as time allows, assuming I can come up with material worthy of being read in front of a live audience. If for no other reason than that it was fun.

So: The Insecure Writers Support Group question for June 2022 is:

When the going gets tough writing the story, how do you keep yourself writing to the end? If have not started the writing yet, why do you think that is and what do you think could help you find your groove and start?

I can stumble while writing a story for any number of reasons. Distractions from the mundane world. Suddenly not knowing “what happens next.” Suffering from depression, burnout, exhaustion, or some combination of all three. An acute ennui.

Any one of these (and there are so many more than I have listed) can act as a drag on the creative process. For me (and this is absolutely not a general prescription for all people in all circumstances), I take a step back and put some distance between myself and the work. I don’t necessarily try to solve the issue immediately, because if, for instance, the problem is burnout, that attempt at a solution will just make things worse.

Dwight D. Eisenhower said “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” This is another way of saying that in trying to solve a problem, first put it in a larger perspective.

Is the problem with the story, or with me? If with me, is it because of something I have control over in any meaningful sense? If with the story, is it something that I can push through or do I need to retrace my steps and rewrite some or all of it?

If, for instance, the problem with the writing is personal motivation, and the lack of motivation comes from depression, then the depression is the issue which needs to be dealt with. Trying to force productivity at the cost of mental and emotional health never, ever ends well (I’m looking at you, managerial corporate culture and late-stage capitalism).

If the problem is with the story, then the story was either insufficiently planned, or (as is usually the case with me) I started writing one story, and halfway through switched to another, and now I have two stories which need to be separated and each dealt with individually.

(The same often happens to me when I write poetry, because most of my poems start out as stream-of-consciousness blocks of text in my journals)

So to sum up, pushing through the blocks when writing usually involves giving myself some space to discover why, exactly, I am having a tough time of it. Modern culture does not encourage, and indeed often punishes, time which is not obviously and specifically productive, but that down’time is essential and allows for healing, re-centering, and growth. And, frankly, for better writing.

On a side note: Being stressed and burned out is okay. We are still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and though the world seems to be stabilizing (or maybe ramping up the overall sense of denial), we are not yet “post-” anything, and the long tail of fallout from the past two years is just starting to make itself felt. The world is even more stressful than usual. Be kind to yourself and the people around you.

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

Halfway Through January

John Winkelman

I’ve been following Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky‘s annual State of the World conversation on the Well. Guest “speakers” this year are Vinay Gupta and Emily Gertz. Much of the conversation seems to center around blockchain this year, which makes sense as Gupta is one of the founders of Ethereum, and Gertz is an environmental reporter. Other topics include COVID (of course), politics (of course), the interaction of the two, and the possibility of a horde of Trumpist bootlicks and coprophages attempting to stage a civil war. The State of the World conversations are always interesting, and past years can easily be found in the index of topics.

Other interesting reads from the week:

The First Full Week of the New Year

John Winkelman

About this time last year, when it became apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic would continue for the foreseeable future, I set about putting together a daily routine for the weekday mornings. This routine included working out, reading, writing, playing with the cats, and generally relaxing and preparing for the workday. I managed to stick with this routine until I received my first COVID vaccination shot at the beginning of April, at which point the stress and anxiety which had been powering my life to that point evaporated, and so did my routine. After my second shot at the end of April I tried to pick it up again, but other life stressors appeared and, while I managed to do some minimal workouts and writing, all of this went away at the beginning of September when my mother passed away. The writing picked up again in the beginning of November with NaNoWriMo, but I haven’t had a good steady week of morning workouts in almost a year.

So here I am at the start of 2022, with a renewed sense of purpose, if not exactly renewed energy. I am 52 (and a half!), and don’t have the deep well of mojo I had in my twenties, or even in my forties.

But a routine is a good framework around which to build a day, and mine looks something like this:

5:00: wake up, feed cats
5:10 – 6:30: calisthenics, chi kung, kung fu and tai chi forms practice
6:30 – 8:00: write
8:00 – 8:30: read or more writing
8:30 – 17:00: work prep, work
17:30 – 18:00: stationary bicycle, hand/arm/grip conditioning

For the rest of the day I relax with my girlfriend, read a little more, play with the cats, work on projects around the house, and maybe watch some TV. Repeat each day of the work week. Weekends are open time when Zyra and I do whatever suits our mood.

For writing I also planned a monthly routine, which involves setting aside the first full week of the month for editing and submitting, and using the rest of the month for writing. As this is the first full week of January, I am using my time in the mornings to catalog and sort all the poems I wrote in 2021, as well as reviewing the large pile of short stories, completed or otherwise, which await my attention.

 

IWSG, September 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

The question: How do you define success as a writer? Is it holding your book in your hand? Having a short story published? Making a certain amount of income from your writing?

“Success” has had many definitions over the course of my writing life, depending on a wide and constantly changing variety of circumstances, and also my experiences in life (generally) and with the literary world (specifically).

“Make a living as a writer” was probably my first goal, and likely the one most popular with beginning writers.

“Become a famous author” was the next goal, and it is not at all the same as the first definition.

“Publish a book” was next, and by now you can probably see a trend in the targets at which I have aimed.

“Complete a final draft” could have been a goal, but it must necessarily follow “complete a first draft,” which I have yet to do. And no, I don’t consider my output from NaNoWriMo to be first draft material.

Here in September 2021, well into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and with a significant uptick in cases thanks to the Delta variant and the nihilistic arrogance of people who think it Won’t Happen To Them, I define success as writing for at least a few minutes every day, no matter what form that writing takes.

To that end, I have been moderately, well, successful. Eight months into 2021, I have written about three dozen poems, created rough outlines for half a dozen short stories, and jotted down rudimentary notes for three novels. I write in my journals every day. I update this blog at least once a week. And yesterday I started planning out what I am going to work on during NaNoWriMo, which starts two months from today (egads!)

Success as a writer depends on prior successes, whether or not you define them as such. Effect follows cause. You can’t have a final draft without first having a first draft. And in order to do that, you need to, you know, write.

As we like to say in tai chi class, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

And a side note, because we are 20 months into a pandemic with no end in sight: It’s okay to be exhausted. It’s okay to be burned out and frustrated, and to not be able to focus on your writing. The world is a stressful place in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Be gentle with yourself.

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

I’m In With the In(oculated) Crowd

John Winkelman

Books for the week of May 9, 2021

As of two days ago, I am two weeks past my second COVID shot, which means, according to the CDC, that I am fully inoculated, or at least as inoculated as one can get against things which continually evolve in response to our interactions with the world. We are well into the Anthropocene, and the scene is getting dangerous, what with the continual and inevitable responses to our actions upon the parts of the planet that are not us.

This was a good week for acquisitions here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey, thanks in large part to the arrival of rewards from a couple of recent Kickstarter campaigns.

First is the Spring 2021 issue of Peninsula Poets, the journal of the Poetry Society of Michigan, to which I had accidentally let my subscription lapse. Things are back in good order now, and just in time to serve as writing inspiration going into the summer.

Next is another Kickstarter reward, Whether Change: The Revolution Will Be Weird and Cooties Shot Required, both edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski of Broken Eye Books, who publish very well-made anthologies full of good-to-great writing on a variety of topics.

On bottom left is the latest issue of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, which is consistently just a damn good read.

On the bottom right is Fantastic Lairs: Boss Battles and Climactic Encounters, from a recent Kickstarter. I have put money toward several games on Kickstarter in recent years. Though I haven’t played in a long time, the ideas in the rule books, the world building, tactics, and strategies therein make for good study and good writing prompts.

In reading news, I am just over a hundred pages into Arkady Martine‘s A Memory Called Empire. I haven’t completed enough of the book to form a solid opinion, but I am really enjoying it so far. For nonfiction I am slowly working through Darran Anderson’s Imaginary Cities. Though well over a hundred pages in, I am tempted to go back and start again, this time with a notebook nearby. I have not read anything like this book. It is a survey, a history, a meditation, a treatise, and it reads like poetry. At less that 20% through this book, I think it will be one of my favorite reads of the year. Highly recommended.

In writing news, not much has changed from last week. I still feel kind of brain-dead from the effects of the second vaccination shot as well as *gestures at the world*, though the effects of the shot have mostly worn off. The world, not so much. But warmer days means mornings on the porch will soon be viable, and when that happens I hope to hit the ground running with several hundred thousand words of prose by the end of the year.

Or maybe a couple of poems.

Or somewhere in the middle.

One Third of the Year, Gone So Soon

John Winkelman

Ivy flower

On Friday, the last day of April, I received my second COVID-19 vaccine shot (Pfizer). I felt fine until Saturday afternoon after kung fu class, at which time my energy level crashed and I developed a fever and I crawled into bed and slept for several hours. As of now things appear to be back to normal.

This was another week in which no new books arrived. April in general was an extremely slow month for the Library at Winkelman Abbey, with only five new volumes added to the shelves. It isn’t often that my reading outpaces my acquisitions.

In reading news, for the last week of April I finished Anders Dunkers’ collection of interviews Rediscovering Earth, which I must revisit soon with pen in hand so I can highlight all of the wonderful ideas and copy down all of the books cited therein.

I also finished  David Meltzer’s No Eyes: Lester Young, a book-length jazz poem or collection of jazz poems in tribute to saxophonist Lester Young. This was published by Black Sparrow Press, back when Black Sparrow was independent, rather than an imprint of a larger publisher, and when their books were immediately recognizable by their rough covers and muted color palettes.

In writing news, I finished out April having written a poem a day, every day for the entire month. It felt really, really good to have my head in that space again. I will try to keep up the pace, while also balancing the writing with editing, transcribing, and writing some new prose as well. The calls for submission never stop, and the deadlines approach.

And with that, I will leave you with the groovy tunes of Lester Young and Buddy Rich.

It’s Like, Warm Out

John Winkelman

It’s been a beautiful week here in Grand Rapids, in the last full week of March 2021. The tai chi and kung fu classes are back at Wilcox Park, weather permitting. After almost four months of indoor classes conducted through Zoom, the outdoors seems huge. I went for a long walk at Blandford Nature Center after class, and I was one of maybe five people in this huge park. For most of the two hours I was there I didn’t see another soul, and though the park is surrounded by neighborhoods, for the most part I didn’t hear anyone either. It was a disorienting experience. I felt something which I wouldn’t call agoraphobia, but it was something on that spectrum. A sense of vast horizons, after a year of being inside my house, and much of that time in my office, staring at a computer screen. It was disorienting having the nearest object farther than ten feet away from my eyes.

A decent pile of books arrived here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey in the past week. Two are from subscriptions, and the last three are from a recent order I placed at the best bookstore in Grand Rapids, Books & Mortar.

On the left is the latest issue of the ever-excellent Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Second from left is Nancy by Bruno Lloret, the latest release from Two Lines Press.

In the center is Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which I have been meaning to read for, oh, at least a year.

Second from the right is The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, which I learned about from Cory Doctorow‘s blog Pluralistic, in which he discussed this book in the same paragraph in which he invoked Frank Wilhoit’s description of conservatism (“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”).

On the right is Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks, which I suspect will have a lot to say which heavily echoes the Wilhoit quote. This is, after all, America.

In reading news, I am about three quarters of the way through Gideon the Ninth and loving every page of it. I will probably finish Monday or Tuesday.

In writing news, lots of journaling but not much else. So it goes.

Next Friday I get my first COVID shot. Then I will enter the liminal space between it and the second shot three weeks later. There is no telling what the world will look like on the other side of that experience.

March, Already and Still

John Winkelman

It was almost exactly a year ago that the COVID lockdown hit West Michigan and I began working from home. As the joke goes, this is not March 7, 2021, it is March 372, 2020.

A small pile of books and periodicals arrived here in the past week. On the left is volume 3 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This was difficult to find, as it is a very specific volume 3 which is part of a set which was published in 1992. I picked up volumes 1 and 2 from the remainder shelf of Schuler Books and Music sometime around 1995. I kept hoping volume 3 would show up for cheap, and I left the bookstore in 1999 with that dream unfulfilled.

Next is The Best of Apex Magazine, which is volume 1 of a series, the other volumes of which have not yet been published. Apex Magazine went on hiatus in 2019 and has just recently come back, so future volumes of the anthology will hopefully be printed in upcoming years.

Next is Notes from Childhood by Norah Lange, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle and published by And Other Stories.

And last but not least is the latest issue of The Paris Review, which has managed to stay in print and excellent and relevant for over fifty years, which is admirable.

In reading news, I am well into Deepak Unnikrishnan’s weird and wonderful novel Temporary People (Restless Books), which started out as a collection of short stories in the literary fiction genre, but soon blew straight through magic realism into the realms of satire and surrealism. And it is really, really good.

In writing news, events of the mundane world sapped away much of my free time and emotional energy and I accomplished very little. I still feel the drive and desire to be creatively productive so perhaps next week will be more fulfilling.

Tune in next week for such thrilling tales as “Welp. Here I am again,” and “Here are some books,” and if time and energy allow, “Here is some stuff I have been thinking about.” See you next time, loyal reader(s)!

Liminal Kittens and the Decades of April

John Winkelman

As far as months go, April 2020 wasn’t the absolute worst ever, but it was right up there. My third-shift project and the COVID-19 disruption of the world has left me in a mental and psychological space where the days are undifferentiated and blur together into an indefinite now and the hours disappear in a blink but the weeks last forever. Z continues to improve from her sprained ankle and with the warmer weather we are able to spend more time outside which, even if we almost never leave the property, is a huge improvement over being stuck in the house all day.

I’m still in something of a lull in book acquisitions, but the page of new reading material never fully stops. On the left is Tobias Buckell’s novella The Executioness, published by Subterranean Press. I picked it up after I read its companion volume, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Alchemist (also from Subterranean Press) and realized that I was missing half of the story.

On the right is a new anthology of short stories from Atthis Arts, Community of Magic Pens. This is from a Kickstarter campaign run by E.D.E. Bell, who I know through volunteering at ConFusion. She and her team have turned out quite an impressive collection of anthologies, and are doing a great service to the writing and reading communities.

A few days ago Z and I picked up a harness and leash for Poe. She took to it immediately and seems to love being outside, though she is quickly overwhelmed by all of the sensory input and so can’t stay outside for more than about twenty minutes at a time. Her favorite activity seems to be chasing all of the flies which the warmer weather has awakened.

Perhaps May will be a kinder month than April, though with the lockdown in Michigan extending through the end of the month, and the emasculated manbabies continued protesting of the quarantine, I suspect things will get worse before they get better. Stay safe, stay distanced, and if you see a heavily armed white man complaining that a woman told him to stay in his room, offer him sympathy for his toxic daddy issues but don’t approach. They are easily frightened and tend to lash out if cornered.

Seven Weeks In

John Winkelman

No new books arrived this week, so here is a post about my life under quarantine.

It’s been approximately seven weeks  since Governor Whitmer issued the first of her executive orders to begin the Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020. And, it scarcely needs to be said, things are strange.

Two weeks after the lockdown began, my girlfriend sprained her ankle while we were working out. She has been in an air cast for the whole month so far, and due to her limited mobility all of the household chores have fallen in my lap. This wouldn’t be a problem, except I am in the second week of a new project at work which has me working third shift four days a week, 6:00 pm to 6:00 am. This project is projected to run to the end of May, by which time I suspect I will have regressed to being able to communicate only by grunts, gestures, and tactical odors.

I haven’t worked third shift since I was 22, and that nearly killed me. Of course that was assembly line work in a factory, and this is computer work sitting in my home office. But I am 50 now, and sleep, always in somewhat short supply, is suddenly an exceedingly rare commodity.

The Grand Rapids YWCA, where I teach and practice kung fu and tai chi, has been closed down since mid-March. Our senior instructor Rick has put together Zoom classes which are surprisingly well-attended, which is encouraging. I have not been able to attend these classes since (of course!) they take place during my new work hours. I do what I can to practice on my own, and my girlfriend is slowly adding the various exercises to her daily practice as she heals, but so much of class is person-to-person training that I can feel myself growing slower and weaker by the day.

I can feel myself…aging.

Another casualty of the stay-at-home order is our kitten Poe, who is tired of having humans around all the time, and is deeply confused by having at least one mobile and interactive person around 24 hours a day. Usually she has the nights to herself, but now she can come in and knock over plants in my office into the wee hours of the morning. Our preferred method of discipline is a spray bottle, so Poe spends a not insignificant portion of the day being slightly damp.

I expect that when the extended stay-at-home order expires in three weeks Poe will undergo similar confusion and trauma, except in reverse. She is already showing signs of separation anxiety when we close the bedroom door in order to save our toes from random attacks in the middle of the night. Once Z and I head back to remote work our poor Poe Kitten will be bouncing off the walls. So, a lot like now, but will different subtext. And no audience.

Z and I are cooking a lot more, which is wonderful since Z is a virtuoso and she is keeping us very well-fed. I pitch in when and were I can, mostly breakfast and various snacks. Z is using this as an opportunity to practice her recipes and I have been the eager tester and grateful recipient of the results of her work.

Surprisingly, I have more time to read since so many of the events and responsibilities which take me out of the house are currently on hold. And though the influx of new books has slowed to a trickle I am placing regular orders with our remarkable local independent bookstore Books and Mortar, the owners and employees of which are doing a stellar job of keeping West Michigan supplied with reading material in these uncertain times.

So here we are. Two more weeks of lockdown and five more weeks of third-shift insanity. Z is healing and growing stronger by the day as Poe and I slowly go feral.

The world will look much different in June than it did in March.