This past week, my friend Sara (of Ethel fame) was visiting me here in Durham, NC. Sara likes to straighten things and do all the laundry and help organize and cull things, and that was all right by me. Together, we went through the hall closet, the cabinet where I keep sheets and blankets, and a dresser I use as a sideboard (buffet?) in the dining room, which was full of old school papers and art by my son. She also put a couple stacks of books back on my bookshelf that have been on the floor since I painted my living room this summer.
I am a person who holds onto papers and books and has a bad habit of letting them stack up. I guess this makes sense, given who I am and what I do, but I do like a cleared space. And somehow, I’ve often have a much easier time clearing and arranging my spaces when I have the support of people close to me. Sara is good at this, and so are my brother Alex and my friend Jessica, who helped me arrange things when I first moved into my current place. Jess’s other calling, besides being a brilliant essayist/memoirist and editor, is as an arranger of homey spaces. She has noted that her forté is really artfully arranging found objects and the interesting, eccentric collections of artistic writer types. So, it’s a somewhat niche but valuable skill, one that helped me feel interested in and comforted by my own space— my own life, even— when I was starting over as a single writer-mother.
Given my task last week of helping my mother and uncle go through some of my late grandmother’s possessions and the project this week of winnowing some of my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to create space for the now. The creative life is so much about allowing for a certain kind of meditative emptiness— going for a walk; rearranging one’s books; weeding out old papers and finding a funny drawing by a friend or a letter from an old lover or an essay you wrote 29 years ago that makes you remember that you’ve been an essayist longer than you thought. Living as a creative (creatively living?) involves refreshing one’s inner space to allow for new growth, new appreciation of the artifacts of a life and mind. New selection and arrangement of details, and new, creative combinations.
As I was thinking through this week’s newsletter, I picked a few cards from the Poet Tarot (Two Sylvias Press). Here are two that came up. As the description from the Yeats card says, “Open the windows, prune the dead wood, and move forward.”
On sale now at Muse:
The Writer as Researcher with Megan Baxter See the course description for new detailed information about weekly lessons. (Discounted price until 11/11!)
Monthly Generative Workshops (for November and/or December). Paid subscribers to this newsletter get a steep discount!
Lyric Essay (self-guided). It opened today (10/22), but you can register through the end of this week!
Course info here.