With the beginning of April 2020, I find myself hopping from space to space, trying to find my groove, my place to express whatever it is I need to be expressing right now.
Over on that side of the Internet, I co-write with author Cat Rambo and a small group of writers doing everything from editing to transcribing to scripting to novel writing. In this small Zoom community, I journal, revise a short story about a ghost who meets a self-driving car, and poke at a novel I’ve been drafting since the mid-2000s.
Over on the other side of the Internet, I throw down a few words for Poetry Month, words like these:
Change
Decrepit
thoughts give
way to discoveries
like spring-soaked
loam to
sprouts.
The form is based on hay(na)ku, a six-word tercet created by poet Eileen R. Tabios. I double the form to give my images more room to develop.
Then there’s that new space I’ve begun to inhabit, a place called Camp NaNoWriMo, which I suspect is not so much a camp to prepare for November, so much as a way to capitalize on a 30-day month, a sort of warm up to the Fall event. I’m still finding my way around, but already there’s a person there who’s writing a poem-a-day like me, thus recapturing the month for NaPoWriMo (September is for memoirists, btw – NaMemWriMo).
Somewhere in the middle of the Internet, I try to stack words up to strengthen my website – blog posts mostly – and find they are the hardest to words to write. Perhaps they trigger a self-consciousness I can avoid by pretending I’m other people on the page. There I try to write new words and sometimes I glean new posts from old posts, those ‘decrepit thoughts’ mentioned in the poem above.
Those are the Writing Spaces, but there are also the Community Spaces – an Open Mic, a Discussion Group, a Critique Group, a Support Group or two – where worried folks like me try to make sense of how their passions can be sustained despite social distancing rules, an unstable economy, and general uncertainty. We don’t have answers, only ideas we hope will help others navigate the particulars of their lived experiences. In the process and with the help of Zoom, we feel a little less alone, a little more connected.
Dilettante. Tinker. Polymath.
Could be any, could be all, but in the end, it’s about giving way to what’s growing inside me, giving voice to thoughts I don’t even know I have yet. And there’s something magical about that, don’t you think?
