1000 WORDS OF SUMMER

So, I’m doing a writing project thing where I am committing to writing 1000 words every day for the next two weeks. Yesterday was very plant/yard work heavy, so I’m just now sitting down to catch up on yesterday’s words & maybe crank out today’s while I’m at it. Here is day one, done and dusted, filed just slightly past the May 31 midnight deadline, unedited in all its messy glory. Might add some additional bits from other days…still thinking on what my focus is, or focuses, as I have a few things swirling around in my brain parts, as well as a lovely food-related suggestion from a friend. (I do love food.) Posting here for accountability, mostly.

Day 1

Writing Advice for Day 1: “Unless you’re a disgraced politician or a famous celebrity, no one will ask you to write a book. Take the ‘book’ out of it; no one will ask you to write, full stop. Writing isn’t something anyone wants from you, but a thing you demand of yourself.” -Rumaan Alam

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Start here. I wrote that just now as a place holder to input the 1000 words I have committed to writing every day, but it seems like a good start, so we’ll just leave it right there.

Start here.

I have been a writer all of my life. As a child, I would cut up notebook paper, tape or staple it together, stamp it with my favorite teddy bear stamp, and write on it: “diary.” I still have these old relics in a box somewhere in my adult house. It would have seemed unfathomable to ten-year-old me that one day I would be sitting in a house of my own, still writing, but now on this thing that didn’t exist then, a laptop.

Writing has been my lifeboat, my entire world. The way I process everything. My dysfunctional brain’s BFF. When dark, heavy things (or sometimes, less often, light, lovely things) are stirring around in my inner self, writing is the only way to extract it, to examine it, to make it a thing I can sit with instead of a thing that will fuck me the fuck up, if left to leech into my synapses and grab ahold of my mental health. Writing is my best therapist (and also Suzie, my actual therapist of three years, who helped me sort my world out, for which I owe her my never ending gratitude. Girl done saved my life, and that is no hyperbole).

When I started my MFA program, I thought, like everyone else, the end goal of writing is to get published and earn a living as a Distinguished Writer and maybe teach in a writing program, wear clever scarves (like the omnipresent purple silk scarf which forever hung around the neck of my writing program director), have a faithful pet companion to pet when writer’s block hit, and a room full of plants and sunlight and books, which is where the magic would happen.

Well. That didn’t happen. I published a few things in literary magazines and anthologies, put together a manuscript of prose poems to send out and get rejected, started the novel I probably will never finish, but I suspect would have actually been quite good if I had, and, along with a fellow writer friend in my MFA program, started a reading series that is still going strong today. But I also came to the realization that publishing is hard, and even if you do publish, you are still probably not going to be rich or famous or even make enough in advances and royalties to keep your dog in dog treats for a year. So you have to find a parallel career path that actually involves a steady salary. (I found that.) But, once you take the pressure to publish out of the equation, writing returns to the magic it was back when I was stapling together sheets of paper for my homemade, teddy bear stamped diary. It is for me. Some of it may, in various forms, make its way into the world, but first and always, it is for me. This idea released me from the shame and guilt of continual failure. I had, was, was going to continue to fail to become a famous, published author with a purple silk scarf wrapped around my neck. And that was totally fine. There was never any money in it anyway, which was, in fact, exactly the first piece of writing advice given to me on my first day of graduate school, by the fabulously straight-talking Jill Cement. “If you’re going to sell out when it comes to your writing, write a screenplay. Otherwise there’s no money in it, so you might as well write what you want.” (I really need to get on that screenplay thing. I’d really like to pay off my credit card debt someday.)

So, one day, fourteen years into NYC living, as I was staring up into a gaping, mold-filled hole in the ceiling of my Brooklyn apartment that had been an ongoing drama-filled battle with my landlord to get fixed properly—they kept patching it up but not actually fixing it, and it would just reappear a week later, and I would call them again, and they would patch it up again, and I would refuse to pay my rent, send them detailed expense reports of all of the things I had to buy because I was continually sick with sinus infections due to extreme mold allergies as well as all of the things I had to buy to protect my mostly unusable kitchen from further damage, and remind them that it was in fact illegal to rent an apartment with a mold infestation (they didn’t seem to care and actually wanted to raise my rent a significant amount for my lease renewal)—I thought, well, maybe it’s time to move into a different phase of my life. And one of my dear friends, full of logic, said to me, why don’t you just move back to Baltimore, and you can live in a house with a yard and pay a lot less then what you are currently paying for your crappy, mold-infested one bedroom Brooklyn apartment from which you have to commute an hour and change each way every day to get to your job on 57^th street in Manhattan? And I thought, you know what? That’s an excellent plan. I had just recently amicably ended my latest long term relationship, my job was such that I could work remotely, and so I had absolutely no reason not to make this move, which felt like the right thing at the right time, and would give me the thing (so I thought, more on that later) that NYC could not—actual space and time to write, in a place where I could exist and not spend most of my awake hours hustling to afford rent and daily expenses.

Well. Fast forward seven years. I’m still here in Baltimore. I love my house. My dog loves the fenced in back yard. It hasn’t been the easy road I thought it would be, but here and there I have actually had the chance to write some words, and next month I will actually have a piece of writing published in an anthology for the first time in I don’t know how many years. And so the project continues. I am, if nothing else, a perpetual work-in-progress in all things.

Day 2

Writing Advice for Day 2:

“There is a very real fear of failure when it comes to writing, especially if it’s work we want to show to others. We want to ready ourselves for success. To present the neat, clean work that shows we’re competent and capable. But quite often, it’s the messiest work that holds all the fun. The garbage is a hell of a good time.

“So dive into the dumpster. Wallow a little with your work. Let it eat a big bowl of leftover spaghetti out of a discolored Tupperware and then drop some of it down the front of its clean white opening page. There is so much good that can come from reveling in the mess. And hey, you can always worry about cleaning up later.” – Kristen Arnett

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I wrote 1043 words about a thing that is too complicated–or perhaps, even likely, not complicated at all except for in my own head space, but definitely too close-to-the-heart–for public eyes.

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Day 3

Writing Advice for Day 3: “I’m no longer interested in waiting for the magic bullet—the one almighty answer from the literary gods that dictate The Way to write a novel. The work will evolve as I do, as will how I approach it. It’s okay to give yourself over to the not-knowing. The I’m-still-figuring-my-shit-out. The maybe-this-never-gets-easier. There’s a lot of room for play in those empty spaces between what we know and what we have yet to learn.” -Leah Johnson

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“A bird that migrates over long distances must maintain its trajectory by day and by night, in every kind of weather, often with no landmarks in sight. If its travels take more than a few days, it must compensate for the fact that virtually everything it could use to stay oriented will change, from the elevation of the sun to the length of the day and the constellations overhead at night. Most bewildering of all, it must know where it is going—even the first time, when it has never been there before—and it must know where that destination lies compared with its current position.” -Kathryn Schulz, Where The Wild Things Go: How Animals Navigate The World, April 5, 2021 issue of The New Yorker

I come from a family of migrators. Both of my parents immigrated from Germany. My grandmother on my mother’s side, my two-year-old mother in tow, newly widowed at the age of 19 joined thousands of Germans fleeing the Tito regime in the former Yugoslavia.

Paula Bechtold (that’s her on the far right) was just a girl living on a farm on the shore of the Danube river, in a little village called Beschka in the former Yugoslavia (near what is now Belgrade). My people on the maternal side of my family are called Donauschwaben, or Danube Swabians. Google “Donauschwaben genocide” and that’s basically the start of my grandmother’s adult life.

When she was matched with a young man to marry, she cried. After her wedding night, she ran away back to her house. Her mother scolded her, you are a wife now, you have to live with your husband. She reluctantly returned.

My grandfather, Heinrich Weiss, was conscripted into army service when shit started going down with Tito, who very much did not want anyone with German heritage to exist. One night, my grandmother woke up in a sudden panic. She knew without a shadow of uncertainty that she had just become a widow.

Around that time, everyone in her village who had not already been slaughtered packed up what they could and started the journey to a country most of them had never actually lived in, but it was das Heimatland, das Vaterland (homeland, fatherland, native country) and they had nowhere else to go. My grandmother and mother joined the queue. Along the way, my grandmother, who had learned as a girl how to sew and made all of her (and my mother’s) clothes, made herself useful as a tailor.

1,335 kilometers (830 miles) later, she arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, and used her sewing skills to build a quiet little life for herself and her daughter, settling just outside of Auschaffenberg in a small town called Goldbach, in a house on the corner of Lindestraße and Karl-Matti-Straße, with an apartment downstairs that she could rent out to a tenant and a storefront on the street level which she rented out as a hair salon. Directly behind her house, familiar farmland, and behind that, forests. It felt like some kind of home, though not the one she would have preferred. Some migrations are not made willingly, but they are nonetheless necessary, and one adapts to them as best one can.

When I would visit her as a teenager and adult, I would walk up the hill behind her house, past the horses, sometimes stopping at the farm to fetch fresh eggs, sometimes bringing a container with which to collect wild raspberries and blackberries. Dodging clumps of horse shit, I would make my way up to the top of the hill behind the farm and stop at the single solitary bench that overlooked the entire city of Goldbach, stretched like a lazy cat across hills and flat lands, woven in between patches of forest and garden plots (because most people had very small yards, there are garden plots at the edges of most cities in Germany, called Schrebergarten, where one can spend the spring and summer ostensibly planting vegetables but mostly drinking beer in the tiny, decorated sheds built onto a large number of the plots). Rested, I would continue on through the tiny patch of forest, on a path that looped around and eventually dumped me out again at the bottom of her street.

My grandmother passed on her migratory genes to my mother, Herta, her only child. Somewhere around the age of 18, my mother went to Canada, but eventually returned to Germany, where she may have stayed forever, had my father—who came over to stay with his great aunt at the age of 13 under circumstances that remain a mystery to me—not decided to get himself a German wife. Pre-Tinder, this was done via a kind of viewbook of eligible bachelorettes, perused by the prospective groom and his mother/guardian. Then followed correspondence of the letter kind (no sexting back in the day) to the perspective matches, which were then narrowed down to a final slate of candidates (in Bachelor-ese, basically skipping right to final hometown dates). Then arrangements were made to visit in person.

My mother…failed to tell my grandmother that she had been corresponding with my father with an eye toward nuptials, and when my father and great aunt arrived for their visit, my great aunt Bertha had to pull Paula aside and inform her of the purpose of their visit.

Well, eventually arrangements were made—grudgingly by Paula, who was not so keen on her only daughter re-crossing that ocean—and my mother joined my father outside of Cleveland, Ohio, where they had four children, the youngest of which (me) became the wanderer of the family.

I did not stray far at first, just a short car ride south for college (Hiram College, alma mater to James A. Garfield, 20^th president of the United States; Garfield was both a student and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which later became Hiram College).

After graduation, in 1997, with only a vague notion that I wanted to good in the world, I packed up my barely functional vehicle with all of my worldly belongings and drove to Baltimore, Maryland, to do a year of AmeriCorps VISTA service (I barely knew what that even was at the time, but I did know that one of my good friends from college lived in Maryland, so, why not?), and stayed there for three years until I decided it was time to go to graduate school and get my MFA.

In the late summer of 2000, I again packed up (most of) my worldly belongings, into a friend’s pickup truck, and we drove to New York City, which I had been to all of once in my life, on a high school choir trip, but I knew it was where one went to become a writer, and I stayed there for 14 years, trying to become a writer (and doing some other stuff).

Finally, I returned to what I had decided was my forever home of Baltimore, the first city I had come to know and love as an independent adult person. It had imprinted on my brain as home, and a large handful of friends I had made during my initial Baltimore residency had stayed and bought homes and gotten married and had babies and started charter schools for their babies, and also my dog very much wanted a fenced-in backyard.

So off we went, and here we still are, seven years later almost to the day, temporarily permanently settled, though the migratory impulse is still there, beating below the surface, teasing me with fantasies of a simpler life somewhere along the Mediterranean coast, maybe Croatia or a Greek island, or Turkey, which I visited and fell in love with in the early 2000s.

But for now, I content myself with helping another creature on its migratory path, the monarch butterfly, and plant milkweed and pollinator-friendly flowers all over my yard, gently transplanting tiny caterpillars and housing them in mini milkweed-filled hotels on my porch, protected from the birds who enjoy them as snacks, so that they may become adult butterflies and eventually join the great migration of monarchs.   

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Day 4

Writing Advice for Day 4:

On process. “I never closely tracked my writing process until people began asking me how I wrote the book they just read. I have no idea how that happened. A mystical process, or one I just never paid attention to, because all my attention was on the essay rather than its making.

So lately, I’ve been keeping track of how it’s going. I didn’t intend to make myself start writing a new book until I was done promoting my last one, but then I wanted to write. Here’s how it’s been going: first, I took interest in something, and I got wrapped up in it, because it was a situation with an unfolding narrative I found compelling. I found myself spending a good amount of my free time learning about this thing, and then compulsively bookmarking things I read online, and then, one day when I was hauling canned cat food up from the basement, a sentence implanted itself in my brain. The sentence wouldn’t leave, and then it spawned another, and then I had to capture them in a Word document so I wouldn’t forget them.” – Elissa Washuta

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[I didn’t write shit today. I blame the disgusting Baltimore humidity for turning my brain and body into a sloth.]

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Day 5

Writing Advice for Day 5:

“To sit down and write is an act of grasping at a stable, realized moment in the whir of existence.” -Jami Attenberg

On productivity and process: “What is writing? How does it happen? Why do I do it? I have no idea. I have no set routine, or place, or time for writing; I often describe the experience of doing it as ‘torturous.’ Sometimes I imagine that if I had a routine it would feel less torturous, but I know that isn’t actually true; it would just be torturous in a more comfortable chair. Whenever I finish something and read it over again the overwhelming feeling I have is distance: how did I write that? The only productivity trick I have is to maintain several projects at once so that my dread of working on all of them sends me to another secret project that I actually want to be working on but am not supposed to, because it distracts me from the more pressing obligations, which I allow to persist long after they need to in order to keep me from enjoying writing the secret project that I actually want to be working on. With every new piece or book, I always imagine that this time I’m going to figure out what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it before I actually start, but so far that has never worked.” – Lauren Oyler

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2080 words, to make up for skipping yesterday. Cobweb clearing, monkey mind thoughts. That writing, only for personal consumption and not for being developed into anything public facing, is important, too.

Day 6

Writing Advice for Day 6: “How does anyone do it? How does anyone sit down on a regular schedule and think: I want to do this and I will and I can. How do we take ourselves seriously? You just have to decide that you do. You have to say: I’m going to show up every day because I want it and I know I can make it happen.” -Jami Attenberg

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1120 words.

I ran across an article on nostalgia, and it got stuck in my head how complicated nostalgia is for kids who grow up with trauma, raised by two humans responsible for 99.9% of your therapy sessions as an adult (abandonment, betrayal, and then the really messy ugly stuff). Every time a happy childhood memory pops into my head, it is immediately followed by the thought, but I was never *actually* a happy child. Was I? Every memory is hazy under a film of trauma. Anywho, I wrote about that. Good times.

“Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion, so nuanced that its sub-variants have names in other languages—German’s sehnsucht, Portuguese’s saudade—that are generally held to be untranslatable. The nostalgia that arouses such scorn and contempt in American culture—predicated on some imagined greatness of the past or inability to accept the present—is the one that interests me least. The nostalgia that I write about, that I study, that I feel, is the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.” – Michael Chabon, The True Meaning of Nostalgia, The New Yorker, March 25, 2017

Day 7

Writing Advice for Day 7: On accountability and community: “I try to write a certain number of words a day, while some friends are measuring the day by how long they wrote, and so on. What I realized is that while I tend to try hard to live up to my promises to others, I am equally good at breaking promises to myself—I mean, it’s just me, here I am, why not. It’s helped so very much to tie each day’s writing to the first tendency, not the second. And what a joy it is that, physically separated though we mostly still are, I daily have these friends at my side.” -R.O. Kwon -Rumaan Alam

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1234 words. Headspace clearing. Shifting from a delightful week of vacation into going back to work mode, and more practical matters, and–here at the halfway point of this project–hoping I can keep up this momentum for days 8-14. Wish me luck.

Day 8

Writing Advice for Day 8: On making peace with your writing: “Writing is really hard, and making peace with it being hard is hard, too. Sometimes you’re gonna do it right, and sometimes you’re gonna do it wrong. The stuff you get right on the first try won’t necessarily be better than the stuff you have to grind away at forever. Probably none of it will ever be perfect because nothing is. So cut yourself some slack. Accept the mess.” -Maggie Shipstead

Today’s writing prompt: CICADAS!! http://www.elisabethdahl.com/brood-x/

“What has changed profoundly in the world in the last 17 years? What needs to change in the next 17 years?”

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Not so much 1000 words as 2 hours of reconstructing a timeline of the past 17 years (I only got up to 2016).

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Day 9

Writing Advice for Day 9: “It’s about making a movement from one place to the next, that’s what sitting down to write has always meant to me. The number is important, of course. The number is something quantifiable. How did I do today? Well, I got my work done. I wrote this many words.”

“And in that shift on the page, there is always a shift in myself. There is a before the words and after the words. I am different because I made this world in the words different. It may not always be clear to me exactly how. Each book I write is an accumulation of small shifts. But I know enough by now to trust that I will always come out the other side different than when I started.” -Jami Attenberg

[0 words. Will do 2K tomorrow.]

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Day 10

Writing Advice for Day 10: “People often say that writing is a uniquely solitary act. But it doesn’t have to be, and there are ways to make sure that you are writing with other people. Reading is the main way I do this. Every time I feel a little too alone with my novel, I read, until I have the sense that those books and writers are keeping me company as I continue on my way. When that fails, I watch a piece of dance, or listen to a piece of music, or look at a piece of art.” -Katie Kitamura

[oh boy, now I’m up to 3K in word debt]

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Day 11

Writing Advice for Day 11: “I believe in assignments (like the 1000 words of summer) and above all I believe in harnessing the power of my own self-loathing. That is to say: I give myself a deadline and a goal that might seem impossible. Then I mentally travel forward in time to the deadline, and I take on board—I really try to feel it—how incapacitated I will be if I haven’t written by then. I bring the feeling into my toes. (As I write this, I realize it’s probably the opposite of a mindfulness technique, though I should be clear I know nothing about mindfulness.) Then I travel back into time to the present moment and realize, with joy and anxiety, that it’s not too late. I can do it. And I always do.” – Elizabeth McCracken

[definitely gunna catch up this weekend. work/life kicking my ass at the moment.]

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Days 12-14

I have to do math to figure out what my word deficit is at this point, but I’m determined to catch up before the end of the final day, day 14. Life has gotten in the way for the past few days, so I’m glad that the advice for days 12 and 13 have to do with flexibility and extending yourself grace:

Writing Advice for Day 12: On flexibility: “The other day I was talking to a class of 6th grade writers. One of the students asked me, ‘Do you ever throw away any writing?’ I told her of course I do because that’s a sign that I’m doing something right. Every time I write something lengthy, say, over 25 pages I get lost like I’m in a maze. I wander around typing random words. I have that where-did-I-put-my-keys feeling. But I’ve figured out that I only get lost when I’m not enjoying what I’m writing. Eventually, I ask myself, ‘What would I rather be writing if I wasn’t afraid to switch over to a new idea or approach?’ That’s when I switch over.” -Maurice Ruffin

Writing Advice for Day 13: On extending yourself grace. “Between the pandemic, protests, and the presidential election, the not-writing folded over and consumed me. And mostly, what I felt was shame. I thought, what if this is it? What if I never write again? All this expectancy people have for me, wasted.

“I think about how I might have been better able to mitigate those fears if our art-making wasn’t so entwined with a capitalist kind of productivity. With this drive for the next book and the next book and the next book without real consideration for the time it takes to produce art or the distinctiveness of our individual processes or that sometimes the world simply requires one to witness. The fallow periods and day-dreaming and TV-watching. The energy it takes to care for and nourish our bodies (especially this; how easy to forget we are animal and we need). All things that are essential to writing but aren’t classified as writing. Actions and in-actions necessary to refill the well.

“If any of this feels familiar, I’m telling you the way I was told—extend yourself grace. You’re okay. Whether it’s been a few days since you last touched the work or a few years, it’s yours and it’s there whenever you’re ready. Remember you like this; that you’re called to it. Take a deep breath. Hold it for five seconds. And release. Ok. Let’s get back to the page.” -Dantiel W. Moniz

Writing Advice for Day 14: “Information should be free. There are many ways to support the vision of this project without spending a dime. Ordering books through your local library. Supporting your peers through social media when they have something published. Going to zoom events and saying something nice in the chat. Being a positive and thoughtful member of a writing group. Mentoring younger writers, if you’re in a place to do that. And when we’re all ready to go to book events again, clapping real loud, especially from the back row. So that nervous person standing on stage can hear you. So they don’t feel alone in this world.” -Jami Attenberg

FINAL WORD COUNT ACCOUNTABILTY TALLY

Committed to: 14000 words

Final actual word count: 14000 words exactly, limping across the finish line two days late, like that last marathon runner who is like, fuck it, I’ma finish this damn thing in my own time. Woot.