My process ebbs and flows. Like the tide, like the Duwamish River with the Elliot Bay's pull. Like traffic with commuter hours. There is movement but a lot of repetition as well. For the last week, I have ,without conscious effort, switched to project mind. I have not written creatively this week except for a few lines here and there in my journal. Instead, I have been working on promotion or my Hugo House Class, applying to jobs, working on my cover letter, building out this website, and working with a friend to get together the visual for some poems I have recently recorded. This stuff stuff may not be visible on the surface. But this stuff is what I have to figure out how to do and work into my schedule. There is no one way to success. How I define personal success makes all the difference.
Everything is a full time job. This goes for other artists as well. To be practicing artist, and be part of community, the way I want to be, I must also be the promotional team, the emailer, so many different little aspects of the job. It is ok with me to shift gears for a week to get ahead on projects and stuff like this, but it is when this kind of work stretches longer than a week that I start feeling beat down, and depressed. I write poetry because I love writing poetry. I love the process, the free writing, the editing, everything about it. I am fine doing busy work if it enables me, in the long run, to have more time to just write. But, there are definitely times it feels like I am treading water, that I waking up every day, currently jobless, and going to the desk to write doesn’t feel like I am doing enough. That’s part of the reason I am doing this blog, to put myself out there in a different way.
