REFILLING THE WELL
Most of my writing lately has been for my day job as a journalist. It’s a completely different sort of beast than the poems I’m known for and the upcoming novel that has consumed the last two years of my life.
The writing you do for a newspaper is bare bones, unadorned, and unbiased— just a presentation of facts and quotes. Writing for a newspaper for a decade has really honed my writing down from what it was early in my writing career, made it more accessible, clear, and authentic. It was a path Hemingway also walked early on, that of a newspaperman, and he was thankful for those years writing for the Kansas City Star and credited them with creating his clear declarative prose.
Lately, I’ve been carrying my trusty old poetry journal and a pen with me wherever I go, just in case a muse whispers to me and some lines come. So far nothing really, just a smattering of sentences with as much substance or impact as mist. I’ve been working on previously written and unpublished poems like “The Chapel”, which was published in it’s original form by The Dewdrop. But I’ve been struggling to create anything new.
I’ve been in these creative lulls before and they typically take hold when I’ve finished drafting, editing, revising, and proofing a manuscript with my publisher. With my upcoming novel with Winter Goose Publishing, Good Brave People, its no different. It’s like I’ve given my all into a writing project, emptied my literary well so you speak, and now I have to let the well refill. I do this by copious amounts of reading, hiking, camping, fishing, travel, cooking, and eating.
So, this weekend I’m going on a ten mile wander by myself in the backcountry, and in a couple weeks my wife and I are going on a roadtrip so I can show her the majesty of the Tetons (she’s never seen them).
I’m cautiously optimistic that these little adventures will help refill my well so I can open my poetry journal and get the hell back to work.
Stay tuned!
