November 2, 2012
Friday

You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest Night—

You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor— 
— Emily Dickinson, 1830-1883
American poet

For a long time I have used A Writer’s Book of Days, a collection of writing prompts, quotations, and essays of encouragement put together by Judy Reeves. The link takes you to the author’s website and a page that features the revised edition. I have also used the original. I don’t use it faithfully, only intermittently, and I know that the times I pick it up and turn to whatever date it is usually signal a period of lostness or confusion in my work and in my life.

Yesterday was the first of a new month, and I needed to draw a line and begin again. I drew the Reeves book down from its shelf, opened it to November, and read the prompt for the day: This is not your home. I picked up my pen and began writing in the voice of a character who finds herself suddenly a young widow in a town she moved to only to follow her husband.  The words came easily, even though I haven’t paid much attention to this novel-in-progress for the past six weeks. I wrote for about twenty minutes, and then got up to make my second cup of coffee.

And that’s when I remembered. I went to my baskets of journals, one of the few well-organized parts of my stuff, two wicker crates that hold all the handwritten private journal work I have compiled since I began writing seriously and steadily twenty years ago. Each 150-page notebook is labeled with a number and the dates it covers. I’m using J38 right now. I flipped back a few to find last November, in J34.

I had used the same Reeves prompt last year to shape the same character. Reading through that day, I also saw that I was feeding the bluebirds (I had thought their recent appearance — six of them, two males and four females from the second set of hatchlings we had this summer — was unusual so late in the fall), and falling into a depression as well.

My notes from 2011 could have sent me into a tailspin of brooding self-pity over the stultifying sameness of my life. Instead, I was energized. It’s been a difficult two months for me, and I have been loath to admit that, since my troubles are so minor and so readily handled when compared with the challenges others face. Ron said last night that he really did discern an improvement in his eye condition, likely because the swelling is nearly gone. Today he did some small tasks around the property: filling the bird feeder, checking the damage on a metal snow gauge that fell over in the storm, inspecting the bluebird house. Those are things that really didn’t have to be done, and they were things I could have done if necessary. But I think it helped him feel closer to normal than he has felt.

As for my character, I know more about her now than I did then. I’ve introduced her to two people whose lives she will change, and I’ve given her a flaw. She’s going to make a very bad decision in a bar, and I will write her into that scene next week, and discover what she is going to do about the consequences of that bad decision.

My wobbling into a genuine depression is not unfamiliar to me this time of year. I have every resource I need to keep it from taking over my life.

Many of my friends live in or have strong connections to the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy. I do too. I’ve been in touch with the friends I made in the Upper East Side neighborhood I sojourned in the summer of 2011, and I’ve been kept informed of conditions at the Jersey Shore. Emily Dickinson’s lines about the flood you cannot fold have been making the rounds among us. No doubt she was speaking metaphorically, about passion, for love or for art, and the forces that can destroy it.

There is so much work ahead for all of us, old work and new work, work we’re eager to get back to and work we wish would not be required of us.

Let’s get busy.