Who are these crazy dreamers who plug away at something, for hour after hour on their own, believing that one day it will come to something? I am one of them, and although sometimes I feel deluded (!), I know that there is a quiet faith that my writing will see the light of day sometime and that is why I do it. It takes courage to have faith. A lot of people will say, just get a regular job, but inside of each of us creative labourers there is this voice, this determination, that says I will do it. I think of writers like athletes, sometimes, training for a marathon, putting in the hours day in, day out, maybe getting their five minutes of glory if they place on the day when it matters, maybe crashing out due to injury, but still going back to training, putting in the hours, and still believing that their day will come.
A writer I have recently discovered is Anne Lamott. In ‘Bird by Bird’, she says, ‘I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and you watch and you work, you don’t give up.’
We didn’t ask for this, this burden of creativity, but it has been given to us. We delight in it too. It is like an instinct or urge to create that we can’t supress, and no matter how often we try to be ‘normal’ and turn our back on it, it won’t leave us alone, like the way my cat follows me around the house when she wants to be fed, and just sits just behind me silently. She just waits there as if to say, ‘when are you going to pay attention to me?’
Something I have realised lately is that as a writer, there is a handicap. For any other creative, you are free to make and then what you have made exists in the world. You can sell it, exhibit it, hang it on your wall, but for the writer, what you have laboured over doesn’t exist until someone else says it is good enough. The amount of work on my laptop makes me feel suffocated. There are dozens of short stories, a novel, a novella, two collections of poetry, a book about the creative journey, but they don’t exist because they have all been rejected. Of course, the internet is changing this and there is the freedom to self-publish but it is still frowned upon in the literary world.
This past year though, I have been working on hand lettered versions of a collection of 34 poems that I have written about motherhood. It seems strange to me that it has been birthed so quickly. Although some of the poems were written 9 years ago, the idea for a hand lettered collection came about and was completed in the last year. And in the zine/graphic novel world, it is the done thing to make a collection and to get it out there. And it feels great to have done this, to have my poems being read, being absorbed, circulating in the world.
May Sarton, in her fantastic book, Journey of a Solitude says ‘the gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up’, and I can’t emphasise enough how true this feels in my life. It feels great to be a maker, to hold something in my hand that I can give away or sell. It’s a little bit like standing naked, holding out your heart on a platter, admittedly, but it still feels real, and worthwhile and I am glad for it.
You can find ‘There You Are’ in my etsy shop here.
elisabeth pike 