#69: june writer's note
practices over professions, developing lifetime creative skills
Good morning,
It’s the last day of June, which means the year is half over. How quickly time moves.
I’m currently in what some call “the fifth trimester” (months 4-6 post birth), which is when most women transition back to work. And what a wrought journey that can be.
In the words of author & advocate Lauren Smith Brody:
The first three trimesters (and the fourth—those blurry newborn days) are for the baby, but the Fifth Trimester is when the working mom is born. No matter what the job or how you define work, you’re going to have a lot of questions. When will I go back? How should I manage that initial “I want to quit” attack? Flex-time or full-time? How can I achieve 50/50 at home with my partner? What’s the best option for childcare? Is it possible to look like I slept for eight hours instead of three? And . . . why is there never a convenient space to pump?
As a writer, I have the luxury of making my own schedule. With that luxury comes a wonderful freedom but also a difficult anxiety. The mental load of navigating care for your family alone is enormous. Adding to that the questions of your own schedule and income: what kind of contracts to take on, at what rate, what kind of deliverables you can manage alongside childcare, how to approach it as the primary caregiver, what’s worth time away from your care work and so forth, is uncharted territory for me. For now, I’m pacing myself, as I’d planned for a solid 6 months of leave, but I’m steadily increasing my work hours along the way.
Still, the urge to write is hard to ignore. It follows me constantly: the ideas, the hunger for a clear 8 hour day to dig into research that’s piling into folders, the desire to be in a room full of adults who challenge your mind and the overall desire to feel progress, to feel productive.
Incidentally, learning to value care over professional productivity is at the core of the project I’m currently working on, so living through it is required. Alongside writing my way through these questions, I’ve been studying how other creative parents approach work after children and how creatives in general turn their work into a practice, rather than a profession.
See here from Catherine Ricketts on Madeline L’Engle:
As she resumed her practice, she established patterns that would last a lifetime. Her granddaughter remembers that she turned in at nine each night so that she’d be fresh for the next day’s work. Whether in her country house or at the library of Manhattan’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where beginning in 1966 she was writer-in-residence, she wrote every day. She did so not because she was inspired every day but so that the tools of her craft would be sharp when a rare moment of vision struck. As she writes in the memoir The Summer of the Great-Grandmother,“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”
Practices, in my opinion, are much harder than professions because they require self-motivation in the absence of validation. Most practices, be they spiritual, physical or creative, are incredibly private. They require periods of intensive work, skill-building and learning, alongside periods of rest and repair.
They are well-documented by Bill Hayes, whose book on the parallels between creative practice and athletic training (summarized by Maria Popova here) outlines 6 principles that sustain long-term fitness. For example, the principle of specificity encourages you to train for your goal, be it strength, endurance, a specific skill etc. The principle of progression demands that you move on as soon as you have mastered a new task. And the principle of rest is the foundation of any sustained practice. “Just as the body needs time to rest so does an essay, story, chapter, poem, or especially, a book,” he writes.
In a sense, each month I acquire new comfort, skills and joy as a mother is also a month I am deepening my understanding of what it means to be a writer and finding new ways to do my work.
One of the pieces of advice I’ve most loved is to approach writing seasonally, which, as you know, I already believe in. Reflecting on the last year while reading Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words was very grounding. She writes:
Winter is an internal and developmental phase. It’s when we ask ourselves questions to develop our baseline creative self. Like: How do you view yourself as an artist and a writer and a creative person in the world? What are your desires? What do you want to get out of your work? What does it mean to you to do work? What are the goals—both big and small—you hope to accomplish? How do you feel about the story you have to tell? Winter is the time to be thoughtful, self-interrogative, and centered. Now we begin to understand why we’ve chosen to write.
My winter began with last year's sabbatical and pregnancy; it was long, it was quiet, and by the end of it I produced one great project, indulged in much private reflection and gave birth.
Spring is about prepping for our project, assessing what we need in order to move forward and be as productive as possible. It’s a moment to examine what our distractions are, how sometimes they are out of our control, but also how sometimes we create them for ourselves. And to notice if we’re talking ourselves out of progress—or even getting started in the first place. How do we get out of our own way so we can succeed? And how do we plan for the future of our work? How do we give ourselves all the care and thought we need to be ready to write? How do we situate ourselves in our world and then set ourselves up to write? How do we arm ourselves with what we need to proceed? In spring, we contemplate productivity and streamlining our process. It’s a moment to be strategic, analytical, and pragmatic.
This perfectly explains my spring, both literal spring, March and April, and the spring of birth, my first 9 weeks with baby, all those quiet moments with him as I observed him emerge and observed myself emerge, so many questions and new ways of working alongside us both.
Summer is when we’ve carved out time in our schedules, we’ve plotted out the future, and we’re ready to commit to generating new work. (This season is how all this began—with #1000wordsofsummer!) Let’s get messy, let’s make mistakes, let’s write into all of it with abandon and see what we can create. We’re in the rhythm now, so how do we ride our momentum to the end? Ever so slightly we contend with where this is all going, but mostly we write with pure joy.
Here I am, 4 months post birth, enjoying summer in the parks of San Francisco, beginning of the rest of my life as a mother and exploring on the page.
And finally, fall is when we acknowledge the need to give ourselves grace. We do not accomplish work all the time. If we flowed in summer, perhaps now we need to ebb. How do we not judge ourselves when we need a break? How can we recognize when we need to pause and regroup? We need to remember the words will always be there for us, no matter what.
Which brings us back to the sabbatical preceding my winter, in which I learned to rest.
Figuring out how to move through our process efficiently, honestly. Contending with the hard stuff of life and recognizing it doesn’t have to derail our work. These are our challenges. But always remember the pleasure of the act of writing—the magic of inventing new ideas and worlds—and move toward that. There’s always a way to get there again. Season after season.
I couldn't have asked for better words to explain how this drawn out negotiation with work has felt over the last year. How allowing work to bloom into a practice feels right. How much has changed in the year since the journey began.
To all those in summer, I hope you’re feeling messy and joyful. And to those just beginning to find themselves in the seasons, I hope you truly give yourself grace this fall. Living alongside the seasons is a wonderful feeling.
Happy Sunday,
Jihii
References Mentioned:
The Fifth Trimester (Book)
Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both? (Electric Lit)
Working Out, Working In: Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to Writing and Creative Work (The Marginalian)
Seasons of Delivery vs. Data Collection (Time Spent)
1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round (Book)
How to Design a Sabbatical (Time Spent)
Related: Pivoting with Purpose: Navigating Career Change After Motherhood (Podcast)
Beautifully expressed