Category: Creative non-fiction

Loaf Pans, Sweet Aromas, and Metaphors in Winter

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This morning I’m making pumpkin bread, ostensibly for my son who’s home with a cold, but mostly because I want to fill the house with the aroma of ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. Comfort. Care. Sweet.

Of late, the home has smelled of sick dog and not-so-homemade meals. The smells of exhaustion.

The pumpkin bread recipe has different baking times for different loaf pan sizes. 8×4 or 9×5.

My loaf pan, browned from years of lightly greasing and flouring, is 8.5×4.5

No joke.

Not quite here, not quite there. Close enough.

That’s how I feel these days, in this place, at this time. Maybe, in many ways, I always have.

It’s a not-entirely-comfortable feeling. No one wants to feel out-of-place.

No, that’s not right.

Out-of-step. I feel slightly out-of-step. Slightly mis-sized. Needing a little finagling to mingle with the other, uh, loaf pans. A different shelf or a little twisting here and there.

On my counter right now is a beautiful, perfectly baked, aromatic loaf of pumpkin bread. Due to the irregular size, it needed more observing, more tending, more awareness than other loaves…more wiggle room and patience than allowed for in the suggested time ranges. It took more than the 52-57 minutes. It took adjusting the oven. It took years of experience to know by sight and smell when it was close to done, and by the quality of crumb on the toothpick that it was.

There’s a lesson there that I choose to apply to myself on these days when the light is fleeting and the year fades into promises for the future. On these days when we hear no and why and you’ve got to be kidding me, on the days when self-care — the soulful kind, not the chocolate kind — is needed, on the days when the fight for rights and beliefs and humanity seems ever needy and urgent…on these days it’s ok to find the metaphor wherever we can.

Even if the metaphor is that there will always be crumbs.

NaNo Victorious

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I won NaNoWriMo in 11 days. That means that in 11 days, I wrote 50,000 words.

And I just don’t feel great about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love meeting a challenge. I love filling out the forms and seeing the stats. How many days ahead I am. How many words per day I average. That’s actually quite a rush for a left-brained writer like me.

I wrote a few thousand words half-heartedly in a poorly thought out novel idea I have. The remaining words were in a series of essays that felt more like confessionals than anything else. They were sprawling and unfocused and certainly unfunny.

I know that 50,000 words of any sort are nothing to sneeze at. I’m a big fan of this notion:

But I’m also, like a certain famous founding father made popular by the luminous Lin-Manuel Miranda, writing like I’m running out of time. That’s just the point I’m at in my life. This is probably a result of having celebrated a fairly major birthday yesterday, but that’s another post for another time.

I am fine if I write bad first drafts. I am used to it and know what to do.

I am fine if I write pointless first drafts to be tucked away probably never to see the light of day again.

But I’m not so fine when it’s both. And this felt like that.

The novel? I need to really flesh it out, to plan, to consider, to walk around in that world longer than the one week I did in October. The book itself jumped around from young adult to “show me your ID” adult, and that, if nothing else needs to be cleared up.

I like writing essays and poems, though. That’s where my heart is. That’s where, right now, the humor is.

But those essays are not things to be rushed for the sake of NaNo or any other false deadlines. They are things to be rushed for real deadlines — the ones I impose on myself, the ones that wake me up at 3 in the morning because if I don’t get the words out, they pull apart and bind with the oxygen in the air and float away.

My husband pointed out that sitting down and doing the work, getting to the writing, has never been my problem. My problem, for better or worse, is idea generation. I tend to struggle for the right things to write about. Once decided, the words flow. That’s an entirely different situation than what I believe NaNo addresses., which, as far as I can tell, turning off the internal editor and working past certain elemental fears that all writers have.

So, for now, I am NaNo victorious, but the work is nowhere near done.

NaNo Scatter

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I’ve had the privilege of two protracted, relatively uninterrupted writing days. I’m closing in on 10,000 words already. First drafts and word counts are rarely my problems — it’s the rewriting, the editing, and finding the art in the marble that causes me to sweat.

So far, I haven’t felt particularly funny and instead wrote stark, necessary essays. Now purged of some of the sulfur, I’m reconsidering the novel I put aside the other day in favor of writing essays.

Maybe a few thousand words will let me know if this is the right time for a novel. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel funny. Maybe in a week, I’ll have the courage to continue the serious pieces.

So I’ll permit myself this oscillate-writing. Back and forth, concurrent, parallel, and distinct. Perhaps an unsurprising constellation awaits at the end.