It’s Been a Hell of a Year

It’s time.

2024 has been a productive and busy year, but it’s also been a creative lost cause. What exactly have I been doing?

The Town. Being chair of the Selectboard means that everything comes my way. When the Health Officer resigned, the board chair got that job by default. Three days later, a homeless drug user burned down the abandoned house she was living in after she was released from jail, and then the next day got bitten by all three of her dogs. We’ve had wildly contentious meetings about muddy roads and preserving trees and the quality of gravel from the local pit. When our transfer station attendant got a new job last December, one of the other board members and I have split the duties of running the place ourselves until we finally hired someone early last month. This is the year of renewal for our Hazard Mitigation Plan, and we’ve received a major grant for the renovation of a discarded Catholic church to become our new library (though we’re having trouble buying the building, with a new bishop coming in and the Diocese declaring bankruptcy… we should finally close a week from today).

The Election. Not merely the national scene, about which I’m optimistically terrified. Our local candidate for Vermont House needed Nora and I to step up and take over lots of campaign tasks. (There’s a whole story there—as Jack Webb used to say, names have been changed to protect the innocent.) Plus I’m a poll worker and an elections officer. The VT Secretary of State has issued guidance on what to do in the face of an active threat, and I’m seeing ads for junior-spaceman scam devices that supposedly detect wireless signals from voting machines to some secret web server where the Chinese-Venezuelan Jews can steal the election… there’s just a lot of lunacy out there. I’d say I’m looking forward to next Wednesday when it’s over, but in the Orange Era, elections are never over; they just turn into baseless, endless lawsuits. Or armed gangs.

Coaching. I led a writers’ group from September to May, which came to a trickling close when the specified end date arrived. I never knew how to be helpful. Maybe I was.

Work. I’ve taken on an external-evaluation job for a Federal grantee, which includes everything from questionnaire development and data analysis to buying 200 coffee gift cards for individual participants, all at a distance of 2,550 miles.

Home Life. It seems like we’ve had people over for dinner or potlucks, or staying with us for a few days, on every square of the calendar. It’s been a super-social year. And that’s before we get to the big project, which was the construction of our studio. It’s a treat (one of our neighbors called it “a public good”), but it occupied most of a year, from September to September.

With all of that going on, I haven’t made any space to just write. I’ve sat at the keyboard plenty, to no avail. I keep knowing that something’s going to come up, looking over my shoulder at all of my real and imaginary tasks, and so I don’t have the confidence to just go away for hours at a time and live in another world.

Writing isn’t about typing. It’s not about proofreading, or editing. Those things are all true, but they aren’t what writing is. Writing is fully inhabiting another life, as emotionally filled as my own. And that takes not merely time, but also permission. Permission I haven’t granted myself for a year.

I started this blog back in 2019, when The Adjunct Underclass was coming out. Since then, I’ve written three novels I’m really proud of; the blog was part of the discipline that let them emerge. But since last fall, I’ve had two really good ideas for a novel. And as the writer and teacher Robert Owen Butler says, if you have a good idea for a novel, you’re going to write a bad book. Stories don’t come from good ideas. They come from the spirit world, from what he calls “the place where you dream.” So I’ve driven those two books sixty or eighty pages into the swamp, with no hope of retrieval. That becomes its own cycle, work that doesn’t work that convinces me that I can’t do the work. Easier and safer to just lose myself to internet head.

So it’s time to be back, to clear the culvert and let the flow come free. Glad to see you.