I thought I needed to learn patience, but it was trust
September Happy Hour link, Fledgling Newsletter #50
Psst…Your Lunch Break 9/28 and Happy Hour 9/29 links are at the bottom of this email!
Today I am writing to you from the garden where the plants are fully bloomed in their early-Fall glory. The bell peppers have made the plant so heavy with fruit that a stalk has snapped and fallen forcing me to eat them soon. The kale resembles a Dr. Suessian bush whose tallest leaves reach all the way to my chest. The green beans have climbed to the top of the trellis, so that I have to reach above my head to snag the highest beans.
I am not the gardener in the family. I am the cook, with a love of carefully harvesting the goods. It makes sense to me, that the proper way to remove a sprig of basil or a flower for your table is to snip at the juncture where two more shoots are sprouting off. (To me, this is also a ripe metaphor for our words and ideas. Set one down, and there another appears in its place).
When it comes to the garden, I am the cook, but also the skeptic, offering remarkably unhelpful naysaying around June, assuming that a slow start means a definite failure.
For instance, in the spring, Henry (my partner for those new here 👋🏼) brought home a sack of hairy tubers and announced we would have to dig them up at the end of the season to store in the cellar, like spooky, sleeping alien babies waiting to come to life again. I’ll admit, this didn’t bother me because I wasn’t sure I would ever see a single season of these dahlias when they were struggling to sprout. Now the living room is spotted with bouquets of their improbably dramatic colors: velvety red, proper fuchsia, and a pink-yellow-white tie-dye.
I am impatient with gardening. When a plant turns brown, I tend to think well that’s it, they’re dead, sayonara. I have been accused (by others and by my own inner critic) of being impatient in writing, too, shooting pieces off to be considered for publication before they’re ready. If I were to spin this flaw in a job interview I would say, that my brimming ideas lead me away from one project right into the next. But sometimes this is preemptive. And sometimes it is not inspiration, but frustration that has me finding “The End” too soon.
Knowing when a written work is finished has historically created a conundrum for writers. Some of my pieces have damn near raised their hands when they were finished, but most I simply cannot bear to look at anymore. I walk away when they are in the pest-eaten, ugly stage we found the dahlias in last June.
But is it really patience I lack? No. Patience is what you teach a kid whose toy is on the fritz. “Don’t shake Elmo,” we say, “be patient.” But this is not a broken toy.
This is progress. This is practice. This is life! I am not guilty of not patiently waiting to see if my writing will work, but I am sometimes guilty of not trusting myself and the work to bloom in its due time. Even if it has an ugly stage.
Henry reminded me that it was slugs that were causing the dahlias to suffer in the spring. Slugs that he had painstakingly hunted when they appeared in the night and dropped into salt water to kill. He did not sit around waiting patiently for their survival.
Last week I began the revision of a chapter that has held me up for a long time. I weeded out my material for what really belongs—attacking it, not letting it attack me. I can’t tell you how satisfying it felt to print and hold the little book of tens pages that contains everything the chapter needs to really be something. My very own bouquet.
There is no waiting in this game, there is only writing, growing, trying. For that you don’t need patience. You need trust.
So, trust yourself, trust your words, and trust the right people to find them, honeydew. We’ve go this. And each of us will find our season to bloom.
News:
🚨Fledgling will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival once again this year! I’ll be leading the creation of a community poetry collage (you’ll have to come see it to believe it!), selling my prompt book Words in Progress, and talking about what’s new with Fledgling. Come see me at booth 529 to say hi and check it out!
💻I was proud to have published this personal essay, about a complicated relationship I had with an older friend when I was a teen, in Hobart this month. One reason it is special to me is that I began what this would become in a Wing Mending course in 2018. Thank you to that amazing group that came together and gave me a safe space to process and write these thoughts down for the first time. (Look out for Fledgling’s trauma writing courses to reappear soon).
📝Fledgling’s weekly writers’ hour Lunch Break is tomorrow 9/28 at 1 pm EST and our September Happy Hour is this Thursday 9/29 at 6 pm EST. I’ll be featuring Hispanic voices for Hispanic Heritage Month this week, and I am so excited. Don’t miss these chances to write with a group before the month is up! Scroll or upgrade to paid to join us.
Prompts:
Turn your phone on airplane mode. Choose a prompt. Write to it for 10 minutes. If you want to keep going, keep going. If you like what you write, reply it back to me and maybe see it in the newsletter next month...
Here’s one for the start of fall and one I return to again and again at any transition period. Write a breakup letter to summer. Maybe this is an amicable breakup, perhaps it was mutual, or even contentious. Let summer know what about it you are leaving behind.
In the spirit of Acevedo’s poem, which you can find below, write about a place or thing that makes you or a character sad, but is emotionally neutral for most other people. Can you not eat peanut butter because your late dog loved it? Maybe it’s a song or a trip to the post office that does you in. Put us there in the scene, describing the place in detail and letting those details connect to something about yourself or the character you are writing about.
And lastly, something to read:
a poem by Elizabeth Acevedo, which first appeared in Poetry Magazine.
You Mean You Don’t Weep at the Nail Salon?
it’s the being alone, i think, the emails but not voices. dominicans be funny, the way we love to touch — every greeting a cheek kiss, a shoulder clap, a loud.
it gots to be my period, the bloating, the insurance commercial where the husband comes home after being deployed, the last of the gouda gone, the rejection letter, the acceptance letter, the empty inbox.
a dream, these days. to work at home is a privilege, i remind myself.
spend the whole fucking day flirting with screens. window, tv, computer, phone: eyes & eyes & eyes. the keys clicking, the ding of the microwave, the broadway soundtrack i share wine with in the evenings.
these are the answers, you feel me? & the impetus. the why. of when the manicurist holds my hand, making my nails a lilliputian abstract,
i close my fingers around hers, disrupting the polish, too tight i know then, too tight to hold a stranger, but she squeezes back & doesn’t let go & so finally i can.
Find out how to join the September Happy Hour focused on Trusting Your Ideas below!
(Thursday, September 29, 6-7:45 pm EST on Zoom)
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