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Not what a good writer does.

It has been a contemplative week for me. I spent the week delving into the creative things I found that piqued my interest, while deliberately not posting anything to social media because something in me was craving alone time. It can be a strange thing, social media. Every post is a mini-performance. It’s like putting on a little show every time you share. And that’s lovely. But your whole life — my whole life — can’t be a constant performance for other people. There has to be a rich and interesting ‘behind-the-scenes’, too. And I had gotten to a destructive mental place where everything I was reading or doing or working on, I was thinking in the back of my mind, ‘should I share this?’ ‘how about this?’ ‘is this important to give the people?’ ‘is this good for them?’

And with all that mental chatter going on, I wasn’t able to take anything in, for myself. I couldn’t process it, chew on it, digest it, all on my own for my own growth and pleasure. That was a red flag for me that something was unhealthy. It is such an important thing to be able to have a clear mind and a wide open space inside where you can run free. A silence all your own. To be with the Presence. The All of Creation. The soft, soft beating of my own heart, wandering wild and free. and alone. and together with The Mysterious Everything.

So this week as I pulled away from the world and into myself, I was still writing, in fact, I wrote more this past week than I had in months and it felt GORGEOUS.  I could hear my own voice again. So I come to you after a week in creative solitude to offer you this little collection of things that inspired me over the past few days. They run quite the creative gamut, and there are two ways of thinking about that. One is that I’m just a scatterbrain. The other is that in a joyful creative life, you don’t hold yourself back, and you don’t box yourself in, and you can grow in every direction you feel like as long as it feels delicious.

How about let’s go with the latter, it sounds so much more fun, yeah? 🙂

So. Here are 4 things I couldn’t wait to share with you, and 2 bonus things that involve purple wildflowers because I want you to feel beautiful, vibrant, and adored because you so are.

(1) I’m wild for the art of self-portraiture right now. It is HARD to do. But when I get an image I like, it feels really good to remember that we are all beautiful, and we are all flawed, and we all have the right to explore our own precious bodies in ways that feel holy, intimate, and healthy. Here is one of my own self-portraits, along with a little riff I wrote about writing big unwieldy things, and not sharing them yet, and painting my hair ocean blue.  Also, here are three self-portrait artists who are insanely talented and have inspired me to give it a try more often: @luna.res @brookeshaden @katieteix 

(2) “Live first. Then you write. You don’t ‘live to write.’ That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not what any good writer does.” — this is some righteous, straight-forward advice from a strong and mighty writer named Rita Dove, who is the next poetry editor for The New York Times. Here is a great article about her and what she believes poetry might grant unsuspecting news readers. The Times will run poetry right alongside their regular news stories. Poetry in a new kind of spotlight? I’m intrigued… (Here is Rita Dove’s poem Testimonial. “I gave my promise to the world / And the world followed me here.”)

(3) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk about the danger of a single story is incredibly thoughtful, empowering, and inspiring. If you ever fear telling your own story – scars and scabs and all – through your art, this talk is a must watch / listen to. It is no secret that we are living in dynamic and sometimes down right frightening global times, and in my heart of hearts I truly believe that it will be the artists who tell their own stories with kindness and conviction, and the ones with the courage to really listen to them, who will make our world a safer place for humanity and this precious planet we share.

(4) “If I were your writing coach, my first goal would be to encourage your sense of self. I know you have one. I’d coax it out.” — Kris Gage in her article How To Be A Writer. I adore this gal’s style. She slings drinks and she does not play when it comes to writing advice. (or life advice, for that matter. which I suppose is quite truly the same thing.)

Which all brings us to the 2 bonus things I promised you this week, in all of your magical creative glow.

Thing #1. A lovely flatbed of wildflowers under a dreamy spring cloud sky. I took this photo while out with my husband antiquing, flea marketing, flower collecting, and looking for the perfect farmhouse to pretend we can afford. Because writers take breaks from writing, too. And we know that a huge part of writing is to live with eyes and arms and hearts wide open. We are sky and earth, and night and day. and rain and sun, and we bloom in our own time, in our own seasons, and it’s beautiful to be us.

Thing #2. A little drawing I made in my journal to represent feelings that I had no real words to describe. I wrote a thing about it here. Which is mainly to say, that whatever you are working on, dear creative friend, it is lovely.  Whatever it is, just as it is, it is a beautiful imperfect gift. And you? You are nothing but miraculous shine.

Until next time, I’m sending you love like wildflowers, and joy like a little witch girl figure whose legs for some inexplicable reason don’t connect to her tiny triangle body,

Allison Marie

Receive weekly creative goodies like these by clicking here to sign up to my mailing list, and I’ll catch you on Monday. 😉

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// Here Is The Flood (Audiofiles) //

 

 

This is an excerpt from “Here Is The Flood” — one of the opening pieces in my upcoming book Luminae.  You can click play to hear me read the full piece.

I find that one of the hardest things to do is to try to speak about why I write. For me it’s about going deep enough within to a place where one can find the breathtaking beauty in pangs of sorrow, and terrible longing even inside joy.  Whenever I write it seems more and more is revealed to me about the paradox of what we are as humans. Though I know I’ll never be able to grasp it in full, I believe somewhere in the search for myself lies the truth of who I am. It is that elusive truth which keeps me coming back to the page.

I hope you enjoy this piece. I hope it sparks something creative inside of you.

Luminae will be available on Amazon beginning November 15th.

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// Wax Figurines (Audiofiles) //

 

 

As the wind on the other side of the house spins dry leaves into playful funnels, I pour a glass of red to take the edge off the cracking in my worn out limbs. When static picks at my insides, I think about how the passing of time can do strange shadowy things to the air in an empty room. I remember your arms reaching for me under warm wool blankets like rays of twilight radiating from behind the gray pale hills in winter. The way the coming season tasted cold in my throat just before your lips made silver puddles in the curves of my fading summer skin. We bent like swans in a secluded cove, beauty is more beautiful when it moves back and forth between two creatures, felt but unseen.

Lighting tall candlesticks made of honey and wax, I swallow the darkness in bottles to help sleep through the pain.

I miss the way you used to hold my eyes with yours so gently that to look away felt like a thousand little claws tearing in my heart. The heavenly weight of you, once pushed against me now hangs burdensome within.  I notice I am clutching my hands so tight there are marks in my palms, I’m trying to hold us together though we have long been torn apart. You linger in a place which grew so loud inside me it screamed itself alive, built its strangled silence into faces on the walls.

The scent of heady incense stays nestled in the curtains, the bed sheets, the windowsill I run my fingertips along just now.  Splinters, glittering stars, little fires spitting heat. Spirits hollow, sing; your ghost in the bird wings scattered at my feet.

There are traces of you in my reflection, your bones carve out the shallow in my cheeks, the stubble on your chin still scratches the length of my collarbone before the dead mornings like knives rush in, bleak. I saw you. I could almost swear but what’s the use. When the heavy snow came down you were red fire in the smoldering paprika sky. My lips burn swollen at the thought of the flame of you. I wish you could still feel the blood pulsing expectant in my wrists, your hands upon my neck. I wonder if you still do. If the places in the mind which ring the mystery of longing exist someplace safely in a place far beyond my name.

But the days have grown short inside of me and midnight falls too easily now, bleeding and so full that when I close my eyes I forget everything I had ever been told about what it means to love, what it means to die, what it means to touch. I still hold you close without thinking and bury my tears into your memory before I lose the grip I once had on what is real and what has disappeared. When will this madness lift. When will all the ache be gone.

The wine is plush and smooth as silk as it glides over my tongue. How is it that as the world grows darker, you grow luminous. How is it that the dead still breathe in dreams. When will those little brown leaves finally let the tired north wind rest in peace.

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(*If you click up at the top there you can hear me read this piece.)

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// Crawl Inside You (Interspace) //

The cool dawn is so clutched with frost that the atmosphere cracks when I exhale. I have been here all this time waiting for you to come home, to build your little warm nest inside me and thread your ribbons through my bones. The air has become rich with darkness inside my lungs; thunder and church steeples round and round like a crown above my low fallen skull.

How is it we emerge again? Is it through sheer force of will, is it by the benevolence of something tried and tested by the fires of hell, something divine which guides the universe. White lights are flaring up, one by one, along the runway toward eternity and all those uncertain things which eat away my organs.

How many ways are there to find your way home. How many people are as lost as I am, listening for voices, calling out for affection, tracing their chipped fingers over bumps in the globe.

As I gaze up into your cloud space eyes, my skin blooms with the taste of that heady sensation just before ecstasy and the way it tingles through my wet body. I drink the sweet rhythm of you and at last begin ebbing away from the pain. I am only as strong as what I believe and I believe in nothing if I do not believe in you. Prayers are fresh tears in a jar by the bed, prayers are the beads of dread and sweat I swallow to try to forget.

With my mouth I hand you a leash of promises and you lead me like an animal into the sun. Four small sparrows sit huddled upon the window ledge and as we depart the earth they sing. Every winter which ever scarred the womb has buried itself inside my final breath. A tangle of rose buds encases my heart like a cage and I sleep with you peacefully as the stones which once erected the bloodiest cities in the world begin caving in.

The footsteps I hear are whispers and the whispers are trees. Could the beauty of your stride be my darkest secrets suspended overhead for all to see. The way you collect me like a child collects the dying leaves tells me we are not done here. We are not done.

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// Dream Angel //

But when I called out for you you were not there, you had become a collection of the things other people laid to rest inside your chest. Your eyes heavy with the quiet death of something I wanted entirely to taste, to be made of, to take into my hands and off your slender shoulders. What did they do to you, my sweet love, that made you cloud so thick inside, fold so yellowed at the edges of your crumbling mouth. I look toward you but you are shifting, you are many sodden bodies multiplied, a wave of faceless mobs turning away in a crowded city square.

The breathing of the pavement hovers inside a dreary mist as I pull a cigarette from under its foil. Inside this void which whispers your name I suck the smoke across my teeth.  I would try to keep you but we are only echoes of each other’s imagination. The way you move is a ghost train sliding off its tracks. Yet in your silent mind I am the single voice which curls against your senses, my mouth upon your neck like warm gravestone hills swelling into amber evening. I am the single touch you let touch you everywhere, inside out, outside in.

It is dark where we come from and where we are going, so we make this kind of love without a sound, without a word, without a trace. I am the pulse in the slow glide of your fingers. These chains you tug around my throat, they turn to milk-white doves. They rush against the heavens when I close my eyes.

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// It Was You //

Low in sound
skin bereft of shadow
it was you
tongue the soft feather bed, you
crushed into the word
fallen
broke free the wing
of dark autumn sky.

you frothing window
wintered
you moving hands among wreckage
they do not know
how to speak

for you. you each night turned
paleface
at the beginning
always the beginning
again and again the ground
opening
opening
opening
clawing at the back teeth
a dream gaping, half-lit
within a dream.

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// And You Call It Love //

Isn’t that what you always wanted, something to dangle me over the edge with, some kind of blade some kind of sliding eyes. I believed you when you told me I was everything but maybe we are all thirsty, maybe we are all scabbed over the knees and forever halfway between home and heartache. Some of us live here. And die here. And spin ourselves sick in the cruel open hands of those who cannot take care of themselves. I would open my mouth for you but then you’d come too close. This is a silence we wear on the outside, we are window panes heavy and drunk with rain. Locked down tight but completely transparent. We would hide but our hearts had long ago, by unspeakable things, been forced open. And oh, our hearts. Our mad beautiful masochist hearts.

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// Almost There //

Turning to look at you, I can barely feel my own body as we nearly kiss. Under your gaze I am already the faintest linen sheets, even before your fingers reach my skin. This is the fascination and the destruction, the way you build me up into heaven before all hell rushes loose from you. No matter the weather, I drink.

Late night phone calls, sex on the sliding pale of dawn, cigarettes and wine, the way the moonlight splays herself down along an endless hallway of cherry hardwood. Through a break in the blinds I can see the old wind turning shadows upon the autumn leaves.

The time changes to sweaters and tall boots and my new obsession with photography even though I never get the angle right so I end up mostly paralyzed and distracted. When it’s pictures of myself it only gets worse, the insecurity, the hyper attention, the opening in my stomach which imagines new and more spectacular worlds, more quiet and less beautiful. We have made ourselves this way as if on purpose and yet we cannot seem to undo ourselves quite as easily.

I like the taste of your fingers across my mouth and how when you speak your voice is nearly choked with worship yet there is a tinge of something on your tongue that tells me you don’t have the capacity to care beyond a certain point. Some people grow a callous around the place too many have touched the wrong way and it gets walled off forever. I don’t need that part of you, at least that’s what I tell myself so that I can live on the edges of a pain I can give my innocence to without losing it completely.

They tell me I have a problem with addiction but I think it’s just that when I look at you the devotion in my heart is like ribbons threaded through a young girl’s dream. Tug on it and the whole thing falls apart. The trouble is you’re just like all the others, the way they sprung up around me like the gush of sudden fountains just to collapse in upon themselves. Mindless. Reckless. Incredible. How the mind can leave its shell behind and we just take whatever we can get.

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// Had I Never Met You //

It’s all around you, the way the vacant words falling from the mouths of those who do not understand separate and resuscitate themselves, surviving only barely by the eating of your breath.

You like the rainy days because they break you and cradle you just enough. I can tell you wear anguish and destruction like a shield, that you believe safety is a gag and a blanket, something you win by paying for it with every aching fiber of who you want to be.

When you smile I want to pull the flowers from your bleeding chest and plant them in the darkest corners of my mind. Never to forget you, you and all of your wilderness, all of your seasons of life and skeletons and death. A wall of tears is suspended in the air, at any moment about to crash along the surface of your limbs. You can tell me all the dirty things, I have no interest in robbing them of you.

The moment I met you I knew we had known each other for a very long time, it felt like my eyes resting behind your eyes would have made perfect sense. The way you saw the majestic and the terrible things I could see and did not turn away. I am always so taken by the souls of those who find silence to be rich, the ones who slide their bodies into a quiet room and listen for the things most people throw away by moving too fast, protruding too intrusively, talking too much. Saying nothing about nothing when I hunger for so much.

They shuffle and speak in low tones as you drift past their illusions and up into the blue electric sky. It’s not that you don’t care it’s just that there has to be more than this, something with a deeper soul must exist if only people would let the darkness into the light and the light into the places where they think there is nothing more to see.

And as they keep trying to sell us eternity, we fade farther and farther into retreat. This moment, the one catching you and I by the gap between heartbeats, this is the only one we need.

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// Wading In //

Sunlight dims to gray pretending to fall through the window as I pretend my mind is not so full of madness I can taste the blood in my gums. When we speak of art, of beauty, of the written word, of what do we actually speak? Mostly torture. Mostly the cutting away of every untruth the others cannot even detect. I’m no better at life but I do show up and the showing up is usually what tears the skin off the bone.

They say you have to keep going even in the face of adversity and then they try to convince you that the adversity comes from outside. Look on the walls, they say to you; look into their flush faces, listen to their unbridled hatred. We cannot admit the demons are really on the inside, that the monsters may multiply but they all wear my face.

Gazing into the dresser mirror, I think of the way you left me stronger than you found me and then I question even that. To know you was to love you by untying the fears which kept me pinned to the ground. I came up to the surface for air only to discover you and you were a drowning I wanted more than life itself. Why do we do these things, why do we cringe and sweat over the way certain people kiss with death all stained upon the mouth.

Why do we try, why do we write, why do we peel the mothworn curtains back just to reveal another day. To get to something. And even though we know it’s there we fight ourselves to get to it anyway. We the small slits of intimacy, we the sharp unnatural bends in the wing.

When no words worth repeating show up I imagine packing away my notebook and heading back into the world gutted by depletion, rejected even by myself and I know that is the heaviest burden of all. To feel that there is not one single place in all the world – outside or in – where you belong.

Maybe the bad days are just the way too many good ones weigh us down in the quiet moments we never speak about. Maybe they blend the unforgiving sky with the cold rain and even our insides are made of decay. Maybe I just have to wait, and I can do that. I hate it. But here I am, waist deep.

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