Reinventing myself as a writer - it's time

A new look. A new lens. Looking out on a collapsing, tumultuous world. This writer needed to make some changes.

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Reinventing myself as a writer after nearly two years of a kind of despair. Well, that may not be exactly right. More like a period of getting lost - lost in the magnitude of the tumultuous changes underway in our world, and picking up speed. These are changes I knew were coming - in my head, I knew. It has been my work for about 12 years now - following the ecological tragedy swiftly unfolding, the unravelings, the collapses of most of the pillars on which our culture and history have been constructed.

But knowing that in the head is different from knowing it in the heart, or in the gut, which changes everything. Makes for clear seeing, which in these days is a harsh view of things.

Girl's gotta write

So, it's the first Sunday of February 2018 and the beginning of the second year of the administration of the Orange Man - and despite all my assurances to myself last year about getting back to more creative writing, it just didn't happen. Like a lot of people, I have struggled with where my writing goes next, what projects to complete, or to alter before submitting, how to really hear this moment in the culture, to penetrate it with all I know from my own life story and the wisdom simmering inside it all.

What is it I want or need to write now? Poetry abandoned me. While that is not my primary mode of writing, I found joy in it. The more I wrote poems, and then the more the poems started showing up, the more I felt poetry-writing to get a hold of me. Whether or not I am a decent poet, writing poems have made me a better writer.

Meanwhile, during the unraveling...

What did we do? What are we doing? What are we creating?

Because create we must.

Yesterday I saw an intimate version of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" at an invitation-only performance at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. The great Estelle Parsons directed, welcomed us, spoke after and invited her actors' input in a post-performance talk-back. I mean, if you love theater...

I had read the play during a semester course on 19th century Russian literature back in my university days in Boulder CO, but had never seen it performed. I have long been attracted to the darkness and despair in a lot of Russian lit, though I cannot tell you why. I'm neither dark nor despairing. But I think I always picked up something that feels a deeply rooted part of the human angst - the struggle with meaninglessness, the psycho-spiritual version of entropy, the darkness that lies at the heart of Christianity with its body-loathing, belief in the power of some outside Devil always ready to draw us into the filth of the world, judgment and a wrathful God.

Writing in the 'End Times' - a comprehensive mission statement for this writer

No, not those end times, not the biblical apocalypse, not the extinction of humans that so many environmentalists predict is imminent, not the death of the planet (it will live on long after we're gone). No, the end of these times, the end of the US American era, the end of U.S. dominance in the world, the end, more than likely, of our political and governing institutions as we have known them.

Only for most U.S. Americans do we not notice that this is happening, so comfortable are we in perceiving ourselves within a certain way of being that we cannot imagine it could ever end.

But it's ending. As I have written elsewhere and repeatedly, Trumpism is not cause but effect. The collapses underway opened a huge vacuum in the culture into which these people could storm in. The destructive force of this rightist movement, ideologically rigid, uncompromising, and fully bent on destroying government as a service to its people (who merely pay for it after all), has been paving the way for this takeover for a long time. The vacuum was created when the 2-party system ended up fully bought by different factions of global corporate power, when more and more people realized that their lives had become irrelevant to the powers-that-be.

Okay, this is not a political blog. It's a blog about writing and why I write. But why I write, and what I write about, the things that most concern me and make it worth my time to sit with my journal or laptop, has a lot to do with how I perceive the times in which we live.

Losing focus - then trying to get it back

I imagine this is the plague of many a writer whose work addresses the times in which we live. I imagine it is also impact of the rapidity of change in our world right now, the intensity of events, and the intense connectivity and exchange of information with which most of us engage on a daily basis now as we try to understand our human predicament.

I've struggled as a writer this year - not because of who is in the White House (though that adds a measure to it) - but because of how clear it has become that we are facing a mixture of crises that are unfolding rapidly and which we humans do not seem to have the capacity to address, at least not in a way commensurate with the scale of the crises.

I've been working around themes of ecology, spirituality, and culture for some years now. But clearly they are not differentiated "themes" anymore. They are a nexus, a point of connection at which the true nature of the crisis is revealed -