Fall In Love With Your Work, Again (Aditya Intro) (02/08/2020)

Fall In Love With Your Work, Again | The Weekly Atticus

February 08, 2020

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Aditya Desai. Announcing our 2020 Poetry Contest!

Valentine’s Day is coming up next week, and though there are people to whom my love will go out that day, I’ve also been falling in love with my work again. I’ve been back into a long project that’s been with me for a number of years (how many I’m too chastened to say!), and it’s a great feeling. It’s been some time since last I’d worked on it, but I’ve returned and with an aim to finish, and I am stunned to see how much this long-term love still resonates with me. Is this a relationship? Maybe even, a marriage? It’s an analogy I’ve heard before, but having never been married, I have instead tried to step back and really pick apart what that looks like.

Being in love with the work is critical, almost necessary for me to get to the desk. I’m not the type of writer who is driven by plotting or curiosity. I have no great hurry to get to the next big “and then.” Instead, I write because I want the language to evoke a passion on the page. I tell myself this is to enrich the writing for the reader — but it is also so that I can live in those moments, so there is a reservoir of feelings I can tap each time I return, to keep me going.

Of course when I return, the feelings aren’t exactly the same from when I first wrote them, when every new sentence was dizzyingly intoxicating with possibility.  Back then, it was writing with abandon, not worrying if any of it came together, just that each word, each page was hitting me in the gut as I brought it from inside and made it real.

Eventually later, there is always the middle period, where I have alternative days of  working the rote mechanics — the proofreading, the revisions, the connective tissue — or just the fallow spells — the dry idea wells, the other projects, the life interjections —when I couldn’t work on it at all. In these moments, I feel terrible about ignoring it. But then when I finally get back to it, all of the issues glare at me and make me wonder if I’ve just wasted time on a failed idea. All I see are the disparate bits and pieces that feel unwieldy and cumbersome, dead weight working against the larger manuscript. Love feels fallow here. 

Lately, as I have been working on it, the love is creeping back in. As I read through and revise, all of those pieces actually are holding together! Despite all of the rewriting, editing, cutting, shifting, and combining, it still feels like the work that I wanted to write in the first place, like a Ship of Theseus where each plank is replaced one by one, and yet it is still the same vessel that set out to sea.

There are loves-at first-sight, but in order for them to grow we keep finding more and newer things to love about them. Of course, people arrive to us already complex and rich with passions — but in our work we’ve got to build in moments that resonate and pull us back, feelings we can harness so that as the rest of the project may change shape or style, we keep hold of the thing that took our hearts in the first place.

Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

Aditya Desai

Book Reviews Editor

ATTICUS NEWS

Announcing the 2020 Poetry Contest,judged by poet Roberto Carlos Garcia, publisher of Get Fresh Books.First prize: $350.Entry fee: $10.Deadline: April 5th, 2020.Go!

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FICTIONMASTERPIECEby Christopher Linforth"Adorning the study wall, the waif frolics on a stony beach, his body half-turned to the sea. He barely looks eighteen."READ ON

POETRYWHERE BLUE FIRES BLAZEby Kelly Boyker"Where one sleepwalks, the other sister follows, a slow circumnavigation of the bedroom perimeter — knife in hand, tonguing crumbs in antithesis while avoiding the moss-covered hallway which invokes delirium at its widest shore. Their amphibious poses betray disdain and the desire to murder with stones."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONTHE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVERby Susannah Maltz"She says, don’t you want a child to advance your worldview... steer the planet back into its infinite, verdant groove, its correct course around the sun, forever?"READ ON

MIXED MEDIAALPHA BETSYby Debra Cantanzaro"This video and my interpretation of the character, Alpha Betsy was inspired by Marc Zegans’ poem and character of the same name from his latest book: La Commedia Sotterranea della Macchina da Scrivere, as part of The Typewriter Underground, published by Pelekinesis Press."READ ON

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