The Right Season

Jackie ♦ May 4, 2010 ♦ 10 Comments

In my post about National Poetry Month, I outlined my plans for celebrating poetry in my work life and in my writerly life. I talked about posters and projects for school and writing a poem a day, which I did last year and really enjoyed.

And my work goals came true: I had students posting poems all over the school, sticking them in each other’s mailboxes, handing out book marks, and one of the bulletin boards in my classroom is now adorned with posters of poems. I even kicked off the month by reading a poem aloud to our entire upper school at one of our morning meetings, a favorite of mine that I have posted here before. I really enjoyed asking my students to do this, and plan to do a variation of the project for next year, perhaps as the second act of a poetry unit that also includes a poetic March Madness.

But my personal goals? Completely kaput. For the first week or so, I managed to copy the prompts into a document in my Google Docs and jot down some drafts for a few of those prompts. But after that? Nothing. All my good intentions got completely subsumed in the whirlpool that was my April. I’m trying to feel philosophical about it, and remind myself that it was a personal challenge, so I’m only letting myself down, but I still feel the same way: disappointed and let down. When I’m in self-pity mode, this just seems like the most recent casualty of The Year That Ate My Life.

But I also don’t want to make excuses: it’s not my students’ or colleagues’ or family’s fault that I didn’t complete this challenge. I was feeling overwhelmed, and chose instead to put my energies into work and family, and chose not to show up at the page every day and do the work of writing, inspired or not. That’s a choice, and I have to own that choice and how I feel about it.

I read a post recently by my friend Anjali where she talks about her own choice since January to make her writing a priority in her life and what a difference that choice has made to her. In that entry, she quotes an agent giving advice to would-be novelists on the importance of making writing a daily or regular part of your life. One of the lines really struck me was when she said, “Maybe this simply isn’t the right season of your life.” One of the most significant reasons that I’ve continued to blog over the past six or seven years, through catastrophes and dry spells alike, is because it helps me keep writing close to the center of my life. I need to figure out a way to make a similar commitment to poetry, an increasingly important part of how I see myself as a writer. I need to see this as a chance for growth, and as a reminder when I set my priorities for the summer and next school year of what is really important to my well-being and how it feels when I lose sight of that.

Sometimes it is simply not the right season, and that is okay. But it doesn’t mean that season won’t come again, or that I don’t have a role in making it the right one.