All I Want To Do Is Write – A Map

There’s a part of me who’s always writing.

She’s paying attention to Everything. She’s reading words around her and they are zipping into her brain and calling out, pulling up, herding and weaving these words into collections…or sentences.

If I read anything, I immediately start writing a response in my mind. Could be a question. Could be a consideration. Could be a cluster of imagination peeling off into a river of ideas…and I want to stop whatever I’m doing and write.

Ninety percent of the time I do not stop. But I’m working to change this percentage.

Like, about five minutes ago, I was reading Molly Peacock’s new poetry collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box, and I was underlining words and phrases, and drawing hearts and writing ‘oofs’ inside margins…and the writing part who always writes barrelled through and stopped me from reading and made me write.

First I wrote several paragraphs in a manuscript I’ve been working on about shit. Like, literally poo. I’m calling it Shitshow. Or Shi*show. You’re wondering how reading Molly Peacock’s beautiful poetry can inspire several paragraphs on shit?

Here’s the map:

Molly’s poetry lights up my imagination and my heartstrings start zinging and the writer part stands up and pays attention.

I underline words and phrases and lines.

I read a quote by Virginia Woolf that Molly has used in one of her poems. “There is…a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out…” (this is snippet of a longer quote). I started thinking about kids love to blurt out potty words, body part terms, how they sneeze by exhaling incredible amounts of snot out their little noses and then laugh. I was wondering about when we lose this freedom of bodily appreciation expression. I was wondering why it’s rude or immature or gross to talk about one of the things that all humans do: poop.

I write in my head…then I type in the google doc: I can talk about shit until the cows come home…and shit.

I arrive in the Shitshow manuscript and write several paragraphs. I laugh out loud. I heat-blush at the fact that today I nearly pooped my pants – twice. And the shame I still feel having gone through it. And the embarrassment I still feel thinking about the poor co-worker who was with me and literally saved me from a disASSterous mess by letting me into his parent’s house which happened to be the closest place with a bathroom we could find. The shame and embarrassment, the writer in me says, needs a place to go. It needs a page, a screen, a space outside my already toiling, roiling guts. And the writer tells me, as she’s been telling me for years, you really should write about your shit show.

I recall my commitment to you. To write more. To share my process.

To confess that it took me three tries to spell commitment.

There’s a part of me who’s always writing, and I intend to give her my fingers more and more and more. To change the percentage.