A December email from Alisa Golden, editor at Star 82 Review. She wrote: “Yes. I love it.” An acceptance! Da, da, da da DAH da da!! I skipped through the dining room, past the Christmas Fern, singing the I Love Lucy theme song.
Kiddo, kiddo, kiddo! I chirped to my grown son as he came down the stairs. I caught my breath and announced: I got an acceptance from a magazine I’ve submitted to five times!
Way to wear them down, Mom! Funny man.
Not really. I just had to send her something good. In fact, I’d submitted to Star 82 Review not five, but eight times, over three years. After seven kind rejections in a row, I feel lucky the editor opened the last submission. Rejections pile up over time, of course, given my determination to keep sending things out. This time, I made the cut. It feels good.
I will try to do at least one slow, celebratory twirl when the next “thanks but no thanks” hits my in-box. Like all the others, it will remind me that I’m committed to the process, with its rare orchestral celebrations and its long fallow periods. Meanwhile, the publication of Beginning of the End of the Dream Job is a lovely reminder that the more I write, slowly but surely, the better I write.
Japanese beetles are iridescent green, shiny–and beautiful. I admire the engineering genius in the strong grip of their tiny claws and the protective shell of their winged backs. I murder them because they feast on all my favorite garden plants: Virginia Creeper vines become laced skeletons; rose and hibiscus blooms are hollowed out before they can unfurl. Day after day for three summers running, I killed the destructive fliers by the hundreds–shaking them into drowning bowls of soapy water.
This summer was bountiful, disorienting, and full of noxious invaders. Covid 19 seemed to be exiting stage left while we adjusted to socializing and the smiles of strangers, then—well, you know that story. Between visits from long-missed friends and during breaks from clouds of wildfire smoke, I was on the couch or on a bicycle. My write-ride-repeat summer plan quickly became a ride, read-a-little, ride-some-more reality. Then all of a sudden, there was snow on the deck, and I hadn’t written in what seemed like forever.
I had fought a losing battle with hungry beetles in the city, and with noxious knapweed in Fairplay. Knapweed is a thistle that sprouts in soft green tufts in the spring only to morph into two-foot high shrubs holding hundreds of needle-sharp seed heads. It has been my enemy roughly since the time that my son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which was around the same time that my mother was dying. My therapist then heard a lot about knapweed. And she once asked me to say out loud the names of each person I loved who had died over the previous eighteen months. I only made it to four, about half way, before losing track and crying. But I pulled a lot of knapweed that year, grateful for one thing that I could destroy back.
This August, while I was obsessing about beetles and knapweed instead of writing, Sunlight Press published an essay of mine that included more about bipolar disorder in our family than I’d written before. Encouraged by the journal’s editor, and with the full blessing of my son, I connected the dots between my mother’s illnesses, my own first major depression, and my son’s bipolar diagnosis. (Have a look if you missed my post about it on Facebook: https://www.thesunlightpress.com/2021/08/22/colfax-and-monroe/).
The more I write, the more I learn to write about (if not publish about) the hardest things. I step into those memories and experiences not out of self-pity, but because they are the truest stories I have. They help anchor me to my current happiness, providing contrast, expanding my gratitude. Maybe those stories also have the most potential to help others.
I chose to become a therapist many years ago because I wanted to be part of transformational conversations, and to be genuinely helpful. Maybe I was most helpful on days that I felt like a failure in my own life, when I was blind to the generational patterns that look so obvious in retrospect. Maybe the counseling I offered on days when I showed up to work confident and energized were my least helpful days in the profession. Possibly, the days I needed to cry in the parking lot for an hour before I could walk into my office were my days of most lasting service to clients.
No shining cosmic memo will tell me that something I did as a therapist or wrote since that time made a real difference to another person. But, like the genuine practice of psychotherapy, a genuine writing practice shifts me away from my petty, narcissistic side and toward a vision of a better world. Beetles and knapweed and bipolar and all. Looking deeply inside ourselves and telling the truth about what we find there, is, I believe, inherently healing. And the more I write, the more of that I want.
View from an evening ride.Looking toward Kenosha PassLate summer sparkle.
In Staunton State Park, a haven of hiking and biking trails near Conifer, Colorado, Elk Creek becomes Elk Falls in one precipitous cliff dive. Smooth dirt trail winds through majestic evergreens, then transitions to connected squares of hewn rock swirled through with reds and grays, as if from an artist’s brush. Expertly etched into the hillside, the trail is wide as a sidewalk and rides like a dream. On a recent Sunday, I gripped my handlebars and pushed hard into my pedals, then relaxed to coast a gentle downhill with stunning views.
Suddenly, my mountain panorama was bisected by the dazzled flight of a butterfly. It floated upward and to my left, shimmering with the bright yellow of fleeting summer. My inner five-year-old sang out, Butterfly! Look! Ooh! Beautiful! My front tire was instantly way too close to the edge, but a surge of adrenalin powered my handlebars up and my left foot down, preventing a gritty shoulder grind into the trail. A no-fall wake-up call.
Oh, the perils of daydreaming—that creative drift so essential to a writing life, and so perilous to life on the trail. The more I write, the more awake I am; conversely, the less I write, the less connected I seem to be to the world and what I am doing in it. If I’m not working making things, all the biking in the world won’t bring me focus or peace of mind. This has been my lesson of mid-summer.
In my notebook and on my bike saddle, I ask, Am I here yet? Trying to gauge whether I’ve dumped my distractions and self-criticisms sufficiently to have a date with creativity. On the bike, I instruct myself aloud: Right here, Right now!
On downhill rocks or in writing slumps an uncluttered mind offers the body a chance to do what the busy mind can’t conceive.
A few days after my near-death by lepidoptera, I get another, gentler, wake up call. Near our cabin is a short, steep forest road that I use as a timed fitness test, challenging myself—obsessively this year–to shave five or ten seconds off the quad-burning climb. Today, the husband asks me, Are we busting your personal record today? And I tell him, Nope. Today, I’m going to see how slowly I can ride it.
Another day, another trail
I switch gears and steer a wide arc to avoid smushing a caterpillar that lumbers blindly across the dirt road. Last year, with drought everywhere and wildfires not far off, I don’t remember seeing a single caterpillar. But now, a small white butterfly ambles from right to left in front of my tire and slips through the spokes of my slowly turning wheel. I keep this insect-friendly pace and look left and right as I make the steep climb. I see for the first time how a flower-filled meadow is shaped like an arrow, pointing down toward the light-layered hills of South Park. My slowed breath scents wild rose mixed with pine, as if a mountain-sized flower has just opened all around me. Life after death by butterfly.
It’s a three-season week in Denver—technically spring but with a recent day close to 80 degrees and snow in the forecast for tomorrow. Above my back-yard fence, recently unfurled aspen leaves touch each other in surprise, too soft to make a sound as the breeze floats their fresh green in slow cirlces. The fountain tinkles water into the bird bath, and a bee buzzes past—a cliché of this season I can’t resist. The goddess Nyx, regal in her shimmering black coat, steps dainty paws onto the mulch behind the blooming crab-apple. She eats a blade of grass then retreats to the shade of the house.
The sun over my left shoulder tosses shadows from my damp curls onto my notebook paper. If I look inside the dark loops scattered across the page, rather than at them, I see moon shapes and slices of pie. I tilt my head, and bright oblong footballs give way to a constellation of marbles, light circles planets plopped onto a newly discovered cosmos. Half a block away, a chainsaw jets raw noise into the stillness, and suddenly the magical universe of miniature shapes becomes just shadows on paper.
Dogs bark next door. My hand moves over the page, determined to find dreamy stillness again.
The hundred-year-old maple across 24th Avenue has only the faintest green on its twig tips. With age comes caution. The mass of its old trunk holds as much wood as five of these quaking aspens, with their heart shaped leaves. The sun heats my arms into beaches and sandbars. On goes the chainsaw, then off again. Vroom. Quiet. VRROOM. Into one lull drops the click of a fence latch as another neighbor steps into her yard. A mourning dove coos, supplicant and charming.
The more I write, the more I appreciate the variety of stillness and interruption in all of my favorite places. Peaceful mountain meadows erupt into thunder claps, or into the rattle of disturbed grasshoppers. The loud stare of a moose stops quiet thought faster than any city siren. She might as well be yelling as your eyes meet on the muddy road: I will bash you. Just give me an excuse.
City quiet, though, is especially rare, an almost inner hush as traffic sounds and background rumbles miraculously cease. The multitude of neighborhood children all sigh into contemplation at once, daydreaming in unison. An hour west, the mobbed spring ski hill also silences unexpectedly. As the crowd swishes down a popular run and the chairlift creaks overhead, I take one short turn toward that pair of pines, and a celestial mute button silences everything but pure light, inside and out. In high volume motion closer to home, as I cycle next to a tumbling creek, perfect silence descends, startling as the cry of a blue jay in this sunny back yard.
A squirrel clacks and squawks at me from the top of the magnolia. Its tail twitching over its head, it spends its outrage then offers a friendlier noise from low in its rodent throat, its contrite little heart telling a story all its own. The chatter of the world meets my determination to making something in stillness–despite or in harmony with this creative symphony of interruption.
Will I learn to listen to the noise and the quiet? I crave motion and distraction as much quiet contemplation. I fall in love with the messy world all over again in the spring, my attention leap-frogging to the next season. It’s easy to be infatuated with summer when it’s not here yet, roasting both city and forest. It’s easy to be happy now, as a white butterfly slips through the holly-spikes of the mahonia bush laden with blooms. I marvel at the tender clematis vine threading itself into the air above the fecund earth. Yesterday’s heat has singed the late tulip petals and sent the hyacinth into retreat, but I’m in love, falling into spring with all of the irrational anti-gravity of romantic bliss.
A baby cries across the fence, his first warm season begun. In my house, the husband clatters a baking sheet into a drawer, jarring yet more sound to me through the open window. Voices take up conversation in the front yard. I crank open the green umbrella for shade, but keep the right half of my body in the white-hot light.
Before I had the nerve to call myself a writer, I spent two years coloring big paper bags, hour after hour, bag after bag. These brightly festooned delivery bags belonged to Project Angel Heart, and were later filled with a week’s worth of lunches for folks living with life challenging illness. They served a different purpose for me–coloring those bags both highlighted and neutralized the repetitive self-accusation: “You’re not an artist! How dare you think you are!” That self-hating voice—timeless, shrill, malignant—halted my creative self-expression for years. But as I colored, its harsh alarms about the self-indulgent absurdity of making art became more recognizable and less impactful day by day. “How dare you?!” became a signal that I was onto something, an invitation to enjoy making things.
After I left my full-time job, my empty calendar was an intoxicant, and my future work life was a big question mark. Waiting for direction or inspiration, I would pull a blank bag out from under the couch, grab my container of rainbow sharpees with their alluring chemical scent, and shape a heart onto brown paper, then mark a swirl through it, coloring in the curved sections with alternating blues and greens. Stars, snowflakes and layered dot patterns emerged. I’d spend five minutes or several hours per bag, then stash them again under the couch.
Twice a month, I pulled out all the bags I’d colored and stack my favorites on top. Over time, circles became rounder and flowers lovelier as my hand became surer. Progress wasn’t measured by number of bags completed or by quality of design, but by something new—the inherent perfection in the colors themselves. I spent peaceful hours coloring while I waited for my high schooler to come home, or as I listened to the snores of my decrepit poodle. Letting things get done while holding still.
But putting color on those bags, over and over, day after day, also calmed my creativity demons. Angel Heart clients could assume that my scribbled over “mistake” was the work of a gifted three-year-old. There was no obvious practical value to the bags being decorated, none besides brightness and color themselves. Beauty for beauty’s sake.
After a year or two of coloring, I started wanting words. I had stopped writing almost completely for a decade, but gradually, infrequent bursts of words landed onto the pages of a dusty old notebook. More and more, I wanted to give voice to some of my mother’s stories and possibly rediscover my own. This creative urge, though, needed help facing up to the inner accusation that I was self-indulgent and arrogant to think of myself as a writer. How dare you?!
So I put my fright in my pocket and took it with me to a class at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, a thriving community of “literary types” that is housed in a beautiful Victorian just off Colfax Avenue. The class was called “Gotta Start Somewhere.” I would not have registered for the class had the teacher’s name been anything but Joy. Joy has the empathetic heart of a poet who is also a therapist. For many months, she coached me as I cried over tangled paragraphs, and she gently alerted me when a piece of writing was glaringly self-enamored. There’s Joy my wonderful teacher, and there is also the energy of joy itself, the celebration inherent in creative expression. Writing is difficult, but these days I often look forward to it like the scent of the first spring daffodil.
Early on, after Joy read an exercise that I wrote for her about self-criticism, she told me: Jenny-Lynn, this voice is not just self-criticism. It’s self-contempt. That self-contempt hasn’t gone away–my inner approval ratings often hover in the single digits. Yet here I sit with ten blog posts published and several imperfect essays out to magazine editors, all while calling myself a writer. I take classes, keep writing hours, and have inspiring, generous writer friends. And those bags? I stopped coloring them six months ago. But I admire their bright cheer when I deliver meals. And I thank the angels every day that I get to make things, to form words on the page, to dare to create.
The More I Write 