No one will greet you. There is no one staffing the Wellness Center in this time of crisis; all personnel have been deployed to less fortunate towns. You may not see another person during your intake assessment. There is no need for alarm.

Sit in the blue chair. The green chair will turn blue at times. It is temperamental. Do not be fooled. Wait long enough for the blue chair to prove itself blue. This will take a short amount of time, but longer than you think.

The screen above you will descend until it is approximately one foot from your face. Look directly into the screen. It will diagnose the level of your infection. It will also provide a complimentary snapshot of your inner beauty. This inner beauty is not representative of an objective inner beauty. The Wellness Center will not be held liable for what you see there.

The treatment will happen without your knowledge. It may take a second or a day. For some, it takes years. No one will know when you have recovered. You will not feel any different; you will not look any different. The Wellness Center will bill you within thirty days.

Go home. Look in the mirror. You are cured. Thank you for your cooperation.

I am not careful. I am tired of being careful.
I throw love at you, and it could hit you in the face.
It is tiring to be loved haphazardly, I know.

Someone will tell you things about your past,
about how you should feel about your past,
or about how to match the socks.

All I say is shapes and colors matter little.
Some of them have gone missing anyway.
Love with force. Match or don’t match. Just catch.

– Halsted M. Bernard

– excerpted from an untitled story in progress

After we fought,
and after you left because we fought,
you became the woman on the train,
older and harder and still unwilling
to get up for anyone, to move or
to be moved. She swiveled and I saw
the back of your jacket, smelling of
Tide and smoke and grain alcohol, of
pride. Of what I thought you would give me.
Of what I thought I had earned.

– Halsted M. Bernard

When it is time, these words slip inside,
carrying a box or a knife or an envelope.
The hallway is dim. The recipient waits.
A noise, half-sigh, half-groan, escapes.

Perhaps nothing happened. The front door swings open;
these words stumble out, playing drunk.
They cross the street and their posture straightens.
As the moon lifts, they head for the next poem.

–Halsted Mencotti Bernard

Perhaps the most useful aspect of a workshop—more useful than the critiques, which are often all over the map—is the irreplaceable and salutary terror of public performance. Putting up a piece before a workshop is in effect publishing it, and the workshop offers many new writers their first exposure to the very best teaching tool, which is one’s own self-recrimination after putting up a piece that the writer knew in her/his heart wasn’t quite ready.

– Fenton Johnson, in VQR’s “Thoughts on the Process: a Conversation about Writing with Fenton Johnson”

This excellent reminder comes from the post “Critiquing” is not “Editing”:

Critiquing is not the same as editing. If the friend is “editing drastically,” the result is no longer a critique but a rewrite.

Sometimes we can forget this, eager as we are to accept help from others, and lose our voice in the process.

I encourage you to visit Daily Writing Tips every day for insightful advice like this.

Where I Write is a collection of photographs of fantasy and science fiction authors’ “creative spaces”. I wish my creative space were as marvelous as some of these!

Where do you write? What do you like about it? What do you wish you could change?

(Thanks to my writing group leader David for the link.)

For the past few weeks, no small amount of my spare brain-cycles have been spent focusing on the question of what I do next with my life, career-wise. After receiving two graduate school application rejections — what a fantastic economic period for this process — I have questioned whether this is the right thing for me to focus on while my writing lies stagnant. Not that I would ever ditch my day job for the promise of a future as a writer; I am far too attached to my current standard of living, and all of my major financial decisions impact not only me, but my partner, and not only now, but our future.

Since I stumbled into library science thirteen years ago, it became a natural outgrowth of my strongest traits, but I never intended for this to be Who I Am. There is some amount of sadness in my heart when I hear myself referred to as a librarian and not a writer. The truth of it is that I spent the past thirteen years focusing on my day job and not my writing.

And now when I want to change all that, to focus on my writing in the bits of spare time I can cobble together, I don’t know how to do it.

I have taken workshops; I share stories and critiques with an amazing writing group; I read books on the craft of writing and the art of getting published.

After a long talk with FunkyPlaid the other night, I realized something overwhelming and horrible: I have lost hope. It isn’t about rejection, either; I have lost the power to visualize myself succeeding as a writer. Because of this, I do not see myself as a writer anymore, so I do not behave in writerly ways. Stories go unfinished; poems go unedited. I wake up with ideas I never bother to write down.

Sometimes I spend hours staring at blank notebooks in stores, pretending that if I found the right notebook, I would see myself as a writer again. I fully realize how ridiculous the prospect is, and I do it anyway.

It is crazy to me that I am entertaining this bout of self-doubt while the rest of my life is soaring above my every expectation. It is crazy to me that I feel this despair while I am surrounded by creativity of every kind, musicians and artists and parents and writers and glass-workers and conspiracy theorists and designers and all of them, every one of them, seeing themselves for what they are.

All I see of myself is what I have not yet done.

I know how this reads to the cynical eye: a plea for sympathy, a fish for compliments. It is a confession, and only I can absolve myself.