On Being Called 'Prolific': A Thread

1. I keep thinking of a convo I had the other week with a group of young women MFA students at a school I'd been reading at.

2. One student asked how I maintained my work schedule, how I published a book almost every year, how she could be prolific too. She looked stressed, & I told her honestly that I would NOT work the way I'd been working the past two years (which has been INSANE)

3. and that being prolific was absolutely nothing to strive for: you create books at the rate that allows you to produce your best work. Period.

4. I told her I burnt myself out: this year, I've written two books & am now (just this week) finishing an anthology I'm editing. Everything had a contract, everything was for someone else, everything felt like something I could not say no to.

5. I've also been doing a lot of work for the state poet laureate position, and there are days where I've literally sat in my car either panicking and/or crying.

6. This is not a work schedule that I've followed in the past, nor is it one I will ever do again in the future. And I'd hate to think that I'm a model for anyone, let alone a young, female, hopeful academic, to attempt.

7. My goal as a writer was never to be prolific. It never will be. If you chart each book according to genre, you'll see I'm on an average schedule---4-5 years between nonfiction books, 3-5 years between poetry. I am, in that sense, an accidental, and not deliberate producer.

8. What I hope I am is a writer who got more curious, more expressive, more complex, more ambitious book to book. I want each book in each genre to be, in some meaningful way, a deep improvement on my last. In that, I think I've succeeded. That was the goal.

9. How the books arrived and when was always accidental, because, well, PRESS SCHEDULES.

10. I know that--because I teach--I inadvertently become a model for other young academics looking to make writing and teaching their lives. And while there are things that I've done well, I'm hoping also to be a model NOT to follow when even I can admit that it doesn't work.

11. We all have to make our own careers, but I hope that the young writers I meet and mentor only take away from me the message that, no matter what else happens in their lives, the goal was about nourishing and sustaining their curiosity and creativity.