Read on Twitter
On Being Called & #39;Prolific& #39;: 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& #39;d been reading at.
1. I keep thinking of a convo I had the other week with a group of young women MFA students at a school I& #39;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& #39;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& #39;ve written two books & am now (just this week) finishing an anthology I& #39;m editing. Everything had a contract, everything was for someone else, everything felt like something I could not say no to.
5. I& #39;ve also been doing a lot of work for the state poet laureate position, and there are days where I& #39;ve literally sat in my car either panicking and/or crying.
6. This is not a work schedule that I& #39;ve followed in the past, nor is it one I will ever do again in the future. And I& #39;d hate to think that I& #39;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& #39;ll see I& #39;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& #39;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& #39;ve done well, I& #39;m hoping also to be a model NOT to follow when even I can admit that it doesn& #39;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.
