Time Enough at Last

The seductive, dangerous dream of more space for the creative

Photo by Lucian Alexe on Unsplash

The other night I woke up from a dream that I can’t stop thinking about; it was one of those dreadfully obvious dreams that feels like your subconscious got stuck in a first draft, but it drove its point home. I found myself swimming in blue, buoyant waters, boundless and warm, like a great salt lake without the salt. I knew in some instinctive way that these should be halcyon hours. As I watched a large white cat sail by on a little green boat (wtf, brain), I shouted to him like some surreal-ass Scrooge: “Hey, you, cat - what time is it?” And of course, because he was a cat - however anthropomorphic - he sailed on, completely ignoring me. And somehow I knew that this answer meant that the water was time, that clock time didn’t matter; that I had, in the immortal words of George Lazenby as the handsomest Bond, all the time in the world.

Of course, just like Bond weeping over his dead bride, I noticed that all the time in the world didn’t matter very much if I didn’t have the things that mattered to me in this sea of it, if I was just sort of swimming around in it unmoored. And I woke up. Like a bad screenwriter, my brain was sending me a message and the message was unclear. Should I be making more time for writing? Or was I being warned to be careful what I wished for?

I turned 45 this winter, and as I’ve found middle age to be a weird place where time diverges wildly depending on factors mostly out of one’s control, like childcare, chronic illness, parents who need caregiving or assistance, financial needs, increasingly job pressure, etc. All while becoming increasingly aware that the clock is not going to slow down or stop until, finally, it does, and then you do, too. It’s a tough place to be as a writer, because some writers seem to have no time at all, while others always seem to have so much of it. (Important to note that the word “seem” is doing a lot of work here!)

I’ve never been a particularly jealous person - I’m too lazy, and a too oblivious, frankly - but time is the one form of currency I do often feel covetous of. A lot of major awards and grants have been announced recently, and every time I feel a) incredibly happy for the recipients and b) incredibly annoyed when I remember that I was planning to apply for that NEA grant or whatever, but then my kid got sick or my job got crazy or my cat needed an emergency vet and I forgot to apply until it was too late. This kind of thinking can drive you straight to a very dangerous place, where you begin to equate ‘writing’ with ‘awards, grants, and recognition.’ Where you equate ‘productivity’ with ‘writing.’ When of course, not only are these things not the same at all, they don’t even exist in the same sphere.

Even if you had all the time in the world, even if you were swimming in a sea of it, would you really have applied for all those awards? And just because you applied, would you have won? And even if you won, then what? Would you stop writing and be done? Or be a better writer, somehow? And even if you didn’t care about awards and grants - if you just wanted that sea of time for the pure sheer act of writing - would you use all that time to write your masterpiece? Or would you putz around and get blocked and binge watch TV and complain about craft on Twitter?

For most of us, I hope, time is not why we started writing in the first place. Time is crucial for a writer, admittedly, and it’s easy to get pulled into the resentment of not having any - I know that town of resentment very well, and have spent entire summers there - hell, most of the pandemic there - sulking and desperately wishing I had more time. I’ve watched writers put out multiple books in the time it took me to write a chapter, after I tucked my daughter in at night and in stolen moments on the weekends. I know that town very well.

But I also know in reality I was most productive when I was 21 and working two retail jobs plus acting in dinner theater every night, going out to the bar after and then writing from three to 5am every day like I was putting out a fire. And in a way, I was. Like most of you, I did not start writing because one day I looked at the clock and discovered I had some extra time to kill. My writer origin story does not begin with “Hey look, an extra hour, let’s fucking goooooooo.” Like most of you, I started writing because I had something to say. I had stories to tell, and a way of telling that I thought was important, or beautiful, or necessary, even if I was the only reader. I didn’t even submit my writing at that point, let alone apply for NEA grants or residencies or hope for awards or prizes. I didn’t know they existed; I only knew the stories that lit me up inside, and the absolutely painfully beautiful way that other people’s stories made me feel like I finally understood being a person. I wanted to make other people understand how I was thinking about being a person, too. If there was any one goal I had in mind at the time, young and raw and unformed as I was, it would have been to join the circle of minds similarly lighting up at new music, at new books, at new paintings and dances and poetry and plays. Just to be a part of the group of people who understand about how impossible it is to be human.

And that has nothing to do with time, not really. In fact, part of the impossibility of being human is that we none of us have enough time in the end for what we want, for who we want to be. It’s why death is the only real subject for literature; time may diverge for us all throughout our lives, like lines gracefully diving and soaring on a graph, but we will all run out of it in the end. The shitty truth, of course, is that some people have much less time, both short term and long term - poverty, oppression, disability, caregiver status, illness, structural racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia see to that - but it doesn’t mean that great art, and meaningful art isn’t possible everywhere, in every small pocket of time. (I don’t mean to be dismissive or shallow here, nor a human “live laugh love” poster - as someone who’s been poor, I know creating that pocket is sometimes impossible, no matter how much you may want it. I only mean to say that art is often more accessible than people think it is, if you’re talking purely about the creation of it. The politics and accessibility of things like money, like publishing and awards are a subject for a different newsletter - or many different newsletters!)

Lately I’ve been reminding myself of that, as often as I can. I may not have time to draft all the books I want to dream up, or to apply for all the awards I want, or to write all the freelance pieces of literary criticism I’m itching to write - but if I can create even those small spaces for myself to feel big passion for this craft, then that’s everything. If I can create at all, then that’s what I came here for, after all. You can break your brain worrying about other people’s time and output, worrying about all the ways you could be more productive, but when did productivity for creatives ever produce anything but shitty books about productivity? I’d rather just spend my time being a person, and stealing some moments in the meantime to consider what that means. To maybe even write about it.

What I’m Doing

I’m working on my next short story collection and a non-fiction memoir-ish project, and taking some classes because you guys, non-fiction is really hard! How do you do this?!! I’m also doing a deep dive into all things Middle Ages for a different project, and trying to teach myself Old English hahahaha. This summer I’ll be teaching a few different classes, which i’ll announce soon - and also I will be teaching this fiction workshop IN ICELAND which I am absolutely pinching myself over. (My daughter actually does this, pinches herself to make sure she’s not dreaming. I’d never seen anyone do that before I met her!) That’s a pocket of time I’m incredibly grateful for.

I might also be working on a children’s book with my daughter. Stay tuned!

What I’m Reading

Nicole Chung’s A Living Remedy, which is an astonishing book thus far, about identity and parents and death and our fucked-up health care system; it’s also beautifully, boldly written. I haven’t finished it yet but I can already recommend it without reservation. Nicole is one of my favorite writers; she’s definitely part of the “how is it to be a person” group of writers I admire most!

Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, a poetry collection I’ve been waiting for since it was announced. It’s an incredibly lovely and naked look at illness and love and sex and living and the realities of the American medical experience. It’s nearly clinical in its precision, but also at times utterly, almost religiously expansive in the use of language and metaphor. And it’s often drily funny! Very much worth picking up.

A Dumb Thing; or Thanks, Elon

You may have noticed (insert melting face emoji here) I turned on payments on this newsletter, so that if you do want to pay for it, you can. I mostly did this because I had a few people ask if they could pay (thank you, you beautiful weirdos) and I figured I had better go ahead and do this since Elon is trying to make it impossible for us to pitch and get freelance work, so I may be posting more long form literary criticism pieces here depending on what happens. I may turn them off again! I don’t know! But please know you will always be able to read this newsletter for free, I promise! I hate money!