Escritor Público

Street scenes, an embroidered eagle from one of my favorite museums, the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, and customers gathered around an escritor público, a public writer.

As a public writer of sorts, I find that one of the hardest things is that writing doesn't just happen. When it does just happen, I find myself becoming superstitious, or just hopeful, that what worked once will work again. I will remember that one time where I was at the 4th street Annapurna and the clouds shifted in the sky in a certain way and I wrote, I really wrote. Then I'll drive all the way out to the 4th street Annapurna and I will not be able to write.

I can write really well with White Monkey or Anxi oolong or Long Jing tea, but I need time to be crabby and uncomfortable until the flowering of the tea happens, and I don't always have that time. I don't drink wine and write, simply because I'm afraid it will go too well.

I just keep showing up, noticing what works, noticing what doesn't, and knowing it all may shift again. In her book, "If You Want to Write," Brenda Euland says,

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountaintop, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten -happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead after another...


...If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it.

I once had a patient who, I'll say, had a brain situation. She couldn't remember where she was or what we did day to day, but when I came to see her in the afternoon, she was always willing to set forth. She would give a deep sigh, say "Lordy, lordy, lordy," and we would set off to see what would and wouldn't work, to see what might happen.

I think of her these days when I sit down to write. I open a blank page with a deep sigh...lordy, lordy, lordy...and set forth to see what will happen.