Inktober: Shut Up and Draw

Does an embarrassing clutter of markers
make you draw more? In a way, yes.

If you’ve ever read this blog, you know that I love me a writing marathon. Every year, I do NaPoWriMo and the August Poetry Postcard Fest, two 30-day writing marathons that I rely on to generate new poems. The rest of my writing year tends to be haphazard, and I work full time, and I’ve never been a write-every-day kind of person. But I’ve found that I can keep up a daily practice of just about anything for 30 days, after which I collapse in a boneless heap of laziness.

So I was thrilled to find that in the world of art—which I’ve recently rejoined after a long and bitter absence (future blog post)—there are also marathons. And this past month I decided to try one: Inktober*, a 30-day sprint where thousands of people from all over the world draw or paint a piece of ink artwork every day and post it on Instagram (#inktober2021). Back in my youth, drawing in ink was my thing, so I was eager to give this a try. I wondered: Could I keep up with a drawing a day? Would it energize me, or make me hate art all over again? And what, in today’s avalanche of art supplies, qualifies as “ink”?

I gathered everything in the house that had ink in it—fistfuls of pens, markers, India ink, even a Cross fountain pen that I bought in a closeout sale three years ago and hadn’t had the guts to take out of its package, it was so unapproachably pretty. I also snuck in some bottles of liquid watercolor, which felt like cheating but oh well. I chucked it all onto an end table in the living room and piled even more on it over the course of the month, my own Inktober hazmat site.

So, how’d it go? Pretty good. I drew almost every day. Okay, I skipped about 10 days, but I tried not to sweat that; not sweating things turned out to be one of the themes of my marathon. I ended up with about 20 new pieces of art, including a few that I’m proud of. 

During the month of drawing, I had a lot of thoughts—some ups and downs, many times when I almost bailed, and a lot of late-night pondering over the connections between visual art and poetry, different animals on the artistic family tree that still share some genes. So, observations:

“Inking” is actually drawing.

I had to laugh at this. Around day 5, I realized that I’d started the marathon with some lofty notion that “inking” would mean just grabbing a fancy pen or some brush markers and whipping up some instant art, a happy little miracle every evening. But I found out I’m too much of a mechanic for that; I preferred doing a pencil sketch first and then inking over it. The few spontaneous doodles that I did were my least favorite pieces of the month—they seemed inert, uninspired. But the drawing thing became an unexpected visit with an old love—I adored drawing in my teens and 20s; then, after some art trauma, I lost my confidence in drawing and didn’t do it for decades. But after this past month of drawing pears and apples and trees and cows and horses and houses and mountains, I now feel like I actually can draw again, like I want to. The muscle memory of it is still there, still in my hands; in fact, with my older brain, I seem to be better at it, better at seeing shape and value. I am, in particular, better at pushing the darkness (a metaphor on a platter). And luckily, the joy is still there too.

To keep drawing, I had to fight my own fragility.

This is one way that Inktober was different than a poetry-writing marathon—it turns out I have all sorts of confidence in my poetry, but almost none in my visual art. I’ve been doing poetry for a long, long time, and I’ve written so much and had so many poems published and rejected that I can write a crappy poem one night and completely forget it about by the next day; I know there will always be another poem. But the same wasn’t true of drawing; if I did a drawing one night that I didn’t like, I felt melodramatically wounded—absolute despair, like it was all over and I should just give up. This happened several times early in Inktober; I’d draw and post something that I wasn’t happy with, and it would haunt me into the next day: Well, there it is—I’m a crappy artist, and now the whole world knows. Luckily, by the next evening I’d usually get the bug to try something different—thank you, pile of art supplies on the end table—and that night’s drawing sometimes turned out OK. And the pendulum would swing the other way—Hey, this came out cool, so maybe I’m good at some things. Or even I like that color. By the end of the month I was very aware of those swings and was consciously trying to even them out. I realized that the fragility was a result of the Great Art Trauma in my 20s—a time when I decided I was a bad artist and feared showing that to the world—and the marathon became a way of working through some of that. And some of the drawings I didn’t initially like grew on me over time; they weren’t what I set out to do, but once I let go of that, they didn’t seem so bad.

The brain wants to get all up in art’s business.

I would start drawing, and my brain was clicking away. I could feel it, trying to control my hand. Careful. Don’t be derivative. That’s too Miro; people will notice. Don’t try that again—you’ve drawn so many bad horses! And then, without my noticing, that language center would shut off. Things got very quiet, and for a while I was all body—my hand scratching at the wet ink, flicking grass or branches onto the paper, my face contorted, my voice whispering to itself—rounder, darker, right here. I would sit back and see the balance of the scene, see what it still needed. It felt just like I was playing deep into a tennis match—all motion, intent, instinct, the body doing what it knows how to do. It was also just like being in the middle of writing a poem—the editor had fled and the subconscious was now driving; that’s always the interesting part. Oh, the brain came back later to criticize what I’d drawn, and sometimes it hurt me. This is a place where art and poetry differ: A poem can always be changed, but ink is pretty much forever and leaves an ugly stain when you try to fix it.

Drawing/painting takes longer than writing poems.

I got tired during Inktober. Really tired. Every night—even if I set out to draw/paint something simple, like a pear—I ended up spending at least an hour on the piece, and often longer. And afterward I’d be so wired that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And it was a busy month at work, so I was already tired in the evenings. Toward the end of the month I felt sleepy every day by late afternoon. My system for writing every night during poetry marathons works better; somehow I can predict how much time it will take and compensate for it so I don't get exhausted. So that needs some thought. And, riffing off that …

I’m sort of lucky I survived.

By that I mean, all that staying up late and drawing when I was half awake probably wasn’t conducive to great art.** And by all rights, bad art should have finished off my fragile ass (see above). However, Inktober made me try out markers and pens and notebooks and pencils, and it forced me to go through my own reference photos (which I take all the time on drives around town) and raid them for things to draw. It was a month of experiments, and I found a few things that I unexpectedly seemed to be good at (and a few that I just liked doing). And in a way, doing that every night produced the same results you get—if you’re lucky—after receiving umpteen rejections of your poems for umpteen years. You stop caring so much about each rejection, because you know you’ll write again and will send stuff out again. Same thing with this art marathon; the next night, there was another pen, another fistful of markers, and another picture in my head. And I tried again. And that was maybe the best thing about Inktober—all those days to try.

* Another thing I found out this past month is that the art world, like the poetry world, has its scandals and infighting. Apparently the guy who owns the trademark to Inktober was accused of plagiarizing another artist's educational writing, and it caused a split in the art world; some artists now refuse to participate in Inktober and have spawned all sorts of rival marathons. So that gives me something else to check out next year.

** This is a debate that poets often have about NaPoWriMo: the argument that if you have to crank out a little ditty every day, how good are the ditties going to be? I understand that viewpoint—and I used to share it—but I found that NaPoWriMo serves a purpose for me, if only to shake up my usual writing practice and to force myself to write when I don’t feel like it, which results in interesting themes and forms. I always figure if I can get four or five decent poems out of the 30 that I write during NaPoWriMo, that’s a fine return on my investment. And I end up with stumps of weird stuff that sometimes serve as sparks for other poems later.

NaPoWriMo, Plague Year Edition

I got an early start on NaPoWriMo by writing
Instagram poems in March. Let's just say
there was a theme.

It’s April 15th, which means I’m halfway through National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). This is the annual poem-a-day writing marathon that thousands of people do during April, and that I've been participating in for about 12 years. As usual, I’m running a small private Facebook group with about 15 other people who are writing poems every day and sharing them there, where only we can see them. Every year, I rely on NaPoWriMo's discipline to help me produce a stockpile of first drafts that I can revise later, poems I probably wouldn’t have written if I hadn't set myself the goal of writing one every day for 30 days. And I’ve always loved the camaraderie of doing it with a group. (Left on my own, I’d flake after about three days.)


Hard syrup
So, how’s the marathon going? I won’t lie to you, reader; this one's been a slog. I haven’t had a single good patch of days where the poems were flowing freely; this year they’re all feeling sort of extruded, like old maple syrup that you have to squeeze really hard to get out of the bottle. Most years, there are a few days like that. But this time, it’s every day—a steady diet of hard syrup.

Of course, this year is different. Everything is different. We’re all carrying the immense weight of the Coronavirus pandemic, a horror show that keeps morphing with its shutdowns and layoffs and fevers and ventilators and shortages and epic presidential incompetence, and so many of us are waiting it out at home, isolated and bewildered. (For my part, I'm working at home, extremely grateful to still have a job, and staying away from people as much as possible.) There’s no guidebook for how to live and be during something like this, let alone try to keep up a writing practice. I see writers on social media talking about how they haven’t been able to write at all, and others saying how all their writing is doom and gloom and mostly cathartic, or they find themselves writing chirpy upbeat nonsense that even they don’t buy. On Twitter I’ve been reading good advice that people are getting from their therapists and counselors, and most of it boils down to this: You are going to feel all the feels, and many at the same time. Whether or not you choose to make art out of this (or substitute “be productive” or “stay positive”) is up to you, and there’s no one way; we’re all learning this, and because it’s grief, it will take its own path through you. Just know that it will.


Getting out there, metaphorically
But I had a poetry-writing marathon to get on with, and I realized that the pandemic felt a lot like the choking wildfire smoke we've had for weeks at a time in southern Oregon in recent summers. I was writing a lot then too, and all I could write about was that damned smoke; it was literally in my face, constantly. The pandemic is functioning like that as well, but of course everyone, everywhere, has it in their face. As with the smoke, I felt like I needed to break the current crisis down into small increments, micro-scenes of my own everyday life; it’s too vast and overwhelming—not to mention still developing—to take on much more than that in a single poem. And the whole thing is surreal, isn’t it? Like a dream that you’ll wake up from and think, Whoa, that was nuts.

I started writing poems about the pandemic back in March, before NaPoWriMo began, because the emergency was beginning to hit us locally and hard. And I decided early on to post a lot of them on Instagram (@amymillerpoet). I’ve been dabbling with Instagram poetry the past few months; I like the mixture of text and images, the block of art. The whole thing about how the poem is now published because I went and blabbed it on Instagram is just another interesting thing; I’m not sure what to do with that. But suddenly it felt like a time to let the poems walk out the door, since I literally couldn’t. We are truly all in this together, and I had a strong compulsion to get poems out in the world where all sorts of people could read them, not just the ones who subscribe to literary journals. And, I don't know, maybe I just needed a gigantic distraction. The discipline and techie geekiness of making those Instagram poems was like a lifeline I was following through some very dark water.

And now that NaPoWriMo is halfway through, I’m continuing to write and post some Instagram poems; the impulse to put together words and images is still strong. So maybe NaPoWriMo has felt like a slog because I was already tired from writing a poem a day in March, more or less. But, like I used to say about the great NBA player Tim Duncan, what made him great was that he kept going on bad days too; he just changed his game a little. So I’m still welcoming the daily discipline of NaPoWriMo, even if it hurts more than usual. I’m still hoping to hit a few three-pointers.

August Postcard Poetry Fest 2016 wrap-up

The dust has settled on this year’s August Postcard Poetry Fest. This is the fourth year I’ve done this month-long writing marathon, invented by poets Lana Hechtman Ayers and Paul Nelson, where more than 200 poets around the world write a poem on a postcard each day in August and mail it to another participant. This year I managed to write the full complement of 31 poems/postcards, and I mailed them all before the end of August. I think this is the first time I’ve written a full 31 and sent them on time; in the past I’ve usually had a flakeout or three during the month, or sent 10 cards on September 6th or whenever in a mad rush to catch up. This year I received 32 postcards from writers all over the U.S., and one in the U.K., a vivid array of artwork and poems that lifted my mailbox out of its usual gloom of bills and ads for laser surgery and window-blind cleaning.

Parties vs. poopers

This year the Postcard Fest had a Facebook group. I’m starting to think every project in the world should have one of these; it’s a great way to bond with other people who are doing whatever you’re doing. Even before the postcarding got underway, the Facebook group was buzzing with people posting about how they were gathering their postcards, buying cool stamps*, getting acquainted, and just checking in with daily details of life. This made me feel much more connected to the project than in years past, and as August dawned and the writing and postcard-sending began, I felt more motivated than usual to keep writing poems and mailing them. It was like I knew these people now, and I didn’t want to let them down. It was also like there was this great party going on, and I didn’t want to be the pooper. Keep the party going!, the Facebook group seemed to be saying. Don’t bring down the room.

De-cluttering the card

This year I made my own postcards. Now, when I say that in the context of this Fest, it’s like saying I built my own house, and then showing you a cardboard box with some holes I punched in it. People in the Postcard Fest set the bar high—there are some real artists in this group, for whom the postcard itself is at least as important as the poem they write on it. Some of them construct elaborate works of art, everything from collages to hand-drawn sketches to prints of their own paintings, write poems on the back, and mail them out. I’m not that much of a visual artist; the postcard, for me, is really just a poem-delivery system. In past years I bought touristy cards at local shops; one year, I got a big stack of them from a brewery. But I was often frustrated by how little room there was on them for a poem; with all the photo-captioning and copyright gobbledygook, there was only about a three-inch-square space to write in, sometimes less. This real-estate issue is part of the Postcard Fest challenge, but to me, it was annoying.

So this year I decided to just make my own damn postcards—that way, I could leave a consistently generous space for poem-writing. And I’d just been looking at the Vistaprint site, pricing out some business cards, and I saw they print (among a zillion other things**) postcards at a really good price. I didn’t overthink it; I just found a few photos that I took last summer of various artsy/natural things, and I chose one with a hornet nest that I always liked. I made a PDF of the photo in Photoshop, laid out the back side of the postcard in InDesign and made a PDF out of that (with a big white space for poems), uploaded it, and ordered 50 of them for about $15. The whole process took maybe a half-hour. The package of postcards arrived a few days later, and they looked great—glossy and professional quality, pretty much like what you’d buy in a gift shop. And there was enough room to write about a 14-line poem on the back.

Baking by the batch

Another thing I did differently this year—and this broke the rules a little—was that I wrote the poems in batches. The guidelines for the Fest encourage people to write a poem every day…because it’s, you know, a poem-a-day marathon. And that’s usually great—I love the discipline of this and other marathons like NaPoWriMo and Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, and I rely on them to generate a lot of new poems in a short time. But during this Fest I discovered something interesting: I seemed to write better poems when I wrote them in batches.

I stumbled across this by accident, right at the start. The guidelines suggested that we write three poems a few days before August 1st and send them out so our first few recipients would start receiving poems at the beginning of August. So I sat down on about July 27th to write three poems and get things started. The first poem—cold start, sputter, cough—took a long time to form in my head, and it came out a little wooden. It wasn’t really a keeper, but that’s OK—the Fest is all about generating first drafts. But the second poem, to my surprise, was better; my poetry engine was warmed up, and the poem slipped out easily and was a lot more interesting. And so was poem #3—it ranged farther off leash and had more natural energy to it than that first, stage-frightened poem. Okay, I thought…maybe writing only one is not the best way to do this. And because postcard poems have to be short enough to fit on the card, writing a batch of them didn’t seem too daunting.

So all through the month, I wrote poems about every three days instead of every day, always in batches. The jury’s out on whether these poems are any better than in years past; I haven’t typed them all up yet (I made photocopies of all the cards I sent), and I’m not even sure what I’ve got there. But I know that I felt excited about some of them, perhaps more than usual. And the “batching” definitely made this marathon feel easier than it usually does—I never got that grumbly-teenager feeling of not wanting to sit down and write. Or if I did, I just didn’t write that night, and wrote an extra poem the next time around. And I had a lot of fun with these poems; somehow, writing batches of them took the pressure off each one. If a couple were duds, maybe others in the batch would come out better. And then I had a couple days off to recharge.

Unexpected conversations

This year I tried to write some poems with a common theme, mixing mythology with cars I’ve known and owned, along with found poems that mashed up car-related public documents in a sort of word blender. I don’t know yet if those poems will ever amount to anything; I have to think more about the structure of that sequence.

But you never know how a series of poems will end up playing off each other, or off other poems that don’t seem related. Last year I wrote a bunch of postcard poems with images of the Rogue River, based on a rafting trip I took when the Rogue Valley was choked with forest-fire smoke. Later I wove several of those poems together with another sequence of poems I’d been working on, and found that they spoke to each other in a way I hadn’t expected, different voices in a conversation I didn’t know my subconscious was having. I made them into a chapbook manuscript called I Am on a River and Cannot Answer, which the wonderful BOAAT Press will be publishing next month as a downloadable PDF book. More on that in a future post.

To find out more about the August Postcard Poetry Fest, visit its web page here.

           

           

* One day, yes, I will blog about being a lifelong stamp collector. For now, I’ll just mention that on an episode of The Simpsons, the family’s house was about to burn down, and Lisa went running back to it, yelling “My stamp collection!” The rest of the family stood in silence for a moment, then they all burst out laughing, even Homer. Philatelists—our coolness has not been discovered yet.

** Including phone cases, coffee mugs and…pillows?

NaPoWriMo 2016: Public, but not too public

It’s almost the end of April, and for those of us who have been writing a poem a day for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), that means one thing: We’re almost done. And holy crap, are we glad about that.

Bigger is better

This is my sixth or seventh year doing NaPoWriMo, and the past couple of years I’ve set the bar higher by doing the writing marathon with a large group of people on a public internet forum. Writing with a lot of people watching makes me work harder to fish for the right idea and then craft and revise the poem. Not every day’s output is beautiful, but I end up with fewer lazy poems when peer pressure is squashing me a little.

            For last year’s NaPoWriMo I did the Writer’s Digest April Poem-a-Day Challenge. That certainly provided the “large public forum” I was after: A huge community of writers—hundreds—do that challenge every year, and they comment freely and encouragingly on each other’s poems. I enjoyed that a lot, and this year I’m using many of the good daily prompts that WD poetry editor Robert Brewer provides for that group (see “To promptly go” below), but instead of posting my poems there, I’m posting them to a couple of secret Facebook NaPoWriMo groups—one with about 100 members, and another local one with about a dozen, both with some very fine writers. The “secret group” format eliminates the fudgy business of whether a poem that’s posted on a public site/blog is considered published and therefore ineligible for submission to literary journals. And the smaller, more intimate groups make it easier to get to know my fellow marathoners. It’s a good balance of public vs. not-too-public.

            As usual, I’ve had some ups and down with the poem-a-day thing. This year I got off to a painfully cold start; the first few poems felt forced and awkward and probably will never amount to anything usable. Then I hit a good stride; for a few days the poems came out easily, and I was excited to sit down at the end of the day and write them. Hey, I thought, I’ve got the hang of this thing. Then, of course, I stalled out again—more exhausted late nights, trying to make steel out of straw or some other completely inept metaphor. I skipped a couple of days when I was just too tired. (Doing NaPoWriMo during the busiest season at work and the NBA playoffs is, for me, a perfect storm.) Then a few days later I rallied and came up with some more poems I liked. Now, almost at the end, I’ve got maybe 6 poems that I like a lot, and another 5 or 6 that could be OK with heavy revision. That’s not bad for a month’s output. And, as always, some of the poems I like—including a couple of angry ones—are things I never would have written if I hadn’t had to sit my ass down and hit that midnight deadline.

Paper or plastic

This public NaPoWriMo business, strangely enough, has changed one of the most fundamental elements of my poetry writing: I now write a lot more on a keyboard than by hand. I used to be a pen-and-paper purist; I had a whole theory about why hand writing was better than keyboard writing, something about that fraction-of-a-second delay between the thought and the hand writing it down, which served as a first edit and made me choosier about the word or phrase. But during NaPoWriMo, I’m often writing late at night and want to post the poem as soon as it’s (more or less) done. So I just let my fingers fly on the keyboard and cut and paste straight from there. I can type much faster than I can write by hand, and as a result I sometimes end up with breathless, headlong poems without line breaks or punctuation. Sometimes I go back in and add those boundaries afterward; sometimes I don’t. Other times I write purposely in set stanzas or line lengths. The upshot is that I now write in several different styles, some more fragmented and jumbled than others. Whether that’s all for the better or worse, I’m not sure yet. But it’s change and evolution, and that feels good. And during NaPoWriMo there’s another advantage to the keyboard thing: I can just copy the poem from my Word or Pages doc and paste it onto wherever I’m posting it without having to transcribe it out of the notebook. That makes for less work late at night, and my 54-year-old body gives that a big, arthritic thumbs-up.

            But the greatest benefit of NaPoWriMo is still simply the poems. By month’s end I’ll have more than 25 of them, some that excite me and some that don’t yet. Some that never will. But those that do, and those that might, will help fill the well of poems I’ll be working on and sending out and assembling into quirky chapbooks and sequences and I-don’t-know-what-yet for the next year. They’ll be the sketches or the paintings or the…crikey, some metaphor. I’m too tired to think of one. Must … save … metaphor … for next poem.

To promptly go

Doing the Writer’s Digest PAD Challenge last year taught me something I didn’t know: I like writing to prompts. Not always, not every day (my mind likes to go off leash, and my inner wild dog is already riled up about having to write a poem every day), but every day this month I looked at several prompts and picked one to think about for a few hours. And sometimes I used it to write a poem that night. These were my favorite sources for prompts this month:

The original NaPoWriMo site. Back in 2003, poet Maureen Thorson saw what the people over at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) were doing, and she decided to start a similar month-long writing marathon for poetry—and NaPoWriMo was born. Every day in April she posts a prompt, ranging from forms (lune, tritina, fan letter) to subject matter (food, fear, technical terms).

Chris Jarmick’s Poetry Is Everything blog. Chris’s prompts—some his own, some by guest prompters—have been extremely varied and provocative. Today’s prompt, for example, is to steal words from the NOAA’s National Weather Service Glossary and use them in a poem.

The Found Poetry Review. Each day in April, FPR has featured a prompt by a guest writer. These are fairly complex prompts; April 28th involves taking a piece of source text, eliminating any words that don’t start with A, B, C, D, E, F, or G, and then using an online program to make a piece of music out of what’s left. I loved the imaginativeness of all of these prompts, but I didn’t try a one of them because they were too complicated. I am a lazy promptee; if I even have to click to another page or look something up, I’m out. But I may go back and try some of these when I’m not hustling to cram in a poem every day.

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic Asides. This is the Writer’s Digest PAD Challenge site I mentioned before. I like Robert’s prompts because they’re often just a word or phrase, which makes them very open-ended: “love or anti-love,” “important,” “set the poem in a food establishment,” “experienced/inexperienced.” These simple prompts were a strategic move on Robert’s part, since, like I said, hundreds of people post poems on that site every day based on the prompt. So if the prompts were too specific, the poems would all sound alike. (Here’s an example of the kind of too-specific prompt I don't like, totally made up: “Take the strongest emotion you felt today and imagine how you would dress it if it were a child.” I would not want to read 400 poems about that. But if you’ve got 400 people writing about “office,” you’ll get a pretty good variety because there are so many different directions you can take.)

Jennifer Givhan. Jenn, a talented poet and editor at Tinderbox, wrote a prompt each day for the “larger” Facebook group I wrote with, which she founded. I won’t put any of them here because I hope she’ll put them together in a book soon. Look for it. They were awesome.