17

I've spent most of today (except for two hours this morning in which I read the entirety of Liz Rosenberg's 17 -- more on that later) writing. When I write, really write, at the expense of everything else. In the winter I shut myself up in my room all day, in sweatpants and thick socks and no makeup, huddled under a quilt. I usually forget about eating meals and surround myself instead with coffee (at the moment, my favorite -- Ja-Makin-Me-Crazy) and chocolate (another favorite right now -- dark with chili). I also get up every once in awhile to light a candle or a stick of incense. It would seem like a meaningless ritual, but it gives me a minute to clear my head and look at my work from a new perspective. I also have, within reach, a stack of books with which I have armed myself against loss of inspiration -- at the moment, a Buddhist philosophy collection, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (which I have not yet started), and the Norton Anthology of New Poems, American Hybrid. Whenever I realize I've stopped writing, I turn to a random page of one of these books, pick out a word or two, and go from there. This works really well for me, and helps me not to stop writing for more than a few minutes at a time, which I think is really important. At this point in the process, especially when I've set aside the entire day for writing, quantity is just as important as quality. The likelihood of emerging from this room at the end of the day having completed even one piece I really love is very slim, so I've got to have a lot of material I can work with later on, when I've got a moment here and there to re-read and revise.

Anyway, back to the book I mentioned earlier. This morning I read the book 17 by Liz Rosenberg, who I know is a professor at BU, although I've never had a class with her. It was alright. I expected better, but I think it was written for a teenage audience and it was published by Cricket Books, so I expect it had to be accessible enough for the mass market. It was a story about a girl named Stephanie the year she was seventeen, and how she falls in love for the first time, and also how she is coping with the sickness of her mother and her own psychological troubles. I liked the way it was written in short sections of prose poetry instead of chapters, and some of the passages were really striking. But I felt that those passages maybe stood out a little too much and that the whole book should've been as carefully crafted. I did enjoy it though, of course, or I wouldn't have finished it in two hours. I think I might like to take a class from this Liz Rosenberg sometime.