Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Before Daddy Walks Through the Door: On Where I Write  
Gary L. McDowell

I write on my knee on the back of a Kohl’s receipt for onsies and the newest, space-age bottle technology—maybe this’ll be the one that ends the colic. I write one-handed at the kitchen counter while waiting for the toast to pop. I write in the bathtub, which has become, these last couple years, a sanctuary that my wife and I fight for every evening after our oldest (now two-and-a-half) goes to bed. In the car before I pull into the garage, those last few moments of quiet before Daddy walks through the door and Poet stays behind. On my Blackberry while in line at the grocery store. On a pizza box. While bouncing a baby on my knee, hurriedly scribbling, ignoring the lines in my lined notebook. Through all the noise—the crying, the laughing, the screaming—I write however I can, and on whatever I have, wherever I am. I have to or I fear the words might stop.

In no way am I claiming to be the first, the only, the last, or the lonely in this practice. It's certainly been a viable option to not writing at all for many writers/parents. What I like about it, what I've found most useful, is the way my poetry has become mimetic of the way it's written: the poems are disjointed, greasy, wet with bubble-bath, disjunctive, hurried and hairy, full of a domesticity filtered through pure exhaustion, and yet they're jubilant, confident, scary, and, I hope, alive. The writing, though I do it, as much as I can, away from the kids, has taken on the very nature they've propelled into the forefront of my life: the poems have become impatient and cranky, full of life and vigorously beautiful in their haste. Where I write has become as much a product of how I write, and for that I'm grateful. I didn't used to write so haphazardly, though I often wonder how I could ever go back to a desk, to a table, to anything flat and unmoving, quiet and relaxing.

I used to write at a desk, that old stand-by of stately productivity. In college I made my own desk because of a lack of funds to buy one new and, well, why the hell not? What else was there to do one Saturday night knee-deep in a case of Pabst and several large cheese pizzas? So off we went in a friend's pick-up truck looking for supplies. I don't remember who drove, but I know it wasn't me—it couldn't have been me—and I know we didn't drive for long. After all, if I'd learned anything as a poor college student, it was that there's always a shit-ton of useful curbside garbage in a college town. We passed up plywood, sawhorses, an old entertainment center, ten-foot high piles of pizza boxes artfully architectured into make-shift rain shelters, hundreds of empty liquor bottles (some of them arranged in sculptures not only beautiful but also mind-numbingly complex), and other random pieces of wood and other supplies that may have met our purpose. If only the students responsible for building the garbage sculptures put that much effort into their studying. And then. Twelve concrete blocks stacked in four piles of three: legs. An old oak closet door sanded and varnished: desk. We loaded everything into the truck. I remember raindrops making it difficult to grasp the varnished door. And I remember spending a couple hours hunched over it with a hairdryer set to luke warm, trying to dry it while simultaneously being sure not to melt the rubbery surface layer. It took all five of us to haul everything up to my third floor apartment: four guys on concrete duty, another—no doubt the strongest of us, though I don't remember who it was—to lift the desk itself. But damn it, that desk was sturdy, reliable, those things a desk should be.

The shine from the varnish held up for a couple years, but eventually it became gummy and pocked with microscopic holes that were neither repairable nor ignorable. I wrote numerous term papers and poems on that desk, but even then it wasn't my favorite place to write. In the warm months—of which, if you've lived in the Midwest, you already know, there are only a few—I'd spend time pond-side or in the local botanical gardens writing my surroundings. When it was too cold to venture far from home, my ex-fiance and I would curl up on the couch or on the bed and write longhand, reading aloud what we'd created. It was hopelessly romantic and hopelessly hopeless—both the writing and the relationship. But eventually I had to put all of that to the curb. By sunrise the next morning, the door and concrete blocks were gone, undoubtedly in the back of some pick-up truck, ready for a new life as a beer-pong table or makeshift door to an illegal basement room at a frat house. Or maybe someone's new desk.

Post-college I bought a table-desk from IKEA. I found it uninspiring, boring, less-than-useful. I took to writing in my car during my lunch break from my first real job: I edited the White Pages for a local upstart phonebook company. It was as fun as it sounds, and even more boring. Though I only lasted a few months at the job, I learned to write in a legal pad propped on my steering wheel. I learned that if you leave your car run in “Accessories” for an hour a day with the air-conditioning on full blast, the battery will die. I also learned that a dead car battery isn't so bad a thing. Walking back to work from across town, though, well, that sucks.

I've written in coffee shops, doughnut shops, doctor's waiting rooms, hotels, bank lobbies, while waiting for my car to be fixed, through the entire night until sunrise, while my wife labored—though maybe I shouldn't tell her that. One of my favorite places to write these days, though, is in the stacks of Western Michigan University's library. I grab a copy of ND237.F434A4 2008 (a book of Eric Fischl's paintings—not only is it huge and make a perfect lap-desk, its pages also act as a quick jump-start if I get stuck) and find a corner near a window to sit down, back braced against the wall, legs bent, pen at the ready—or on a lazy day, laptop plugged in. Sitting on the floor makes me work quickly, fill the pages before my legs fall sleep, before my ass goes numb, before the kids wake from their naps and my wife calls, says its time to give her a break, make dinner, let her soak in the tub. I usually find myself on the fourth floor where the science texts, historical records, maps, and philosophy are found. Something about all of those foreign-to-me texts makes me feel loose, gives me the freedom to create, to think uninhibited thoughts, to write without fear and without direction, and I cherish it, because in no other area of my current life am I so free.

I'm still not sure that where I write matters much in terms of ultimately getting the work done, but finding a place where I'm free to create, to live separately from this and in that makes me realize just how important having a place to write at all really is. I love changing diapers, potty-training, bribing for naps, for lunch, for quiet, for anything other than crankiness, and I love what those things have done for my poems, but sometimes when it all becomes a tad overwhelming, just a little quiet, a little lap desk, and a little moldy-library smell is all I need to find myself again, right myself back to what I love second-most.

 

Gary L. McDowellis the author of American Amen, which won the 2009 Orphic Prize for Poetry from Dream Horse Press, and of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005). He is also the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). He lives in Portage, MI with his wife and two young kids.