Forward from Here by Reeve Lindbergh

Author:Reeve Lindbergh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Glo read to the children

Sitting in her lap

Children took their books home

Homer took a nap.

Homer was a quiet cat

He did not hunt at all

If Homer heard a bird, he purred,

Mice played with his ball.

It needs work, I know. I’m just setting the scene, here, and establishing character traits. The rest of the story will come later, probably just about the time I get stuck in the next chapter of this book.

Another procrastination device, subtly subversive in my case, is to write in a journal. I do this, if not daily then quite regularly. If I have a deadline for another writing project, I sometimes write in my journal for hours at a time. This is self-deceptive procrastination, fueled by a notion lurking somewhere at the back of my brain that journal writing is not the same thing as Writing.

Much of my published work has come directly from my journals, but journal writing never seemed important to me in a literary way. I called it “just writing in my diary” for years, and only recently learned I could upgrade the whole experience by calling my diary a “journal,” and the writing I do in it “journaling.” There are workshops, books, classes taught in colleges on “journaling” now, but to me it has always felt like playing hooky from the real thing. If I’m not writing in my office on the computer, or not writing on my usual paper with my usual pen somewhere in my house or in the library’s Writer’s Room, then I think it doesn’t count.

I get a lot of work done this way, avoiding Writing by writing, and lately I’ve learned another, even more self-subverting trick. I keep any ongoing writing project, like this book, in exactly the same place where I write letters, pay bills, and keep my diary—no, my journal. That is the informal, cluttered, not-Writing place at one end of the dining room table. We can barely dine here, in fact, because Nat and I both work at this table, one of us at one end and one at the other, spreading our letters and books and papers all over it.

We each have an official “office” space, too. His is downstairs, a small comfortable cave of a room between the woodshed and the back hallway and laundry area. He has a row of filing cabinets along one wall, and two tables that provide an L-shaped work surface along another two walls. One surface holds his computer and his printer along with associated papers and possessions. Another has his electric typewriter, which he still uses for a number of tasks, including typing his own journal. The typed journal is mostly a carefully kept record of the weather and natural events around the farm, he says, and it sits on a table overflowing with books and papers, a nest that surrounds him when he sits there.

My office is upstairs. It is a room full of light just under the eaves, with a long table that fits perfectly in the space made for the dormer window.

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