a room of (sorta) my own

Billy Collins has a poem about working on a poem and then talking about it before it was finished, only to watch it get up and walk away. I know how he feels. Then there are other times when it helps to get it out in the open like a promise that needs to be kept, and talking about it can help it happen.

I’ve been working on a book for a while now. The earliest notes and drafts I have go back to the summer of 2016. I was hoping to have it finished by the end of that year. That didn’t happen. I circled around the next year; it didn’t happen then, either. I have been chasing this thing down for three years now. This book has had a longer gestation period than an elephant.

I would love to tell you I have been writing the whole time, but that has been part of the problem. The reasons why I have not written regularly are myriad. What matters is I wasn’t doing it. The energy I have found in getting back to blogging regularly has ridden side-saddle with trying to figure out what I need to do or change to create space to write. I figured out that space was both literal and metaphorical.

One of the signature stories in my life comes from watching my nephews play soccer when they were little boys. Scott, the youngest, was about five, which meant a soccer game was a gang of kids huddled around the ball moving up and down the field. My brother said Scott’s team was the best in the league because of one piece of advice the coach gave them.

“If you don’t have the ball,” he said, “don’t run to the ball. Run to open space and let the ball find you.”

I have come back to that advice a number of times in my life since then. It showed up again this week. I have been looking for a place to write where I can leave my stuff out and come back to it. Our house does not have a room like that. The barn is not temperature controlled. My “desks” are at one end of the dining table or in the window seat at the Marketplace. Both of those are good for my editing work and other projects, but not for the book.

I came across Guilford Co-Working last week, a place quite literally across the street from our house that rents places to work. I contacted the owner and he told me he had a client who only used his office a couple of days a week, and not all day at that, and was looking for someone to share the space. Just like that, I have a room of my own—or at a least enough of one to write. I took a picture of my desk.

After I finished my editing for the day, I went over there today for the first time and wrote for two and a half hours. What that means is, with the work I have done already, I should have a complete draft in early September and a new book to share with the world about this time next year. I feel good about saying it out loud because it is within reach.

At first, I thought I was writing a grief book about what I learned after my father died. Though that is still there in many ways, one of the things I learned about grief is that it is a universally shared experience, so that book has become one about how we are all connected—a central theme in my life all along the way. The book will be titled The Color of Together: Metaphors of Connectedness.

Believe me, I will keep you posted. Stay tuned.

Peace,
Milton