In which our intrepid writer sits at her desk…

Original post: Jan 25, 2024, Substack newsletter

OK, it’s not entirely accurate—

First of all, it’s been more like ten and a half years since I moved to Denmark from Northeast Ohio. Second of all, solitude has happened in bursts and stretches amid a mostly connected and interconnected life. I didn’t get me to a nunnery, rocky island cave, remote family compound in the jungle, or anything like that.

However, in core ways, disconnecting from a career in academia, departing familiar geography and cultures, amplifying distance to closest friends and family, and forfeiting immersion in my native language have all had intense and mixed effects.

We landed in June 2013, settled into a tiny apartment close to every useful thing, got bicycles, then a car, and helped our youngest daughters, then 10 and 12, to find their (newly-bilingual) way in school and extracurriculars. Martin worked in a music store during the days and played with his old band some nights and most weekends. By agreement, he would work for pay and I would, at long last, focus foremost on my writing.

In March 2014, I wrote a blog called “How to be Alone” that opened this way—

…my days are pulled in opposing and mutually unsupportive directions. I get messages like this from inside my head—

“Work on your poetry.” and

“Learn a new language.”

Then, from both inside my head and sometimes outside of it—

“What have you been writing?” and

“You need a social network. Call someone for coffee.”

These are all loving messages, but to accomplish what they ask requires generous attention of an impossible sort, the sort that can focus intensely north, shift and focus just as intensely south, all while carrying on conversations both east and west.

Although I had completed writing a novel, edited and published a quarterly literary journal (Poets’ Quarterly), and regularly submitted poems during the days leading up to that post, I go on bemoan my pace of adapting, jobless, to practical life—

I’ve been progressing slowly, excelling at nothing, because the figuring out how to be with myself instead of being surrounded by rotations of students feels really weird. And figuring out how to calm and steady-like keep this family fed instead of the regular bursts of fast food (bad version), and playdates that turn into all the parents cooking together (good version) I was accustomed to where I knew lots more kids and parents, or (other good version) living with the spouse who did almost all the cooking that got done—well, that was easier because it was so familiar.

Felicitous outcome: Since moving, I have become a better and more efficient (slightly less recalcitrant) family cook, I learned to speak Danish, I savvied my web-skills, I got a step counter to reward myself for walking and walked a lot. I also put pressure on myself to stay centered—

I’ve done a couple of online spiritual courses that have helped me, I’m sure of it, deep in my soul and my cantankerous relationship with my own personality, and have probably made me a better mate, parent, and global citizen.

Perhaps true. I’m still at it. Centering is a dynamic process—Always, we begin again.

What I didn’t know ten years ago, sitting at the green Formica and metal-legged resale desk, writing about loneliness, was that, partially due to experiencing loss, partially brain chemistry, I was drifting into a bout of depression that would shroud the next several years. As gaps in my attention grew wider, and sourceless sadness increased, I dropped one commitment after another, then more and more threads of connectedness and communication. Retrospect lets me re-read my own writing and see it coming—

… most of this life these days—during the long hours between family breakfast and all the afternoon arrivals and departures from school and to other activities—is simply alone. Just me, the apartment, our stuff in it, the town, and all my innumerable partially-made projects. I got more exercise when the weather helped me feel like biking and before we had a car, but I’m still doing okay walking to this grocery to the south or that one to the east, or the green grocer to the north. And sometimes I remember that I can suit up in my cold weather gear, wrap on a cozy warm scarf, and just walk to the nowhere that becomes my just-then somewhere.

The language I used in that post is full of this and that, assertions and about-faces. Ten years later (different desk) it’s much clearer how my solutions, or perhaps more precisely, my way through, were bound together with the challenges I faced. I’m pleased to report that—

• I’ve been depression-free for nearly 4 years and it feels great to say so in the middle of winter gray;
• We’ve long ago left the small apartment and are renovating a very old house on a hill beside a forest;
• The novel I first drafted for NaNoWriMo 2013 (DKBuckeye) is well edited and actively looking for an agent;
• I never send out poems as often as I should,
• But I’ve started my own small press that regularly publishes The Daily Lines and gorgeous blank books of my own design.

And wouldn’t you know it? I’m still deciding to focus on my writing to the exclusion of other income-producing activities. Maybe this is the year that writing begins to pay me back. In any case, I’m not going it alone. My community of Danish and other expatriate writers grows and grows, connections on social media stay connected—

—and I appreciate so much knowing that you’re out there reading these entries (or posts or newsletters) as I’m getting my own daily writing habit off the ground. How’s it going with yours? Do you write every day? More than once a day? When something supernatural takes your hands and puts them on the keyboard? How do you maintain your creative community? How can we help each other?

I think I’ve finally figured out something special for paid subscribers and plan to launch it in February—an extra thank you for helping me to keep a productive writing solitude at the center. More on this next time.