Let Your Mind Spill onto the Page
“I don’t write every day, and I don’t worry about keeping an exact record of my life,” Katherine May wrote in her newsletter a few weeks ago. “I just open the book when I need to, and let my mind spill onto the page.” And then she came up with a fantastic set of reasons why letting your mind spill onto the page might be a good thing for you to try, as well.
But there’s a core reason underneath all those reasons: To live consciously.
To know what’s on your mind. To understand what’s happening in your life, to you and around you. To begin to see how it all fits together, and why it matters.
Large audiences, fortune, fame—those things are secondary to figuring out what matters most to you, then learning how to share it with another person so clearly that they can understand why it matters, too.
Finding the time in your life to do that isn’t easy, though, especially not when you’re living under 21st-century hypercapitalism. Melissa Florer-Bixler recognizes that all too well. There are always a few people successful enough at telling stories, fiction or nonfiction, that they can focus on that and nothing else. The rest of us, as Florer-Bixler observes, have to “think and write in the cracks of our labor in and out of the home.”
She tells her newsletter subscribers about how she was recently able to carve out a week for herself to work on her latest book, and the historical material she’s working with is right up my alley, and I’m already intensely curious to see where she’s headed with it, and I find myself wishing for a world where she could finish that book sooner and I could read it sooner. I suppose that’s more than she or I can sort out—at least on our own.
But there’s always that wonderful quote from Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Enough of us just have to apply ourselves to the task. And maybe one way it begins is by stealing every moment we can to set our dreams and ambitions down on paper and fix them in our memories, so we’ll have the destination in sight.
PS: A few years ago, the Quaker non-profit media company I work at launched an annual fiction issue for our magazine/website, Friends Journal. The next one’s coming up, and the deadline to submit a story is a little over a month from now. Genre is (pretty much) no exception; the only real limits are that we’re talking short-short stories, less than 2,000 words, and as you might expect they have to be grounded in Quaker experience or encounters with Quaker faith or…basically, Quaker-themed in some way. But you don’t have to be a Quaker to submit a story.
Take a look at last year’s fiction issue, or the 2021 science fiction issue that started us down this path. That’ll give you a pretty good sense of our editorial sensibilities.