the Village Knittiot

I have noticed over the last couple of years that Summer usually brings with it a bit of a lull in the blogosphere — or at least the portions of it I tend to gravitate towards. I think during this time of year we are probably more willing to actively engage with the world around us and we don’t need the digital buffers of a virtual community as much (or, at least, this sometimes introvert doesn’t). In essence we want to get out in our backyards and smell the proverbial roses and maybe watch the grass grow a little, figuratively speaking (and if you’re the sort who isn’t terrified of bugs and things like lyme disease or west nile virus, probably literally as well).

For my part, the quiet around the Village lately is due to a number of things. For one, I still feel like I am recovering from the frenzied pace that marked the beginning of my first summer here in Philadelphia. The crazy work schedule followed by the exhausting visit with my family has left me with a great fondness for naps and sleeping in (a luxury I rarely afford myself). And, while the knitting and spinning and fleece processing continues, it does so at a much slower pace. My summer of knitting naturally has been a tremendous part of this as, more than ever, I think before buying.

I have also finally accepted the fact that I am not the kind of person who enjoys purchasing other people’s patterns and making them, that I will not readily plunk down a sizable amount of cash for a collection of someone else’s designs. It is just not something I do (easily). I simply want knitting to occupy this space in my brain that is something like second nature. I want to be able to just find yarn that I like and use it to create something of my own. I know this is not a new expression of desire for me. I’ve said it at least a dozen times. And I’ve lamented my lack of knowledge and the lack of classes that explain on a fundamental level just how this knitting thing works. I’m not talking about purls and knits and step-by-step instructions that walk you through a specific pattern or isolated technique. I want something that will give me a knitting foundation. You know, the kind of instruction people used to get when having socks and sweaters depended not on your ability to buy a $35 book and follow directions, but on knowing how to take yarn and turn it into a sweater or pair of socks that fit the intended recipient.

But to blame the lull here on slower, more process-oriented knitting wouldn’t be entirely accurate. The truth is, I’ve been a lot more preoccupied with thoughts about writing, or to be more accurate, what I want to accomplish over the next couple of years. I’ve also been reading a lot (which further reduces the amount of knitting time I have). At this point, I’m not sure how blogging fits in to all of this, or rather, I’m not sure how blogging about knitting fits into that. And while I recognize that I haven’t ever blogged exclusively about knitting, it has provided a framework for what is here. However, I find myself feeling a bit limited by that framework lately. Fiber and its various incarnations are only a part of my life and there are avenues I’ve been wanting to explore and haven’t felt able to in this space.

When I first started blogging, I was really struggling with my writing. It had become a source of tremendous stress for me and the act of writing something out here where it was visible to the world was an important act at the time. Blogging became a tool by which I was able to rediscover my voice and while it might sound melodramatic, it saved me at a time when I was in want of a little saving. Then there was the unexpected and very welcome side effect of finding this little community of amazing people who were supportive, surprising, creative and thoughtful. I don’t want to lose that, but lately I’ve been feeling as if my focus is split. I’m wanting to make some changes but I’m not quite sure yet what they are. Until then, I suspect the Village will continue to be a little on the quiet side.

Just a quick announcement with a little shameless promotion of the *other* blog — Kaizerin (co-blogger extraordinaire and wonderfully dear friend) and I just posted a write up on our impressions of Joan Didion’s latest book The Year of Magical Thinking over on The Bookish Dark. Feel free to venture over for a little literary discourse should you be so inclined…

I am continuing to make my way through America Knits, and every morning I find some little nugget that just extends into my entire day. This book has turned out to be such a surprising gem, and I am definitely adding it to my list of must-own books. It isn’t because the patterns are so wonderful, though there are some very wonderful patterns. It is because of the stories it tells. And I supposed it is because each pattern is connected to a story that so many of them are appealing to me.

I am tempted to say it is the writer in me that finds this so inspiring, but I am a true believer in the universal power of story. And it is this power that I want to bring to each and every garment or item I create.

I’ve been ruminating on this topic for the last several days, considering all the insight into myself and the nature of creativity and the act of creation I have received from these profiles of everyday, ordinary people who are at various stages along a path that involves living your passions and embodying your dreams. It is truly mind-boggling how many different forms this takes.

For me, working from home has been the start of a major shift toward pursuing the life I want. And while it is still fraught with insecurities and isn’t quite where I want and/or need to be. It is a beginning. While reading my husband’s blog the other day, he was talking about how hard it is to see the accomplishments in your life and what a fine line it is between overvaluing or undervaluing them. Me, I tend to undervalue. And when I say undervalue, I mean often can’t see. And while this serves to drive me forward, there is this hollowness and desperation to it in which what I do is never quite enough.

When I considered my own writing life, I always imagined that it would take the form of fiction. Stories. That is my language. And since I found a partner who also speaks that language, we tend to focus on the centrality and importance of it a lot. As such, my definition of story has begun to broaden and assert itself into every area of my life. Because of this, my understanding of myself as a writer and a creative person has undergone some major development.

While I still read fiction (I just picked Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills), I have found that the majority of my reading life has become centered around non-fiction. I want to know about people and their stories. I want to understand how events have unfolded, how discoveries are made. I want to know how people make the decisions they do and if their everyday lives feel as mundane as mine sometimes do. I want to know if they feel pressure to compromise and fit in or if they are afraid of the same things I am. I am a glutton for a good story.

Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to the idea of having enough room to tell your story. We need to give our voices room to speak our stories, and the more we hear other people tell their stories, the more we can hear our own.

I am surprised by the number of people in this book who became burnt out on their passion. They found themselves focused on production or consumed by it and lost joy in the process. One of the women, at the time she was being interviewed for the book, was only just allowing herself to sit down again at the spinning wheel. It was a slow, tentative dance and like a runner with a bad knee, she was favoring her wounded parts. It ended with the sentence, “Through her struggles, Louise is learning important lessons about herself — about patience, confidence, acceptance and fulfillment.”

That gave me pause. It touched a tender spot, and I’m trying to make an effort to carry those words with me into every day. It is the story I want to tell about myself. It is the space I want to make room for in my life.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”–above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

I discovered this poem in the American Literature class that changed my life back when I was a youthful undergrad. For me, the whole world of metaphoric language and symbolic imagery exploded that semester and what I had thought I understood and what I came to realize I only appreciated on a very limited plane was suddenly swallowed up as this entire universe opened up before me. I saw new dimensions and it was like a whole way of existence was now available. There were “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” and that has always stayed with me.

Yesterday, as I was reading and responding to JoVE’s comments on my post about Lists and Structure, something she said really impacted me. After her very insightful thoughts on non-linear strategy (which is a whole other post), she concluded with,

“The trick is to just trust your gut and start.”

Such a simple thing.

Trusting one’s self comes to us pretty naturally. It is an instinct we are born with. Unfortunately, we don’t receive a lot of training or encouragement in trusting our gut or leaning on our own intuition. As a matter of fact, from what I observe on a daily basis, a lot of us have pretty much had it drilled into our head from the beginning that the most important (and socially acceptable) thing you can do with instinct is suppress it. While this may work just great for fitting in and towing the line, it creates an internal discordance. And, depending on where you draw your creative energy from, it can wreak serious havoc on your process.

I have always considered myself a writer. From the time I was a very young child, this was the only thing I wanted to be. I wanted to write stories like the ones that populated my entire life and helped inform my internal landscape. When I finally got to the point where I was ready to be serious about it, I suddenly found myself floundering, struggling and gasping for air. Sitting down to write resulted in severe anxiety, surrounded by a cycle of fear and self-criticism. Finally, I just couldn’t write. Crippling panic would set in every time I sat down to do some work. Sometimes I could power through it, but more often I walked away feeling as if I had been beaten with a large stick.

It was as if the voice had been taken out of me. It wasn’t a sudden thing, by any means. I could feel her getting weaker and weaker until suddenly she was just silent. Occassionally I could force a little bit of something out of her, but mostly she was like a ghost in the background, barely visible.

While the temptation was to feel that this was something that had happened to me (why is the victim mentality so appealing?), I ultimately had to accept responsibility for my role in all of it, and accept that I was the one who silenced her. I was the one who never gave her room to speak. And then I wondered why I couldn’t write? Hmm…

Just a small step of initial trust has resulted in so much. And everytime I give her room to say what she needs to say, I can hear her louder and clearer and stronger. Every day she grows and grows and grows and someday, I won’t be able to contain her. What an exciting prospect.

Structure, I can see, plays an important part in making room for my voice. I sometimes use goals — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly — to help me create some of that structure. I start every day with a pen and an index card on which I write (hopefully) realistic goals about what I will accomplish. I have a notebook where I keep other larger goals and some of the smaller steps I need to accomplish those. There is a fluidity to these goals, because life changes and it is important to allow the journey to impose a little of its own structure, but there are larger goals that I don’t want to compromise on or lose sight of.

One of my larger goals for this year is to give my voice more room to speak. And really, this process of creating a room of my own, is a lesson in learning to trust myself. The end result, I can now see, will be more of an ability to “Just start.”

There are two ways to define something. One is to say what it is. The other is to proclaim what it is not. You would think that the first would be the easiest, because it is precise and to the point. But I think it is the hardest thing to do honestly. Telling someone that a myth is the same thing as a lie is to rob them of so much meaning and also to entirely discount its earlier role as a vehicle for making sense of the world. The second way has a much longer list of options and possibilities to draw from, but it can be terribly misleading. To say that an egg is not an elephant may be true, but it is a long way off from truly getting at the heart of what egg is.

The difference between the two is one of approach. To describe what something is, is to go at definition from an additive space. You start with a blank page and begin to fill that area with thoughts and words and impressions until it is more or less complete. The second method is entirely subtractive. You start with the whole world and your existence in it and begin to remove things until what you are left with is the definition.

Someone, to whom I am eternally grateful, recently pointed out to me how easily I resort to the subtractive. I tend to define myself in terms of what I don’t want. In ways, this makes sense. After all, what do we have here but the whole world and our existence in it? (Yes, yes, yes — the whole vast internal landscape thing. I’m getting there.) So, as I work at making sense of my self and my place here, it would require some stripping away, right? But since our perception is limited and our existence in this world doesn’t readily appear to touch everything, how do you then add new elements into the mix when you are only skilled (or mostly skilled) at deconstruction? It was suggested to me that perhaps some balance was called for. To which I jokingly replied, “What is this balance of which you speak?”

So what does this have to do with knitting? Or writing? Or anything really? Well in this past year of intensively examining the blocks that I feel have been holding me back from hitting my creative stride, I think I’m finally onto something here. And this touches my knitting, spinning, writing, career and other creative pursuits. You see, creativity holds an inherently additive element in its nature — it isn’t an either/or scenario, but a both/and process.

When I am trying to go from brain to needles and yarn, or wheel and fiber, or pen and paper, certainly I am carving something out (the deconstructive/subtractive portion of events), but there has to be more than that. You have to bring something new to the table. And more than just adding things external to one’s self, I am finding that the additions need to come from someplace internal. In order to summon up that kind of creative power, it seems you have to know yourself and trust yourself. Otherwise, you’ll just be happy to put your creativity or even your very life in the hands of other people who you think “know better.” And in this way we remain perpetual children of the world with a series of events that just happen to us and which we have no control over. This, of course, frees us from the enormous and overwhelming responsibility of our own lives. And in a world trying to escape from consequences, this is a pretty appealing scenario. Also, not a very satisfying one.

The more Corvus and I talk about our creative futures both as individuals and together, the more I come face to face with the need to develop my additive skills. We are both such course charters by nature — seldom comfortable on a well-trodden path. The thing about stepping off into uncharted territory, though, is that you not only need to have the necessary skills to make your own way, you have to have faith that you can do it.

I keep a notebook with me at all times. Usually I have three of them, but no matter what, whenever I leave the house, I bring my smaller notebook with me so that I can jot down important things, unimportant things, great ideas, not so great ideas, snippets of conversation, words whose definitions I want to look up and interesting billboard phrases. When I was in college this sweet, wonderful professor led us through Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and lovingly spent an hour talking to us about the Poet’s chief occupation as a cataloger of life.

I often jot down ideas for blog entries in my little notebook and today was struck with the thought that if I followed through on them all, I would have a post or two a day. On Monday when I wrote about Feed and my Sisyphaen difficulties with finding my starting point, I realized that I was onto something.

The most crucial part of writing for me is the first paragraph, the first chapter, even the title. I need the seeds of a beginning to help me get started. And a holistic approach to thought, in which all the pieces are interconnected, makes it difficult to find the starting line. Perhaps it is because, in the midst of my inclination toward holistic thought processes, I have almost all my mental training in linear progression. When I learned how to outline in grade school so I could take notes, I used to cry trying to make it all work. I just always felt that things were missing, connections weren’t made and I didn’t know how to fit everything into a nice neat order. Life never struck me as particularly nice, neat or orderly. Also I’m fond of following rabbit trails, and tend to find some of my best thoughts happen in tangents. I also resist definitions, because, well, inevitably they miss something, some subtle nuance. I think my third grade teacher is still living in my head telling me that I’m not following my outline.

Years later I was introduced to spider web outlines — the kind that start with a main topic in the middle, which branches out into other major subtopics and their little parts beyond that, and you can draw lines between them to show how minor subtopics are connected to other minor subtopics. It was a brave new world, but you try turning in a spider web outline to your teacher for a report on the salmon and see how that goes over. Not very well I can tell you.

Thanks to the new job, I have been learning a lot about my own writing process. When it’s something I don’t have to care deeply about and I can recognize it as a writing exercise with a point (namely gainful employment) it makes it easier to face some of the blocks and to analyze them step by step. This then translates into my own personal writing.

The word I use most often to describe the cluttery state of my mind is “overwhelmed.” When it comes to taking all my thoughts and getting them down on paper in a way that both makes sense and communicates complexity and depth, I sometimes have trouble breathing. It’s as if I have to go back to the beginning (in a linear sense) and suddenly I am hyperventilating in my third grade classroom trying to explain to my teacher the inadequacies of an outline and getting nowhere. I slump back to my desk in defeat and half-heartedly attempt to start at Roman Numeral One. (***I understand that part of school is supposed to be about learning a certain number of skills, but sadly that often turns into squelching actual critical thought when it crops up. Shouldn’t most of school be about encouraging people to really think about things?)

So I’m thinking, maybe it’s time to let go of those expectations I’ve been carrying around since third grade? Maybe it’s time to stop worrying so much about how it will all come together in “the way it’s ’supposed’ to” and just let it come together the way it will. Maybe its time to start figuring out what really works for me. Revolutionary thoughts, I know.

Yesterday at work I handed in a really big project. It was the first time I had written anything so lengthy for them and it turned into a bit of a monster. Not because it necessarily was a monster, but because I tend to have problems with perception and otherwise harmless little bunny rabbits turn into drooling, fanged beasts that want to crush my bones and eat my spleen. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, but more on that later.

Over the course of a couple weeks, I have been slowly and anxiously plodding along on it. Making use of my time at work, but also worrying. Worrying that it wasn’t good enough. Worrying that I was about to fall flat on my face. Worrying that I didn’t know enough about dishwashers (yes, dishwashers) to write it or that my facts were all wrong! I even brought it home over the weekend, but fear induced procrastination talked me into just avoiding it instead.

This, in turn, led me to the 11th hour, which is usually where I do my best work. However, I forgot that my best work is usually preceded by a complete and total meltdown. So, on Monday night at 8:00 I finally went sobbing into Mr. Knittiot’s office to tell him why I shouldn’t be allowed to go on writing when everything that comes out of my mouth is such shit. Furthermore if I couldn’t write to save my life, maybe it was a sham of a life anyway. My husband is very patient. I appreciated this about him. I, myself? Not so patient. Well, maybe with others, just not so much when things of me are involved. He agreed to take a look at what I had (laughing when he asked me how much I had and I said 15 very bad pages after I made it sound like I’d been sitting staring at a blank screen for two weeks) and said he would be my editor for the evening.

I continued to write. He continued to bring in the tiniest of suggestions. A sentence structure here, a punctuation there. I kept telling him to feel free to be brutal. Please, if I need to change everything, tell me! I’m sure I need to change everything. But, of course, I didn’t have time to change everything so I accepted his minor suggestions at the rate of, oh, maybe one or two a page. And I kept asking him if he was sure. I went to bed at eleven, slept fitfully for five hours imagining my bosses looking at me wondering what in the hell I had been doing for two weeks. I got up at four and finished it off. Finally at about 9:30 that morning as I was going over things one final time before handing it in, my perception shifted. I got my objectivity back, and I could see that this wasn’t so bad. It would work. Might require some changes, but in general was good enough. It was okay.

When one of the owner’s of the company (he is spearheading this project) called me into his office later in the day to go over my document, I expected he would be satisfied. I thought he would suggest changes. But no. No. Not all. He was ecstatic. He couldn’t stop saying how wonderful it was. How I had an excellent future in the company and a bright career ahead of me. He used the word “perfect” (oh, the sweet, sweet sound of that word — it is like a drug to me) and I just sat there in complete bliss. The words of my dear husband, who told me that even my crap is pretty good (which I am working very hard to believe, my love!), bouncing about my brain.

And to top it all off… Mr. Knittiot has a job interview in Philly on Thursday morning. What a week. Now, if we can just sell the house…

p.s. — don’t worry, I have not intention of selling my soul and my desire for teaching to embrace a career as a copywriter. Been down that path and the road to hell has been paved by Marketing professionals…

Here’s something else—if no one says to you, “Oh Sam (or Amy)! This is wonderful!,” you are a lot less apt to slack off or to start concentrating on the wrong thing…being wonderful, for instance, instead of telling the goddam story.

Stephen King from On Writing

As it turns out, the secret of writing is writing in secret. In the past, I have always been pretty quick to share my lovelies with my wonderful spouse or some other worthy reader. Unfortunately, this is typically the death knell for my enthusiasm. Talking about it too much leads (for me at least) to not writing enough about it in the long run. Mr. King’s (”No, please, call me Stephen,” I imagine him saying. “Mr. King is my father.” And then we laugh and have a nice conversation about writing.) practical, useful and wonderful advice to write an entire draft “with the door closed,” so to speak, has been an electrifying charge. My story is mine. All mine. All the little characters. The big ones. The events. My big secret. Who knew it was that simple?

I am one of those people who, for all of my childhood and beyond, have been genuinely happiest when my nose is in a book. I remember when I was in college how I couldn’t wait until I was done so I would have more time to read. (Ha!) I was constantly exposed to new materials that I would only get a taste of but could never fully delve into. My list of things to read grew faster than I could keep up with. And I foolishly thought that outside of college I would find the reading time I craved. And I didn’t fully realize at the time what a powerful thing it was to read and discuss in a community — even if that community was nothing more than a class full of people who I had decided only half cared.

I’ve noticed when I talk to people now about books and reading that most people get this sort of hushed awe about it. They usually tell me about how important books are and how they know someone who reads a lot and how that person is really smart. What usually follows is an admission that they don’t read much. This is almost always said with a bit of embarrassment. I’ve let them sit in that embarassment and walked away with my smug attachment to the library, the bookstore, the great mothers and fathers of literature, etc.

As I go through life and deal with my own illusions about myself and “the way things are” I have to admit that I have always held very close to my heart a sense of satisfaction and, embarassingly enough, a personal superiority around my love for books and reading and words and language and writing. When I was younger and “troubled” I received little encouragement in the academic arena, but even I knew that testing out at a 10th grade reading level in 3rd grade was a big deal. It was something that I was good at and liked so I clung to it. Almost as an identity. Okay, maybe not almost, rather most assuredly. I liked books. I could write a little. That was who I was. It made me smart and wonderful.

After college, I had less time for reading, as I’m sure you can imagine. And as the pressures of “adult life” mounted, my time for reading got more and more crowded out. At first I noticed my vocabularly lacked a little lustre. Then I had no time to care about that either. I realized for the first time how much mindfulness reading requires. And how it means being able to set aside all the noise and clutter in your mind to immerse yourself in another world. That has become harder to do. I started reading more non-fiction. But I missed stories.

I am always grateful when the opportunities to dash your own self-importance start to present themselves, because it helps clear out a little of that clutter. So lately, in the light of my struggle to make time for reading and my even greater paralysis around writing, I am thinking a lot about my senior class in Biological Psychology where I read one simple article that talked about how they think it is possible that only 20%-40% of brains are really wired to be “great” readers. How the processing of words and language might just be a fluke of biology and genetics. And how that forced me to imagine that, like so many things, there is an element of luck involved in the things we are “good” at (or in my mind, the things that make us good) and it may have very little to do with us. It’s hard to feel arrogant about luck-of-the-draw physiology.

Lately I am reading a lot again. Fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, comic books, blogs, textbooks. And it feels good. My brain feels happy. I am learning to shut down the noise of my mind and live in the moment where I am scanning words across a page and letting them sink in. And I’m learning to read them with a little bit more of the being comfortable in my own skin. I’m putting the eternal “Why?” and “How?” behind everything and hoping to let the smug superiority, born out of an internal terror and insecurity of “never good enough!” just slide off.