The Storialist Turns Seven!

While I was thinking about this post, I remembered a poem I’d read in a workshop in grad school by one of my classmates, Heather Kirn Lanier. It was called “Ode to Seven,” and was about the mysterious recurrence of the number seven in folklore, religion, and medicine (and also a beautiful tribute to her father). I remember learning from her poem that our bodies undergo cell regeneration every seven years.

That’s a pretty amazing fact, isn’t it? Poetry teaches such wondrous things.

This post marks the seventh anniversary of The Storialist. For seven years, I’ve been posting poems, art, videos, interviews, and links. This online space—and the space I include in my life in order to write—remains one of the kindest gifts I’ve given to myself. My work here directly feeds the beast that demands that I write; it also soothes that beast, somehow, when I get too hard on myself.

I constantly battle to balance the urge to create with the urge to feel PRODUCTIVE (this is also a Virgo-Leo cusper thing, I’d wage). I’ve learned in the last couple of years that sometimes, creativity demands a certain slowness and patience. The most valuable creative moments might actually be when I’ve seemed the least “productive.”

I wonder if anyone else relates to this. I often think about this in regards to teaching writing. I like to talk with my students about how helpful it is to identify the ideas already on the back burner in our minds. It’s not about waiting for the perfect moment or concept—it’s more about letting an idea IN, and letting the mind mull it over. This might look like procrastinating (and maybe it’s one form of it!) in that very little is happening externally, but internally, there is PLENTY happening.

Lately, I have more and more of an appreciation for getting out of a task mentality when it comes to creativity.

I know that the next year will bring new ideas, failures, and changes (as always). One enormous change—my husband and I will become parents in December. We’re so thrilled to be expecting (it’s a boy!). Many of the (terrific) poets I know are (terrific) parents, but I know that parenthood dramatically changes our experience of time, and our seeming control of it. Already, I’ve experienced this—I can’t believe that I’m at the halfway point of pregnancy right now. It’s absolutely FLOWN by.

Right now, I just feel full of gratitude. Gratitude for the little human coming to meet us, for having a supportive partner and family, for the artists/writers/readers I’ve connected with over the years, and for the balm and tonic that art and creativity continue to be in this life.

Thank you for reading this. I so appreciate you, reader. In the next year, let us all experience the desire to make and the ability to luxuriate in creative stillness.

On to the next seven!


Previous anniversaries:
July 2008
July 2009
July 2010
July 2011
July 2012
July 2013
July 2014

In my natural habitat