How much living and how much writing?

Mary Oliver, Joni Mitchell, and searching for the perfect ratio

I have a distinct memory of being in my late twenties or so, listening to a Joni Mitchell song. It might have been Amelia or Coyote. I love Joni’s lyrics. “Maybe I’ve never really loved/I guess that is the truth/ I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes.” Or “White flags of winter chimneys/ Waving truce against the moon.” Just…wow.

“She seems to fall in love a lot,” I whispered to myself. I was probably driving somewhere. From Mississippi to Kentucky or Alabama to Indiana. I drove a lot more in those days. Just me and Joni on the freeway for hours at a time. “Like, a lot.”

Should I be falling in love more, I wondered. Was I missing out on something? Was my love life deficient in some way?

Of course, I told myself, the songs aren’t all necessarily autobiographical. She might not really be falling in love that often. It was years later when I read a Joni Mitchell biography and discovered, actually, yes, she really did appear to be falling in love that often. By that point, though, I was in my fifties and the idea of falling in love that often just seemed exhausting.

Recently I’ve been reading two Mary Oliver poems every morning. They’re meditations. They’re little prophecies whispering in my ear before I take up my phone and get lost in digital oblivion.

When you read Mary Oliver’s poetry it pretty quickly becomes clear that she spent most of her time not writing poetry but being outside. She spent most of her life picking up half-dead sea mice on the shore (I had to look up what a sea mouse is and part of me wishes I hadn’t). Or bumping into clumps goldenrod along the side of the road. Or watching birds. She spent a lot of time observing birds.

Photo by Aurora K on Unsplash

In some poems, she’s explicitly writing about the competing pulls of writing poetry and being outside. It feels like, in her poems, that being outside definitely won. I mean, don’t get me wrong. She wrote a lot of poems. But think of all the moments of being outside that didn’t make it into her poems. I think the outside won and I think for Mary Oliver, that was the whole point.

“Christ, I should be spending a lot more time outside,” I think when I read Mary Oliver poems. I’ve never even seen a sea mouse (actually, I’m sort of okay with that). “I’ve never seen an otter or a flicker. I’ve only seen an owl once and it was so quick, passing it on the road in the early morning, that I’m not even sure it was real.”

All in all, feeling I should spend more time outside is probably healthier than believing that I should be falling in love more often. The wisdom of age and all that.

Still, both of these women make me wonder about the perfect ratio of living to art. Where’s the right balance? Am I there? Am I close?

For Joni Mitchell, most of the men she fell in love with were fellow musicians or artists. Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Warren Beatty, Jaco Pastorius. That’s an abbreviated list. See, she really did fall in love. A. Lot. Falling in love and making music were deeply intertwined for her. In fact, half the time she was maybe falling in love with the music as much as she was with the man.

Also, making music is cooperative. It’s social. It involves other people in a way that writing poetry or fiction does not. So the living part (falling in love) and the creating part (making music) were pretty closely intertwined.

For Mary Oliver, I imagine her spending most of her days outside. Then for an hour or two, she comes indoors and writes a poem. Poems are, after all, short. This doesn’t mean they don’t take a lot of work and skill and craft. But I also don’t think Mary Oliver could have been a novelist. She wouldn’t have had enough time to go outside and thank god for that. I’m very happy with Mary Oliver the poet.

This gets at the difference between being a writer of prose, though. Fiction or memoir or creative nonfiction—the specific genre doesn’t matter. If you’re writing long works, that balance between living and creating becomes…trickier. If you’re writing long works while you work another full-time job, now it’s even more complicated. Unlike Mary Oliver, I can’t spend my whole day outside watching the birds and then coming in to jot down a poem. Unlike Joni Mitchell, I’m not making my art with a group of people.

No, right now I’m alone in a room as I write this. There’s not even a cat with me now, which seems especially sad. And there are so many things I love about this moment, alone with words. But also, is it living?

Watercolor of the view from my lonely writing room, which is a nice view as views go

Of course Flannery O’Connor (or Eudora Welty…I can never remember which) famously said that we all have enough material for a lifetime of writing by the time we’ve “survived childhood,” which seems an especially apt way to put it. It’s true, I think. I’ve written quite a lot and haven’t even really tapped into the stories of my childhood. They’re still waiting there, like a fertile garden that’s been lying fallow.

So what’s the problem, then? It’s true that as someone who writes longer things, I might spend more time inside than Mary Oliver and more time alone than Joni Mitchell. But I enjoy that inside, alone time. I might need that inside, alone time.

Maybe the problem is simply that the lives of Mary Oliver and Joni Mitchell seem so much more…interesting than my own. I mean, Mary Oliver saw a sea mouse! I’ve never seen a sea mouse! I don’t live by a beach! Just this lame river, which is cloudy and mysterious and ever-changing and sometimes sparkles in the sun in the most incredible way…oh, okay, maybe it is as interesting as the beach.

But I don’t get to fall in love with Warren Beatty or impress Bob Dylan with my weird guitar tuning or write a song about my flirtation with Sam Shepard. Okay, actually all of that except for the Sam Shepard part sounds sort of lame (also, was Warren Beatty purposefully having affairs with amazing women songwriters or what?).

Instead, when I get restless after spending too long alone in my room writing stupid essays like this, I put on my favorite puffy coat and walk to the library, where I get to chat with Jess or Melissa and stop in at my friend Randy and Mark’s store and possibly run into a couple of other people along the way. Or I set up at the coffee shop and pretend to write while I really just eavesdrop on all the conversations. My friends and neighbors aren’t Warren Beatty, but he was kind of an asshole, anyway. I don’t travel around the world like Joni, but going deep into the life of one place and one community is it’s own kind of journey.

I believe Mary Oliver did spend a lot of time outside and Joni Mitchell did fall in love a lot. But their actual lived lives were quite different from their poetry or their songs. In their music and their words, they transform their lives into something different. They transform their lives into something bigger. Sometimes more beautiful. They chock it full of meaning that might not have been there in the actual moment. That, my friends, is art.

For the people in town who read this newsletter and also know me, I don’t have to explain the gap between art and life. If you read this newsletter, you might assume that I’m at least interesting and perhaps somewhat amusing in a social setting. Well, sometimes, but I’m just as likely to be reserved bordering on surly and often the first person to head home early in order to lie on the couch and read.

The linked short story collection I wrote is a world populated with a whole range of unique and interesting and funny people, all of whom came from my own experiences beyond sitting alone in this room. All of that came out of the living I do in this particular place and this particular time. Perhaps someone reading those stories someday might feel the same sort of FOMO (fear of missing out) I feel when I read Mary Oliver or listen to Joni Mitchell. I hope that I’ve taken bits and pieces of my own life and made it different. Bigger. I hope I’ve filled it up with meaning, even if I have not fallen in love with Warren Beatty¹ or found a sea mouse on the beach.

Thanks to all the new subscribers who I lured here with dogs honking car horns. Sadly, I have not been so blessed with another sight as uplifting as a dog honking a horn, but I did about lose it the other night watching this video about cats and poop (I’m a total sucker for poop jokes).

Also, stay tuned for some exciting writing/publishing related news coming soon!

1. Okay, that’s a lie. I did fall in love with Warren Beatty, when I was a teenager and Dick Tracy came out, I went head over heels for Warren Beatty. At least I’m in good company. What is it about that dude?