By Megan Baxter
It’s dark here this time of year. The sun barely clears the pines. But the moon is brilliant on the snow and birches, and my dogs sleep restlessly as the coyotes sing on the wooded paths that braid through the timber lot. This time of year, everyone has something they want to resolve or do differently. All I’d wanted to do was fire the burn pile while the snow was low, but the equinox slipped by, and then the holidays, and now a year too has turned over. Already, I can feel the garlic sprouts twisting in their frozen bulb hearts under the mulch, and when I touch the blueberry canes, the new season’s buds bite like puppy teeth. The bears are sleeping too, living, like the bulb and the bush off of last year’s stores—that fat we put on to cushion us through the lean times. I dream of sunburn and thunderstorms breaking over the farm.
Last spring, when the greenhouse’s skin turned the air tropical despite the chinging chill, a poem came back to me, like a barn cat I’d almost forgotten. When I was in high school, my poetry teacher had made us memorize the poem—this was an art school, you see—and for a week, he wouldn’t let us enter the workshop until we had an answer to the question: What is poetry? In his wool blazer with worn elbow patches, my teacher stood at the front door and asked us that simple question, and we whispered or mumbled our answers. I wish I could remember what I said to gain entry. But it was probably something wild, something with teeth.
The poem, by Gary Snyder, returned to me whole and has stuck in the back of my mind all year:
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
The last few years have challenged my creative process. Having published three books of creative nonfiction, finished an MFA, and established my teaching practice, I found that I had to relearn creativity. The blank pages stared back at me like a snowfield. I tried all the things that worked for me in the past—early morning writing, writing from prompts, writing to music, writing longhand, but nothing felt right. Like many writers, I’d taught myself how to be productive under various circumstances and living situations. Now, though, having built a life that I’ve dreamed of for decades, a small house in the big woods, a homestead farm, a life of letters and soil and granite, that creative voice was quiet.
And that was when Snyder’s poem reappeared.
With no deadlines, editors, or professors, my writing had been returned to the wild. These days, I spend hours studying the lichen on the stonewalls. I hike out to a raven’s tree at sunrise to see what he’s collected (one morning, it was lobster shells robbed from a 4th of July party by the lake). Nearing 40, I am now more like the girl I was at ten, stealing off to the woods with a backpack of books and a beloved dog, or the punk 16-year-old harvesting strawberries to Rage Against the Machine intoning ‘I won’t do what you told me!”
So what’s the secret? How does writing come to you?
What was that word I whispered to be allowed back in the workshop room? For me, and I don’t mean this to be prescriptive or a rule, it comes to me wild. The real stuff doesn’t like deadlines or writing schedules, and I know this is hard to read and even hard to write because I’m someone who has two-day planners. I am not a wild person, but my creativity is. And so I can’t cage it or bait it. After years of making time, of meeting deadlines, I’ve learned not to force it. It comes to me, not the other way around.
This process of relearning how to create feels more like an unlearning. I’ve tossed out all of the old dictums. ‘Write every day’ has been crumbled up and tossed into the recycling. Now, I allow myself to write seasonally. Spring comes with sugaring, then seeding, and summer with planting, harvesting, and market days, then fall with storing, logging, and cleaning; I let creativity lope around the edges of my mind. But when the ground freezes up, and the snow falls, and all the wood is split and stacked, the seeds ordered for next year’s fields it comes to me. This feels natural here on the farm, unforced.
If we must begin with resolutions, I’m going to allow myself wild creativity. No fences. No deadlines. What happens when you let go? What happens when you trust something enough to come back to you? A poem might rise up on your tongue, or a line slip in and leave shadowed tracks across the white field of the page.
__________
Ready to write wild? Join Megan Baxter to build your practice in Wild Creativity: CRAFT TALKS’ new 6-week generative bootcamp for all genres. Saturday classes begin February 3 rd . Find out more/register here.
Megan Baxter is the author of three books of creative nonfiction. Her most recent essay collection Twenty Square Feet of Skin was released in May 2023 from Mad Creek Books. She has won numerous national awards including a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in publications such as The Threepenny Review, Hotel Amerika, The Florida Review, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Megan lives in New Hampshire where she runs her own small, organic farm and teaches creative writing.
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