"No one will write your poems for you..."

Last week at book club, we discussed No Clock in the Forest by Paul Willis. (Aside: If you happen to follow the link to check out the book at Amazon.com, don't be put off by the cover picture. It was the one thing our book club unanimously agreed on - terrible! Not at all right for this book. It almost kept me from reading the book. In fact, the author himself bemoaned this cover art in an interview.) Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. His primary writing genre is poetry, although he did write a set of four novels, of which this was the first.

During Book Club, we read and discussed an interview Willis once gave about his writing career, and the line that stuck with me is what I have used for the title of this post - "I finally realized that no one would write my poems for me." Willis was commenting on all of the competing arenas in his life - teaching, committee work, family obligations, cleaning his office, whatever. But then he recognized, a bit profoundly (at least from my perspective), that of all his obligations, what he could write (create) was uniquely his. If he didn't make time to do it himself, it would never happen. That caused him to re-prioritize his time.

As I have mulled that over for a few days, I realized that it spoke into my soul a bit. I haven't been posting much to this blog since the school year started in September, but I have scraps of paper where I have started an idea and never returned to it. I have opening paragraphs for posts written in my head, half of those now forgotten. And no one will write those things for me. I suppose there is hubris in this - who says they need to get written? But I feel them bottled up in me, wanting to be written. So there it is. Perhaps I need to think about prioritizing my own time to allow for me to blog more. And so it is that I find myself typing at 11:15 PM in a quiet house, where everyone else is sleeping. (Although, in a strange meta-blog style, I am writing about how I ought to be writing more. Let's see if the creative juices still flow long enough for me to find any of those random scraps of paper and actually blog.)