With my books, running is not about training or miles or speed. I don’t have a routine or a goal. There is such pressure to equate a routine with productivity as if writing were an equation. When I talk about running, everyone reminds me that Haruki Murakami, author of many books, woke up at 4 am each day, wrote for 5-6 hours, and then ran 10k. But I have learned to hear about the routines of famous people and not follow them.
Running is a way for me to work through ideas, think about poetry, worry about the toenail that might fall off, and let the relevant and the irrelevant float about because it all forms part of my writing. At Yaddo, I’m reading poet Dashaun Washington. His poems are full of tenderness and longing. In “A Fairytale of Black Boyhood,” he writes, “When I say Black, what I mean is the curl of my hair is tight enough to snag the teeth of a wide-tooth comb. So, I don't comb my hair when I'm in the comfort of my home. This comfort is the standard by which I determine who, what, where is home. I rarely feel home in my father's home.”
And you may think that his poem has nothing to do with my book on the meatpacking industry. But I find that the poetry, photography, and art that I think about when I’m running make it into my writing. The other day, I read a profile of painter Lisa Yuskavage that described her as “violently focused.” And I loved that description and took it with me on my run. So much of the creative routine has been created and claimed by men, made into a test of endurance, a way to save time, or something brutal to overcome. No, no, thank you.
When I get stuck writing, it’s often because I’m no longer excited, because something feels stale. I need the physicality of running to work things out, and the ideas dictate the run. There is a creative way, your way, and you will find it in a run or a walk, or a midnight dance.
Love,
Alice
News & Events:
September 20-30th: I will be in El Salvador to teach a workshop for journalists about how to cover gender-based violence via the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
November 2: I’ll be giving a talk about labor rights in the meatpacking industry at The University of the Ozarks as a part of the Walton Arts and Ideas Series
I contributed a chapter to the book Living with Precariousness published by Bloomsbury.
Love this! So much (hobbies, interests, ...) has become about productivity or pushing yourself or proving something.
This is so much more appealing of a way to approach running than just about anything I've read before. Thanks for sharing!