Prompt 290. The Quiet Place

& the poet Darius Stewart on the wandering mind

Hi friend,

I’ve learned over the last decade that creative work comes in seasons. There is the season of ideating and researching, figuring out the form something should take. There’s the season of actually making the thing—the Anne Lamott butt-in-chair phase. (To quote her: “How to write: Butt in chair.”) Then there is the season of putting the work in the world, letting it fly so it can go out and find the person who needs it most at the moment they need it most, as my husband Jon said in his Grammys acceptance speech.

I’m currently in the butt-in-chair phase (although that earthquake the other day nearly shook me out of it!). It’s my favorite season, I think. I find myself getting lost in the world of the work—thinking about it all day, dreaming about it at night, fully living in what feels like a parallel universe. When I’m here, time starts to collapse. Earlier this week, I took my dogs to the vet, and when I was filling out the date on the intake forms, I wrote 2023—not once, but twice, and with great conviction.

In my younger years, I often fell into the trap of spending more time talking about the work I wanted to do rather than actually doing it. By now I know that the only way I can get down to it is by carving out the time and the space—by cultivating creative solitude. I make sure there are days when I have nothing on my calendar, so that I can be fully immersed in the work—even if the work sometimes doesn’t look like work, even if it’s reading, or journaling, or taking notes on index cards, or going down a rabbit trail of research about East African fertility masks, or lying down for a nap.

Rest, I’ve found, is so important. The other day, I got to a point where all I could see were mistakes in my painting, and I knew it was time to step away. So I brought the dogs down to my favorite swimming hole in a tributary of the Delaware River—it’s where I used to cold plunge with some of my beloveds—and for half an hour, I watched them play. The bank was dotted with dandelions and a couple of feral daffodils, and I let my tired mind rest, and just took in the sights splashing in the mud and the sounds and the colors: so much yellow. Suddenly I was creatively energized again.

At times the creative process feels frustratingly inefficient. I haven’t hit upon some formula; I don’t have quick-and-easy answers or tried-and-true productivity hacks. But time and again, I’ve found that if I carve out quiet, when I cultivate creative solitude, I can hear my own thoughts, and I can follow my intuition. When I do, I usually find what I was looking for—even when I didn’t know what I was looking for.

Sharon Salzberg once said, “It is in the place between the known and the unknown that we find the essential truth.” That kind of exploration is the subject of today’s guest feature—a poem called “Intimacies in Borrowed Light” by the poet and essayist D. Antwan Stewart. May it bring you to a quiet place. May it give your mind the space to wander, to imagine what may have been and what could be.

Sending love,

Suleika

From yesterday’s Studio Visit: Survival as a Creative Act

Some items of note—

• Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure of sharing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of my painting residency in my Studio Visit: Survival as a Creative Act. It was so much fun to connect with the community and to talk about where I find creative inspiration and how I balance ambitious goals with physical limitations. If you missed it, don’t worry—we’ll be sending out a video replay later in the week!

• Each Friday in our Isolation Journals Chat, we share a small joy from the week that we want to hold onto. This week I wrote about a quiet weekend at home with my beloved and his unconventional attitude toward photo ops. To add your small joy to the chorus, click here!

Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913)

Prompt 290. Intimacies in Borrowed Light by Darius Stewart

I have chosen a quiet place in this great old house,
wandered the various rooms,
gazed out the great windows: Spanish moss
tangled like silly string in the cypress,
great mounds of it floating in the pool
where two lovers may have taken a midnight
swim, brushed the strands from their arms, maybe
even mistook it for exposed veins–fibrous, infected,
relentlessly inescapable. This is where my imagination turns
whimsical to glum, I know, though I can’t help but wonder
if this empty house signals the end of their love,
if the signs were in the sky pockmarked with stars,
as though the cosmos had unleashed its grief
upon the world: Spanish moss and stars: the signs?
No... forgive me. It may be the silence is too ingratiating.
I have forgotten what it feels like to curl one’s body into the curl of another
and wait out the night swaddled in cathedral silence,
just a kiss or two at the nape of one’s neck
for assurances, because, after all, this moment
is one of the great palaces of the world: intimacies
in borrowed light of the moon or lamp-like glow
of a hundred fireflies just outside your window, you listening
to wave after wave of latticed sounds filling each room
with the possibility of surviving the night, and waking
the next day eager for the hours to shave away until you reach
the hour when everything repeats.

Your prompt for the week:

Write about a quiet place, one that makes you wonder. What do you see, hear, feel, or dream about when you’re there?

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

Today’s Contributor—

Darius Stewart is the author of Intimacies in Borrowed Light and Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir. His poetry and creative nonfiction essays appear or are forthcoming in Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, The Potomac Review, storySouth, Verse Daily and others. Stewart received an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. Winner of the inaugural Emerging Writer Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, he is currently a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa.

If you’re new here—hi, I’m Suleika!

I’m the author of the memoir Between Two Kingdoms and the founder of the Isolation Journals, where we turn life’s interruptions into creative grist. Each Sunday, I send out this newsletter with an essay and journaling prompt from a guest contributor.

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