Category: Process Notes

How to get a book of centuries into the world

4/12/2024

In December, Modern Mythographer Press published my first book, 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle, a collection of memoir-adjacent poetic-essays in the ancient century form. Below is a reflection of my process of this project, from inception to release, also in the century form.

Find yourself in a global pandemic that extends months, a year, years longer than first estimates.
After a year of pandemic university teaching, find yourself desperate for creative fulfillment, anything to beat the burnout.
Get an email from Carolyn, the writer who was chair of your graduate department during your MFA studies, about a month-long silent virtual playwrights retreat led by Erik Ehn.
Agree to apply. Thank Carolyn for the idea and subsequent recommendation.
Schedule to teach two summer virtual theater classes that same month—because why not extend the burnout?
The first day of retreat, sit in the same Zoom room as Sarah Ruhl, Liz Duffy Adams, Erik Ehn and others you admire to celebrity-playwright-degree, adding up to fifty-some playwrights altogether. Hear a yelp of imposter syndrome shriek in your chest.
Realize the first week, though the silence and creative journeys are intended to function alongside your other obligations, you could have spent the whole month doing just the retreat and still not get to everything offered each day.
As though your two-year Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program got smashed into 30 days.
Each day, open emails from Erik loaded with prompts, PDFs, links and potential new directions to take.
Each day, open a box, package or envelope he and his wife hand-wrapped in brown paper tied up with string before the retreat began, that they packed into a larger box and mailed to participants nationwide (if not also internationally) from their New Mexico home. Notice that they labeled each package with a number in Sharpie, corresponding with each retreat day.
Notice that the attachments, links, packages, readings, topics and prompts never fit directly within the play genre.
Poems, jazz, dance instructions, essays about green therapy, meditation invitations, games reminiscent from childhood playgrounds, tarot cards, sound maps, colored pencils and trading cards of wild birds represent a small sample of the gifts.
Among the emails, invitations and packages, learn about the century, a form of writing stemming back to the 4th Century AD, at least.
This list of 100: a container like a prayer that contains too much and not enough, that goes in surprising directions, that teaches you about yourself and the world where you live as you write it, a form that explores autophenomenography as you discover more about yourself as a body within a certain ethnography through an autobiographic lens, while you dig as archeologist dismantling the crust of yourself/your life/everything surrounding that self/life the longer you study your findings.
Take Erik’s invitation for all participants to write one century. Get hooked.
Write another. Then another, another, another.
When you talk with Erik in your weekly meeting, listen to his encouragement that centuries be the thing you work on as your primary project in this 30-day exploration.
Listen to his advice to follow where the centuries take you, that they needn’t be preparation for another project but can be the focus of your attention in and of themselves.
When you hold five centuries at the end of the 30 days, feel a longing to continue.
Do just that over the following months, with an aim to split those five centuries into 10.
Wonder what the point is, what you’re making, why. Continue all the same, pulled by some force deep within. Pulled too by an unseen force without, a higher, upper self, something beyond.
Learn a lot about yourself through the way you write these centuries. About what you pay attention to, what matters to you here and now, there and then.
Also learn from the subjects that arise as you divide these explorations into 10 specific themes, topics, conversations.
Learn from surprise tangents that squeeze in without warning, from how you as a person living a life weaves within and throughout all the other events that happen, things that exist throughout the course of the universe, the history of the world as you know it and as you don’t, the unknown future, the places you have been and have yet to see and may never know.
Learn about yourself and the world and the nature of existence by what comes up.
Start thinking of this as a cycle of centuries. Let your mind drift to August Wilson’s very different Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, each one taking place in its own decade within the 20th century.
When you see an opportunity to make something out of an object sent to you by your former MFA program and to talk about your process making that thing on their podcast Artifact, respond to your former adviser Cindy right away. Express your interest in using that object to help you finish your century project. Hope that having a subject you didn’t think of yourself will allow for some unexpected randomness, like the chance operations you love to incorporate into performances.
When the program agrees it’s a good fit, set up time to talk with the podcast’s host, Neil, about your plans and the journey ahead.
Receive a shadow box mailed by Cindy.
Look at this artifact with dumbfounded wonder and oblivion.
Ask yourself how you’re going to write a century about a shadow box. What to do with the wood, the panels.
Put the box on the shelf as you wonder aloud on your phone recorder.
Continue writing and rebuilding the centuries as you were doing before, talking about your process and the century form until you figure out what to do with this new element.
To help your figuring, write a new century entitled “What to Do with a Shadow Box,” listing 100 different possible ways to use the thing.
As you come up with ideas outrageous and obvious, think, what if each panel is devoted to one of your centuries, featuring a few words, phrases, stray images from that century? Simple as that?
Count the panels on the box. Add up more than 10, when you count the front facing edges as a panel, which seem big enough to count.
Start to question the number 10.
Because of the shadow box, but also out of love and respect for Wilson’s Century Cycle. Decide your cycle should contain a different number, because the projects are so different.
Decide to make 12 centuries and split the front facing edges of the shadow box into two panels, visually speaking, to place images and words from two different centuries there.
Let what draws you to the number 12 be as impulsive as intuitive as what drives you to continue these centuries. Because, based on the shadow box alone, it could have been 11.
Perhaps it’s the mystical quality of 12, even the Biblical roots of the century form itself, or something to do with months of the year.
Go to the craft store for art supplies.
Get white primer and paint markers with brushes in a limited pallet—black, red, blue.
Finish writing the 12 centuries, include the preface that describes what this process, and introduces the project and serves as acknowledgments.
Prime the box in white.
Find key images, words, details from each century to include on the shadow box.
Use the markers, magazine clippings and occasionally a Sharpie to draw images, paint words and paste tiny photos on each panel, corresponding with each chapter.
Treat the shadow box century as a bonus, lucky 13. Don’t make a shadow box panel for that one—there isn’t room and the shadow box is the full representation of that century.
Record audio notes of your entire process on your phone, resulting in a daunting amount of narrative to piece together.
Try to converge the clips in a way that’s interesting enough for podcast listeners, realizing that your meticulous account may be too detailed, too inside baseball to be listenable.
Send the files to Neil anyway so he can finalize the episode. The deadline approaches.
Decide that obsessive detail, scrutiny and too-much-ness fits the nature of this project and resembles how your brain works, so at least podcast audiences can walk away feeling that sensibility.
Move on to make text revisions and edits. Compile the book itself.
Learn to use Scrivener—sort of.
Take photos of the shadow box, one panel at a time, as well as photos of the notebook in which you wrote the centuries. Aim to include a visual element with each chapter of the book.
Even with lucky number 13, treat the book as 12 centuries with one preface.
12 lifetimes.
Remember your poem that contained the phrase, “I have lived 12 lifetimes.”
And the song that your partner/spouse/person wrote, inspired by that phrase.
Include the song lyrics and poem in the book, too.
Assemble the whole thing: 13 centuries, poem, song lyrics, shadow box and notebook photos. Prepare to read a few at an art gallery called MING Studios through their weekly series, where artists can experiment for an hour in front of an audience.
The thing feels raw, vulnerable and outside anything you’ve done/shared before, so only invite the people you most trust to come see/hear.
Display the shadow box, original green notebook and other papers at the reading, revealing the works in process. Play some favorite instrumentals from your “Writer Music” playlist on Spotify.
Feel the heat of a spotlight as you read when there isn’t such a light, as though you’re holding your breath that full hour, as though your life is changing in that moment.
Feel the audience’s attention as time slows. Embrace the laughs and tears you absorb from their chairs.
Hear your friend say afterward, “That was the best writing I’ve heard in a long time.” Hug him.
Hear the parts that resonated most with others, how their lives followed similar patterns in certain lifetimes. Hug them.
Agree to record a few centuries for MING’s podcast My on Mondays.
When you do, listen to the audio engineer’s family story that he shares in response after he says, “You’ve been through a lot.”
Take a road trip and land in Oakland for a week.
Listen to your friend Nick, a writer/musician hosting you and your partner, talk about how his next book is one that wouldn’t make sense for the indie press he signed with before, so he’s starting his own.
Remember his experience with publishing and with self-producing albums when he likewise tired of the limits from his former indie label. Trust that he can do it.
Hear him talk about the writers in the workshops he teaches, how a lot of them have material he could publish in the same small press.
Talk with him about the long line most artists stand in, trying to get through the same door of the tall building that was constructed in their field, ignoring the backdoors, the windows, the chimneys, the crawlspaces.
Talk about what it would mean to make your own door. Your own building. Your own way.
When you return to semi-arid, high desert climate post-vacation, email Nick with his new press in mind.
Say Hey, I know you said your book doesn’t fit traditional structures. I also have this project and I’m not sure what it is. Any ideas what I could do with it?
Send it when he agrees to read it, expecting nothing, except maybe some consultation about next steps.
Hold onto your desk to keep from falling over when he response--This is a book. Thank you for writing it. Want to be my first guinea pig for my small press, the first book I publish that’s not my own?
Work with Nick on plans, goals, timelines and revisions.
Talk about making the book an art piece, about seeing how small it can be—the book itself as well as the publishing and marketing approach.
So that it’s not about reaching the mass market but getting this book—that Nick says is the kind that makes readers want to call their closest friends to see if they’re okay—into the hands of the people who need it most.
Share sections that mention family members with them. Make changes as needed.
Deal with the expected fallout after writing about things some think you shouldn’t write about. And some fallout that you didn’t expect.
Carry on and move forward, because what else would you do?
Cut the poem at the beginning but keep the song lyrics.
Cut the bonus century about what to do with a shadow box. Instead write a new one called “How to Be a Writer,” which isn’t so much about how to be a writer at all but your individual path to becoming who you are. See how the new chapter pulls the whole collection together.
Get a few trusted early readers. Know you could seek out more but this whole process has been about less. The muchness of less.
Get a few blurbs from those early readers, people important to you and to this project, without whom the book never would have happened. Prefer this to pages and pages of quotes from reviewers, publishing houses and authors.
Approve Nick’s cover designs and internal layout. Collaborate on a contract. Decide a release date.
Push that date back. Revise and wait and work on other projects. Inch closer to the new date.
When Nick’s life gets turned upside down, shift your collaborative process, put in extra effort on the final copyediting stage. Discover that you’ll need to take over more of the marketing and shipping tasks than was originally planned.
Together, despite his major newfound grief and current life without a permanent residence, bring the book out into the world, first in a soft release—while you also get a new play out into the world in its first production.
Out of the generous outpouring of people buying the book without really knowing what it is, hear profound heartfelt responses that first murmered in your dreams as people tell you how much the work means to them, how they cry-laughed throughout reading and rereading, how beautiful the packaging, how surprising the insides. Realize that you, Nick, and everyone who helped along the way, really did create an art-object.
See the way this form helps you deal with your too-much muchness as you write about too much and too little all at once—to make it just enough.
Feel for the first time that you can start moving on from a lot of the stuff you wrote about.
Months later, bring the book into the world again in its first live ceremony, again at MING, uniting chance operations, communal co-creation and celebratory food, drink, live music, roses and artifacts into the sharing event. Sit in a circle with the audience instead of facing them in proscenium arrangement.
Start thinking about your next live ceremonial reading events. Wonder where they could take place.
While you read aloud, hold the blue spine in your hands, see all the parts you’ve played, the marks they make on each page. The lifetimes you’ve lived.
Get ready to live some more.

Notes: A Little Blog Page

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Or: The terrible responses our imaginations work up about our art and what we can do about them

Heidi Kraay

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