Silent meet-ups
Making a creative date before the weak sun rises
When I tell people I co-write a
about analog joys (a.k.a. real stuff), I usually catch a few gentle jokes about publishing an ode to analog on a digital platform. Isn’t it ironic? the Gen Xers might say.I couldn’t disagree with this thinking more. I’m no Luddite. I like technology, and toggle through devices all day long at work and, often, when I’m reading to relax or connecting with friends and family. I’m even a member of an unofficial text-only book club—it is the only one I’ve participated in that hasn’t devolved into a crafts group. Nothing wrong with crafting, of course (I literally just heard Oma’s eyebrow raising). I’m just in it for the books.
But I try hard to use the incredible technology available to us as an assist to daily life, not as a focus. As tools for living, not replacements for same. I approach the apps, the feeds, The Discourse, with a level of resistance. Anything that sucks me in with such a great, sticky force deserves vigilance. I’ve been obsessed this week with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes’ new book about what the apps do to our attention spans, which is about how the kings of Silicon Valley “have colonized our attention but are harvesting it in the way industrialists once exploited our physical labor.”
This winter, I was telling Oma about a new project I wanted to work out on paper, and I fretted about finding the time to make any good progress on it. Funny how, no matter the life phase, no matter the fact that each day contains the exact same 24 hours, time always feels like the one thing I never have enough of. So Oma threw down the gauntlet, suggesting we reclaim dawn for a creative hour.
I’m no stranger to work before sunrise. I’m from Iowa, after all. I’ve detasseled corn (iykyk). I conducted most of my writing through my 30s and 40s before my kids ever woke up or after they went to bed. But I’m not a natural early riser. My favorite state is horizontal, with a book, or on my way to same. (It doesn’t surprise me that, according to literary lore, Frank Conroy worked from his bed. I wrote much of Water in bed, too, as I wrote it over a similarly cold winter and didn’t want to emerge from the covers at 5 a.m.)
Also, writing is not a communal pursuit. It requires focus, which usually means isolation. I don’t listen to music when I write, I don’t even check the clock. Focus, actually, is my second favorite state of being, and when mine is interrupted, it makes me crabby. It can be somewhat difficult to reenter the cognizant world when I’m really deep in the stuff. I emerge feeling hazy, a little rattled; it takes me a while to get moving.
Still, I’ve always fought the stereotype of the tortured artist, the broke artist, the whatever-Hemingway-was artist. Sometimes you just like to tell stories. And sometimes, such as after a global pandemic and your kids have left for college, you don’t want to spend hours alone in a room, working on the creative thing you love but that leaves you, well, lonely.
So we started the Silent Meet-Up. On the night before a silent meet-up, a group text goes out. “Who wants to write tomorrow?” Another friend has joined Oma and me now, and we three begin a FaceTime call, wave hello and good morning, then angle the phone to our fingers as they fly across the keyboard, occasionally lifting to take a drink of coffee.
I would have once called this having accountability partners. I don’t really need that anymore. I write for a lot of different places, about a lot of different things, and I’ve developed a pretty tight writing practice. It’s just that, at this stage of life, I don’t want to be alone all the time. But that doesn’t mean I want to meet at a coffee shop surrounded by people, or to sit at a table working side-by-side, either. In my experience, these things require both driving and talking, neither of which I want to do at dawn, or when it’s -13 degrees outside. Also, neither of them are about focusing, or writing.
Instead, for this work that sustains our little embers inside, we silently point our cameras at our hands and go. These little miracle tools—the phone, the FaceTime—help us get together in the tappy-tap keyboard quiet of a small group of dreamy people who need to focus for a while in an un-lonely way. Without the distraction of meetings, or the siren call of unloading the dishwasher, without running after the dog who is threatening once again to vomit on the rug. In the morning hush, on FaceTime, enabled by our phones, we play.
It works. For us. Which is how it should be. Happy almost-weekend.
P.S. I took my dogs to get haircuts this week. I’d grown their curly hair out really long because it’s colder than Sir Edmund Hillary’s expedition over here. Anyway, I had to go to a chain store to do this because our appointments got a little messed up at the vet’s, due to the aforementioned dog vomit issue. My big fluffy poodle dogs were allegedly too matted to be brushed out and trimmed, so the groomer made the executive decision to shave them both instead. Now they look like hairless cats. I haven’t stopped laughing (and they haven’t stopped shivering, poor guys). Please enjoy this content.
Like the Silent Book Club, but that’s in person. I’ve never attended one, but there is a chapter here in Vegas. I feel like I would be hyper aware of every little noise I made 😅
Louie & Arlo look very clean