Trying to Believe in Writerly Belonging

28 Dec, 2025

I think it was right before the Covid era that I went to a Patricia Lockwood reading. During the Q&A, someone asked if she ever suffered from writer’s block, and if so, how she handled it. Of course, I remember her saying; when it happens, you just keep reading and trust that the words will come.

Prodigious as her output is—even, apparently, after Covid severely messed up her ability to concentrate¹—that coping method seems to work much better for her than for me. After all, I’ve been following that advice for years now; was probably doing so even before she offered it without explicitly considering it a strategy. I’m still trusting that larger projects I have in the works will eventually see the light of day in completed form—but trusting seems to be most of what I’m doing, since the writing itself only comes in fits and starts, and I’m not sacrificing every other aspect of my life and health in order to force my brain and pen to buck up and force the thing out, damn it.

This state of pained nonproduction is hardly a strange or undiscussed situation for writers of any sort, whether only aspiring or universally celebrated. Václav Havel talked more than once about how much he hated looking at a blank page, or even the thought of writing itself; the cover alone of S. D. Stewart’s Hatred of Writing says it like nothing else will.² The other night, though, I came across an interesting twist on the old round and round of “I hate and fear writing / I can’t stop writing or at least desperately wanting to write.” Behold Jane Kenyon ending her description of an apparently perfect day and set-up for poetic production, an afternoon of flowers and contented cats and silence:

I know you are with me, plants,
and cats—and even so, I’m frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect
possibility.³

Precisely. Fear of nothing coming or of botching every possibility that presents itself, sure. But I also keep coming back to being paralyzed by the thought of something spectacular hanging there in perfect and patient clarity, and you rush in and get it all down. And it all goes absolutely right, and then suddenly you’re finally on the other side of success, and with your one thing out in the world, that’s how you’re seen: as a brilliant poet or novelist or critic, as someone with a mind-bendingly creative outlook on and approach to presenting things interior and exterior and everywhere in between. What happens, not if you blow a great chance—but if you succeed? If you succeed, and still have no belief in the genius everyone thinks you possess, and on top of everything else, everyone’s actually paying attention to you now?

That’s a lot to read into those few lines, and at this point, I’d take that triumph out of nowhere, even given the sad fates and disappointed ends of many a one-hit wonder. I’m more familiar, though, with the perfect possibility that I’m grasping at an entirely false fate, a destiny never meant to be mine, i.e., that I refuse to accept the reality that I’m not a “real” writer, and am never going to be. (And yes, I recognize the absurdity of arranging words for public consideration while assuming said activity doesn’t truly count as writing.) It could well be I’m leaning more into that possibility, since I’m now halfway through The Day on Fire, in which the Rimbaud stand-in is living fully into his vocation as no one, as one more of the world’s hardworking drones making his way in outposts ever more remote and forgotten, if they were ever noticed by most of humanity in the first place. This guy is apparently doing his best to deny his own destiny—to be remembered as a path-breaking poet—in favor of chasing his desired end of falling into complete anonymity. And it’s not in the disingenuous way, either, that I caught Jorge Luis Borges describing himself in an interview/documentary from the ‘80s: as a reader who sometimes writes things.⁴ I cry foul at that claim: when you’re already a literary legend, with thick tomes to your name, you can’t honestly make that assertion. Morel/Rimbaud, on the other hand, knows nothing of the growing reputation of his poetry, writes nothing but letters to his mother, and has even ceased reading altogether. He’s truly no longer a poet.

See my references, though, to writers and what’s been written about them? I’ve often suspected that all the reading I do isn’t a form of marching in place while waiting for the writing to come, something that’ll help encourage its arrival—but is instead an excuse not to set pen to paper. The pattern was easily recognizable when my line was scholarship; miss a reference to some obscure-but-essential master of the subject, and you’d be shot down, dismissed as a hack. Better find that citation first. At least fifteen years out of that world, though, and I just can’t seem to draw the line between having read enough to be comfortably informed and having read every last treatise on the smallest point that actually has no real bearing on the overall project. I’ve still not arrived at the conviction that I have any right to say anything at all, unless I’m wrapped in a wall of well-cited defense.

All the fretting and the pressure and the disappointment probably have a lot to do with my having bought into the screwed-up assumption that if you’re not paid enough to support yourself with something—or if you’re not paid and don’t want to be paid anything at all, or that the thing that means most to you is in fact meaningless if no one else acknowledges your doing of it as legitimate—you can’t call yourself a practitioner of that something. Intellectually, I can identify that all as so much bullshit; emotionally, that’s another story altogether. The thing to do, I guess, is to keep reading in the right way—as a spur and form of conversation, not as a crutch—and to recognize I’m hardly alone in this struggle. Here’s another bit from Kenyon, then, to try and help me keep my head straight about it all and so much more.

Finding herself alone in the house, (presumably) her husband gone somewhere, the poet says, “Maybe / I don’t belong here. / Nothing tells me that I don’t.”⁵ Kenyon-as-poet is trying to talk herself through her own particular doubts about who she and others think she is in this place of which she’s not an old native. A different scenario from my own, but that connection, even hand held out, across disparate conditions, is one of literature’s and the arts’s major gifts. If I think about it, nothing of real force tells me I don’t belong here, throwing my own words into the ring with everyone else’s. I just have to remember that, damn it, and learn to believe it, and then the words might actually, finally, flow over and around and through me for real.

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