Perfect

Lovelies,

"Make yourself perfect, then write naturally."

Bruce looked around the table at a bunch of wide-eyed teenagers on the first day of Harvard Summer School, Creative Writing: Poetry.

"Alternately," he narrowed his eyes, "you could do what the rest of us do and just begin."

Even as we giggled I savored his words like sugar on my tongue: This attempt to disarm us. This invitation to consider ourselves poets, too.

This permission to be imperfect on the page.

But really I'd let myself be imperfect on the page for quite some time.

This week I'm back in my southern Maine hometown, going through deep bins of old possessions. Well it turns out everything in a bin is a piece of paper covered in words. Poems and short stories and creative nonfiction and first drafts of expository essays edited in red pen. Thirty journals that somehow missed my initial purging of hundreds of journals. Literally a thousand letters from various friends and teachers, implying I sent a thousand letters prior and another thousand after.

Most of all pages upon pages of loose leaf paper covered to the millimeter in my barely legible script — free writing too free even for binding.

Actually how have I had time to do anything in my life except write?

I'm not reading much of it. A letter, here. A paragraph of a story there. It's naive. It's a fever-pitch of drama. It's self-deprecating to the point of self-eliminating. It's in love with everything. But what enchants me is how messy it all is. Sentences trailing to nowhere. Three options for adjectives left hanging in a sentence, as if to let the paper, itself, decide.

Childhood: In every interaction I was eminently composed. In my writing I was chaos.

Which isn't to say I wasn't reaching for something. Every time I write, I'm an asymptote — ever closer.

But what I approach is not perfection. If I had to sum it up I'd call it meaning.

And at the end of this messy week in Maine I've come to suspect meaning is the messiest thing of all.

With all my love,

"I hope you woke up someplace that's always fading spectacularly into night" — Messages, Kristin Hall

It was such a joy to produce Kristin Hall's sparkling debut, Ghost Town. Ghost Town is a concept album — about going back to your childhood home to sort through things and losses. The songs, themselves, are ghostly, each quoting the others like hauntings. I was enchanted by Kristin's ambition and I vowed to meet it with my own — I decided the soundscape, too, should haunt itself, the sounds and motifs departing and returning in different forms. The final song is the most haunted of all — it's literally an amalgam of the first five — but it is also the most free, the triumph of a woman who has learned to both walk with her ghosts and drive away from them.

Thanks to my impeccable team: James DePrato (guitar), Jason Slota (drums), Daniel Fabricant (bass), Gabriel Shepard (basics engineer), Reto Peter (vocal/mixing engineer), and Ken Lee (mastering engineer).

I co-wrote, produced, played piano, and occasionally sang background vocals.

For my Muzis and the Muzi-curious! Please enjoy this newly revised Inspiration Mission!
 

Unsent Letter

Get creative ideas from the things you don't say.

So many things get left unsaid. We sense someone doesn’t want to hear us. Or we’re afraid to change how someone thinks of us. Or we recognize our feelings are irrational.

So our thoughts remain our own. Stowed in our cave of secret longings.

And oftentimes we are wise to stay quiet. Not every statement is constructive. Not every situation is safe for expression. Not every conversation we rehearse in the shower should actually happen.

But our unsaid words don’t just disappear. They remain, if only peripherally, in our awareness. They affect our self-perception and even the course of our lives.

And they have the power to play a huge role in our creativity.

Scan your past. Scan your present. Where have you turned the other cheek? Where have you stifled a scream? Where have you hidden an affection?

What aren't you saying?

Imagine each time you bit your tongue is an unsent letter. 

And then look at the fascinating trail of unsent letters that extends behind you. Is it not a straight line to your most fascinating content? Your most honest content? Your most compelling, relatable, incisive content?

Is it not immediate access to your heart? A clue to the mystery of what really matters to you? A brief history of what has truly affected you?

Is it not the eau de you?

What we’ve said is interesting. What we haven't said is intriguing.

In UNSENT LETTER you will harness the creative power of the unexpressed.

Write everything you thought, everything you felt. Pick words that are hot in your chest. Emotions you've tapered in service of another. Thoughts you've buried for the greater good. Statements too frayed for public consumption.

Be unabashed. Be outlandish. Stray from the facts if that’s what you feel. Be true only to what clamors up and out of you.

Use this Mission to discover a new source of creative fodder.

And delight in each bit of human truth just waiting to be alchemized with creativity.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store