“All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.”
That is how the Elizabeth Bishop ends “The Bight Poem,” in which she describes the activity in a fishing cove where stove-in boats are piled “like torn-open, unanswered letters.” I know exactly what she means, having spent time as a child, mostly during summer, in the Nova Scotia fishing village where my father grew up. This past May, I ventured north to the Elizabeth Bishop house in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she spent her childhood, and hunkered down for a week of writing. I felt right at home. The house was charming and cozy and quiet; there was no Wifi or television, no traffic, no other guests–just me and my thoughts. I used to think I must be a freak for requiring such solitude, but that was before I called myself a writer.
Awful but cheerful: That’s how I often feel, writing. The work (and it is work; nothing comes easily) is solitary and often frustrating. But I can’t imagine not writing. It’s the only way I know to make sense of this life. Sometimes the end result is great, and often it isn’t. But I keep cheerfully at it, because I don’t know what else to do. Nothing else feels as challenging, and almost nothing else feels as intimate.
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Beata Infantia 