Tag: writer

Cozy Posts · Nostalgic Posts

My Desk

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

Well hello there, you! This morning, I am sitting at my desk in what we call “The Big Room”. The desk, a scuffed up IKEA dining table bought by Mike’s roommate sometime in 2011, has served many functions over the years and has more than a few scars to show for it. It is imbued with the soul that comes from years of multipurpose use. It has served as a dining table, a catch-all for clutter, a boardgame and puzzle surface, an art studio, an interview office, a Friendsgiving buffet, a Christmas tree stand, and a TV stand, among other things I can’t recall. I am sure it is embedded with heat stains and maybe even a little grease from Williamsburg Pizza boxes and the condensation of water rings from ice cold bottles of Lagunitas IPA and Bell’s Two Hearted, fresh from the bodega down the street on Union Avenue.

When we first moved back to New Jersey, we used it as our dining table for a little while until my parents visited briefly during the pandemic to drop off some essential supplies and my mom laughed at how small it looked in the space. And so, our little, old table was retired from high traffic use and replaced by a newer, bigger, blander model from Amazon. I squirrelled the old one away in the laundry room for a while until its current purpose dawned on me. Afterall, every writer needs a desk. Wasn’t I a writer once?

Nestled in the corner of the Big Room, topped with a jar displaying two Harry Potter wands that my cousin and her husband made for me, a rock my sister brought back from Ireland, some 40-watt soft-white lamplight, and a pink, paper box of my nana’s that contains my writing books, this space is my main access to creation. It is rare that I sit at my desk and feel any sort of writer’s block. It has helped me through blog posts, fiction projects, plot holes, a play, poems, greeting cards, resumes, cover letters, emails, and even text messages. When I’m feeling unmotivated and uninspired, the awareness to sit down at my desk weighs on me and pressures productivity. And, like the drunk, scarred, slob that it is, it isn’t quiet about it.

My Desk

I like writing in the Big Room with the curtains drawn and the table lamps on. It’s cozy and dark and when I turn the heat up or bundle up in chunky-knit sweaters and sweatpants with a mug of tea near at hand, it’s even warm. Perhaps the best characteristics about the room however, for the purpose of writing, are that we don’t sleep in here for much of the year and that I can close the door to distraction.

In his memoir, “On Writing”, Stephen King mentions the importance of writing a first draft with the door closed. I am easily distracted and when my focus is interrupted, it starfishes onto something new and the suction can be a force to be reckoned with. If I am sitting up in the main area of our home, my closed door is represented by a large pair of headphones. That being said, being able to close a physical door comes in handy for me.

The Big Room is usually where we put guests when they come to visit. It has more space for luggage, kids, and pets. It even has a desk and a comfortable chair. I originally intended for the Big Room to be “our room” and hung our two framed wedding pictures on the wall, but by the time it got really cold our first year of living here, we learned pretty quickly that the little room holds heat in much better and so we make an annual migration in the fall and spring between the two. And so, our guests are stuck with us looking all glammed up when they stay in the Big Room. I guess I’ll just apologize for our not looking quite that pretty all the time!

Anyway, I’m using this post as a warm-up to jump back into a fiction project and I feel like it’s time to switch gears now. I’ll take a little break and make some tea and then come right back and get to work. Old Pizza Stains McDenty Face has me on the clock and my attention’s good and starfished.

Poetry

Dream on the Cusp

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

Woke up today feeling small-

Not weak or defeated,

Just not much at all,

A speck on a marble that spins round and round,

In a bed, in a house, on the ground.

You couldn’t see me from space,

Head up in the clouds

Of fog fallen from grace,

Looking up towards the gray to peel and reveal,

And wonder why Earth’s a big deal.

Dreams circle black holes

Drawn to depths un-suspect,

Stretched like melted shoe soles,

Till I can’t recognize, translate, or surmise,

Stars extinguished from sparkling skies.

Wake to reason sipped on the porch-

Ground elixir of addicts

That can’t hold a torch

To the infinite warps of spacetime, sublime

That inspired this wandering rhyme.

Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health

Let’s Hear it for the Boy

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

A friend of mine once asked me how I come up with ideas for my blog posts. I confessed to her that my process is not so thought out, but rather a let’s just see what happens approach. If I feel like I have the stamina to write something for the blog on a particular day, I open my laptop and hope to be inspired.

Most of the time, to my own astonishment, it works and words string into sentences and paragraphs like a dream. There have been seven times (maybe eight with this one, who knows?) when it hasn’t, but I have grown used to ignoring the number of unfinished drafts in my writing view of the blog. Maybe one day I’ll devote fresh eyes to those, but for now the back burner is big enough to hold them all, so there they will sit for now.

Sometimes a title comes first – sometimes a particular line of a poem. Sometimes a memory or a feeling gets typed out and sits alone on the otherwise blank page for a while until words fill in the space around it, disguising it amongst the forest of sentences and stanzas, seemingly equal to the rest.

I clutter with words. They are something I found again when I began to simplify things. Writing words brings me joy and so I do not set a limit on them.

I always wished I could speak as comfortably as I write, but something gets lost in translation with the whole words coming out of my mouth thing while simultaneously breathing and thinking. It’s nerve-racking to go off script when other people improvise. I often rewrite conversations in my head that have already happened. The ones that can’t be edited are torturous. I write conversations that will never happen as well and wonder how they’d play out in reality.

I used to have a debilitating fear of talking on the phone to strangers. Like, I was afraid to order a pizza growing up and I love pizza. There was even one time during college when I thought I left my wallet in a restaurant and Mike told me it was ok and to just call the restaurant and he was sure it would be there. All I can say in response to that is thank goodness that wallet was just stuck between the car door and the passenger seat of Mike’s mom’s car, otherwise it would have been irretrievable. I mean it was bad you guys.

To have an irrational fear of saying words as a person who loves words doesn’t make any sense and I let it limit me for way too long. I soon learned, however, to my relief, that I wasn’t the only one who had trouble on the phone.

The summer after graduating college, I got an internship as a scheduling coordinator at a rehearsal rental studio in Manhattan. I remember keeping a Post-It note in front of the phone at work with impossibly difficult information to remember such as my name, the name of the studio, and the studio’s phone number so that when my throat began to tighten when I picked up the receiver and my thoughts turned to static, I’d have some lifeline to hold onto. I know– tough stuff.

It wasn’t until I got a call at the rental studio from a boy who was clearly more nervous on the phone than I was that I began to get over this irrational fear. He forgot to give me his name when he booked and hung up before I finished asking for that info. I called him back to finish the booking, silently praising my Post-It note strategy, knowing that without it, I’d be drowning due to my overactive salivary glands that switched on as soon as I picked up the receiver. The boy picked up and admitted that he was nervous talking on the phone. I told him not to worry and that I was too sometimes (white lie- I know). I got his name and finished his booking and we ended the call, each feeling a little less alone perhaps and a little more comfortable on the phone. That phone call changed a lot for me and I grew confident in a career that heavily involved answering and making phone calls.

Writing helped me cope with my phone phobia. I used to write out everything I needed to say on the phone if I were making an important call; in fact, I still do sometimes. I have even learned that some of my friends do this too and it makes me feel less like a malfunctioning robot of society. Somehow, seeing the words written out in an order that makes sense before I release them from my mouth gives me confidence. You can’t, however, pre-plan most of life’s conversations. Like I said before, I clutter with words. They are shoved in the hall closet of my head like miscellany after panic-cleaning and I’d hate for something to fall out that would disrupt the order of the room. Sometimes, however, words fall out and get a laugh or a smile and those make the uncertainty of it all worthwhile.

Poetry

Watered Down Whiskey

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

I take a sip of watered down whiskey.

Honey sweetness coats my tongue

And climbs my palate walls,

like a spell of rain on rewind.

Ginger heat slides down my throat

And spreads across my chest,

A fermented shield beneath my skin.

Spiced warmth seeps into my armor

And I am fortified with soothing calm.

The sensation of the aftertaste follows,

A pleasant burn that lingers.

Thoughts relax and the world warps,

Viewed through a curved lens.

Apprehensions subside, the words easy to find,

And the impossible is a matter of effort.

Synapses twinkle,

Transmissions fire,

And there are too many ideas to write down.

I hardly know this me,

This artist whose craft comes easy

Temporarily.

And I think perhaps I owe this burst

To the sips of watered down whiskey.

Mental Health · Poetry

Fortune Favors

Beth DeFries2 Comments

My mind is a deconsecrated cathedral turned into hipster apartments full of whimsy, mismatched decor, and white-washed walls.

The Madonna weeps over a modern record player with the Abbey Road B-side scratching on repeat in a studio kitchen,

Majestic in her broken panes of stained glass, cemented together with black composite.

She is beautiful and her suffering-an art.

She is womanhood and childhood and loss.

Taken for granted,

Rent-stabilized cost of losing a savior

for location location location.

The stations of the cross taken down,

Their shadows left behind beneath un-frescoed white walls to make room for mass-produced art from Target.

My creativity, removed from its sepulcher during construction, is haunting the rooms, evicting the mundane tenants who are satisfied with the status quo.

The times they are a changin’,

Rearranging priorities and preferences,

The colors-more vibrant, the words-more bold.

I write on the walls with lipstick and crayon, like Harold in his purple world

With a grown-up twist.

Unformed and malleable,

Full of possibility and light,

I grow and glow.

I illuminate past the confines of the bulbs in the IKEA pendant fixtures,

A mixture of grace and insanity come to life in a way that finally pulls the room together.

Free to curate slowly with care,

My soul revived with abundant self-worth and self-love,

Absolutely enough 

and ready to take on the neighborhood market – Upscale and laid back with an unbeatable view of  the future.

I grip my grasp on happiness with a firm hold,

finally bold 

And recognize that “can” is a word in my vocabulary again.

Survival does not depend on compromising on dreams and

Split seams can always be mended.

Everything will extend beyond fine.

Unraveled thread, re-wound.

Possibility abounding.

I am me. I am she.

I am mine.

Six Months of Cozy!
Health & Lifestyle

Six Months of Cozy!

Beth DeFries1 Comment

Today is the six-month anniversary of cozy does it! Hooray!

This is my twenty-second post in six months and I feel incredibly proud of that. If you are reading this as a blogger who is just getting started, I wish you luck and encouragement and urge you not to feel pressured by the blank page. You can do this and you can do this at whatever pace is right for you.

I started this blog as a healthier writing outlet to social media and it turned into something much more nourishing and sustaining for me. I realize now that the title that came to me as I was sipping coffee at our kitchen table early in the morning on August first and the themes of coziness and minimalism have provided me with positive, focused fuel for my writing. I don’t know exactly what it was that ignited the spark in me, a perpetual procrastinator, to sit down and figure out how to start a blog that morning- to purchase a domain name, choose a layout design, and tailor the font to best suit my topic, but I am so thankful. Having a subject matter that continuously feeds my creative energy and urges my flow of ideas each time I am met with a blank page is something I have not experienced in over a decade and it is something that I do not take for granted.

I have self-identified as a writer since I was a little kiddo and this is the first time in a long time that I feel honest in that claim. Writer’s block is a very real struggle that attacks a writer’s confidence, pushes aspirations out of reach, and induces personal anxiety. I am personally familiar with feeling lost on the snowy expanse of a blank Word document and the unsteady falling sensation of slipping around on buttery journal pages. The most useful tools for me, oddly enough, have been to remove the pressure of goal-setting when it comes to my own creativity, and to strip away any expectation of success and go into creative endeavors knowing that I may be my only audience member.

Back on that August morning, I realized that I just wanted to write for the sake of writing. I just wanted to reclaim that part of me for myself and no one else.

Over the past few years, I have occasionally taken part in creative retreats and artist salons organized by other artist friends of mine. I would go to these events, hoping that being an audience member to the mismatched collection of creative contributions would inspire me or instill in me a drive to exercise my creativity. Unfortunately and surprisingly, the events had the opposite effect on me. While they seemed to work wonders for other artist friends of mine who are more deadline-driven and fueled by ambitions of making it professionally, I found that when my turn to present would come, the acid would rise from my stomach to my esophagus and set off cacophonous alarms ringing in my head, pumping a rush of blood to the tips of my ears, unveiling me as an imposter.

In my recent post, Beth’s Picture Show, I wrote a little about the dangers of comparison. When I used to find myself included in public gatherings of artists presenting their work, a quiet ball of jealousy would begin to tumble and grow as I compared my own creations to those of the more talented song writers, painters, illustrators, playwrights, poets, and musicians present. I thought with an unattractive bitterness, why should I even bother?

Other artists reading this may be thinking, well if you want to succeed as an artist, you need to be able to take criticism. Sound familiar to anyone? Anyone? Bueller? They are right, of course, if success as a professional is indeed your goal. But there are other types of success too – smaller, less obvious ones. I acknowledge that editors are necessary to tailor a piece to its best possible version, but for me – at least for right now- it is more important to just be writing. I am talented enough for myself and my talent has different, not worse, actualizations than it does for other artists. The pure and simple exercise of somewhat consistent writing is simultaneously enough and more than I could ever have hoped for these past six months.

I hope no artist reading this has shared my sense of inadequacy while being an audience member to other artists’ work, but the realist in me says that’s probably not the case. Let me be one tiny voice telling you that you don’t need to practice your craft all the time to be an artist. You don’t need to constantly cater to a practice that leaves you feeling drained and insufficient if it’s not coming naturally one day. It is ok to be patient with yourself if you are feeling particularly uncreative for one day, week, year, or decade of your life. Your reunion will be waiting for you somewhere down the line and will hit you smack in the middle of the face with a densely packed snowball or maybe introduce itself more subtly in a sip of coffee on a warm, summer morning.

Thank you for reading today’s post! I realize it strayed from the theme of cozy minimalism, but I am glad you gave it a read all the same. I want to extend a quick thank you to my cozy community. I am so grateful for the handful of family and friends who have taken time to read posts over the past six months as well as to the members of the blogging community who have been so encouraging by choosing to follow the blog or “like” a cozy does it post here and there. I only expected an outlet for my writing in starting this blog, but I am so grateful that some readers have chosen to join me on this adventure. Thank you all and happy reading!