Process Notes by Tiana Reid
Welcome to the Sunday post.
Today’s post is by Tiana Reid.
Tiana Reid is a writer, scholar, and educator who lives in Toronto. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University, where she teaches black literature. Her writing has most recently been published in Aperture Magazine and Pinko: A Magazine of Gay Communism.
It has to mean something that I lost my notes for these notes on process.
Here is where I started, in June:
I am currently on a bus to a small town in Ontario, Canada, where my mother lives. I decided to leave Toronto for some days to work on my academic book, which is about black literature, gender, and labor… Right now I’m preoccupied with the fear and magic of having to do something I’ve never done before. This anxiety means I’m toggling between a bird’s eye view (structure, distance, argument) and whatever perspective is signified by the red pen (critical intimacy, detail, language). Vertiginous, dizzying. I suspect this back-and-forth won’t ever end, and part of me hopes it never will. For I have always thought the opposite of the quote “I hate writing I love having written.” I hate the finality of being published, and even the pause of putting a chapter aside.
At my mother’s house, which is not where I grew up, I am gifted with something like a clean slate. I spend seven days at the little local library, which has a sign in the window that reads, if I remember correctly, something like: a library is not a luxury but a necessity (a version of a Henry Ward Beecher quote). I finish writing a draft of a chapter. I cannot bring myself to say: I wrote a chapter.
Now I am in a little cottage in Montana for a writing residency. The first night I woke up and puked till there was nothing left. I attribute it to a migraine attack or mountain sickness, maybe even Covid recovery. Maybe all three.
When I told my analyst over Zoom, she said something about getting it all out. I am paraphrasing. But either way, against my better judgment, I am leaning into the migraine as metaphor, or at least as symptomatic, the physiological as relating to the emotional, though not only that.
It is all related to writing. Every last bit of it.
I try to get it all out. I work either at the large kitchen table, the desk by the window (where I saw hummingbirds, a double rainbow) or, if it’s the late afternoon or early evening, the large sectional couch. Now I am at the table. There is a ticking clock behind me. I am a professor, which means summer is supposed to be when I get all of my research and writing done. (And watch lots of TV.) Tick, tick, tick.
I have that chapter printed out. It’s a thick document scrappily folded in half and stuffed into a philosophy book that I will reread to help me with revisions (X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought by Nahum Dimitri Chandler). And I am making edits on paper. One page takes forever. I am only on the second page and I have to remind myself of the book’s argument.
Just for today, I have surrendered to my way of doing things, which is that I have many writing projects going at once. I wish it weren’t so. I wish I could hyper-focus on one thing and then get it done, then the next, done. And so on.
But that is not my life, not my way, not today. So between the academic book, I am also working on something else, a proposal, and on other things too: writing a review, editing a student’s reflection, editing an interview.
I have always wanted more than I can handle. Greedily, nothing ever really ends, and practice is always there for me. It seems I keep writing to reframe everything that came before. It is never done. Thank God.
If you’re interested in writing your own process notes to be published in Mommy’s El Camino and sent to the inboxes of over 700 subscribers, send a brief pitch to mommyselcamino at proton dot me. Process notes may be epistolary, an outline, written notes, a diagram—however you wish to briefly interpret describing your current writing/art-making process. Payment for published Process Notes is $25.00.