August 21, 2015

Where my crazy stories come from

Every time I call Russia, I hang up the phone bewildered. Was it true? Was it fiction? How can I separate the two into bits that make sense? Primarily I call my mom, sometimes my half-sister, sometimes my cousins or my step-mom, but most of the family drama comes from my conversations with my mother. I have just started reading The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton and got to thinking. This is human shit and blood and sweat that we're all wallowing in and yet are afraid to expose. She wasn't, Anne. She turned herself inside out and dropped her guts on your face, whether you wanted it or not, but you related. Of course you did, it was the hidden stuff that gave you nightmares.

And I thought, maybe I should stop being afraid of exposing all this family drama I have dangling over my head. I fictionalize it, because I don't want to hurt anyone, having been hurt so many times by other people that I know how painful it is. And yes, I'm a storyteller, and this is the stuff of life. And unless I commit it to paper, it eats my insides like acid. Perhaps that's what Anne did, perhaps that's why in the end she killed herself. It's not easy being naked among those who are clothed. You get pinched and cut and slashed and, in the end, beheaded.

July 2, 2015

The social media engage/disengage battle

by Ksenia Anske

Yesterday I caught myself on noticing how "I'll just check my phone real quick" turned into 30 minutes of lost time. I'm usually pretty diligent about sticking to the routine of DO NOT ENGAGE ONLINE UNTIL YOUR WORK IS DONE, but I'm only human so I slip. For some reason this particular slip really got under my skin. It was evening and I was so tired that I had no energy to exercise or to meditate. My day was packed and I hoped to combine the two into one biking session with my eyes closed. It didn't happen. I got upset. As a result, I didn't sleep well.

Meditating clears my mind. Without it it's like a bee drunk on vodka mixed with beer, buzzing around and around and around my skull until I want to drive my head through the wall and be no more (in other words, slide down the wall into a brainless bloody morass). I thought checking my phone would only take a few minutes. Ha ha ha. When I glanced at the clock, I nearly dropped it. It wasn't a few minutes like I thought it would be. It was 30 fucking minutes. I have robbed myself of exercise, of mediation, and of a good night's sleep. So today, as I'm typing this, I'm not even going to look at what's happening on the sparkling internets until this post is done.

March 19, 2014

Emotions and writing, or, there is no writing without emotions

by Ksenia Anske

I'm a writer, and in the course of the day I may experience the multitude of emotions that other people experience in a month or even a year. Everything from depression, to exaggerated glee, to self-scorn, to an outright wish to die, to bursting joy again, then back to self-deprecation, to sparkling glory and pride, to fatal indifference and bleak ideas of peril, to sudden feeling of worldly wisdom and truth. It never ends, and it drives me nuts. I am nuts, by some definition, I'm a writer. I have to experience all of this to be able to craft characters, multiple characters, overwhelmed with an array of emotions, to convince the reader that those are real people and they really REALLY feel it. Because if they feel nothing, the reader will feel nothing, and there will be no reason for the reader to read my book. It's a curse, and I've been afflicted with it all my life, not understanding it, trying to get rid of it, to suppress it, to make myself numb, going as far as seriously contemplating suicide, and then, finally, deciding to live and embracing it. The reason I am a writer is very simple. If I don't write, this cauldron of feelings, this hot fucking lava, this hodgepodge of my thoughts, this mishmash of my ruminations on life and everything else under the sun, this amalgamation of worries and heart palpitations and sweat perspirations and cries (don't you already feel overloaded by reading this sentence?) will spill on people around me, burn them, and they will run the hell away from me, screaming. Writing saves me and my life and the lives of those around me. Without writing I'd explode in a shower of fireworks, or bloody guts, or feces, your choice. But this is the thing. Without feeling this river of OH MY GOD I FEEL SO MUCH I WILL DIE shit, I wouldn't be able to write. And neither were you. So it's okay you're always overly dramatic and expressive, that's what writers have to be, to write.