A few weeks ago I went on vacation and took a break from daily writing. Before I left, I fired off a few trifling pieces to post on my blog, set up WordPress to post one each morning, and then closed my laptop, giving it two weeks of true hibernation. Up to that point, I had made time every day since launching my blog to sit down and write. But only when I stopped this routine did I realize that I had not only made time to write, I had also made time to think. The act of writing had allowed – had ushered in, really – the acts of thinking, of observing, of seeing the ordinary in a new way.

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And I started to wonder: if I stop writing, will I also stop seeing?

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Since starting to write, everything I do, everyone I talk to, everyplace I go has become possible material: a baking session with my son, a phone call from a friend, a trip to the grocery store. And that is both good and bad. On the one hand, I have begun to find new meaning in each moment and have started to think more about being present in every encounter. But on the other, I worry about making characters out of the people I love most; I do not want to mine my family and friends for stories or truths they had not intended to broadcast to a wider audience. I do not wish to use them as means to a revelation.

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I went into my vacation thinking about finding a balance, contemplating turning off the x-ray vision of the writer, and wondering if I wanted to.

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And then I found some help in the person of Anne Lamott.

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During my vacation, I blazed through two of her books. Her writing bubbles over with the wisdom, humor, and truth of the everyday, whether she is writing about her first year raising her son or about, well, writing. In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Lamott offers some clarity and encouragement for fledgling writers trying to figure out what role writing should play in their lives:

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"In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, 'This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.' And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing."

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I love this image of myself as a woodpecker, carving out some space in the world for my ideas. And Lamott’s metaphor also helped me find a solution to the question of how to apply a writer’s scrutiny to the business of living and interacting with real people. Now I just might think of the stuff I do, the people I meet, the places I go, the fodder of my life as the twine and twigs that make up my woodpecker’s nest. These fragments support me, they are the foundation of my little hole in the tree, but ultimately it is my pecking – my writing – that tells the story.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Kristen Stiefel Levithan, Guest Blogger

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Kristen Stiefel Levithan is a teacher and writer. Her graduate thesis, “Balancing Act: Massachusetts’s Racial Imbalance Act, the Lynn Plan, and School Desegregation in One New England Town,” won the Wesleyan University Rulewater Prize for outstanding reflection and writing. A New England native, she now lives in the Midwest with her husband and two young sons. Kristen shares her cultural commentary and musings on modern motherhood at Motherese. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor