How I Write from Inside the Circus: My Love Letter to Chaos, Graveyards, & Yesteryear

If you asked me how I find time to be creative. I would just laugh. Not a tickled laugh, the sharp kind you make when your 5-year-old is yelling at the 2-year-old not to lick the dog while your 7-year-old is narrating a sword battle between all the boys in the voice of a war-hardened general and your husband who is partaking in the battle is asking if you can “just read a quick scene and tell me if it lands,” before the four separate dinner orders burn.

Let’s just say it’s not something I “find.” It’s something I wrestle out of the jaws of a flaming, boy and pug-scented circus. And it comes with a lot of guilt, like I’m sneaking off to eat the last good chocolate. 

I’m late to the mama game. We had three boys in 6 years, calculate time spent without cocktail hours plus nursing and I am just now feeling my body and emotions like a normal human being. In time to heed all the warnings of perimenopause, but I digress. Being older to enter the parenting arena makes you hyperaware of the way time is blinked away. I lost my own Mom right after my 2nd son was born during high-covid. The sum of all that equals the hard-earned wisdom to not take one minute for granted. So anytime that I spend away from soaking in all the greatness and the sights and the sounds of said circus is a sacrifice of sorts.

Before life became an episode of Survivor: Snack time Edition, I had rituals. Sacred ones.

I’d go walk trails in the greenbelt or sit in silence in a chapel. I’d drive with the windows down through the Texas Hill Country, getting intentionally lost with only my camera and the purple straw hat, that only I think is cute. I once (more than once) wandered through forgotten graveyards, wondering what stories the stones weren’t telling. I definitely skipped my fair share of college to do all of the above and have no regrets about that choice.

In a nutshell, I did what I wanted, when I wanted. I left plenty of space for inspo.

There is major magic in the art of not doing much and not having any intent of being productive. In meandering for no reason. In wandering. In letting the world grow quiet enough that I could hear the voices I was supposed to write down.

Back then, I frequented beaches, played in nature preserves, carved out time to smoke and think. I very happily quit smoking. But I will admit, I vehemently miss the deep breathing and the deep introspection that it afforded me. 

Nowadays, if I manage to steal a few minutes—no screens, no noise, no tiny fingers under the bathroom door—I can feel the ember inside me catch. I feel it there, waiting for me. 

Sometimes I go sit in my car in the driveway and pretend we’re out of TP, so I can have 15 minutes. Sometimes I drive until I see cows and allow iPads to blare from the backseat and sometimes, I play games with my sons’ ability to create too. It’s a system, its ever evolving and it’s imperfect. And when it works? It fulfills something in my blood. In my very form.

Something breaks open. God speaks or whoever you choose to attribute things larger than yourself to. 

Stories spill out. Not exercises, but the type of stories that stick. I remember who I used to be and who I still am under all the peanut butter smears.

I gave up writing for anyone else years ago, for me I write for the process, for the muscle memory, for the love of being a vessel for an inspired wind that whips by just for me. Writing is the only self-inflicted competitive sport, I participate in. 

As Whitman said better than anyone:

“I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

I can’t wait for the day that I can explain to my kids that loafing is part of my job. But it is. It’s how the stories get in.

So if you’re reading this in a stolen moment (perhaps in your car, outside a dance class, or hiding behind a laundry pile), I hope you give yourself permission to loaf. To get lost. To be bored. To go wander a cemetery and imagine the lives of strangers. Much like the beauty of travel, inviting in a new perspective is an earth-shattering, God-given blessing. It’s not wasted time. It’s the womb of wonder.

So if you see me at the grocery store or staring at my steering wheel muttering to myself, no you didn’t. That’s just me, writing.

— Erica

Cofounder, Death Do We Party Press

Lover of 3 Sons, 1 Pug, and a moody doody husband

DeathDoWeParty.com

#TheDaisyChain #DeathDoWeParty #DDWP #Will2Write #StoriesThatStick #SmallPressLove #BooksWithBite #ReadMoreBooks #HistoricalFiction #WesternBook #WesternLit  #BookLaunch #IndieLit #WomenInTheWest #TheColeEdwardsSaga