The Fun Project

Last fall, as I was starting my MFA program in poetry and a new job, I remembered my friend and mentor Ross White telling me how important it was to have a fun project on the side.

He actually has two computer monitors set up side by side, with his “serious” work on one, and his “fun” project on the other. When he’s stuck on one, he simply turns to the other.

(me, circa early 90s. turns out I’ve always been into cool fonts)

Starting *another* writing project seemed counterintuitive, when I was already writing poems and essays about as fast as I could, but there was an idea for a YA novel that had been been nudging me for several months, and I thought, Ross is a smart guy. Why not give it a try?

I’m here to report that indeed, Ross is a smart guy. Whatever your serious work is, and whatever a fun project might look for you, instead of eating up your “serious project” bandwidth, making the choice to give some of your time and attention to something fun actually creates more bandwidth, not less. Your mind is more than just a machine that cranks out work that has been deemed acceptable by capitalism, more than just the work that “counts.”

(My cat sleeping so weirdly that he appears to have no head. Fear not, he still has a head.)

So this November, I’m doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again, even though I haven’t found an agent for my first YA novel yet, even though I might not ever.

Do you have a fun side project? Leave a comment, tell us about it!

Also, because I am proud of these books and maybe you need a gift for someone who likes poems, both of my chapbooks are available now: I Will Write a Love Poem and Rupture (Rupture is a pre-order, out in January).

And because they’re so gosh darn nice I must share them with you, here’s the blurbs for I Will Write a Love Poem:

Adrie Rose’s I Will Write a Love Poem is a book of trying, risk, tenderness, and resistance. The poems recount dark times as they reach for brightness, asking, “how much violence begins this pastoral”? Anthems to resilience, their common form—loose prose poems with leaps, gaps, and staggers—mirrors how we fracture but hold together all at once. Rose writes of the body—bones that barnacle, veins blue as calligraphy, a hand branded by a horse’s hoof—and of trying to love the self as is, and as she leaves what she must behind. In this generous book, songs are spells, the unspeakable is spoken, and broken things are rendered whole.  

— Rebecca Olander, author of Uncertain Acrobats

I Will Write a Love Poem fits an immense world into a few pages. At the other end of the horse’s pail, the sleeping infant, and the naked pool, there is an insistent life—a life that will keep rising and embarking on the steep trail. Rose’s lines of verse are at once lush and sturdy. She may take us into the cuts, but if we hold onto this “bright rope,” love will find our breath. 

— Priscilla Wathington, author of Paper and Stick

Till next time, don’t forget your brain does better when it also gets to have fun,

Adrie