#ellisavery

This hit me so hard. So hard that when I had read on a few pages I went back and read it again.

I knew something in my life was WRONG. I knew it was going to take time to fix it.

I have spent too many years with my face in my phone, with my mind in my small business. "How is that bad?", I bet you are asking.

It is bad because just like you can scroll for ages and never find the end of your newsfeed, I was scrolling through my life endlessly never finding the fake thing that I was looking for. That OTHERS were telling me I needed to find.

I had stopped writing poetry. Stopped reading books. Stopped going for long walks in the woods. Stopped seeking spiritual growth. I had stopped being ME!

I was just filling my kettle with crap, instead of pure white snow.

Interview by Melody Nixon.

EA: Up until the age of 38, when my mother died, I would have said an emphatic yes, writing is what gives my life meaning, together with loving and being loved. Life felt like a game where I traded my youth for books I could point to proudly. Maybe I’ll feel that way again one day, either when I’m better or when I’ve made my peace with not getting better.But for now, my brush with mortality—my mother’s and my own—and my subsequent confrontation with chronic pain and disability has made me feel less self-important about my writing, less product-driven and more process-oriented. The fiction I’m working on, I’m doing for pleasure, not out of a need to prove myself to the world (or to the imaginary biographer, who is probably my mother) as a novelist.I still write daily haiku: I think keeping my senses open to each day’s unique flash of beauty and humor—and finding the words with which to share it—is what gives my life most meaning. That, and love. To be honest, it feels like I’m playing a different game right now, one where life gets increasingly difficult, but if you can find something to be grateful for all the way to the end, you win. By those rules, I’m batting a thousand.

Read the full interview here.

Ellis Avery is an accomplished author, editor, and teacher. Her first novel, The Teahouse Fire, won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction, a Stonewall Book Award, and an Ohioana Library Award. Her second novel, The Last Nude, also won a Stonewall Award. Avery edits the Public Streets column at Public Books, and writes daily haiku poems on Twitter—a year’s selection of which have been recently published as her first volume of poetry, Broken Rooms.