Start Making Sense

 One of my favorite quotes from Wallace Stegner is "We write to make sense of it all"

The truth to that is what has helped me over the past several years.

It was this time a year ago when I was saying goodbye to my father for what would be the final time. He had been living in a memory care facility for the final year of the nearly-five years at River Ridge in Avon. The last few years were very hard to watch. But watch I did, just as I did with my mother several years earlier. Fortunately, my father and my mother both went peacefully. It was just getting there that was anything but peaceful. Literally, the day after my father passed, COVID-19 was forcing rest homes to shut down, and it was a struggle just to get his belongings out of his room.

 I had two shows that weekend, and then all clubs were shut down. I had nothing to do but sit at home and wait for several months before I would play any sort of working events. I didn't write any songs however. I was learning a lot of cover songs, but no material of my own was coming out, until nearly a year into the shutdown, when I was tagged in a songwriting challenge that takes place every February around the world. My partner and I jumped in, and together we came up with over 10 songs in less than a month.Writing quickly forces me to draw inspiration from all kinds of places. Some I want to go to, but don't know how to express simple (or complex) emotions. Some I would rather not go to, but have been waiting to be expressed, and now I had a chance. So I went for it. All of it. 

In a few short weeks, I dove deep into a pool of sadness, and joy - I wrote about my father, I wrote about my grandfather, I wrote about the breakdown of my previous relationship, and the journey I had gone on after that.to find myself ready to write new chapters in my life, and find love anew. After much soul searching, I ultimately discovered I was in a happy present, but was still carrying around some very sad memories from the past. I guess, once I start writing, it's like the floodgates open, and all that volume spills forth. 

But it is a strange process. When I read back a lot of my lyrics, they often don't align with specific events in my life... they often merely capture a mood, and the details within the rhymes could be about anybody.

Another Stegner quote that has always struck me was, "To write good Fiction, you must be Truthful"

Maybe my quote should be, "Write about something you know, and you could be writing about someone you've never met."