Please welcome today’s guest poster, Jonathan Hiskes.
Jonathan Hiskes (’04) is a writer at Bastyr University in Seattle. His work has appeared online or in print at The Guardian, Mother Jones, Grist, The Sun, Books & Culture, The Other Journal, The Mennonite, Geez, and Conspire. He recently published the essay “Pamoja House” about questions of faith, race, and community that addled him at 21, and addle him still. www.delicious.com/jonhiskes

Painters love to paint. Musicians love to play music. Writers love to have written.

When I first heard this aphorism I wanted to throw my hands up in silent alleluia! because it articulates something I’ve felt for so long. I have to write. I can’t not write. Stories nourish and sustain me, and trying to tell some of my own seems the only decent response.

Yet it’s such an everloving drag so much of the time. Right? You hunch at your keyboard and stare bleary-eyed at a cursor, knots forming in your legs and back, self-doubts dancing like goblins in your head, while the lusty green world flows by outside your window.

I remember the surge of envy when I first entered the studio of my art-major roommate in Grand Rapids. He turned our musty basement into a bright cheerful chaos of charcoal sketches, unfinished canvases, paint tubes, brushes, knives, beer bottles, rotting fruit rinds. You could see the fertile unfinished energy of his craft, and it looked so much more fun than my drab PC and uncushioned chair upstairs.

I felt the same way at a David Rawlings Machine concert a few years back. Dude conjured hillbilly spells with his guitar and flung his voice into the heavens, grinning the whole time to let you know he was having way more fun than anyone dancing on the concert floor. He sang an old-time, multi-layered tune about a toothache that unfolded like one long joke. He sang a riff about a monkey driving a train and made it sound like high gospel. He coaxed his bandmates into a frenzy, then sang perfect aching harmonies with his life partner and artistic collaborator, Gillian Welch. You’d be grinning too with her swaying at your side.

Nobody gets as good as Rawlings and Welch are without putting in a lot of practice hours. I’m sure they work even when they don’t feel like it. But they make it look like such a lark. Watching them grin like kids sneaking out of detention, it was impossible to feel anything but the same giddy joy.

Which I try to remind myself as I strap myself to a desk chair each evening after putting my son to bed and cleaning up dinner. I recall the writers who sneak such cartwheeling flourishes into their prose — Annie Dillard’s acrobatic humor, David James Duncan’s reckless joyous leaps from the mundane to the cosmic, Brian Doyle’s piling on of adjectives to hilarious towering heights, Kurt Vonnegut impishly revealing the ending of his book at the beginning, Geoff Dyer gazing at his own procrastinating English navel until you want to hug him or punch him …

They make it look fun. Which isn’t to say it’s easy. But it’s enough to make me want to try.

I don’t know why the process of arranging words is less satisfying than other creative habits. Maybe it’s the physical materials – plastic keyboard keys have none of the tangible pleasures of wooden instruments or brushes. Maybe it’s because writing doesn’t physically engage the body as playing a fiddle does. All the more reason to ground writing in the material world. Inhale the plume of campfire smoke in the mind if not in the nostrils. Flip somersaults in the imagination if not in the joints. Or just take some breaks and get out more.

Side note: I shouldn’t really be here on this under-30 blog, since I reached the gassy old age of 31 this summer. I’ll try to fake it. Sincere thanks to the Post Calvin creators for having me and putting together this fine project.

Jonathan Hiskes