For the first time in months, I wake up happy. Everything that has stopped me from writing this book will not stop me today. Over the weekend, the competing voices in my head—I must write this. I cannot write this—fell away when I realized what I lacked was not time or ability but patience.

I have always valued my worth in relation to others. If I give enough, if I do enough, I might be enough. Yet in this moment, I am stepping out of one commitment after another: putting the reading series on hiatus, taking a semester off teaching, walking out of roles at one magazine after another. The sense of obligation that led me to each one is gone. Even the obligation to socialize is disappearing: instead of going to an Oscars’ party, I do research for my book.

In my case, research looks like talking to my parents. Or more like listening to them. Hearing about how they went to the first Rainbow Gathering, lived on one commune after another from Colorado to Tennessee, picking fruit in between, knowing they could pick up the phone at any point and call home, but they never did.

Out the window the sky is alpine blue and the sun is shining through the bare trees. Today the low will be eight. Winter teaches me to base everything on the low.

My mother would always come back from the road with a stuffed animal for me to hold during the long stretches when she was away singing. Ruffy lies beside me now. I found him underneath the Christmas tree when I was eight years old.

I tiptoe through the morning routine, wanting to be my own ballerina. I find a workshop-appropriate dress for my evening class, a blend of casual and professional. Then it’s sweater, scarf, calf-length coat, elbow-length gloves and earmuffs.

The first train is bursting with bodies. I stand back and watch it pass. I take the next one, and transfer to another line at Jay Street. My morning hop-skip-jump for three years running.

When I get out at Delancey, I stop at a Chinese bakery for a cheesy bun. A few blocks over, I walk three flights up to the warehouse where I work, where male models used to box in underground events and, before that, garments were made. I’m one of the first to arrive—almost everyone else who uses the space works for a startup, but doesn’t start the day till 10 or 11.

I type up my pages of notes from the night before about how my parents found themselves in Tennessee, visiting The Farm for the first time, and another commune, Spring Hollow. For my mother, Spring Hollow Farm was love at first sight, a family she’d been waiting for. My parents move there, and weeks after, they join. It works until it doesn’t work anymore—if you want to save the world by creating the world anew, spending your days canning tomatoes falls short.

Come evening, I’m sitting at the end of a table in a conference room, leading students through an essay by Robert Vivian. We always start the workshop by reading aloud a sentence we love. It’s so much easier than diving into meaning.

Because meaning often fails us. Or we search and find none. Or the meaning shifts. Meaning is what we attach to what we see. The workshop demands it. My book demands it.

What did my parents’ lives mean—to them, to me, to then, to now? How is it that they ended up on a historically significant commune, where there were so many unspoken rules? How is it that they gathered the courage to go in the first place and later gathered the courage to leave? What does it mean that I was born there? What is the legacy?

My students and I listen to George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From.” We copy the format and create our own.

I am from cloth diapers,
from soy milk and nutritional yeast.
I am from the forest that was our front yard.
(Tall grass yearning,
trees touching down.)
I am from the wilds
That were subdued into rows.

When the dumplings arrive–pork and chive, peanut, shrimp, and mushroom—we discuss the students’ work. By the time everyone leaves, it’s reaching toward 11, so I take a cab home. I have too many bags. It’s too cold. It’s too late. It’s less than $20.

We drive over the Williamsburg bridge, and I look at the dots of light I call home. Twenty minutes later, we’re on my block, where I brace myself for the low.

        ~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Her previous book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, was a revelation. I didn’t know you could match image with lyricism, or that you were allowed to go public with loneliness—I thought that was something to hide. Rankine’s is a voice that I trust. I want her to narrate the world to me, which is what she does in Citizen.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Find a way to calm the dragon that says you can’t do it. Feed it ice cream. Read it a story. Say shhhhh. Then sit down and write.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Giving up. If I’m reading something that doesn’t resonate, I put it down. I might be halfway through a book. I might be three quarters of the way into an essay. As a former “good girl,” it’s a relief to have found the wherewithal to walk away.

You can read Erika Anderson‘s writing here:

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

March 1, 2015: Erika Anderson

Erika Anderson studied ecology in the Amazon, Mexico, and Alaska. She was a broadcast journalist for an anarchist radio station in Texas. She taught yoga in London and worked at the United Nations in Geneva. Now she’s a writer living in New York City.

I met Erika at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we both earned our MFA, and then we worked together at Hunger Mountain, where Erika wrote book reviews–sideways reviews–and a wonderful craft essay, “I Craft, Therefore I am: Creating Persona Through Syntax and Style.”

These days, Erika is busy. She teaches for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, is a contributing editor for Guernica, and co-hosts the Renegade Reading Series.

Here’s the beginning of a piece she had a piece in The New York Times, titled “On Being Both the Wolf and the Lamb.”

One of the first questions you confront in any five-borough conversation is, “Where do you live?”

“Crown Heights,” I say. Inevitably the next question is: “How do you like it?” You would think this would be straightforward, easy to answer, but it’s not. Not for me.

I mention the literary scene, the Franklin Park Reading Series, Hullabaloo Books and a series I run for emerging writers. I praise the restaurants on Franklin Avenue. And then I say, “But I was sexually assaulted on the street, so there’s that.”

This is the thing I am not supposed to say but cannot stop saying.

read more…

Here’s the beginning of her essay in Vanity Fair, entitled “What Life is Like When You’re Born on a Commune.”

My parents spent the 1970s on communes: first, a shared house in Boulder; after that, a “self-realization fellowship” in Paonia, Colorado; then the Spring Hollow farm in Tennessee, with a dozen other couples. They were out to save the world, or at least themselves. Peace, love, and understanding.

After several successful years, my family moved, with Spring Hollow, to the Farm. With a population of about 1,500 at its peak, The Farm was the largest commune in the U.S.. Founded by Stephen Gaskin in 1971, it still hosts a premiere midwifery school run by Stephen’s wife, Ina May Gaskin, whose book Spiritual Midwifery remains a standard for those seeking an alternative to hospital births.

Of my sisters, two of us were born on The Farm. My eldest sister has a snowflake tattooed on the back of her neck—she was born in a blizzard in Colorado. My other sister was born in a tent on The Farm (no tattoo). I’ve said that I should get a trailer inked on the back of my neck, because that’s where I was born—in a mobile home my dad brought from Nashville. As with most Farm babies, a midwife trained by Ina May guided me into this world.

read more…

Erika is also the brains, or I should say the heart, behind the Army of Lovers, giving out Valentines to strangers because love is for everyone. You can follow her on Twitter @ErikaOnFire.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ERIKA ANDERSON spends her days.

The Literary Death Match was hilarious–Adrian Todd Zuniga as host. Roxana Robinson read against Rigoberto Gonzales , while Pam Houston read against Christopher Castellani. And it was the women, with the help of squirrels, who advanced to the final round–which turned out to be a spelling bee, not of words but of authors’ last names. Pam phoned a friend–me (ha)–for help with the spelling of Achebe. But she lost points on Ondaatje and Solzhenitsyn. Roxana won on Eugenides. Steve Yarbrough judged on literary merit , Carmelita Tropicana (in snakeskin) on performance, and Tom Bodett (in a fedora) on Intangibles (or as he put it, on Je ne sais quoi). I haven’t laughed that much in a long time. Already looking forward to next year.

Our panel on Building Communities of Readers and Writers, with Jodi Paloni as moderator, was lots of fun. David Abrams talked about his blog, The Quivering Pen, and World Book Night. Erika Anderson, who teaches at Sackett Street Writers Workshop in NYC, talked about how she uses Twitter, and I talked about Catching Days, sprinkling in a quote from Apollo 13: “You never know what events are to transpire to get you home.” Figure that one out : ) Questions from the audience led to a discussion about MFA programs and their pre-made communities.

Readings took place all day Saturday and Sunday–Christine Schutt, Chris Bohjalian, Alexis Smith, Kris Jansma, Sophie Cabot Black, Howard Norman–with books flying off the tables and writers being stopped on the streets for signatures. Matthew Limpede, editor in chief of Carve Magazine, and Leah Miller, an editor at Random House’s Crown Publishing Group, held an informal talk on the editing process. The rain only seemed to make the weekend cozier and the leaves more colorful.

The Author Dinner Saturday night took place at The Gleanery in Putney, where the food was freshly grown just down the way. I wish I had taken some photos. Still tasting the delicious beet salad and the squash.

What Books (be honest) Are On Your Nightstand/Bedside Table, Dede Cummings’ Facebook Book Group, created a series of fantastic posters that decorated the walls of the Gibson River Garden.

Many thanks to Sandy Rouse, the director of the BLF, who, due to a last minute injury, missed it all! Thanks also to the many volunteers, including Jodi Paloni, Cynthia Larsen, and Suzanne Kingsbury. It’s not too late to donate. And be sure to mark your calendar for next year–October 3-5, 2014!