there's no failure in sports

two quick thoughts on failure and mistakes, plus June intentions and a poem for the end of the school year

Welcome to Write More! This is the monthly intentions email, which goes out the last Sunday before a new month starts. It’s a chance to fight the Sunday Scaries by thinking through your goals and intentions for your writing practice in the coming month and to reflect on your progress in the previous month.

If that sounds helpful and fun, subscribe here.

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Not to be all womp womp on a sunny holiday weekend, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about failure and feeling stuck. So I thought I’d start our June intentions with two notes on failure and the inevitability of mistakes.

First, from the world of sports. (No one’s more surprised than me to be embedding a video from a basketball player, but I could listen to this all day. It’s so lovely.)

After this team was eliminated from the playoffs, reporter Eric Nehm asked the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, Do you view this season as a failure?

It’s the wrong question. There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days. Some days you’re able to be successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn.

Around the same time that video was making the rounds, I came across this essay from Heather Havrilesky, Mistakes Will Be Made, about cultivating self-compassion when you’ve messed up. It’s worth reading the whole thing because the narrative’s really part of the power, but I’ll share one favorite bit here:

The real challenge of being alive isn’t making sure you never mess up, making sure you get everything right, making sure that everything looks and feels and sounds perfect – or else you’re a loser, or else you’re an idiot, or else you’re doomed to fail and be miserable. The real challenge of being alive is to savor the moment and give your love freely in spite of the clown show unfolding around you.

Those pieces feel like two sides of the same coin to me. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. And in writing that so often means muddling through the bad draft, forgiving yourself for not having figured it out sooner or written it better in the first place—so that you can get back to the work. In my own writing in the past week or two, it’s only as I’ve been able to relax and get a little looser—a little less afraid of messing it all up—that I’ve been able to figure out something new.

Are there any failures or mistakes you can reframe as we head into a new month?

June intentions

It’s very nearly the beginning of summer, which so often brings changes in schedules. I’m still figuring out my own schedule for the month—trips! half days! field trips!—so I thought I’d share two pieces from the archives with tips for writing through a changing season:

How to Write in Summer Time, with tips and strategies for working through the fragmented time of summer

and also the reminder that There is No Trick. I love reading other writers’ descriptions of their writing practices and squirreling stories about how writers work—but what you really need is to figure out what works for you, in the season that you’re in.

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a poem for the end of the school year

Last night, I zoomed over to Colorado Springs to read as part of a series Colorado Humanities is hosting to celebrate finalists for the Colorado Book Award. I was representing The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, a finalist in the anthologies categories; my co-editor, Emily Pérez is a Coloradan, but she was unable to make the reading so I subbed in for her. (Emily’s book, What Flies Want, is a finalist in the poetry category!)

I shared a handful of poems about mothering across the years, starting with Camille Dungy’s “The Average Mother Now Spends Twice as Many Hours on Childcare as Did Her Counterpart in 1965 . . .” about traveling with an infant (co-starring Pittsburgh’s beautiful bridges), then Catherine Pierce’s “High Dangerous,” (the very first poem in the book!), and finishing with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “The Whole Point,” which, appropriately, opens the “Transitions” section of the anthology. Whew, some day I may be able to read that poem without crying, but I will tell you that last night was not that night. It’s a beautiful poem, and really the perfect poem for this transitional time of year. I thought I’d share it here, as we all move into summer.

Ahhh, and now I’m crying again! So embarrassing. But it really is a perfect poem for June, season of transitions.

What do you have ahead of you this month? What are you excited about in your writing life?

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