Mapping the Lyrical Essay

In the spirit of holiday fun, from guest blogger Nina Gaby:

I thought it would be a good idea to take a break and actually sketch out whatever it was that I thought I was doing with the rewrite. (Besides stopping to make up a playlist with Paul Simon’s Rewrite shuffled through it a few times.) I was in deep, braiding three story lines, toggling between professional and crazy. I’m a visual girl. Plotting out the neuro-tangles on paper, along with actually acknowledging a 40 year nicotine craving, helped me settle. Besides, taking a break was nice. I had let this thing molder for seven months under the umbrella of boo hoo I’m too depressed/busy/tired/fat to write any more. Actually sitting in the chair (OK I was in bed but ‘sitting in chair’ has a more authentic writerliness about it) was making me dig at my cuticles (which I didn’t put on the map but probably should have) and I had to get up for Band-Aids anyway.

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Nina Gaby is a writer, visual artist and psychiatric nurse practitioner who lives and works in Vermont across the road from the longest floating bridge this side of the Mississippi. She often does not blog at www.ninagaby.com.