A Day in the Life
By Adebe DeRango-Adem
Rise, water and fruit, spend about twenty minutes adjusting my spiritual frequency to the world. Think about the day and what it will entail. Recalibrate against the chaos if I've had strange dreams. Dream up what I'd like the rest of the day to look like. Sometimes I choose to read positive affirmations and meditations to begin my day, but it's most likely poetry (though arguably such kinds of writings are very much the same). Reading something that's not the daily news or social media helps refresh the mind and act as a reminder of the importance of seizing the day. Otherwise I think it would be mighty difficult to get one's creative gears flowing.
Though such is part of my morning routine, truth be told I'm not really a "morning person" and have been one to dislike routines for the most part. It's as though my work ethic revs up by night instead. Whatever one's creative clock is, I have always felt a large level of misunderstanding on the very real self-discipline and accountability (i.e. hard work that is focused and deliberately from the heart) required by the writerly life. And even more so for those writers I know who work from home/not a formal outside office. We sit at our desks but are ultimately nomadic. We may be more inclined to domesticity, but inside our minds are a whole set of other rooms that need to be tended to.
Contending with a prodigious and hopefully authentic supply of creative or kinetic energy is a lot of work, especially when you're on deadline. We writers be busy folks.
The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book: Toronto.
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The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.
Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in various North American sources, including Descant, CV2, Canadian Woman Studies and the Toronto Star. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate. Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, was one of ten manuscripts chosen in Frontenac House's Dektet 2010 competition and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is also the co-editor, alongside Andrea Thompson, of Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out.
