perching lines, no. 13

salvage the spark: notes on life reimagined

Hello gentle-people,

Before I get on with our usual scheduled content, I have a personal update to share.

On Friday, January 17, I’ll be undergoing surgery which will be followed by about six weeks of recovery. I will be leaning into community support during this time and spending much of my recovery time at a best friend’s house.

If you’d like to support me during this time, you can Buy Me a Feather or Venmo “rosejpercy” and I will use those funds to buy items that will help make my recovery a bit easier and more comfortable. Every little gesture means so much to me, and I deeply appreciate your care and kindness.

I have a few posts scheduled out already. I am not putting pressure on myself to get any writing done or publish if I don’t feel the motivation.

Thank you for being part of my journey—it’s a gift to know I have such a wonderful community surrounding me.

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I don’t always get a word for the year but this year “revision” might just be that word.

Revision.

I quite like that Merriam-Webster defines “revise” as “to look over again in order to correct or improve.”¹ In the spirit of a new year, like many of you, I am looking back over my life. I see many things I hope “to correct or improve.”

🐦‍⬛ about perching lines

A “perch” is a light rest. Much needed in a world where many of us have to learn how to catch a break while standing up. In these lighter posts, I will offer poems, questions, and connections for those brief moments of reprieve. [Explore more in this series.]

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

“salvage the spark”

While I will revise a Substack post over and over, as a poet, I am light on revisons. It is actually an area of artistry I want to improve. Remica Bingham-Risher, poet and author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and the Questions that Grew Me Up wrote a gorgeous chapter called “Revision as Labyrinth,” where she writes on revision in conversation with the wisdom she gleaned under the tutelage of the poet Tim Seibes. Bingham-Risher learns that “revision is about our own volition and meandering.”² Her description of her process of writing a poem and revising it has lingered with me since I first read this book at the beginning of last year. She first comes to the page to write, letting the words lead as she travels freely through her thoughts. Then she revisits the words after a couple of days “with keener vision”:

“Once revision begins, I am trying to get out of the way of the poem. When I return, it is my job to rid the poem of its vague fogginess, the things clarion only in the mind of the one who experienced the moment or dreamed it first. Craft is what helps me salvage the spark³ that led me to the page in the first place; research helps grow it up and give it a face. To add precision and build tension, this is where I begin, with hope that I will redeem and transform what undoes me.”⁴

—Remica Bingham-Risher, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and the Questions that Grew Me Up

There is a humility here. I hear it in the often-quoted Stephen King advice on the revision process—“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Being who I am, in terms of linguistic commitments, I prefer “salvage the spark,” to “kill your darlings.” I like that Bingham-Risher is painting a picture for us of a revisioning process that is life-giving and nurturing.

from my calligraphy sketchbook

“The perfectionist fixes one line of a poem over and over–until no lines are right.”

— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

I include this quote because I think this post had to have somewhere to remind us of the limits of revision. Perfectionism, which invites you to self-edit as you create, is not the kind of revision we are talking about here.

Last year, I began my journey through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I am still working my way through it since I am taking it slower than the 12 weeks it is organized into. I took her advice and started writing morning pages, which are stream-of-consciousness writings. (Perfect for releasing perfectionism, by the way.) Every morning since August 11, 2024, I sit down with a notebook a pen, and some coffee to do my morning pages. I’ll be honest, though Cameron asks us to write 3 pages per day, I sometimes only do one page or two. But I got to see the benefits of the system when I finally got to the chapter where she told us we can revisit our morning pages and look for insights and action items. It took me about a week to read 6 months’ worth of daily writing while highlighting and bookmarking tabs to revisit a 2nd or 3rd time.

Afterward, I was left with pages of notes I jotted down. Some of my insights turned into affirmations. Some of them turned into reflections to bring into therapy. Some turned into action items that became goals for the new year. Some I am still sitting with, as I hope they might inspire long-form pieces for A Gentle Landing. Through this process, I embraced meandering, which I suspect was made easier because I didn’t know I would be revisiting those words down the line. I got to look back at my writings after months of writing with abandon. There were times I made myself laugh and times I simply thought as I underlined and highlighted, “Wow, I will never let myself believe I am not insightful ever again.”⁵ There were so many sparks to salvage.

Bingham-Risher reminds us that living life is its own craft. Let us embrace this as an affirmation as we revise: “The work, on yourself and your art, is never wasted. It is a useful, necessary tending.”⁶ As we greet this new year, let us embrace some meandering. Let’s revisit some beautiful places where we have walked. Let us make the changes we need in order to salvage the spark.

🐦‍⬛ Landing Tracks

1. Prepare to be sick of me—I have decided I am going to become a morning pages evangelist. I know writing isn’t for everyone, but this exercise isn’t about being a good writer. It’s designed to help you get out of your own way. If you needed a nudge to try morning pages, or to get back on the bandwagon, consider this the nudge.

2. Remica Bingham-Risher provided some good questions for the revision process for writing and life:

   “How do you let the poem speak beyond your passion or grief? How do you devise your own understanding, sometimes in spite of what seems like the strange living of others? How do you remake yourself, as an artist and a human being?”⁷

   Take some time to sit with these questions, perhaps turning them into a writing prompt if you’re a writer, or a conversation prompt to process with someone else on the path of revision.

3. In another paragraph on her process, Bingham-Risher names that “poems are an extension of our living.”⁸ She names that sometimes we need distance from a poem before we can revise it. Sometimes we might even need to let it go and stop working on it and move on to another poem where we’ll make more progress. She reminds us, “Much of putting together a complete living is culling obsessions and dead weight.” How can these serve as a metaphor for revision in your life? As you endeavor to “salvage the spark,” where do you need some distance before you can process a revision? What do you need to walk away from for now, so that you might walk into a new place where your revisions can flourish?

4. In the refashioning of yourself and your life, leave a little room for you to surprise you. Find ways to open up your capacity to take in the wonder of being you, alive in this world. The process of revision may have you feeling like cutting away is the only work—remember to salvage the spark. Try a gratitude practice to help you embrace the parts of you that need revisions to support their flourishing.

5. Help me with a Survey! I am collecting responses to help guide and shape the “Woven” series, which you can read more from here. This survey also has some general questions on your relationship to A Gentle Landing and social media in general. There is no reward for taking this survey, but you will have my gratitude!

1. Explore the word and its etymology here.

2. Bingham-Risher, Remica, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and the Questions that Grew Me Up, 176.

3. Emphasis mine.

4. Bingham-Risher, 176.

5. Yeah, that kind of confidence was worth the process.

6. Bingham-Risher, 186.

7. Bingham-Risher, 179.

8. Bingham-Risher, 181.