Greetings, writers—
Any Portlanders looking for something to do tonight should consider heading to the Hollywood, where Showing Up, the movie that my partner, Jon Raymond, wrote, is now playing. He’s doing a Q&A after the 6:30 screening, and it’d be fun to see you there.
Showing Up is a funny, beautiful, wonderful movie, and that’s not marital duty talking. All the critics (NYT, Vox, the LA Times, etc.) think it’s great, too, except for one dude who totally hated it and is obviously a cretin. Jon says I should include a link to that review, too, but I refuse!
As Justin Chang of the LA Times writes, Showing Up is a portrait of an artist at work, but “[n]ot a famous writer pounding self-consciously away at a typewriter, cranking out page after page of voice-over-excerpted masterpiece; not a genius tackling a blank canvas that will, a few scenes later, be a gorgeous finished painting. Lizzy (Michelle Williams), the artist we’re following, is a Portland-based sculptor of limited means, modest aspirations and no particular reputation. But her work is lovely and expressive and not to be hurried — not by her own process, which is assured and meticulous, and certainly not by the camera peeking quietly over her shoulder.”
Lizzy is like many of us at various points in our creative lives: a person laboring long and alone, guaranteed neither praise nor recognition (let alone financial reward), stubbornly dedicated to making beautiful things.
Whether we’re talking about a sculpture, a poem, or, as my friend Robin charmingly put it after Monday’s class, “a fiction,” the process of taking something from a personal vision to a publicly viewable or readable work is a long and deeply fraught one.
It takes patience, belief, focus, and stamina.
The poet Carl Phillips has a whole essay on stamina in his book My Trade is Mystery, of which I’ll share a paragraph:
Stamina, at least at first, presumes ambition. If ambition is what makes us want to write at all, for example, stamina is what sustains that drive or desire over time in the face of the many things that can sometimes thwart ambition and sometimes utterly destroy it. Stamina has its limitations, of course; it’s not much use against the certainty of death and, before that, the unpredictability of physical and mental health. But if ambition is… a form of faith, then stamina is what comes into play when that faith—as it will, inevitably—gets shaken. Stamina is the persistence by which we move past doubt and return to the task of making.
But how does one “move past doubt and return to the task of making”?
Sometimes I just put my head down and keep typing. Other times I take a break from whatever it is that I’m working on and wait until the crippling doubt gets bored and wanders off to sabotage something else.
In his essay, Phillips points to a line from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Today, take that line and use it somehow (thematically or literally) in a scene/poem/fiction.
Stamina!
Happy writing—
Emily
I love this movie! Thanks for your beautiful writing.
where can we watch this movie?