It’s been weeks since my last post and I know that in blog land, that is a very, very long time. I’ve been marking student assignments and final exams, as well as dealing with my own end-of-year portfolios. Now that I’ve finished, I’ve caught the requisite end-of-term cold, so I’m forced to lie about and think. When I’m under the weather, I always think about Woolf and her essay “On Being Ill,” in which she states that the mind is esteemed as a civilizer of the universe. By allowing ourselves to become ill, the potential for further illness—for “wastes and deserts of the soul”—becomes possible.

It’s totally true. I’m wrung out after weeks of almost constant marking. I’m not someone who can just apply a time limit to each page. Sometimes, I’ll spend as long as forty minutes per assignment. I second-guess myself, I second-guess the writing, I second-guess myself. (Maybe I should say I third-, fourth-, and fifth-guess all of these things. You get the picture.) Thank goodness there’s an established marking criteria guide for me to reference. I emailed it out to my students and told them to self-mark their work so that they’d have an idea of where they’d land in terms of grades.

The issue is, after six years of workshops, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of assigning creative writing a grade. This incongruity has only happened since I started grad school, where we’re told not to worry about grades any longer and are hence liberated and free to take risks. At an undergrad level though, I feel as though there’s the assumption that students need to know the basics. That they have to know the rules in order to break them. Blah blah blah. I’ve heard myself say it a million times.

But why not liberate new writers sooner? Now that I’ve internalized the marking criteria guides, I can’t help but see them hovering over my own page like a stencil when I sit down to write. Not a good feeling. Marking has completely taken over my life – but not the marking up of any pages with new writing, unfortunately. Did my workshop students have similar experiences? I think I’m going to ask a couple of them to discuss their thoughts about introductory creative writing courses here. That’s what I’ll do.

And I’m going to return to Woolf again. (I know – it’s just a cold. What can I say? I like drama.) Woolf says illness is why we need poets and writers to create a heaven that we can access when we’re sick – that the sick grab at the instinctive, evocative quality of language because there aren’t words to express the experience of illness. So I’m going to bunker down with the latest Paul Vermeersch and Steven Heighton. We’ll see what happens.

Either I don’t work long and hard enough, or I’m just lucky, but hunching over the keyboard and tap-a-tapping doesn’t leave me with back pain, hand pain, eyestrain, or any of the writer’s traditional aches. Because words never come to me in neat, ordered sentences, the painstaking cutting-and-pasting, condensing, expanding, and scrapping is painful enough.

My sheer frustration with making stuff publishable, or even coherent, often manifests in itchy skin, flushed cheeks, and, when things are really bad, a throat that threatens to seize up. When my body hits that point, I leave the house or office, walk to a nearby park, and get on the playground swing. But I don’t just sit there twisting my toes in the sand. I swing. As high as I can. For as long I need to.

The wind on my face and the rhythmic sailing between sky and ground eases the itch and the constricted feeling, and cools me down. (Twisting in figure-eight patterns helps loosen mental blocks, too.) Yes, often there are children swinging next to me, and their parents eyeing me from the nearby bench, but I don’t care. The kids are swinging just for fun. They don’t need it the way I do.

Krista Eide is a writer and editor who blogs about Vancouver arts, food, and excellent happenings at www.granvilleonline.ca/secretcity.

In a word, sitting. I sit for hours and hours a day. I sit so much that you could bow a lovely Dvorak melodrama on my hip flexors. As thrilling as that sounds, it’s pretty painful. My massage therapist and I have a good relationship – I see her after I’ve done something heroic, like lifting a car off a little old lady or standing up too quickly from the breakfast table. (Actually, I only have one table. It can be the breakfast, lunch, second lunch, early dinner – you get the idea – table.)

This desk jockey business is wearing me out. In the past five years, I’ve slipped a disc, torqued my sacrum, and after long period of typing, can’t feel the middle fingers of my left hand – and I’m only thirty. To make matters worse, my eyes are going. The other day at work, I wasn’t able to focus the text on my computer screen. Couldn’t have focused to save my life. After a visit to the optometrist, I now stare at the fire alarm switch down the hall from my cubicle. I’m supposed to focus on it for at least one minute every hour. Unfortunately, the switch is next to the washrooms and more than one person on our floor must think I’m a total creep. Between the lewd staring and the pelvic stretches in the lunchroom…In case of emergency, pull alarm.

What do writers do to keep physically healthy? Never mind, let me rephrase that: what do writers do to keep themselves from falling apart? What are the occupational hazards we face? How do we deal not only with the physiology, but the physicality of writing?

I’ve asked three writers, Krista Eide, Karen Shklanka, and Ray Hsu, to share their ideas with me, so standby for further posts.

And get up right now and stretch, for heaven’s sake.