March to Barcs: Riding and Writing

5 hours
22.5 bicycle miles
8 wide ruled comp book pages.

My friend and former student Evan and I were planning an outing today that I like to call Riding and Writing: bike a bit, hunker down and write a bit, then bike and write some more. Evan bagged out, but feeling the pressure of a writing group we'll have with Stephanie in a couple of weeks, I went ahead by myself, in an attempt to jump start my brain.

I had expected to do a lot of writing in Hungary. The kind of perspective and distance I'd have far from everything I knew and the electricity of adventure and new encounters would fuel my thinking, and I'd even have more time in the working week to write. I've done writing here on the blog, but it's not what I'd planned. For one thing, I start by selecting and placing pictures and then framing my thoughts. It's a good process in ways and it allows readers another entry point to our travels, but it's not the same as starting with a blank page and building one thought upon another and discovering new ideas and perspectives there. Additionally, I wrote for our neighbors and colleagues at the same time I was writing about them, which naturally narrowed the emotional scope of my writing.

And I didn't write a single poem or story. I have an idea that if I make time for writing, I ought to be working on fiction, or a poem, something that yanks on the scope of my imagination and emotional core and works within an artistic symmetry, maybe because this is more difficult for me than journaling, or what might emerge from this, a personal essay.

So today I biked a few miles, then sat down to write at least a page and then moved on to a next point, bicycling, I noticed, more and more slowly as I became more and more immersed in a story, the first one I'd tried to write in a few years.

Evan, here's where you didn't go: