▶️ Press Play: An Interview with Cynthia Marie Hoffman
"I knew, if I had any chance of returning to writing, it would be because of friendship and the result of gentle, inspirational peer pressure"
Welcome to The Long Pause, a newsletter about being creative, being stuck, and what to do about it. I’m Erinn. I’m a writer and an artist in a long, long Pause.
Today’s post is part of the Press Play interview series, which asks creative folks to share the story of their Long Pause so we can all learn from each other and stop feeling so shitty and lonely. I think you’ll love Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s perspective on community, being gentle with yourself, and making space for creativity! 💖
Explain yourself. Who are you, how do you identify as an artist / creative?
I’m the author of four poetry collections, most recently Exploding Head, a memoir in prose poems about my lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). All my poetry collections are what we used to call “project” books—obsessively focused on a cohesive, singular theme. Recently, I’ve plunged head-first into personal essays and have had several published in TIME, The Sun, and Lit Hub. I’ve worked a full-time, non-academic consulting job in the electrical energy industry for the past 17 years.
You’re here because you’ve gone through a fallow period where you didn’t produce much work for an extended period. How did your Long Pause come about? How long did it last?
My creative productivity was slammed to a halt by my publishing schedule.
I’ve struggled to tell this story—in all its complicated glory—in a way that doesn’t get bogged down in dates and timelines and math, but more importantly, in a way that doesn’t make me seem ungrateful. Like, what am I complaining about? I didn’t write for more than four years. But that long pause came after an even longer period of furious, obsessive productivity. During the half dozen years I was doggedly punching tickets for my first manuscript to ride the first-book prize merry-go-round, I moved on to writing the next manuscript, and the next. By the fall of 2009 (while also heading into the ninth month of pregnancy), I was actively submitting three finished manuscripts.
Those manuscripts would become my first, second, and third books—all with the same publisher, Persea Books, and as luck would have it, in the order in which I’d written them. Over the years, as the publication timeline slowly caught up to my backlog, I continued to work on other things. Some of those things didn’t become books at all. One became a chapbook. The novel is buried in a drawer. RIP 💀
Look! I made a timeline! The long pause is represented by that big shadowy rectangle. A window to a room shrouded in darkness.
From the outside, it may have appeared as if I were prolific as ever. See that book glowing in the dark? That was a bright spot, for sure. But when I launched and promoted that book, nine years after I’d finished writing it, I was doing so in the midst of not-writing, from the depths of feeling the most disconnected from my writing community and miles from my creative self. And that was really hard.
So, why had I stopped writing? It was in late 2015, a year after my second book was published, when Persea was willing to look at new work. At the time, I was well into writing a new collection of prose poems about my lifelong journey with OCD. I’d been working at a furious pace, under the perceived pressure of my publisher’s timeline. Let me clarify, that pressure was entirely self-imposed. I had a master plan. The OCD memoir, Exploding Head, was going to be my Next Big Thing.
But the manuscript wasn’t quite ready to submit. And I had this other finished manuscript burning a hole in my drawer. Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones is a book-length, collage-y sequence on genealogical research, such a departure from my previous books that I figured Persea would likely pass, and that would clear the queue for Exploding Head to be next in line as soon as it was ready.
Surprise! My editor loved Tombstones. After the phone call, I locked myself in the storage room at work and sobbed.
I was thrilled. But it kind of messed up my master plan. The pub date was set three years out, and that’s when the math really started adding up. It meant my publisher wouldn’t be willing to look at my Exploding Head manuscript for another four years at the earliest, and then it would be another two or three years to pub date. Suddenly, the finish line, which had been visible just at the end of the street, was pushed beyond the horizon. I had been in the final sprint, but now I was running a marathon. I figured, what’s the rush? Why keep writing at such a furious pace? It knocked the wind out of my sails.
I stopped writing, just like that. And once I stopped, that was it. Not-writing became my modus operandi – for more than four years.
Were you confident you would return to your work at some point?
No. I was dramatic. I’m not a poet anymore, etc. It felt as if poetry had so wholly left me and all facets of my life that it would never return. This was vastly unlike previous fallow periods or periods of writer’s block, in which I trusted the writing would return. No. This time, it was The End.
The rest of “life” easily rushed in to fill the cracks my not-writing had left in my schedule. But I can’t say my career and parenting responsibilities demanded any more time than they had when I had been writing prolifically. Yet, once the space that had previously belonged to writing was filled with something else, it seemed never to have existed at all.
What did you learn about being a creative person from experiencing a Long Pause?
Once I lost the time I’d previously carved out for writing, it was hard to get back. I learned that it’s my responsibility to claim the time I need for writing. But that doesn’t mean I do it alone. A big part of that responsibility is asking for help. No one writes or publishes in a vacuum.
I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself. I struggle with regret about the time I “lost" to not-writing. Looking back, it’s easy to see where I went wrong. It wasn’t so much that the lag in publishing was out of step with my pace of productivity, but that I had allowed that external timeline to impact my internal drive to create. Not to compare books to babies (but here I go, anyway), publishing is like a birth plan. The one thing you can plan for certain is that it’s not going to go as planned.
I still think about what I could have done differently. While I was waiting, I could have been experimenting outside my primary genre. Now that I’m writing essays, I’m kicking myself over the fact that I hadn’t discovered essays back then, that I wasn’t writing at all simply because I had boxed myself in as a Poet. Even as a Poet, I could have continued writing poems and publishing them in journals, but I had boxed myself in as a Writer of Books. The very thing that had worked for me in the past (writing “project” books), when faced with a blip in the ideal timeline, had become my downfall.
What advice would you give another creative about how to move through a Long Pause?
If you’re in a pause right now, be gentle with yourself. And if you’re regretting a pause, same: be gentle. Remember Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet:
So you mustn’t be frightened… if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Greet what’s happening to you with curiosity. What is your long pause trying to teach you? What might it be working to transform?
Perhaps my pause was protecting me from publishing Exploding Head, my OCD memoir, too soon. That book was too vulnerable and too important to rush. Perhaps it was my brain and body telling me I was tired. I needed a good long break from the intensity with which I’d been writing for years. Perhaps something unbeknownst to me had actually been seeking permission to take that break, and waiting to shuttle an older manuscript into the light was the perfect opportunity.
That reaction I’d had when Persea accepted Tombstones? The sobbing? Part of that might have been relief.
If you’ve hit Play again: Tell me about the project that returned you to your work. How did the shift out of your Long Pause feel? What brought it about?
My long pause fell (not coincidentally) during a drought of community. During my most prolific periods, I’ve always had two, sometimes three, poetry groups who meet regularly to share work. But suddenly, those peers with whom I’d sat at the kitchen table or in tiny library conference rooms were, all at once, scattering off on sabbatical or moving away or having babies. No one was knocking on my door every two or three weeks to read my poems (nor I theirs).
When my long-time poet friend J.L. Conrad suggested starting up a group again, I joined in with the caveat that “I’m not a poet anymore.” But I knew, if I had any chance of returning to writing, it would be because of friendship and the result of gentle, inspirational peer pressure.
So it was literary community, not a project, that returned me to my work. After four and a half years, I opened the Word doc of Exploding Head to see what I had left behind. And it was just as urgent and vulnerable and passionate as ever.
Your work will wait for you.
There’s a lot of rhetoric around “putting in the work” or “being productive” when it comes to creative output that can be helpful in some contexts (think: tracking your progress so you can see small actions add up!), but very unhelpful in this one. What would you say to someone who thinks you can just “snap out of” or “power through” a pause like the one you experienced?
It’s hard to resist that rhetoric, which is so ingrained in our culture, and dare I point out I’ve used the words “prolific” and “productive” in this interview. I was (and still am) my own worst critic.
When we speak up about being too busy to write, we’re met with well-meaning tips for powering through by stealing snippets of downtime for writing—in the pick-up lane after school, while the kids are brushing their teeth for bed. How many words can you write in five minutes? Those words add up! It’s an echo chamber of the “you can have it all” messaging that is predominantly directed at women.
Is it sometimes inspirational? Of course! But having it all comes at a price. Sometimes that price is needing to take a four-and-a-half-year break. Rather, shall I say, your reward is getting to take that break. It’s okay. You deserve it.
When you return to your writing (and you will return, on your own timeline), you and your work are worth more than snippets.
What else did I not capture…?
I want to say something about social media. The algorithm is real.
During my long pause, of course I wasn’t writing or publishing poems in journals, so I wasn’t posting any links to my work online. It didn’t take the algorithm long to figure it out, and it was all too accommodating in reflecting back my own experience. Without my real-life poetry groups, and suddenly thrust into communal darkness by the social media algorithm, there was little visible evidence in my daily life that a vibrant, creative literary community was mightily charging on. I still saw my writer “friends” online, but my feed was mostly pics of their gardens and families and new haircuts.
It wasn’t until I returned to publishing, and therefore sharing my own work online, that my social media feed lit up with everyone else’s poetry news. Suddenly, it was pics of books, snaps of favorite poems. Everyone was still getting haircuts, but they were also actively reading and writing.
If you’re in a long pause, it’s important to not let yourself become isolated. If social media feels “ick” for you, it’s okay to take a break. Creatives do not need to be chronically online or online at all. If it feels good to do so, keep reading. But it’s okay to take a break from reading, too! And if you can, stay in the poetry group to read what others are writing and provide your valuable feedback and moral support.
However you do it, hold onto those relationships as if you’re on a boat that’s drifting into the ocean, and those other writers are your one rope tied to the shore. That will bring you home.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Exploding Head, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, all from Persea Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.
Find Cynthia on Instagram at @cynthiamariehoffman and Twitter at @CynthiaMHoffman
this is so smart and thoughtful, Cynthia! I really love this perspective on being gentle with yourself about "lost" time, and I especially love the way that community brought you back into writing.
That timeline is brilliant! It’s inspiring me to make my own visual ✍️