This summer, I embarked on two parallel journeys: publishing a new novel, State of Paradise, and training for a boxing match that’ll happen in the fall.
State of Paradise is my sixth book and the fight will be my second, so I have a lot more experience in one arena than the other. I fought for the first time a few years ago and while I’ve done some more informal sparring exhibitions and the like since then, I decided this year to recommit to formal (USA Boxing recognized) competition. I lost that first fight by decision, but that didn’t have anything to do with the lull; I actually had a lot of fun and learned a ton. Training for a fight can be a little abstract if you haven’t ever experienced the unrelenting intensity of one, which is to say I emerged with a much clearer idea of what exactly I was working towards.
Last year I could have competed but didn’t. I moved from Florida to New York state, returned to teaching after an extended leave, and finished a book. Adding a fight into the mix felt like…a lot. A valid enough reason, but also the truth is I don’t love competition the way some fighters do. I have trained with people who were kind of average during practice only to snap into an entirely different–a sharper, faster, more ferocious–version of themselves when The Moment finally arrived. I don’t love The Moment and yet I feel called towards it. I’m 41. I don’t have a lifetime of competition ahead of me and there are certain things I want to do. Also, I could see that if I kept waiting around for the perfect time it might not ever arrive.
Anyone who has published a book knows that there is a long window between when you submit the finished version and when it actually appears in a bookstore. This is a period that, to put it mildly, can really mess with a writer’s head. Garth Greenwell sums it up perfectly in “Success is Only Ever a Distraction from Failure,” from his very wonderful To Green a Thought: “The worst thing about publishing a book—and this is something I’m feeling now—is that publication is like an overwhelming, unavoidable distortion of gravity: it warps all of your values. I was talking about this with a very brilliant writer here in Iowa City the other week: how contentment for both of us comes in the middle of long projects, when we’ve retreated to privacy and are just doing the work day after day. That feels like such an enormous privilege, to get to be a writer, to claim space for that kind of introspection and playing around, to be free for a while from what is for me the anxiety of beginnings and endings.”
Most writers I know want their work to exist in the world. They want it to be read and they want it to mean something to the people who read it. We work so hard to reach The Moment and yet, when it arrives, many of us long for the delicious privacy of the writing cave. I am happiest when I’m deep in a project, when my days revolve around the words that get put down, the new strands of character and world that are imagined. At some point there is a gravitational shift and the project becomes a kind of lodestar in my life; it’s an intensification of focus that always feels like a kind of magic to me. That makes me feel like I’ve been possessed by a friendly ghost. It is the kind of energy that makes me wildly deeply glad to be alive.
State of Paradise came out in July, so I am still moving through The Moment as I type. My last book, a story collection, was published in the summer of 2020, and so there was a particular joy in being able to travel in person–to meet and thank the booksellers who have championed my work, be in conversation with writers I admire, connect with readers. So much goodness has come to State of Paradise these last few weeks (a few favorites!), but experience has taught me that accolades don’t ease the buzzing unsteadiness of publication, which is such a different gear than the more anchoring act of slowly bringing a world into being. State of Paradise is also more personal than my other books. The early interviews–despite the grace and care of the interviewers–felt a little scalding, in a way that caught me off-guard. In these moments, the deep-sea privacy of the writing cave called out like a song.
[from my launch at Greenlight Books, with the magnificent Hilary Leichter & Marie-Helene Bertino]
The boxing journey, meanwhile, is still in the grind phase, with several months of training left to go. I’m deep in the “happy middle.” I will admit that the grind felt extra grindy on book tour, when I was waking up early to run before catching a flight to the next destination (San Francisco, you are beautiful but your hills nearly killed me). When I bemoaned the hills of San Francisco to my mom, she worried that I was pushing myself too hard and urged me to “be reasonable.” But boxing is not a reasonable sport, fights are not reasonable activities, and sometimes the training has to reflect that. I assume that my future opponent is working hard every day, and that I’m giving her an edge if I don’t do the same.
Writing a novel is also not a reasonable activity. It is not comfortable. It is not safe. You end up doing things you never would have done under other circumstances. Going to places you never would have gone. Writing novels has, in a strange way, prepared me for the mindset I need for boxing.
In boxing, the grind has a much clearer structure than it does with writing–or it does if you’re lucky enough to be guided by a coach who knows their shit and wants to see you succeed. At my gym, competition training is from 5-7 PM on weekdays and on weekend mornings. If I can’t make training, I run, lift, recover. I decline invitations to do things on weeknights–I missed some weeks of training this summer, for book tour, so I have ground to make up. In a roundabout way the unreasonable sport of boxing has brought more reasonableness to my life: for my earlier books I kept traveling and traveling and saying yes and saying yes until I eventually crash-landed into burnout. I felt an urgency around accepting invitations–what if they stopped coming? In time, I began to trust in a different version of the future, but before I could make that mental leap boxing gave me a physical anchor. You can’t train if you’re not home. The Grind will go on without you.
And here’s the thing–I love the grind. I mean, sometimes I hate it but even on those awful days a part of me still loves it. Just like with writing. The worst writing days are still, somehow, kind of the best. And when I say best I mean because I feel like I am exactly where I am meant to be, doing exactly what I am meant to be doing.
I’ve been thinking about why I love the grind so much. Why I feel like I could stay in that space forever, training hard for some distant, harrowing test. For a lot of people this might sound like hell but for me it is a kind of heaven. I think it has something to do with the way we put blinders on the moment we step inside the gym, like racehorses that can only take in what is directly in front of them and thus can only go in one direction: forward. You have to keep your attention on the task at hand. Drift off elsewhere and you’re bound to get caught. For me, the structure creates a feeling of safety. The particulars of each training session vary, but in a general sense I know what to expect and trust my ability to move through it. And the grind is a less judgmental space–or perhaps a space where the judgement feels less definitive. If you show up and put in your best effort you have succeeded. And what a human thing, once we locate some stability, to not want to risk disturbing that solid, safe feeling. To not want anything to change.
The Moment ushers in that very change. The Moment brings about a distinct shift, a culmination, an end to one phase and the start of another. The Moment is unpredictable. A writer might know what reviews are assigned, for example, but likely won’t know who wrote them or what those people have to say until the reviews run. We don’t know who will show up for our events. A fight is similarly unpredictable. You don’t know where you’ll fall on the bout sheet, if you’ll fight right away or wait around for hours. You don’t know what your opponent will do–Will they cut angles, pop their jab? Will they rush forward and brawl? Will they fatigue halfway through or have boundless energy?–or even what exactly you’ll do until the bell rings.
And then there is the matter of judgement. Writers have different metrics for how they define success, of course. The writers I know who are the least compromised by the book publication process have a more expansive metric: art is a belief system, a way of being in the world, and each book they release belongs to that greater thing. I’ve also met writers who had–from the outside at least–dreamy publications only to discover they’re stubbornly fixated on this one thing that did not happen, or the one critic who didn’t get it (I strive to be the first kind of writer, but have also been this person, I’m afraid). There is a sense of judgement being levied–by critics, readers, sales figures. The book is no longer yours; it is in the hands of the world. But the timeline is also murky. Sometimes books have a quiet release only to get a terrific second wind, steadily gathering word-of-mouth support and finding its readers over time. Books often have much longer lives than publishing cycles suggest. In a fight, the judgement is much swifter and more definitive. You have three rounds (amateur fights are always three rounds) to do what needs to be done. You either win or you lose.
I started boxing–for fitness, initially–after being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and PTSD, with the idea that high-intensity exercise might help manage my symptoms. Out of the common trauma responses, mine was definitely “freeze.” I’d initially sought help for a flying anxiety so leveling that I had at times become, quite literally, stuck to airport floors, unable to either board the plane or go home. Before public events, I used to be plagued by an intense worry that I would stand before a microphone, before an audience, and be unable to read the text, even though this was not something that had ever happened to me before.
In boxing, freezing up is the absolute worst thing you can do. Flight can even work to a fighter’s benefit if done strategically enough. But not freeze. It was a problem for me, when I first encountered the pressure and intensity of a hard sparring session, and I think this is why I have hung in with the unreasonableness of this sport. I believe that boxing came into my life to shatter the freeze, to teach me to find calm in chaos, to stay connected to my breath no matter how intense the pressure gets. Fights are chaotic: you have to cultivate a calm space within yourself, so you can see clearly and act decisively. You can’t disassociate, not even for a split-second. You have to be hyper-present. It is obviously a very physical sport, but the mental piece, the fight for calm, the battle against freeze–that is why I spend all those weeknights sweating my ass off in a gym. That is why I recommitted to competition this year.
There is no real risk of freeze when we’re in The Grind. Or maybe that’s not exactly right–artists freeze up in the middle of projects all the time, for one reason or another. Maybe the difference is the freeze being less public. Or the sense that each day brings another chance. The Grind is like a river in that sense; the day-to-dayness has a way of carrying us along. There can be a sense of infinite possibility.
But endings are what allow for beginnings. We never stay in one season for all time. The release of putting a book out into the world, the release of stepping into the ring on fight night–it’s what lets us move on to the next thing. I am a little stunned when I think of all the new doors that have opened in my world only because I let my books go out and live their own lives without my supervision. A life that was all grind would amount to a kind of stasis. We need The Moment in order to move forward. To release, to shed, to progress. To see where we are so we can better understand where we’re trying to go. Maybe the trick to dealing with The Moment is to understand it not as a destination but as a bridge we must cross in order to reach the next place.
As a fellow writer-fighter (though I got to use my feet as well!), I love this pairing you’ve explored so well here. I think these two things go so well together for so many reasons: the 180-degree physical difference is just wildly intense, but both things are a practice, and seem (in my experience anyway) to very much proceed as such: on that forward-back-forward-back path that can be so frustrating at times, especially if one fixates (as I tend to do) on the negative, or just be too myopic, unable or unwilling to take the longer view. But I also felt a connection between the two things, and felt that they complimented each other, learned from each other… how I focus (or don’t) was something that I learned not from writing but from karate—specifically from fighting, and it was a startling (and sometimes quite painful) lesson! I also found, personally, that it was the flood of fear that fed the freeze, for me, and I’m not entirely sure I ever bested it. Like anyone who dives into extremes like boxing or karate, you see that I could talk about this all. damned. day. Great stuff!
Laura, I appreciate your words here! I agree with you.
Thank you for your sage advice during my time as a Periplus Fellow. I am continuing to learn that one’s personal and professional responsibilities are likely to create their own manifestations of cruel San Francisco hills (in fact, an artist’s challenging crests could come from the writing itself) - but, as you stated, the quest is determined by whether a writer commits art and self entirely to the grind, despite the odds and discomfort (for me, it’s saying no to people and things I love and hold important to prioritize my time with the page).
I look forward to reading more from you!
And may victory be on your side! 🥊